SEO Strategy for 2022 (Webinar)

It’s time to plan out your activities for the coming year! But what should you include and what should you prioritise in 2022?

Joining Dixon Jones to discuss this is Amel Mehenaoui from Puffy, Rejoice Ojiaku from Incubeta, Lidia Infante from BigCommerce, and Andy Drinkwater from AndyDrinkwater.com.

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Transcript

Dixon Jones

Welcome to Old Guard, New Blood, episode 24. Sorry. What’s your SEO strategy for 2022? Welcome. Thank you very much for coming in. We’ve got a great team in here again today. Andy, Rejoice and Lidia have come in to share what they’re going to be prioritizing in 2022. And hopefully we’re going to have a great chat. Andy, why don’t you introduce yourself and say hello and who you are? You are one of the Old Guard.

Andy Drinkwater

I am indeed. So I’m Andy Drinkwater. I’m an SEO consultant, just andydrinkwater.com and predominantly a technical SEO link building. Those are the two primary areas that I focus on, SEO audits. But just into my 22nd year now. So yeah, we’re moving on a little bit.

Dixon Jones

We were young when we started this.

Andy Drinkwater

Absolutely. We were indeed. Yeah, we were indeed.

Dixon Jones

So my wife has been saying that this shouldn’t be called Old Guard, New Blood. It should be called Old Farts, New Sparks or Young Sparks. So have a chat with the Young Sparks. Rejoice, hi, how are you? Tell us about yourself and your background?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Hi. So I’m Rejoice Ojiaku and I am an SEO manager, Incubeta. Most of my background has been an all rounder quite recently. And I’ve been mostly focusing on content, everything to do content optimization, strategy, creating content, brief content writing. Yeah, the fun stuff.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. That’s great. And Lidia, hi again. How’s you in ’22?

Lidia Infante

Hello. Well, I’m Lidia Infante. I am senior international SEO manager at BigCommerce, and my background has mostly been on content and digital PR in the sense of SEO and all of that. I was just doing the math when you were talking about how long you’ve been in the game. And I think I’ve been it for eight years now. It feels like too long to be doing the same thing.

Dixon Jones

Just wait till you get to Andy and my level, we are just… I mean, honestly, it carries on going, “What do you do?” I tried to retire once, it didn’t work very well there. Okay, thank you so much for coming on everyone. Just before we dive into things, the first thing I’m going to ask is what’s the one thing that you’re going to be prioritizing on, and then we’ll move into some other bits and pieces. But if you are listening on podcast, well then fine, feel free to listen long. But if you are live on Facebook now or YouTube or anywhere else or Twitter, wherever it may be, then please dive in with any points that you want to make in the chat, because we have David, our producer, who’s going to be monitoring those.

David, is there anything I’ve missed that I should be talking about?

David Bain

I’d just like to echo your sentiments by saying, happy new year to everyone and also to ask the listener, the viewer, what is your SEO resolution for the year 2022? If you’ve got any SEO resolution that you maybe haven’t done enough of over the last year that you’re going to do this year, share us in the chat and let’s involve you in the conversation as well.

Dixon Jones

Brilliant. Okay. And before we go, thanks very much to our sponsors Majestic, without them this wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t keep happening with episode 24. That means I’ve been doing this for two years now. So it’s started to become a thing, I think. So let’s start off with the Old Guard. Andy, if there’s one thing you’re going to be looking at on 2022, your resolution, if you like, the one thing you want to start focusing on, or what’s your strategy moving forward that you think is going to be important for you, personally? What one thing would you give to people?

Andy Drinkwater

It’s got to be, for me, it’s primarily internal links. So I can’t say it’s architecture, because with the introduction of Google MUM as well. There’s going to be some… I reckon there’s going to be some very interesting changes that’ll also hang around the more visual aspects of topic clusters. So that’s primarily where I’m going to be heading this year. I’ve already got some work lined up for clients this month, which is taking a turn in direction. Noticing in the fact that they’ve got no particular structures to the site, but creating virtual silos and topic hubs so that you can try and focus areas of the site as Google wants to see them because Google thrives off votes.

