Search Engine Optimisation can be a bit of a nightmare for marketeers, there’s so much conflicting information and it’s difficult to know if you’re doing the right thing. Help is at hand!
In this episode of Not Another Marketing Podcast we are joined by Patrick Hathaway from Sitebulb who looks at 5 Areas of Search Engine Optimisation That You Cannot Ignore.
Websites and services mentioned during the podcast include:
Transcript (edited for clarity)
Jon Tromans: Joining me today is Patrick Hathaway from Sitebulb.com. Thanks for giving up some of your time Patrick, I appreciate it.
Patrick Hathaway: Hey Jon, how’s it going?
Jon: Not too bad. Let me get this right now, Sitebulb, I’ve written down what I think it is and you can explain a bit more. It scans your website, finds out all the faults, and from an SEO technical perspective then gives you some advice on how to fix it.
Patrick: That’s basically it, yes. I come from an SEO background. I work with a developer. We’ve got a little two-man team and we make software products. Actually, we’ve got two products; we’ve got Sitebulb and we’ve got another one, URL Profiler which we started out about four years ago. They’re both aimed at digital marketers and they’re both aimed to help you collect and understand data about your websites from an SEO perspective, but also some user perspective as it will tell you various things that are wrong with it, various things we think you should fix and various ways you could optimise your site better. Essentially to rank better in search engines.
Jon: I ran it through my website and it was like having a teacher put red marks all over my site like, “Oh dear.” I thought it was actually quite good and now I don’t.
Patrick: One of the things we’re working on at the moment is building a recommendation engine in there so we can start to prioritize things because at the moment, like you say, you put a site in that you think it’s all right, and it will go here’s a ton of things which we found that you could improve but no real way of saying well, actually, these are the most important things for improving, these are the least important things to improve.
We’re working on that right at the moment. Later on today, I’ll be running through with Gareth, who’s the developer, some more designs for how that’s actually going to work, but it’s looking good. It’s looking a lot like it will work a lot better so that people, especially people who don’t, are a bit newer to SEO or don’t necessarily understand it or will be able to know, “Okay, well this is a low-impact thing, this is a high impact thing, this thing’s critical. I really need to fix this.”
Jon: I must also say congratulations on the award wins. You’ve won a few, haven’t you? Best search software tool in the UK Search Awards and then in the US Awards; best search tool and also best software innovation.
Patrick: Yes, I’ve got them just there on the shelf. Yes, we’ve done really well. We started Sitebulb last September and it’s basically been running for a year. A year and a quarter I suppose and we thought we’ll try these awards. We’ve never ever entered any awards for URL Profiler, but we thought, we’re really proud of what we’ve done with Sitebulb, we’ll give it a go and I went across to Vegas and we won the US ones, won both of them over there. So we just was submitted to those two categories and then we submitted to the two categories again for the UK ones and we were down in London two and a half weeks ago and we won the best software tool. We were super pleased with that.
Jon: Yes, I bet absolutely, yes. When I first contacted you, I said to you, “Let’s have a look at the things that marketers need to get right on the SEO side of things,” and you said back to me that your take on it would be areas that you’ve absolutely should not ignore, which is slightly different to it. Explain what you meant.
Patrick: Well, it goes along with what I was saying about the thing we’re trying to build into the tool. It’s essentially that there aren’t just a set of rules and if you do these rules correctly, your website will be great. It doesn’t really work like that. It’s much more of a case for your specific website and your specific situation, in your business, in your niche of the people you’re targeting, the type of content you can produce, what are the things that make sense?
Having a generic list of ‘fix these things’ just doesn’t make sense and all the best SEOs and all the best SEO advice is very much understanding the specific situation for a specific site.
Jon: So you’re looking at it holistically rather than just a list of tick boxes to get ticked?
Patrick: Absolutely, yes. That’s one of the things I really despised in the industries is this tick box mentality. So in terms of the software, that’s one of the things we’re trying to move away from. How do we stop people thinking that they just have to tick all of these things and how do we go, “Right, so on your website, here are the five most important things.”?
