Following on from our April episode on how web accessibility impacts SEO, we are once again joined by Billie Geena, Damien Robert, Heba Said and Heike Knip to have part 2 of this important conversation.
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David Bain
How does web accessibility impact SEO – part two.
Hello, and welcome to the August 2024 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel, where we’ll be discussing how web accessibility continues to impact SEO.
Back in April, we had part one of this discussion, but there was so much that we couldn’t cover so we’re pleased to be able to bring back the same wonderful panel for part two.
I’m your host, David Bain, and joining me today are four wonderful web accessibility experts and SEO experts. So let’s find out who they are starting off with Heba.
Heba Said
Hi, everyone. I’m Heba Said. I’ve been working in SEO for 10 years and now working as a freelance consultant for my own business and you can find me at hebasaid.co.
David Bain
Thanks for joining us, and also with us is Heike.
Heike Knip
Hello everyone. My name is Heike. I run The Good SEO Company, and I’ve been working in digital marketing for 12 years specializing in SEO.
David Bain
Thank you so much for joining us, Heike. And another one with us again is Damien.
Damien Robert
Hi everyone. I’m Damien Roberts, search marketing and web accessibility lead in Convatec, a medtech, FTSE 100 company in the UK, and it’s a global company too. And you can find me on LinkedIn – Damien Robert SEO.
David Bain
Thank you so much for joining us, as well Damien. And our final panelist is Billie.
Billie Geena
Hi, thank you for having me back. I’m Billie Geena, and I am the founder of RankSuite and also a freelance SEO consultant.
David Bain
Thank you, Billie. Well, let’s start with Damien to begin with. So Damien in April in part one we touched upon the European Accessibility Act, that becomes law in all EU member states from June 2025.
So let’s start by exploring that in more depth – are you able to give us a bit of a summary of why this law is important?
Damien Robert
Yeah, it’s very important not only for the country within the EU, but any country that is trading with any country of the EU. So basically, any global company should be concerned.
I know that when we had the GDPR law coming up lots of people thought that it wouldn’t concern the UK because of Brexit. But this is exactly the same story, it will still concern the UK, it will still concern the US or any country trading with EU countries.
So why is it important? It’s coming into force on 28th of June 2025. So in one year, it will concern not only the public sector, but also private companies. So private organizations, with an emphasis on online banking, and e-commerce websites when we’re talking about the web.
But it also goes beyond the web. It goes to products, to services, to lots of different things, and I invite people listening to us today to actually have a look at the act itself. It’s available, just Google search “European Accessibility Act”, available on the EU website, and it’s actually quite comprehensive as an act itself.
David Bain
Okay, so it applies to people in the UK, it applies to people and businesses in the USA and Egypt, Africa, Asia, as long as you’re doing trade with people in the EU. So what does doing trade mean and does that simply mean, allowing people to browse your website? Or does that mean trying to get them to buy your product or your service?
Damien Robert
Well, it means any audience. So anyone who is visiting or wants to interact with your websites. Probably when we are talking about e-commerce websites, and banking on our website, and that probably why the emphasis of the act is on these websites is when that there is a trading concept, isn’t it? So not only are you the audience of this website, but you are actually doing a transaction there.
However, in a similar law that’s concerned private companies in the US through the ADA that came into force in 2001. So some time ago, we have seen lawsuit cases for people only browsing a website, trying to access the online services offered. So I think the sky’s the limit really there. And if you have an audience from the EU, you should feel concerned.
Nevertheless, you’re working for the benefits of all. So it is a beautiful journey of web accessibility. It’s not a painful restriction.
David Bain
So if you’re working in an agency and are listening to this and thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got to start talking to my clients about this’. What specifically should they be saying to their clients? How do they prepare their clients for this and to ensure that they’re as compliant as possible?
Billie Geena
So for me, when I’m talking to a client about this, first, I’ll talk about the legislation, what that means, what’s already in place. The UK and the US already have some laws to support accessibility, but obviously, the European Accessibility Act is building on that a lot more and it’s much more effective.