Dixon Jones

So you talked about visual there, visual aspects of internal linking. What do you mean by visual?

Andy Drinkwater

I think it was On-Page, videos, any source of creative so that could even be an animation. It could be anything like that. So I mean, Google’s doing some very interesting stuff around that. And I’m quite looking forward to seeing what the next 12, 18 months, 24 months brings with us as well. It’s going to be more interesting, to say the least.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. Okay. We’ll come back to it, I think, with the other ideas and let everyone chat about the other ideas. But I’ll just grab everybody’s one takeaway to start with. Rejoice, what are you going to be focusing on? What’s your main objective, at least in January when you’ve set those objectives up in your head?

Rejoice Ojiaku

I think mostly just looking at content refresh. So how content is going to change, or maybe how we think about content and the idea of evolving content and refreshing it based on your strategy, based on your brand image as well. I think I want to look at how brands can actually focus more on… Well, focus, less on being original and focus more on repurposing what they already have and how they can utilize such intent to actually repurpose. I think that’s a great angle to come from when you’re repurposing. Rather than thinking about a brand new idea, look at if the intent has changed for a particular keyword and input that into a content strategy and content repurposing. I think you’re on mute.

Dixon Jones

Sorry. It’s because my producer told me to put myself on mute. That was my producer. Thanks, David. Anyway. Yeah, we’ll come back to that as well. I think that’s a great one. Refreshing repurposing versus generating new stuff. Lidia, what’s your goal?

Lidia Infante

Yeah. So my goal is to try to move away from trying to make websites that are perfect from an SEO perspective and focus more on the business objectives. So I want to create strategies that are agile and lean, improving the ROI of content through trans-creation and having a very iterative, intuitive, I don’t know how to pronounce that.

Dixon Jones

Iterative.

Lidia Infante

Iterative. Thank you.

Dixon Jones

Iterative.

Lidia Infante

And that sounded like a lot of bullshit and buzzwords. So let me just bring it down to what it means. So currently I’m working at BigCommerce, as I mentioned earlier, a senior international SEO manager. That means I have to make sure that we are producing the same level of quality and quantity to an extent across 10, 12, 20 websites, at some point. This means I need to create a very effective agile trans-creation process where measuring the results for the business is key. Does that make more sense than the buzzwords they use initially?

Dixon Jones

It does. And what I think is really interesting about those three ideas is that all three of them are not focused on creating more shit. It’s about trying to improve the existing stuff that you’ve got out there, which all three examples which were internal linking, improve the internal repurposing, refreshing content for the next year and then focusing on the business objectives and taking the user down the right business journey. All of those ideas and thoughts are a million miles away from, get more back links or get more content out there and just keep on generating more and more and more and more and more stuff. And I think that’s really good. It’s not about getting more links, it’s about getting better links or more targeted links.

It’s not about getting more content, it’s about making sure that you are conveying your messaging across properly. So I think all of those are really, really good. Let me jump back in on one of those and focus on the refreshing versus repurposing. Rejoice, you talked about that. Are there any things that are important now? Do you have stuff out there, like, best stuff for 2021 that is going to turn into best stuff for 2022 or are you talking about going back and looking at your content hook line and sinker and refreshing that from the ground up?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yes. Mostly going back to essentially the content you already have. So I think rather than trying to recreate a whole new topic or whole new content, look at where your previous content are ranking and look at how is being positioned compared to your competitors. And then that way we can help you utilize any new intent to actually ask yourself, is this content actually answering the question that the users are trying to put forward and that can help you then repurpose it. You don’t necessarily have to now generate a whole new idea, but maybe repurpose the content with a new angle, maybe make it more interactive by adding, I don’t know, interactive infographics, videos, and all those things. So that way you build that out a bit more and refresh what you have. I wouldn’t say, let’s now create a whole content ideation plan that can be quite daunting for clients as well. But if you present a client, we can take what you have, look through it and see what keywords are now doing better and repurpose that content for you. That is a better angle to come at it.