I don’t actually tend to do SEO audits myself anymore because I don’t have time with the software, but for many years I did and my focus would always be when I come in and look at a website, how do I understand what’s actually the situation? What’s going on with the website? Have they had a traffic increase recently? Have they had a drop? Has it been steady? Are there opportunities here or are there problems? Once you get that frame, you can go, “Okay, well, if there’s problems, what are the problems? What do we need to fix in order to right the ship?”
If it’s going all right, where are the areas that we can optimise? That comes into what are our competitors doing? What are other people doing in this space? Also, what are the search engines doing? The type of queries that you want to rank for, what sort of pages are coming back, what sort of things are the search engines rewarding? Because that changes all the time and, that’s one of the areas that is kind of difficult to stay on top of if you’re not embedded in the SEO industry day in day out, where Google are making changes to the algorithm and it can be impacting stuff, which is very, very difficult to actually see because it’s not just a thing they’re updating.
They’ve now- they’ve got AI built-in so they’ve got an algorithm called RankBrain, which is very badly understood in the industry, but what it essentially is doing is when someone’s typing a query into a search engine to look for something, it’s trying to understand what that query really means.
I was looking for mince pie recipes the other day and if I’d have just typed in mince pies, they’re trying to understand what the intent is behind that.
Does that mean that I want to buy mince pies or does that mean that I want to look for recipes for mince pies? What does that mean? I’m looking for the reviews of the best mince pies and when you’ve only got two words to work with, they’re not entirely sure.
They won’t show you a series of results, but when you give them a bit more information, then they’ll start to get a better idea of the intent, but the other thing you will start to see with this sort of thing is it will change throughout the year. Coming up to Christmas, you will see the search results will change because the underlying intent has changed. They will understand that actually more people are looking to buy them or more people are looking to make recipes for them. They will change the results that come up.
Jon: I’ve got to admit, I’ve said this for years and years and years, probably before it even happened that I reckon there’s a switch just before Christmas that puts purchases ahead of information.
Patrick: Totally, yes, yes. I think there is.
Jon: A client of mine once described search engine optimization to me and he said to me what it actually was. He said, Google is a computer. You just have to give it inputs and it gives you the results. What are the inputs I have to give it to get me to number one?
But it’s just doesn’t work like that. It’s not a program that you put inputs into and gives you– It’s almost like Google is becoming a creepy person with the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, it knows, it’s trying to know your intent and what you’re thinking. Is that right?
Patrick: Yes, six or seven years ago that statement was probably relatively accurate. There were certain triggers. You could be given a recipe of, “‘Do these things on your site, go and get all these links and you could rank pretty well for the things that you wanted to rank for.” A lot of that hasn’t changed in terms of there are still a set of important things that you need to do and if you get those things wrong, it’s not going to work.
Jon: Let’s try and go through a few things then. We’re going to try and get five areas which you can’t ignore.
Patrick: I’ll start off with the most technical one and this is– I come from a technical SEO background so I’m way more biased to this stuff than probably most people are but the most basic thing you need to get right on your website is it needs to be crawlable and it needs to be indexable, because there are no rankings. You will not rank for anything if your page is unindexed and this is the most basic thing you need to get right and you need to make sure that you are not accidentally or deliberately telling search engines, “Either don’t crawl my site or don’t index my site.”
Jon: Sure and we’re not just talking about, say, the HTML pages here are we? We’re talking about the JavaScript, we’re talking about the cascading style sheets, the CSS sheets and things like that. I still come across shopping carts from years and years ago where the JS folder, the JavaScript folder and the CSS folder were blocked by the robots.txt file.
Patrick: Yes, so in terms of what search engines want these days, in the past, the way that they would do is they would just go and literally grab all the HTML, just download that. Essentially like going into your browser, right clicking and pressing view source, taking that content and that would be what they use to index, that would be what they use to try and find all the other links on your site to go and crawl.