I will also talk to them about their user base and what amount of users I can see are coming from the EU. Then we can talk about stats within accessibility, like how much of the internet population is living with some sort of access need, and then I’ll also try to tailor it to things that they can do, because a SaaS company and travel company and a banking company, they’re all very different. They’re very different legislation.
So it could be technical changes we focus on more than content changes, but it’s just important that they know they have to make changes, that they listen to what we’re saying.
Then the biggest thing that I always recommend anyone in SEO doing, especially around changes of legislation, is follow up with an email and CC every single contact you have, because it should not come back to you of them not being informed. You need to inform them and back yourself because they are within one of the many sectors that definitely need to do this. You need to cover your back and everything as well, don’t just think saying something on a call is enough.
David Bain
I like the fact that you mentioned the user base, because that’s something very easy to actually see what percentage of users are actually coming from the EU.
Now, going back, looking at the cookie law, it wasn’t brilliantly applied by many businesses, many businesses were a little bit scared of it. For instance, some websites in the US didn’t even allow traffic from the EU or from Europe, because they didn’t want to fall foul of that particular legislation.
Can you foresee there being similar issues with the rollout of this particular law?
Billie Geena
Maybe yes, but at the same time, can they afford to lose customer base within the EU? If they can, then they’re probably going to do it but a lot of businesses can’t afford to exclude an entire continent.
I think it’s just really important to provide information and also make that information as accessible as possible not just in the access needs way but as in crate-train explain these accessibility laws in a way that someone who’s not tech savvy can understand that is important and pass on that message.
I do think a lot of the content about these changes is a little bit overwhelming. If any of you or in the audience or on the panel has a bit more time, which I know you’re all very busy so I doubt it, but someone needs to take that opportunity and create a simple guide to this.
Heba Said
I was thinking the same thing before this panel. I was like ‘Okay, I opened an Excel sheet and started pointing out stuff, very easy stuff to give away to people. Just change that and this and your website is going to be accessible with little effort.
For your question, David, I guess, yes, people can do that. But sadly, they’re going to lose a whole continent of people that might be interested in their business or in their product. So I think it’s not a smart move to do. And for what? For doing some easy tricks to make your website accessible. It’s not worth the loss you make, losing traffic for this is not worth it. So a little bit, 10 hours of work, and everything is going to be working great.
David Bain
So Billie obviously started off by talking about the fact that it’s different for different industries. But you did say, Billie, that perhaps you’d start off with technical changes. So Heike and Heba into the conversation – what are some technical changes that you tend to recommend initially, as beneficial for web accessibility?
Heike Knip
There are so many things you can do with this. I just want to add also a little bit of what was said before here. I think also America, and like that will not really reject people from the European Union, because it is also beneficial for them. Because 25% of people are disabled and need disabled access to the website. So it’s beneficial for that.
On the technical level, it can be anything from just photo image IDs, descriptions, to having a look what our specific needs for specifically for certain people.
One of the things that I talk about with people more and more is not Search Engine Optimization, but Search Experience Optimization. How can we enhance the experience of the searchers for people online.
David Bain
So we’re not even necessarily talking about our own websites here. It’s about optimizing elements such as images, that can perhaps give you an opportunity, from an accessibility perspective to drive people from places like Google image search.
Heike Knip
Yeah, for sure. Because I speak with some people from the deaf community and the blind community also, they say these are the things that are quite important for them.
Damien mentioned accessible design. I am talking more and more with people about how my websites are gonna go all fully accessible by this year. But I got to talk with experts in every field offered from the visual impaired. Some of my friends can’t even physically use the website. So they need to use voice or different tools. So it’s not an easy subject to look at, because there’s such a wide range of people that we need to work with. But it is also a big opportunity for businesses.