Dixon Jones

Lidia, would you say that that fits in quite well with your approach of improving the business focus?

Lidia Infante

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I’m doing is I’m auditing the existing content, assigning it some unique identifiers and then bringing it across our different locals. So if you’ve ever heard me speak about international SEO, and I think you have, I always speak about being very specific to your market and not only translating the content that you have, adapting it to the keywords and so on, but actually translating it for intent as well because the majority of the markets differs massively and less mature markets tend to accumulate a lot of search volume on more generic keywords and then brings in the very annoying problem of intent ambiguity. So you need to be aware of that, test, explore and do a lot of work. But if you already have a main website, like it’s my case that bigcommerce.com website has a lot of amazing content. I just went through it, found the best performing content to start testing out a trans-creation process with it.

Dixon Jones

That’s brilliant. JD’s got a point about zero search which I think we’ll come onto, but Doc Sheldon said, “The three points that you guys have come up with, while all three points tangentially affect it, I find it interesting that nobody’s specifically mentioned entity focus as a goal.” Although I think that’s a little unfair on Andy, particularly who said, “Right, internal linking is talking about topic clusters.” So you’re talking about topics, entities, topics. I call a bit of a synonym, anyway. But would you say Andy, that you’re really focusing on entities when you’re talking about topics on internal linking or is it really all about architects for you?

Andy Drinkwater

No, absolutely not. I mean, the anchor text makes a difference, obviously, because I mean, you’ve got to get enough architect into your supporting content that’s supplying the signals to Google in the first place. So you’ve got to know what it is you’re actually talking about there. But ultimately, absolutely, it comes down to a really strong focus on entities. I mean, you don’t want just go off at a tangent literally and start linking to all sorts. If you’re all selling shovels, you don’t want to be talking about garden sheds and interlinking those two. You want to keep the focus tight and that’s predominantly what that’s all about.

Dixon Jones

I’ve got a little challenge. I mean, I’m try to run something about link opportunities and I keep on seeing the missing linkers, the underlying entities. So you kick off in a tangent when you do that. Right. Okay. Let’s jump onto JD’s point if we can, again, David. And JD said, or Harry or JD said, “Happy new year everyone.” Well, thanks very much for coming in JD. “I’ve got one question. What do you guys think on voice SEO, will only focus on local SEO or will impact on eCommerce?”

Okay. I’m not quite sure about the grammar on there, “And increasing impact of zero results in Google?” So basically I think really, how much is voice search going to increase, is something that SEOs start to engage with? And is it something that we are going to get involved in, in this group of four here or gang of four? Or is it something that is a different mindset and we’ll leave it to Nick Wilsdon, I seem to remember him talking about voice search quite a lot conferences, 18 months ago. I don’t know if anyone wants to jump in, on voice search at all.

Lidia Infante

Yeah. Let me bring in the popular slash and popular opinion of… Let the concept die. We know that it’s happening, but it’s not going to be 70% of searches anymore. You know what I mean? We had that moment where we all obsessed about voice search, and we were like “Oh, how do we measure this? Is SEO going to die?” Spoiler alert, it’s not. Spoiler alert, voice search is also not going to be all that. Well, I recently bought a TV because it was a black Friday deal and it comes with a remote control that I can use voice search with. And I call it search, but it’s not really. The intent that you have, you’re not trying to find the answer to a question. You’re not trying to find a website to get something done. You’re trying to use a software that allows voice input to tell it to do something for you, right.

So if I Google search on… Well, if I voice search on Google Maps, it’s because I’m driving and I should not be touching my phone anyway. If I voice search on my TV, it’s because I want it to open YouTube. And if I voice search on my Google Home, it’s because I want something specifically on Spotify. I’m not really on a search journey, so yeah.