Now they’re still doing that part, but they also want to render it as well. They also want to render it, they want to understand what it looks like on mobile, they want to understand the speed of the site. All of those things, you can’t do if you can’t actually download all the assets on the page, if you can’t also download, like you say, images, the style sheets, the JavaScript. If they can’t go and get that stuff and download the page, then they can’t judge your page properly.
If you’re blocking up scripts accidentally, which is very easy to do. So in your robots file, you’ve got rules which say, “Disallow a WP content file or something like that,” which could house your style sheets or some JavaScript files. You can easily, accidentally block this stuff.
It’s very easy to check if you’re doing this stuff. There’s various free tools that you can use. Google’s Search Console is a great place to start. If you don’t know what’s happening on your website, go make sure you verify this to Google Search Console, go in there, look at the errors, look at the warnings they give you because if you’re blocking this stuff, they will tell you.
That’s really the primary reason for using a crawler like Sitebulb is you’ll understand how search engines can crawl it because it is a crawler. It will go and try and crawl the sites. If there’s pages it can’t get to, there’s a reason it can’t get to them.
If there’s pages it can’t get to, it means search engines can’t get to them as well. You’re going to get messages coming up in the tool which will say things like, “You’re blocking your JavaScript files, or we can’t access this file or you’ve got these pages indexed on these pages that aren’t indexable.
Jon: Make everything indexable crawlable. Number two.
Patrick: Number two is really thinking about your targeting. Doing keyword research, basically, although we–
Jon: Does that still matter? Does keyword research still matter, do you think because you hear a lot of people say, “No, forget about your keywords now. It’s like 1995 all over again.”?
Patrick: No, it’s still a massive part of it because it’s just a deeper hole to dig into because, again, it’s not just understanding what the keywords are, it’s understanding intent behind the keywords and making sure that your content answers that in turn.
Jon: It’s what people search for isn’t it at the end of the day?
Patrick: Yes. On a very basic level, if you don’t really know what your pages are actually supposed to be targeting, you can’t set your page up correctly in order to target them. Even if all you did was go, “Right, I know I’m making mince pies, running with this mince pie analogy. I’m making a site about mince pies,” right?
Jon: Yes.
Patrick: I’m going to put in some mince pie reviews. If you don’t put on the page, “Mince pie reviews,” it’s not going to work. If you start to see that your mince pie reviews are not ranking for mince pie reviews, so you’ve got your page mince pie reviews, it’s not ranking for mince pie reviews, well, you want to be looking at the page and understanding am I actually targeting the keywords properly on the page? Are there variations of these keywords that we should be targeting on the page?
In whatever industry you’re in, there should be at least four or five big things that are important for you to rank for that will have decent search volume, will have the right kind of intent so you’ve got people coming to your site that are going to be in the right position to either look for the service that you’re looking for or buy the product you’re selling.
If you don’t get that bit right and you don’t understand what the intent is, or you’re optimizing for queries that have got the wrong intent, you’re going to start ranking for pages that are irrelevant. You’ll get people coming in, seeing the content which you’ve laid out, which is buying type of content, but they’re in informational stage and they’re looking just to learn more about it. You’ll get lots of traffic but it’s not relevant traffic. It’s not traffic that actually converts. If you’re not doing the research, you’re not targeting your pages properly, then you’re wasting your time.
Jon: Number three.
Patrick: Number three is links.
Jon: More links, the better I hear.
Patrick: Essentially.
Jon: From anywhere you want.
Patrick: Pretty much. Obviously, there has been a big thing in the last few years where you can’t get bad links and bad links will hurt you and all that sort of stuff.
Jon: Google’s really messed this up, haven’t they? Google’s messed it up, the whole links thing, haven’t they, by penalising and punishing people for backlinks instead of just ignoring them.
Patrick: They did change the penguin algorithm. When was it? A year and a half or so back to now make it so that they’re not necessarily penalising, they are just ignoring and there’s definitely have been some recoveries off the back of that. If you’re a small business owner, I wouldn’t be worrying about that aspect from the outset.