Yes, we talk about legislation, but also, as any business I show them also what are the benefits of doing this, stepping into a full new market. Sometimes with smaller businesses they say why do we need this? I say one in four people are disabled. So if you eliminate one in four people from your online platform, your online presence, be it search, be website, be something else, means you’re missing out 25% of your profits, revenue. And that suddenly turns also in the people’s heads – I’m missing that. They should use it actually for the good but again, revenue is always a good help.
David Bain
Heba, you mentioned that it would be useful to actually have a document that summarizes actions that website designers and SEOs need to take in order to be compliant with this and future legislation. But is there a resource online that people can go to find out about communities that they might not have thought of? Heike mentioned blind communities, I’m sure there are other communities that would have their own individual challenges with being able to access certain web pages.
Heba Said
Yes, I believe that. I’m talking for the blind communities because I’ve been there. They actually have websites and resources for web developers on how to make their websites accessible and web accessible for people who are using JAWS and NVDA. It’s like screen readers. So there are resources.
It’s very hard for people like us to dig into this, but I can collect all these in a sheet for people to do, because it’s very simple. You need to work on your codes, like use semantic HTML code, use an area code, you need to label your forms, some easy stuff, but it’s very simple. If we collected all this in a document for people to go to whenever they are building a website. You need to make sure that your keyboard is very accessible with your website because the keyboard user can tap and use their keyboards without a mouse.
So all of these elements are very technical, but it’s just one code that you put into your code. So it’s very simple at the same time. It would be easier to have these free resources collected in one sheet. I truly think it’s going to be helpful for people to have something like that and I wish that people would use it.
David Bain
There’s a nice resource on web accessibility on the Yale University website, actually. So we’ve got a table of contents talking about things like link text, image links, designing links to the developer techniques as well. So that’s a decent resource that you can go to certainly as well.
What about testing? How do we test to ensure that our sites are as compliant as possible? Is there software that we can use to do that?
Heba Said
Yes, they are free and you can test it. You can test via developer tool and AXE developer tool, or WAVE. I love WAVE because it’s a little bit simpler and they do this contrast and color checking and everything. So it’s so easy for me to use as an SEO, not very complicated.
David Bain
So that’s a completely free resource to use. And you simply put your URL in there, and then it’ll give you some kind of score. Okay, that’s a good place to start. Any other tools that anyone else would like to recommend?
Billie Geena
So I am a Sitebulb fangirl, I don’t hide that. But Sitebulb uses the AXE dev tools system. So you can actually audit accessibility in bulk through just a normal crawl. Which is really good for SEOs, because a lot of SEOs do use Sitebulb, they’ve already got it. And they can do testing in bulk.
And I’m a big fan of manual testing as well. So testing on a phone, on a tablet, on a laptop, and trying things out and different scenarios. So I might use it in a text only browser for an entire site, just using the keyboard, using a screen reader, whatever. I always find that I learned the most through manual testing. But AXE and WAVE are my favorites too, so Heba beat me to it with them.
David Bain
In relation to what you’re saying there, Billie, with your manual testing, you can start with seeing who your users are, which you mentioned earlier on, and seeing what devices your users are using, and then trying to test on the most popular devices.
Certainly, in the old days, when we used to have issues like looking at conversion rates, and maybe thinking that people on iPads don’t want to buy anything. If you actually tested you’d see that the button was off the screen on the iPad, and it wasn’t possible to complete your purchase on an iPad as well. But unless you do that manual testing, sometimes you don’t realize that things like that are happening.
Damien Robert
For manual testing, I like to always advise that when I give a talk about web accessibility it is to emulate disabilities or emulate temporary disabilities.
You can just close your eyes and try to access the content of your website, you can put your hands on your back and use the voice command of your mobile to see how far you can go on your website to actually get to what you call a conversion.
It’s important to remember that we can all have temporary disabilities, for example, I had a very bad arm at some point so I used voice commands on my mobile, and it showed me that actually, I couldn’t do everything I wanted to with my mobile. So I think that manual testing should also give that layer of emulating disabilities, everybody is able to cover the eyes or the ears.