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think voice search it’s limited in a way and it doesn’t actually tell you anything about intent as Lidia said, because it’s based on the environment that you are in. So if you’re out and about, I wonder because I’m taking a walk, or I’m shopping, the way I search through my voice, would I break down the keywords I use or would it then be conversational? Would it not be? So it’s all dependent on the environment, which I don’t think is an accurate description or accurate and truth to where the searching is within a journey. It doesn’t tell brands anything. It just tells brands that someone said Apple on Siri and that’s that, really.

Andy Drinkwater

Yeah. Can anybody imagine doing the shopping on Alexa? God only knows what you’d end up with.

Lidia Infante

Oh my God. It doesn’t understand my accent half of the time. No, I’m very done with voice search.

Dixon Jones

Brilliant. Okay. I don’t know if you could hear me because I think I might have frozen.

David Bain

Yeah. I was just in for a second there Dixon because I thought you’d completely vanished, but you’ve just frozen on the screen, but we can hear you fine.

Dixon Jones

That’s fine. I mean, I think I’m going to put the counterpoint then a little bit, if I may because I think that now I realize what the original person asked about, because if you want to dive in and start asking, order me a cheeseburger, I think that is something that may well start becoming a reality on voice search in the not too distant future. So I guess the Uber eats and those guys, the Deliveroos are going to be still all over voice search or those kind of people should be. And then it does become a case of, well, it might be important for local SEO or do you think I’m over optimistic there?

Andy Drinkwater

I do think that maybe something further down the line for local as well, but for Big eCommerce, would you really use it? I don’t know. I mean, if you are on Deliveroo, I can only imagine you wanted Five Guys, you end up with a Sloppy Joe’s from somewhere down the road that you really didn’t want. And I say, if you didn’t get those sorts of things right, I suppose if it’s got some structure to it, then it might work for the likes of those delivery services. But I think I’d be quite hesitant to use it personally, especially on the Big shopping sites from a large SEO point of view.

Lidia Infante

I think I would give it a try if I could reorder something that I already ordered on Deliveroo or Uber Eats, but it would be quite marginal. I’m not sure how much it will take on. Definitely not 70%.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. If that technology becomes something that we can use, I think it’ll start growing quite rapidly. So I think that JD makes a fair point. And I think that us as cynics, may be cynical now but I do think that voice comes in. Oh yeah. And Lidia, Doc agrees with Lidia, sees voice more as device commands and stuff. And certainly it is at the moment, but there is got to be some potential and surely the Googles of this world or the Alexas of this world aspire to be able to say, can you order a taxi, please? That’s not a difficult thing for a voice search to be able to do. And it’s also not going to be a difficult thing for us to optimize for, but I suspect that’ll be paid. I think it will rapidly go into being a paid result and it will just be Uber that do a deal with every single taxi firm. And it will always be an Uber that fulfills the demand, I think, and an Uber Eats or Deliveroo for food.

Lidia Infante

That makes sense. But I think the point that we were trying to make collectively a bit was that, at what point is that search over a command, where is the line that differentiates it? Sure, we are using search. Well, we are using our voice to give commands to different devices, but is it search? And I think we are saying that it isn’t.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Okay. I’ll leave… Sorry, Rejoice, so you want to jump in?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah, I was going to just add, if you just look at the search process in general, at least with search, we are presented with a range of results that the user can actually sift through. Whereas I think voice search it kind of… Like Lidia said, it is a device command that it specifically goes to find something that you have asked it to do. So it’s not necessarily search because you are not tackling every aspect of the consideration stage or the awareness stage. You’re just telling your device, find something and you know exactly what that something is. So it’s not necessarily a true search journey.

Dixon Jones

So Gerry White, who used to work at, Head of SEO at Just Eat had delivery reordering by voice. Okay. So reordering. So basically you have to have logged in to Just Eat to do that. Jerry, how successful was that four years ago? Could I ask? Because I’ve never ordered Just Eat by voice. I’ll let it him comment.

Lidia Infante

I didn’t know it existed at all.

