A WordPress SEO Discussion on Strategy and Tactics

Ronald: Hi, Marieke.

Marieke: Hi, Ronald! We’re here at WordCamp, and we’re talking!

The importance of SEO for a Woo shop

Ronald: We’re talking. We want to talk about WooCommerce and SEO. So I’ve noticed in the last Google marketing live announcement, that products are featured much higher now at any search query or the results page. If you do a query, maybe with the second or third row you’ll see products are listed in the search results. So my question to you… answer this massive question to all the WooCommerce users… how important is SEO if you have a store?

Marieke: Important, because I think a lot of people search via Google, and that means that you need to have your schema well implemented. So make sure your product schema is correct and good. And your SEO will take care of that for you. If you have to Google risk extension, you really need to have to Google on risk extension if you have a shop. And that will allow you to at least have a chance to be ranked at the top; because if you don’t have the schema, Google isn’t really capable of understanding how to show your product in those results. So you need to help Google a little bit with that.

A bit deeper on schema

Ronald: So let’s go a bit deeper on the schema. So schema are meta words.

Marieke: Yeah. Metadata that describes to Google what’s on the page or what your product is about. Because Google is smart in many ways, but it’s not smart in understanding from Oh, this is the size of a product, or this is the name. And so if you add that part to the schema, or it’s a technical thing, then Google is more able to understand that. And with that, more able to rank it.

Ronald: Yeah. So let’s talk about shoes, for example. The shoe in the method. You’ll describe what size of shoes, the color of the shoes, the branded shoes. Yes. And all the tiny little bits of data. Yes. And if you do that correctly, you’ll have a much higher chance of appearing high on top of the Google.

Marieke: With a nice picture and everything. Yeah. So if you have a shop and your competitors have similar shops, you just need to have that in order to go rank between those. So for shops, I think that’s really important. Good product descriptions are important too, because Google… look, that’s the weird part. So Google is dumb. I just said that I’m allowed to say that Google sometimes is a bit dumb, but Google is incredibly smart in reading texts. So it’s all the algorithm updates have been about Google understanding texts almost in a humanlike way. So your product description should be nice to read. It’s quite boring to write a lot of poor descriptions. I get that, but it is important.

Ronald: It is worthwhile. Now, let’s dive into the Yoast part of this metadata and the plugin that allows you to pull this data and make it visible to Google. Share a little bit of the insight of how that works within Yoast.

Marieke: How do you become a person?

Ronald: No, but surely there’s a project, right? There’s a big update. We need to make this happen.

Marieke: It’s an update, okay.

The process of updates internally

Ronald: Discuss the process.

Marieke: Sometimes we know in advance because we are close to the Google people. We know them really well. Sometimes they’ve worked for us. So we talk to them all the time. So sometimes we know in advance that an update is coming and then we’ll make sure that there are features in our plugin that take care of that immediately. So you won’t have to deal with that. And sometimes they just announce it. Sometimes the WordPress team of Google doesn’t even know about it. So it’s doing a lot of research, reading a lot. We’re in a lot of SEO groups and we soon know that something has come up and then that gets priority above all the other things.

Ronald: A little bit of panic in the office?

Marieke: Yes. I’m really happy that Google usually doesn’t do updates over the summer and over Christmas… that helps. So you do know these are usually slow times, but if a big update happens, that means that we immediately have to start working.

Ronald: And then how big of your team are dedicated on an update like that? Do I imagine that two people, is that a whole team?-

Marieke: A whole team? I think we have, we have a few development teams and I think if something like that happens and it’s big, then we’ll allocate an entire team on that. I have to say that in a lot of cases, Joost, himself, who isn’t working at Yoast, but is still an advisor at Yoast, he’ll probably code it himself.

Ronald: Just to make sure.

Marieke: He’s a really fast coder and then someone else needs to check it again, because he’s not the most cautious coder. He makes a bit more mistakes than other of people, but he gets the work done really fast and understands everything.

Ronald: So he lays the foundation and somebody needs to just polish it and make a quick update.

Marieke: Does he have a quick update? Yes. He will make the foundation.

Making big changes in the plugin

Ronald: That’s really interesting. So he is very actively involved in the bigger changes. I was going to ask more about the process.

Marieke: Yes. Oh, fantastic. And you know, we have a plug in with 13 million active installs. So if you push something towards so many, many, many sites. It’s really important. You can’t mess up people’s rankings. So we test rigorously. We have automated testing. We have a QA team and make sure that… we still have bugs because we’re still many, many, many users, but our testing process is really rigorous.

Ronald: Are there times when you are really nervous because you know that with a big Google update next week, you’ll have lots of store owners saying I used to make a lot more money. I was ranked so much higher on Google and here’s the proof of that. And you think that’s not right. It doesn’t work like that.

Marieke: There are. It doesn’t work like that. There are Google updates that… Google tries to give the user the best experience and not the shop owner. So if a shop owner does things that Google does not like for instance, writes really crappy texts. I the hold days, people would spam with keywords or make like white background and then white letters on it. That sort of thing, Google dislikes. And then it could be that you’re banned from the search results or an algorithm update. It leads to those search ranking lower. Yeah. That’s nothing we can do about that. People get mad sometimes. Yeah, but they then should get mad at Google. And not so much at us. So that’s what it is. I think everyone has angry customers. So we do have those as well.