David Bain
So is there voice command software that we can download onto our devices and use free of charge?
Damien Robert
We all have native voice commands on mobile phones. And then there are some voice commands native for Windows, for Mac. I suppose, if you want to use a very famous one, which is Dragon speaker, I think it’s called, that’s a paid one. But every single modern device should have a native voice command software.
For screen readers, there is NVDA, which is free, one of the most famous ones. But again, there is native software, for example, Narrator for Windows, which is integrated. So, usually you just have to go into your settings, tap Accessibility and see what’s offered on your device.
David Bain
That’s a wonderful testing process sequence that people can go through. Is this something that web developers are actually doing at the moment, or they have to be told to do?
Heba Said
From my experience, I didn’t find anyone who would look into this kind of stuff. So developers and designers are only doing what the client needs. And what they see is beautiful for the user to see. And they don’t consider the 25% that we’re talking about.
Heike Knip
Yeah, for sure. I see the same. I do see that designers are getting a little bit more aware about it. Because again, this is the question that I’m myself, I’m neurodivergent. So for me, it’s sometimes also the process of it. And I work with some people that have learning disabilities. And it is also easy when in the designs, let’s say, “easy read” or something like that comes into place, making sure that people understand.
But these things you don’t see, because again, just coming back, people don’t understand that. This is why we need to talk more about it to get more understanding. And that’s why it’s good that the legislation is coming into the European Union that forces the hands of people to learn more about it, and what they need to do about it, because there’s so much good that can be done with it.
David Bain
I think Heike, you mentioned it beforehand. So essentially technology that will assist users that have impairments to progress through a webpage. So is this the integrated software that’s part of devices already? Or is this additional software that you mean, by that?
Damien Robert
There is a massive range of software, isn’t there, Heike? But screen readers are the main ones, but we are talking about BCI these days, brain computer interface, when actually you’ve got the signal of your brains dictating your browsing on the web. I don’t know if you know any other Heike?
Heike Knip
It’s sometimes really specific by the needs and I know also with AI days in the background, a lot of technology that is coming up and processing it in. I just had a presentation the other week, and I’m not promoting Microsoft here just to be clear. There is a Copilot. What they have in the pipeline for the future is so much better for people to digest information.
Let’s say I have ADHD. For this meeting, if I don’t find it interesting, I zone out, I just go and look at the bird or something like that. But meanwhile Copilot, in that case, would then record everything, process everything. And then I can ask specific questions: what did David say about that? And it filters out exactly that information.
I think the technology we’ll be talking about now is already going to be outdated in three, four months. Because this is the volume of the change that we are coming into creating. But that means also with websites, SEO, etc. Even look at Google at the moment, it already gives you AI answers to certain questions you put on there, but it pulls from the web. And that’s only going to develop more.
David Bain
So does this mean that in the future, a large part of ensuring that what we publish on our sites is compliant, is accessible, is about ensuring that our website is understood by AI? And if we do that, and perhaps even use AI, in the analysis process, then it’ll help us to actually determine whether or not our content is accessible?
Billie Geena
I’ve got a lot of thoughts here and I’d be super interested in everyone else’s opinions. But for me, I tried to keep AI and accessibility kind of separate because on the Internet, there’s no one solution that can create a 100% accessible site for everyone because it’s such a broad spectrum of disabilities and isn’t just one thing, it’s 1000 things in each thing, levels and spectrum within that.
So I think with AI, it can improve some things but a lot of the assistive technology that we use isn’t necessarily going to change. We’re going to need all sites to be accessible for screen readers like “easy read browsers”. We need everything to be able to work and it doesn’t necessarily need AI to fully understand or comprehend that because there’s always going to be a need for human level accessibility. That’s my belief anyway, feel free to disagree on whatever.
Heike Knip
I fully agree with you because it is deemed that it is a combination of this not one solution to it. It is a multi-approach. Some people just say that AI is going to take over everything. I see it as a tool that can help a certain amount, let’s say for me with dyslexia. So AI can be a great tool to help me with writing, giving me thoughts, but I’m not expecting the AI to write everything for me. I have other tools or people proofreaders etc. going through that with me. So I fully agree. It needs to be for different levels. You have my full backing on that one.