Dixon Jones

Well, yeah, I didn’t hear about it and so existing and using it are two different things. So maybe Lidia, you have a point about how quickly that’s going to take on as a share of search, shall we say. Okay, let’s move on. And no doubt, I’ve just goated Gerry into coming back with some stats, but maybe he’s a bit far from Just Eat now to be able to do that. But let’s jump into some areas of SEO and start with technical strategies. And I know that Rejoice you’re more of a content person. And I think Lidia is-ish, but let’s jump in with Andy. But if anybody wants to jump in with other bits, Andy, what technical stuff do you think is not top of mind for you, apart from internal links, which is on page.

Andy Drinkwater

Well, I think one of the things that I’ve always got at top of my mind is page speed and not just page speed. I mean, you look at the whole core web vitals, whilst I don’t think that we got what Google said we may or may not get last year when core web vitals was supposed to make a big difference to, sorry, to the search. I do think it’s still important. And these are still important metrics to keep an eye on. I mean, if your site’s going slow, it’s going to have an impact somewhere along the line, even if it’s not directly, it’s going to be indirectly. So core web vitals are something I’m still going to be keeping an eye on.

I always take a look at the technical capabilities of any website and see how they are for all the best practices. How are they doing with regards to the individual pages themselves? I mean, we talk about the internal links and the topic clusters, as well as that’s all satisfied when you get to start digging into it, is the canonical links, are they all right? Do they have any issues with them? Getting the best practices in place as well, I mean, it isn’t just about being as technical as you possibly can be. Sometimes it’s just case of just get back to basics and just make sure you’ve got what’s needed in there in the first place.

Dixon Jones

So Rejoice, can I ask you, when you are writing on multitude of mediums or multitude of websites I’m guessing, do you find the impact of what you do is affected by, when there’s a site that’s really good for, that’s technically seems to be working very, very well for SEO. Does every word that you publish seem to do better as a result of that? Or is that too hard to say?

Rejoice Ojiaku

I think sometimes it can be too hard to say, but I do think when a site has a great foundation technically to add more blog posts or to add new landing pages that you have to write content, optimize content for, is a lot easier, because what you find is sites that are going through quite a lot of very complex technical fixes or technical changes. You never know if that new page or that new content you put out, and you’ve linked something within it, you don’t know if it’s broken because the pages ain’t loading properly or it’s taking too long. In the past I have dealt with clients who the blog post were writing, they just had such a hard time finding it because the way that the URL structure was, it was so weird and that made it very difficult for any content writer to do, because you can have great content, but if the site is not allowing it to be found or not allowing it to be called properly, then it’s really, what’s the point?

Dixon Jones

Yeah. And Lidia you’re on eCommerce site. So does that whole technical SEO side of things, does that become more important on a e-commerce site or is it still trying to get content into an e-commerce site, that’s a challenge?

Lidia Infante

I believe technical SEO becomes more important on an e-commerce site, but the way that I try to explain this to my coworkers and peers, because I’ve moved from agency side to in-house. I moved in December and that’s put me, again, in a position of having to manage a lot of stakeholders and again, have to learn how to explain SEO in a way that doesn’t put everybody to sleep. So what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to divide the function of technical SEO in two ways. In one way, we have technical SEO that’s directed at search engines to enable them to find and read the content. And then we have technical SEO directed at delighting the users and working on the user experience. And on that site, we’ve got web performance optimization, we’ve got making URLs readable. We’ve got, gosh, I don’t know, all the core web vital stuff. And just making the website not suck on the side of, towards search engines. So enabling the website to be red and index.

We’ve got all the indexation, crawl budget, yada, yada, yada, which is really important in eCommerce. And I’ll be sharing eCommerce case study that someone wrote, I can’t remember her name, tomorrow on my SEO women thread. But yeah, basically, for me there’s two separate functions and they have different roles and they need to be prioritized separately.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. If you remember what the case study is and you put it in the chat, let David know, or maybe try and when we publish this out on blog.majestic.com, which will be in the next 24, 48 hours, we’ll try and link to it as well if it goes live. Okay. So I wanted to also talk about links and on page. We talked quite a lot about on page, but we might come back to it. But what about links? I mean, you’ve talked about internal links, Andy, but what about a back link strategy? How is your approach likely to be, or are you one of those people that doesn’t do a huge amount of link building? It’s hard, it’s getting harder to do link building for sure. But is it something you at least have an ear open to? I’ll go with you, Andy, because you’ve got your mic off.