Really, the thing that you really need to start thinking about is how you’re actually going to acquire links because the key things that I’ve mentioned so far, if your pages aren’t crawlable or indexable, absolutely, you aren’t going to be ranking for anything. If your pages aren’t targeting correctly, you’re not going to rank for the things that you want to rank for. If you don’t have links, you’re just not going to be able to compete.
Maybe in some small markets, or some local markets, you can get away without leading many links. Links are like the petrol. They’re like the thing that push you up, the power that makes it all go. That’s really how you start to rank for competitive terms, that’s how you rank for lots of terms across your website, is by getting lots of links. Links from powerful, relevant websites that are linking to you in the right way.
We could spend hours talking about links. Obviously, I’m going to try and avoid that. You can’t just build a website and expect it to rank. You can’t just build a website and expect that links are going to magically come in, you need to do something or other that’s going to raise awareness of your product, and raise awareness of your service. That can be offline stuff, that can be news stories, that could be charity things, that could be events that you’re running. It doesn’t have to be online, online, online.
Number four will be about the things you can do online. There does really need to be a plan for acquiring.
Jon: My attitude towards links and everything is to build it in holistically. I understand if we go back 20 years ago, then offline and online world were very much separated in a way. Nowadays, it’s very much the same thing. Online and offline is almost combined together in a way. If something is happening in the offline world, it’s also being talked about and mentioned in the online world at the same time. The idea of generating links is just to promote yourself and promote yourself really, really well.
Patrick: Yes. Exactly. You do see this, that like that there is an expectation, particularly with some small businesses is when you actually– You launch your website, you put it online, and things are just going to come in, and that’s just not true, you have to go- like you say, you have to go out and promote yourself. We actually, with Sitebulb, with URL Profile, we don’t build links in the traditional sense. We do have an acquisition strategy, we do think, “Well, how are we going to get this in front of people that they can build links for us.”
I know our industry is not one to compare to, because lots of people blog all the time about lots of things. It’s easy to get links in the SEO industry. We didn’t have to try that hard because what we could do is go, “Right, well, we’ve got some friends in the industry, we’ve got some influences. We’re going to talk to you guys, we’re going to show you our software, and eventually they start blogging on or software,” and then we get links that way.
We’ve entered these awards, we got a bunch of links at the awards. We weren’t going to get links, but we did get links because we were promoting ourselves. It’s having these various channels that you think about and go, “We think if we do these sorts of actions, we will generate links.” If you don’t do that at all, you’re not going to get very far.
Jon: I think it’s almost like having a mindset, isn’t it? The mindset is not, “I’m going out there to try and generate links. I’m going out there to try and promote my business, promote my company. The byproduct of that is that people are going to link to me.”
Patrick: Yes. That’s what Google wants you to do. If you do things that way, you’re not going to need to worry about penalties or anything like that, because the links will be coming in naturally. You’re not trying to manipulate anything. You’re not going to get anchor text saying, “Best mince pie 2018 coming in.” It’s just going to be, “Read these reviews,” or “Check this site out,” whatever. That’s how it should work.
Jon: That’s fine, isn’t it? That’s okay, isn’t it, if somebody just links to you with the words in the link that just say, “Check this out.” That’s fine.
Patrick: Whenever the manipulation was going on in our industry, people would seek out to put those sorts of anchor text in so that it didn’t look manipulative. Just leaving people to it is the best way to make the links look natural, and promote yourself and make sure there is some way for links to get acquired even if you’re not going, “I am going to get links today.”
Jon: Links, right. So we’ve got crawl, indexable, we got targets, keywords, make sure you’re targeting your pages at the right place, we’ve got links, what’s number four?
Patrick: Number four is having a content plan. This is really the online version of what we were just saying because you can, maybe in some industries, you don’t need to produce content. In a lot of industries, you do need to produce content. One of the reasons is because it can attract links. Also, the next reason is it can attract the users at different stages.