Ronald: There is. It keeps you sharp as well.

Marieke: It does. It does keep you sharp.

AI writers and SEO

Ronald: What do you think of AI writers?

Marieke: Oh, very interesting. I was skeptical at first because I’m a writer myself and I think writing is a skill and that should be done by humans. But I have to say, I’ve looked at a lot of AI tools and content tools and there are getting pretty good. But we say that good content should be original, readable, and findable. And while IA can really help you with a readable and findable part, it’s not easy to come up with an original thought through IA. So I think it’s wonderful for product descriptions because you don’t have to have put a real original thought in a tissue, but if a blog post, for instance, on how WordPress should change in the next 10 years. You can’t write that with artificial intelligence. We’re looking into that. We should collaborate with people that do AI more with those so that we can help people that can’t write their own text or probably aren’t native English. It’s really hard. So then an AI tool can really help you write a better text.

Ronald: That’s actually a really interesting point you made there, because it may be seen as a bot that will fake the product description, but as a helpful tool, support and improve the spelling, and maybe think of examples that you didn’t think of. Add those and make it a richer experience to the user.

Marieke: The whole comes down to, if you put in garbage, garbage will come out. So I’ve changed my mind a bit about that because I was like, Oh, that could never happen. But they’re actually pretty good. The tools that I have seen get a bit worse in the end. So if you have like a really long article, it kind of ends up talking nonsense.

Ronald: So maybe the first two paragraphs. Then leave it to that and take over as a human being.

Marieke: Yeah. But that could let be a real help because people often see that wide screen and don’t know where to start and then you have a starting point. That’s wonderful, I think.

Ronald: If you are a developer agency and you have clients that have a catalog of products, maybe going thousands, but only the top hundred are selling well. And I remember as I’m saying this to you, because I remember you doing a talk on keeping your content, your book clean. Give it a tidy-up like you did with your wardrobe, figure out what’s working, what isn’t working. If you translate it into products, is that a similar approach where you have to just clear up what isn’t working?

Marieke: I think so.

Ronald: But then I see your point.

Marieke: Your point, but maybe also from the shop, because you also have storage and you have to, if you have so many products and a lot of them aren’t sold regularly, if it’s a physical product, you have to keep it somewhere. So that costs money too. If you have a digital product, of course that’s not the case. But then still you need to be aware of, if you never sell something, maybe you should well remove that from your site in the right way. So not just remove the entire page, but add a proper redirect and make sure that Google does not come to a page that does not exist anymore because Google really dislikes that.

Ronald: The four and the first three. Yeah. And does your have a tool where you could check these things? Yes. Yeah.

Marieke: We have. So if you accidentally remove a page, we already say to you, No, don’t do this. And then you have to redirect it to another page that’s maybe similar or something. And then if there are any links pointing towards that page that you’re going to delete, Google will follow the link to the new page that’s indicated, and then Google will not get lost.

Ronald: Do you think this is an opportunity for an agency to actually make that an engaging conversation with store owners to proactively work with them and say, Hey, you have all these pages that are not doing anything we should tidy up. We should put things together.

Marieke: We have more and more of these conversations as the internet is growing. I think it’s the same it’s content. It’s, it’s, it almost feels like a bad thing if you remove something because maybe you’ve worked hard for it. But if your company is changing and if your products are changing, you need to do maintenance. That could be like a new model that will appear because of the internet is growing.

The carbon footprint

Ronald: Yoast, and in terms of consciousness of the carbon footprint and SEO and bringing up a search result page, you do leave some carbon footprint. I could say that Yoast is actually, by serving the better content, already contributes to improving the environment. Is Yoast doing any other conscious contribution to that. We have time.

Marieke: Google is crawling a lot. So Joost de Valk, who is my husband and the founder of Yoast, is writing a lot about how much Google cross. So he, my father has a site. He’s a fiscal therapist and retired. He has 25 visitors a week on a site. And Google comes there 10,000 times every day. So that’s a lot of energy. And not only Google because you have all these SEO tools, not Yoast SEO, but by Semrush and Ahrefs, but all the other search engines, Bing, what else do we have? We have this Yandex thing in Russia.

All these bots come to your site unless you tell them not to come. WordPress, actually not just WordPress, just by the way your site is built, Google, not crawls your Euro once, but sometimes it crawls it 10 times because you’ve added something or your comments. In Yoast, we’re now working on a tool that you can indicate which pages you want Google to crawl and which you don’t want Google to crawl. In that way, Google can crawl less, and only the things that are important. Then it will crawl your site faster, which is good. If everybody would do this, then we would save a lot of trees because-

Ronald: That’s some really quick gains to make as a community.

Marieke: And next to that, we’re of course working in the WordPress performance team in making WordPress as a whole much faster. And that would… We’re 50% of the web. If we can make 50% of the web 10% faster, that’s an amazing opportunity. So we’re really looking for more companies to join us here. So it’s currently a Yoast and Google. I think Bluehost is also joining, but this is something we want to do with more people so that we can improve WordPress. And with that also improve the Web.

Ronald: So if people want to get involved with that, how would they get in touch? Whether would you find that this project, and

Marieke: I think Yoast is now currently talking to a lot of people asking them… Well, we should actually work together and collaborate. Of course, we could also look at brokers core because that’s also a really good place to start contributing to this project.

Ronald: Excellent.

Marieke: Great.