Andy Drinkwater

I do an enormous amount of link building. It’s probably the second largest side of what I do and probably upwards of, I don’t know, 1500 links a month across my clients, thereabouts. So I’m very much an advocate of link build. I share it on Twitter regularly. I’ve been link building for a specific product for Big eCommerce clients, and if we’ve been targeting that and nothing else, then I’ll share the growth on some of these as well.

Dixon Jones

So you are a big believer of-

Andy Drinkwater

Oh yeah.

Dixon Jones

… that links make the difference still, in spite of the-

Andy Drinkwater

Yeah, absolutely.

Dixon Jones

Do you think that the Google mantra of links are not so important is hiding it a little bit.

Andy Drinkwater

Links make an enormous difference. There’s no two ways about it. I mean, the difficulty comes with trying to make something that’s scalable because you can only put so much content out there that’s going to stick, that people are going to want on the websites. So trying to find the next in… To get to an enrolled, it’s always a challenge, of course. I mean, nobody likes outreach. I think if you liked outreach, there’s something wrong with you. I mean, it’s time-

Dixon Jones

It is a pretty horrible task. Yeah.

Andy Drinkwater

Oh, it is. Yeah. It’s a necessary evil, but having been doing this for long enough now like I said, I’ve got a pretty decent patter down in terms of that. But I mean, I’m not afraid of picking up the phone if I think that there’s going to be opportunities for good links, for particular clients. I’ll pick up the phone, now I’ll talk to somebody. I did a stint in sales for quite a number of years, so I’ve got no problem talking to people. And if I think there’s something that’s link worthy, I’ll sell that as a reason why you’d want to have it mentioned on your website. Obviously you don’t go in there and say, can you give a link, that very rarely works, but it is something that’s I do a lot of and I will continue to do so as well. I mean, there’s been nothing that’s changed at all that would make me think that links aren’t as important now, won’t continue to be as important.

Dixon Jones

And Rejoice, I mean, link building is not particularly your main focus, but presumably when you write a good piece of content, it attracts links. And when people link to your content, does that not have a positive feeling?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah, absolutely, it does. It shows that they see your content as being quite knowledgeable or authoritative, or they’re trying to align with it. So I think it really does tell a lot of brands that people are actually interested in not just the brand itself, but interested in the things you have to say, because it is quite readable, it is quite attractive. So I think link building is a very important aspect of content. And also it could be a reason why maybe your content isn’t performing well, because maybe you have loads of toxic links linking to it, and you have to be careful. And that idea of anchor text is so important because sometimes the architects are just not relevant. So you do want relevant sites, relevant businesses to be linking back to your content, because it shows again, telling Google, “Hey, this is trustworthy information. And that way it’s helping your content do really well.”

Dixon Jones

What’s your view on link building for 2022, Lidia?

Lidia Infante

Well, as an ex-RiseAtSeven, I have very strong opinions on link building. I think not everybody that wants links necessarily needs them. So the very first thing that I do is perform a link up versus my competitors to try and understand if links are going to move the needle or not. So the very first thing that I would recommend to anyone who’s thinking of building links in 2022 is build a link gap analysis, understand how many links do you have? How many links do your competitors have? Where are they going within your pages? And then think about link velocity. So how fast are you acquiring them versus your competitors? And lastly, if you’re there, I would perform a link intersect. And what that is, is looking at what sites are linking to your competitors that aren’t linking to you necessarily, and trying to bridge that gap as well, because that’s going to give you a little bit of an edge over them. Rather than an edge, meet them there and see if there’s any of the traffic that you’re losing, might be due to you missing that endorsement from that website.