Again, this goes back to the targeting section. If you’ve got any kind of online research or any offline research at any stage, not now, in the past 10 years. The way it works is someone starts to think about a concept or an idea, they start to research it, they start to build up some ideas about what thing they’re actually looking for, and as they’re going, they’re moving through a buying funnel of awareness about products. Then they start to build a consideration set in their mind of, “Right, I’m interested in these four or five products.” Then they start to go and look around and compare the products and compare the different features, the different benefits, the pricing, all those sorts of stuff. They start to hone in on one or two products. Then eventually they’re in a position where they’re going to buy your product.
All through that process, that might take days, that might take weeks, it might take months depending on what sort of thing it is. It’s different if you’re buying a holiday, or if you’re buying a pair of shoes, or if you’re buying just a stocking filler present for one of you kids. All of these, essentially, are opportunities for you to collect that user and get them in your world, reading your content, understanding your brand.
It might not be that if they read some of the top of the funnel stuff, which might be why it’s nice to make your own mince pies as a concept piece. They might read that in July because they were thinking, “What am I going to do at my Christmas party this year?” or something like that or you might have content about nice things you could do at a Christmas party.” Then there’s no commercial intent there at all. If they find your article and because they’ve searched on the website, they find your article, they start reading your stuff, they might then come back to your brand or they might then click on another link on your website. They might then find your reviews or they might then find your products. There’s lots of avenues for you to collect that user.
Then it starts to then bleed into other digital marketing disciplines like retargeting. You can drop a cookie on their website, then you can start sending your products to them or you can- if you know it’s a seasonal product like our mince pie for example and somebody does come on in July, you can save that up, wait until it comes to December and then start sending the ads out in December.
Jon: I think to get good ideas for content marketing, I think making a list of the questions people ask and try and solve their problems. If you got a call center or if you’ve got a sales team or something like that, ask them to write down the questions that people ask offline, because they’re probably asking it online as well.
Patrick: Yes. Getting that kind of qualitative data is super useful because you’re right. That’s where you also get the natural language that people use. The natural language that people use to describe your product is not necessarily what you might think the industry term is or what everybody calls it in your industry, the natural language that people use. I used to work in a, what we always called the promotional gifts industry, where you’d get printed pens and stuff like that. Within the industry, everyone called it promotional products or promotional gifts.
If you look at it these days, a lot of the people who I speak to these days, would never say, “I want some promotional gifts, I want some promotional products.” We want to get swag. That’s what they call it. They call it swag. That’s a thing. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a little sub niche thing in the SaaS world or the software world and the SEO world that I live in. It’s certainly another term that people use for this thing.
Jon: You’re absolutely right there. I’ve spoken to lots of companies, where they’re using their jargon, their language and their customer, the client doesn’t use that language and that jargon. It’s simply different.
Patrick: Yes. Again, that thing does come back down to the keyword research as well. You’re totally right that having those conversations, getting just like distilled understanding of what the problems are can absolutely help you make content that will then be useful for other people to search for, and they’ll end up finding you.
Jon: Final point, number five. What’s going to get us to number one?
Patrick: This, I don’t know if this would get you to number one. I actually think it probably wouldn’t get you to number one, but this is what can really, really hurt you basically and that’s performance. We’re going back a little bit technical again. I’m talking about how fast your site is and really how well optimised it is for mobile because you can probably get most websites on the internet are probably all right in terms of how fast they are, but if you have a slow site, you are doing massive, massive damage to yourself.
If you have a site that takes five seconds to even show you anything, you’re really, really, really going to damage your site. You’re damaging from a number of perspectives. The first one and the most obvious one is just the user experience. People come on your site and it takes a long time to do anything, they’ll just leave and that’s even more important on mobile because they’re not always going through a wi-fi connection. It could be 3G, it could be 4G, it could be anything. You don’t know how slow their connection’s going to be.