David Bain
Heba, what are your thoughts on this? Are you an all embracing user of AI when it comes to assisting you with determining web accessibility success?
Heba Said
I agree with everyone here because I think AI is not working into people’s disabilities, I guess. AI is smart, it’s intelligent, it doesn’t have any issues. It is just collecting data from whatever database it’s got. But I believe that it is going to be helpful for people with disabilities to use AI. So they get to use it, not the other way around.
David Bain
So you need to ensure that your site and your whole experience can be understood well by AI?
Heba Said
I believe if we’re using everything, like the rules for accessibility, and the act and everything, I’m not gonna have any problems with AI whatsoever because the code is readable. And this is what I’m doing. I’m doing it too, for other software to read it like screen readers, for example. So if the screen reader can read it, so AI software can read it, and so on.
David Bain
Shall we focus on maybe some common SEO bugs that can be fixed quickly? Heba, what common SEO bugs do you see that can be fixed quickly to have a big positive, sudden impact on accessibility?
Heba Said
The alt tags, this is number one, and everybody’s doing it for 1000s of years and it’s actually something for accessibility. Labeling your code, maybe this is something very in depth, I believe, putting a title and description for your website is something for accessibility. Adding a language for your website, it’s for accessibility. This kind of stuff is very easy and SEOs can do it without any developer.
What else, I have, like 1000s anchor texts, adding an anchor text for your links. We’re doing a lot of internal linking and backlinking. But give a little thought for your anchor text to be very descriptive about what you’re saying you’re doing. If you’re having a form or signup form or anything, you need to label what the user is actually completing and what to write in the form here, you can add your name here, you can add your last name and so on. This is a label code. It’s very simple. So I guess these are the little bugs.
Also, the contrast, this is a UX, and we need to look into it while we’re auditing our website. You can lose a lot of users because they can’t see the button, they can’t read what’s on the button. So this stuff can really help with SEO and it’s very simple.
David Bain
So things like contrast, is that something that has to be manually checked? Or is there software that can be used?
Heba Said
WAVE software can detect it and you can detect it, there is a Chrome extension that can detect it. There are lots of tools out there that can detect something like that. So whenever you’re doing an audit for a website, this is the first thing you do for a website, when you receive any project. Just look into these little stuff, and add a UX audit for your website. And play the role that you have low vision, you’re blind, play the role and see if it’s working for everyone.
Billie Geena
I use Sitebulb for all of that. So I don’t believe you can do the color contrast and analysis from the top of my head, but maybe you can, because the AXE dev tools does and that’s in there. But I tend to use it for the color contrast, just the Chrome plugin. David and I can get some links and resources together.
David Bain
Yes, absolutely. Obviously Majestic will share the episode as part of when it’s published in social media as well. So feel free to reply with different links as well. Now that would certainly be useful.
What about yourself, Damien, anything that you want to add here?
Damien Robert
I would go back to the basics and the classics of SEO. Everything around the structure, title tag, meta description, and headings are important for screen readers. In fact, SEO has been born from web accessibility and not the other way around. So your title tag and meta description, and your heading structure has been designed originally for web accessibility, not for Google. So this is the same work. This is really like a great overlap in the same level for the alt attributes really.
I would also add everything around time based media, such as videos or infographic, templates, audio and add transcription that could be read by search engine bots too. Not only will it add some content to your page without any effort because it’s just a transcription of your video or audio, but it will be accessible for screen readers, for people who have low vision or are blind.
David Bain
Are we not at a stage now where video can be automatically transcribed and screen readers will automatically know what the audio and the video was saying or not yet?.
Damien Robert
There’s limitations. And they are the things that everyone talked about today. The limitation of AI is that yes, we have auto generated captions, for example. But we’ve all seen major mistakes, especially when it comes to names of brands or everything important actually, for business. It’s usually not well auto generated.