So link gap, link velocity analysis and link intersect.

Dixon Jones

And guys, just for the audience, if you haven’t tried the Clique Hunter on Majestic, it’s great. You can put 10 websites and you can see, with a couple of clicks, you can say, right, I want all of the websites that are linking, all up to say four or five or three of my competitors not linking to me. And then you can sort all of those based on the Trust Flow or Citation Flow of those sites as well or number of links they’ve got coming in or whatever it may be. So if you haven’t tried the Clique Hunter tool, that’s my ad for Majestic for the time, because they’re sponsoring the show. So there we go. But do give it a try. I went into it the other day and I just realized just how much better it had got compared to three or four years ago when I was using it, when I was full time at Majestic as well.

So I want to jump back to On-Page because it’s right up Rejoice’s and Lidia’s street, but when we are talking about On-Page optimization and you were talking about repurposing content or rewriting content, but what are the things that make a page good for you or content on a page good for you? And I’ll go with you Lidia, first.

Lidia Infante

Intent. It’s intent, all about intent. Are we going to satisfy the user’s intent through text? Is it going to be maybe a page that you can listen to? Is it going to be video? Is it going to be images? Do they want the templates? What does the user want? Right, there’s so many things. And I like talking for example about the home vertigo, which is very popular on Pinterest. When you’re looking at how to satisfy the home vertigo side of things, we’re talking about queries such as how to organize a fridge or how to decorate a small apartment. You’re going to want to satisfy this, not with a chunk of text, but with an infographic, with a template, with visuals. That’s a very clear example of something that we cannot satisfy with just text. We’re going to have to plan it in advance, build it and same with everything else.

If I’m trying to understand how to hang a very heavy mirror from the wall, I probably need a video rather than just a block of text or a bunch of images. So when it comes to repurposing and reevaluating the content that you have, look at all the performance metrics that you need to look at. Clicks, what keywords are you ranking for, bounce rate, how far do your users scroll down the page, but then mostly think of intent and what you can do that. It’s not only just intent from the type of query that’s coming, but look at the content cluster that you have, the series of keywords that you’re looking to rank for with that specific piece of content. And what is Google showing on their serves for those keywords? Are they showing images, news, videos, knowledge graphs, what’s going on, on the serves, take a look at that content.

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think, to add to Lidia’s point is I think a good content, of course, you have to listen to what the user wants in the regards to your intent, but also you have to ask yourself, am I delivering this content in the most appropriate way to answer this intent? So to further what Lidia, your point is, if you are creating how to guides, for example, is it appropriate to create how to guides with all text, no images? Is it appropriate to create things like, how to build a wardrobe with just text and there’s no video, there’s no tutorial, there’s nothing. Think about every other type of content or content formats that you can use. I think a lot of brands get too bogged down with only text and text is not the only content format. You can do other things, infographics.

And those things can still answer a lot of user intent as well as help you with any set features, knowledge graphs and all those things. So just the echo of what Lidia said that it’s intent, delivery of content in itself. How are you actually answering that question? What formats are you using to answer that question?

Dixon Jones

Just to blend On-Page content with technical just a little bit. I had an example just a couple days ago where… I had a page that I was refreshing the content. It was already ranking pretty well for a pretty strong phrase and it had videos. It was made up of principally three videos in there, but at some point tried to speed up the site by not loading up the embeds on YouTube, I think, and trying to find faster ways to doing that. I then managed to break it. So then I went back again and just put out images there so people could click through to get to the videos themselves. And I went back to put the videos in properly and, I don’t know, but within 24 hours it had a positive impact because it was about something that encouraged having video in the page. So there is a trade off, isn’t there, Andy, between content and getting content as fast as possible and as rich as possible because making it richer will definitely slow it down, wouldn’t it?