If you start putting heavy pages on that take a long time for them to download, it will just take ages and they will just bounce. They’ll just go, “Forget this. I’m not doing this. I’m going to go somewhere else. I’ll go and look at the next result.”
Jon: Sliders, homepage sliders. I met one a few weeks ago with 15, I kid you not, 15 slides on the homepage. Now, when you load this on mobile, it’s going to load all of the 15 slides. It’s trying to pre load all of these and slide them out and it just slows everything down. What’s a good way to try and speed up your website? Is it getting good web hosting? Does it matter? Is all web hosting pretty much the same?
Patrick: Web hosting certainly matters. If you get the cheapest possible shared hosting account where you’re on essentially with a thousand other sites, it’s not going to result in a good experience for your users. There’s obviously a degree of what the specific use cases for you. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, it does not make sense to go out and you get a dedicated server that you’re spending hundreds of pounds a month on. That’s not the sort of thing that makes sense. You can get a very reasonable VPS for 30 or 40 quid a month, which is going to be more than adequate for most small businesses.
Once you do that then you are putting yourself in a position where the server is not really going to hold you back again, unless you have a very high traffic website. With a lot of performance stuff, it just comes down to the basics like one of the things with the slider example is a lot of sliders, they’ve just got full sized images in there and they’ve not been reduced, they’ve not been optimised, they’ve not been compressed and so you’re asking the service to just download a ton of stuff in order to show the page. Performance is one of these things where it really does come down to this specific situation, what’s actually happening with the page, what’s actually happening with the site.
If you have a slow server, then you need to change it or speed it up. If you’re not optimising your images, you need to optimise your images. One of the things you might see in small businesses is there’s a lot of WordPress, or CMS websites where they’ve just got absolutely loads of plugin. They’ve just got tons and tons and tons of plugins. They’re not even using half of them, they’re not all up to-date. So there’s so much code that needs to be loaded in, there’s so many scripts that are getting loaded in every single page. You just don’t need it.
You don’t need to be highly technical to go into WordPress. Even just look at the ones which you don’t need anymore, you know you’re not using. Just deactivate them, remove them, just get rid of them. Compressing images, making sure you’re not loading in loads of extra script you don’t need, making sure there’s some sort of caching solution which obviously affects users who are coming back or viewing lots of pages on your site, which that obviously basically means you go on one page, you’re going to download the resources you need, then you’re going to store them for the duration.
Jon: I must admit, two things which I’ve noticed, particularly on speed is on the hosting side of things. It’s like you said, having some little virtual private server but with an SSD drive instead of a spinning hard drive. I moved a lot of websites a couple of years ago from spinning drives to SSD drives and did nothing else. You could visibly see with your eyes a speed increase. It was just so much quicker.
Patrick: You’re not the only one that’s going to see that, right? Your users are going to see it, but also the search engines see that as well. It does have an impact on rankings, but it is much more on the extreme. Like I said before, most websites are probably in the middle of it. They’re okay. You’re not going to see a rankings boost by increasing your speed. You’re not going to see a rankings drop by making it a little bit slower. At the top end, where you’ve got the really competitive niches, you can make strides by improving your side but also at the bottom end or if you’ve got a slow site which is genuinely very slow, you’re hurting yourself from an SEO perspective.
Jon: To recap, we’ve got crawl. We’ve got make sure your website is indexable, Google can find all the pages, all the code, all the scripts, everything like that so you’re not hiding anything from Google. We’re looking at targeting things properly, looking at the intent. Are people ready to buy something now? Are they ready to buy something in six months? Look at how long your customer funnel is and decide which bits of content to write. Lots of content really to match the different bits of intent, yes?
Patrick: Definitely, yes.
Jon: Links, we’ve got to try and generate links but do that maybe holistically so that we’re looking at trying to generate links as well as branding as well as maybe sales as well as everything else. We’re just being active in promoting. Content plan which is like putting the other three, I suppose, the two above into some sort of a plan so you’ve got a strategy to work forward and obviously performance. You do all that, you’re going to help yourself. Does Google genuinely look at all these things and think, “Yes, we’re going to notch him up a couple of spots.”?