In terms of transcription, I don’t think there is a free software that is giving you the transcription. But of course, if you upload your video on YouTube, and you’ve got the captions, and actually you just gather the captions and make a transcription out of it. That could work. But I will always manually check them. Because everything that is auto generated is imperfect.
Heike Knip
Yeah, for sure. I also want to add to that one. One of my friends is from the hearing community. She had a lot of issues with transcriptions and like that she watched a couple of products, where videos were not transcripted. Or she couldn’t get that. So there’s still so much to do with that. Automation is not great. I remember that also one time with a project we did translating it in multiple languages, but came up with quite interesting translations.
David Bain
What about conducting an SEO audit for accessibility issues? Is that the software that we’ve discussed so far, or is another process or type of software that you would recommend for doing one off audits just to establish your score, and specifically what you need to do first of all? What should the priorities be in order to get things fixed first?
Billie Geena
For me, I always do an accessibility audit the same time I’m doing the technical audit. A lot of things just crossover naturally, I’m going to be looking to make sure Javascripts working on a page, I’m going to be making sure everything’s working. So why not just take extra steps. And the tools that I use are very similar because I will be using Sitebulb or Screaming Frog, I will be using Chrome Dev Tools. And then I will be using the accessibility tools on top of that like we have already mentioned because I will be manually checking our website anyway.
You can’t do an audit without actually going on the site. And I’m going to just do all of this. So I might as well just spend an extra hour or two checking everything for accessibility. And wherever I can, I make connections to the activities. I will be logging them as technical SEO or content SEO issues. It’s very rare I will just tell the client some things primarily for accessibility because it’s harder to get the devs doing that, but if you say it helps with SEO, which ultimately will, I’m a big fan lying just for no reason. I don’t know why I love lying. I can professionally lie. It’s great.
David Bain
Heike, you look like you want to add something?
Heike Knip
I loved how you said that, Billie, but it’s not lying. It is just getting something across what needs to be across. Because people don’t understand it but then if you show that it’s good for their SEO, they go like ‘oh yeah, that’s better’. So that’s quite interesting.
Myself internally, we are calling more and more also to do the accessibility checks like that also for personal reasons. I think it is quite important that there’s so many tools out there that we already discussed, that can help with that. For me, it is more important, I want to make a company that does this and check it and make sure the message goes through. And like Billie, I will lay about so we get something better on the market, but always beneficial.
David Bain
I think what it relates to is actually coming up with a positive financial value for the impact that improving web accessibility is likely to have. So if you do an analysis, if you have a report for a client, and if you can provide them with a likely positive financial improvement, as a result of the work that you’re recommending, then you’re more likely to get that work implemented. So how do you go about defining that? Can you do that?
Heike Knip
I can use as an example that I also sometimes do neurodivergent training. And when I talk to businesses, first they go like, Oh, what is that about, but then I say it increases your revenue and, productivity. So that always sells better and people get more acceptance about it.
Damien Robert
Let’s not forget that you are designing your services and your products to 15 to 25% of the population. So that’s missing out in terms of money. And there is an initiative in the UK, which is called The Purple Pound, please check it out. And it says that in the UK alone, the spending power of people with disabilities is 300 billion pounds in one year. So you are missing out on these 300 billion pounds. And I think that gets the buy-in of senior management straightaway, talking about money.
David Bain
Let’s finish off by asking everyone, what would be the one web accessibility improvement that you could make that is also likely to have an extremely positive impact on SEO?
So we’ll get your opinion on that. And then we’ll just remind the listener where they can find you online. Heike, shall we start off with you? What are your thoughts on that?
Heike Knip
One of the easiest ones that everybody can do has been named before here is alt names. Just name your pictures, it can have a big impact, you can find it easier. Anybody can do it, just describe the picture. What is it about? What’s in it? Even go to the specifics. But also you can make a little bit of fun so that when people read it from a screen reader gets a smile on their face. And getting more familiar with the branding. A good friend of my iced coffee is really brilliant in that.