Andy Drinkwater

Yes, of course. I mean, it’s always going to. I mean, there’s any number of ways you can speed up a page and it’s so easy to slow it down just by getting something wrong as well. And one of the things that I’ve always been using as well is using the likes of Hotjar or one of these tools. I mean, there’s the one I liked to recommend to people because it’s great. And it’s a great way to have a look at how people are interacting with your pages. If your pages are stalling, if your pages are running slowly, you’ll see it because you’ll have a recording of it. I mean, if it’s people are getting bored, if you can see them scrolling around, if they’re struggling to do something, because there’s an element of it that’s trying to load and not doing, you’re going to lose something. So yeah, this very much technical and content, they do go hand in hand, absolutely.

Dixon Jones

Of course, putting Hotjar on or Clarity, or is it Microsoft Clarity is one that’s also free and stuff. Of course, that has a potential to slow down your site as well. So again, it’s always a little bit of a double thing. And Lidia, you make the point that that’s exactly what you say about SEO. There’s two sides to everything.

Lidia Infante

Yeah, exactly. So it brings back to what I said about the two functions of technical SEO. One side, you’re trying to get your content rank higher by doing tweaks and improving web performance optimization. But then on the other side, you’re trying to delight your users. And part of that is loading the right things on your content. I think what you were mentioning is the perfect example of that trade off.

Dixon Jones

Yeah, okay. Brilliant. Okay, guys, we’ve already got to near the end of the whole show. Before we ask people, ask you guys how people can find more about you, David, why don’t you jump back in and tell us what’s happening next time around?

David Bain

Sure. Well, we’ve actually got a couple of shows that I’d like to tell the listener about. The first is on the 2nd of February. So that’s the next one. That’s episode 25, and that’s on how to use Google Search Console to improve your SEO. Joining us for that one will be Natalie Mott and Olga from SEOSLY. And then a month after that on the 2nd of March, this could be internal linking that we’re going to be discussing. Andy’s going to be back for that one, Andy Drinkwater. Also joining Andy will be Orit Mutznik. Sign up for those at majestic.com/webinars.

Dixon Jones

Excellent guys, thank you very much for coming in. Just to say, the case study that Lidia was looking for, we’ve tracked it out. It’s boostroas.com, which is https://www.boostroas.com/case_study/misirli-crawl-budget-optimization-success/. Okay. I can’t even say that. Okay. I’ll tell you what, it’s on is it boostroas.com?

David Bain

It’s in the YouTube chat. Yeah.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Okay. We’ve got it in the YouTube chat. So find us on the YouTube channel if you need it in the YouTube, if you need to find it as a podcast. Guys, thank you ever so much for coming on today, I really enjoyed it. There’s some great tips, ideas, thoughts and approaches. And I love it. So if people want to get ahold of you, how do they do that? Andy?

Andy Drinkwater

Twitter. I live on Twitter @IQSEO, or just by my website, which is andydrinkwater.com.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. Lidia, how do we find out about you?

Lidia Infante

I also live on Twitter with quite a lot less followers than Andy. So you can find me at @LidiaInfanteM. You can also find me on my website, lidia-infante.com.

Dixon Jones

Okay. And for those that don’t have the benefit of a screen, that’s Lidia with an I, Lidia Infante M. Is it?

Lidia Infante

Yeah.

Dixon Jones

Great. Rejoice, how do we find you?

Rejoice Ojiaku

Yeah. So Twitter as well. RejiYates on Twitter and also LinkedIn, I’m active on both of those platforms.

Dixon Jones

Excellent. Guys, thank you ever so much for coming on. Thank you to Majestic for sponsoring the event as always. We’ll see you next month, if we don’t see you in cyberspace in between. Thank you very much and see you next month.

Resources

After the webinar, Andy produced a follow-on post where he explores further the importance of backlinks, content, Core Web Vitals and more.

My follow-on after the excellent webinar with @Dixon_Jones @LidiaInfanteM and @RejiYates

What will SEO look like in 2022?https://t.co/iBA5z2EUnV pic.twitter.com/GWKLFktENu

— Andy Drinkwater (@iqseo) January 7, 2022

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