Patrick: I don’t know if I would phrase it like that because it’s not a case of Google ticking any boxes either. It’s just a case of they’re judging the things that you put out there against everybody else that’s out there. If you’ve got things which are well-targeted, if you’ve got things which have got links pointed at them, if you’ve got content which answers the questions that your customers are looking for then you’re putting yourself in the mix. That’s really what the other two are about as well. Crawling and performance are about making sure you’re in the mix.
Over time, if you improve all of these things, if you improve the number of links that point to your site, if you do more keyword research, you find better ways to target your pages and improve your pages. If you keep working on these things, you’ll see incremental improvements over time.
The way I was approaching this question you set for me, I was approaching if you forget about any one of these things, you’re potentially missing out and you’re probably are missing out. Certainly with the crawling and indexing. That was obvious. If you’re not indexable, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
The last one I would say, performance is probably the one which you could probably do last. If you’re trying to prioritize these things, I would do them in the order that I’ve said because they’re the things where if you shoot yourself in the foot by not making it indexable then you can’t even start. If you’re not doing any research and you have no idea what pages are targeting what, you’re essentially just flying blind. You’ve got no idea what you’re really aiming for. You can’t measure anything other than traffic. You can’t measure your rankings, you can’t actually benchmarks, you just don’t really know where you’re starting.
Jon: Sitebulb can help with a few of these things. It can look at your website and spot problems?
Patrick: Yes, it will help you. It will help you do a lot of the first option crawling and indexing. It’s going to tell you loads of things to do with that. It won’t tell you bits and pieces that could help you with your targeting stuff. It’s not really designed for that. It’s got nothing really to do with the links or acquisition strategy because that’s really off the site.
There are things that Sitebulb will tell you about your own site and your own internal linking which is I would say probably a bit advanced and a bit outside the scope of what we’re really discussing. There’s a number of like extra technical things which it will tell you. It can help with content in terms of telling you where there’s lots of pages with lots of words or very little words, reading scores, sentiment, so you can get an idea. It’s some qualitative metrics on your content. Then it will do performance testing. It will tell you if you’ve got pages that are slow, if you’ve got slow overall download time, if you’ve got pages that are too big for mobile.
Then when we were just talking through the various different things which you can do to improve your performance, one of the things that Sitebulb will do, it will tell you on a rule by rule basis or various optimizations that you could do to improve your speed.
Again, one of the things which we’ll see in January is they will be tiered so it’s not a case of update your font being the most important thing. It will be the things which actually are going to make a difference to you.
Jon: Where can we find Sitebulb? Where do we get to it?
Patrick: It is on the original URL, Sitebulb.com. Go there and we have a free 14-day trial. It’s desktop software so it works on Windows or Mac. You just download it. You don’t have to put your credit card in or anything. You download it, create an account and you’re running. You can put your website in, you can put your competitor’s website in, you can- essentially you can call as many websites as you want. The limit for the number of URLs it can crawl is 2 million. Most small websites you won’t have worry about that all. You can just stick wherever you want in and let it go.
You can connect things like your Google Analytics account, you can connect Google Search Console, you can select as you go the sorts of things that you’re interested in. If you’re interested in performance, you can tick that box and it will come back and it will tell you things about performance. If you’re just trying to get an overall idea about your site, you don’t need to worry about that at the moment. You just want to see how it crawls, you can just let it go with the basic settings.
Jon: Fantastic. Brilliant. Thanks for spending time and talking about this, Patrick. It’s been really, really interesting. Really useful. Hopefully helped quite a lot of people. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.
Patrick: No problem at all. I’m just going to go off now and register a mince pies domain. Start my content plan.
Jon: This is the niche you need to be in, I think is mince pies. Absolutely.
Patrick: My niche.
Jon: Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.
Patrick: Thanks very much. Bye-bye.