And for the rest, you can find me on The Good SEO Company. Always around to help and answer any questions when needed.
David Bain
Thank you. And Heba?
Heba Said
I would go with URL structure and navigation. Easier navigation and good URL structure are good for accessibility and perfect for SEO. So if you do that, you will gain a very positive impact for both worlds.
You can always find me on LinkedIn – Heba Said, and on my website hebasaid.co. I’m happy to help anyone that needs help with accessibility audits.
David Bain
Lovely. I’m tempted to ask a follow up question. So if your URL structure is horrible, if it’s long, there are lots of parameters in there as well. But you do have some reasonable rankings on Google, is it still generally recommended to change your URL structure and make it more simple?
Heba Said
So I believe it’s going to be better for your website to do this. I believe that if you’re making your website accessible, it’s going to help with your SEO, whatever we’re seeing. Like you said, it might be good and they are ranking but a little difference for the 25% that we’re talking about. You’re losing a lot of money, you’re losing a lot of audience, so why not do it for these. If we talk numbers, we’re going to convince people.
David Bain
Damien, so what are your thoughts on that question? First of all, about that number one thing that you can do from a positive web accessibility perspective to improve your SEO?
Damien Robert
I would say adding transcription to your video, it’s a bit of what I said before, but and whatever way you do it, if you’ve got integrated videos on your website, you can just add an accordion with your transcriptions of the video, it will definitely improve your ranking on that page with the video because you’ve got more text that can be read by the search engine bots. This is just benefiting everyone. Let’s not forget that search engine bots are these disabled entities, let’s say they cannot see the content here. So they will wait for the transcription.
And you can find me on LinkedIn. Also in September, follow me on LinkedIn, I’ll tell you where to sign up for a newsletter. We said that in 21 days new change of habits. Every day, I will send an email with a little tip about web accessibility, to be able to open the eyes of lots of people on what they can do, factually technical, in 21 days to improve accessibility on everything not only the website. So, please do sign up. I’ve got nothing to sell, and just a passion to transmit, by the way.
David Bain
Search engine bots are disabled entities. It’s a nice way to think about it. But because obviously they don’t have the same senses that we do necessarily. So think about your site from their perspective as well. And just one little follow up question for you as well. Damien, you talked about the benefits of adding a transcription to your video. Does that also apply if you’re just embedding a YouTube video on your site?
Damien Robert
Yes, it does. YouTube doesn’t offer you the transcription. It does offer you the transcription on YouTube, the platform, but not on the iPlayer. So do that with YouTube. For Vimeo you can have the transcription on the Vimeo. However, this is not search engine friendly. So the bots are not going to be able to read it. So I will always advise to add transcription manually in an accordion. Double checked manually to make sure that everything is correct and incredible.
David Bain
I love definitive, quick answers like that. Thank you so much. Let’s move on to Billie. Billie, what are your thoughts on that final question?
Billie Geena
I guess the easiest thing to start with, and the quickest win for SEO is to simplify the language that you use on your website. I know for the UK in particular, we’ve got an average reading age of nine years old as a country. Let’s simplify language, let’s not talk in jargon all the time. It also includes a simple read version of an article or a summary, or do a TLDR.
Similar to Heike, I zone out, I can read but I can’t read if something is too long, I cannot concentrate long enough to read it. So add a TLDR. Do something like. You’re getting those extra opportunities to convey whatever it is you’re doing, keywords – great, fantastic. And it helps the users.
David Bain
And where can people find you online?
Billie Geena
You can find me online as Billie Geena, I’m everywhere. Or you can find me at my new project, which is RankSuite. And we’ve got some stuff on accessibility coming out at some point. Like Damien, I am not trying to sell things. Check that out.
David Bain
Thank you very much, everyone. Great discussion. I’ve been your host David Bain. You’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO Panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course check out the other series at SEOin2024.com.
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