E134: Kieran Wright

Richard:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of Econ One. Today's guest, Kieran Wright, technical account manager at Econ One, one of our own. How are you doing Kieran?

Kieran:
I'm very good, thank you Richard. And yourself?

Richard:
I'm really good. Thank you. I'm really good. Well, me and Kieran met probably about, I'm going to say about seven years ago where Kieran was actually on the other side of the fence and actually worked for one of the companies that we worked with at the time. And Kieran came to our attention pretty much seven years ago and now he's very much part of our team and works in the technical team heading up a lot of the technical projects for different clients. So looking forward to having a good chat, Kieran, how's things?

Kieran:
Yep, all good. Thank you. All good. Yeah, likewise, looking forward to having a good chat about all things technical and hopefully making it a bit more exciting, the new show's got a bit of reputation as a bit of a snooze fest, so hopefully we'll bring a bit of excitement to the world of tech.

Richard:
Doesn't it just. I think it's sort of one of those topics, technical SEO, I think cold sweat I think is usually what happens with most business owners, but yeah, we're both going to try and make this absolutely actionable and a little bit inspiring 'cause I think technical SEO, it's got a bit of a bad rep, hasn't it? How-

Kieran:
It does.

Richard:
Oh, it's really tricky and we've got to be careful and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But how important is it? That's what we're going to run through. So I think it'd be good for you to kick off and tell us how you found your passion for the world of e-commerce and how you got into the industry.

Kieran:
Yeah, basically I started out actually doing content writing. That was my first job in the world of e-commerce. Basically just writing product descriptions all day long for the website. But where I was at the time, the setup of the office meant that we had a little window that went out into the warehouse. And I still remember, even though it's almost 10 years ago now, from where I used to sit at my desk, I could see out that window into the warehouse. And I still remember how excited I was. It sounds really sad this, but the first time I remember seeing a product that I'd written the description for, I saw a guy walking past the little window carrying it to go unpack it for a customer order. And I still remember feeling like, yes, I had a hand in that. That's my product that got shipped out.
And basically that feeling never really went away. So my role grew over time. It grew from just writing product descriptions. I got more involved in the website, the category management, the product management side of things, and also into the technical and SEO side of the business. And that feeling of excitement about that, that never really went away. So it was the same even a couple of years down the line, I'd go in and do some optimizations or I'd go in and change around the category and then I'd see a product from that category out on the shelf waiting to be packed. And I'd be like, yes, I had hand in that again. I think that's quite common for a lot of people in the world of e-commerce, just that rush of yes, my site won that customer, that was me I had a hand in that. That's where my passion for it came from really. And yeah, that's never really changed over time.

Richard:
I think that's very relatable to probably everyone listening, the fact whether they've built their website with whoever they've built it with as a merchant, and then to see that product page develop or that category page develop and then potentially rank in the index and get some visitors and then somebody buys from that search, it's a magical thing, isn't it? But then to see, absolutely, there's nothing quite like looking in the warehouse. I have very, very fond memories of when we had our ... I think we had about 22,000 square feet back in the day full of products, about 1100 SKUs. And I used to do it all, but going down to the warehouse, it was normally for me, it would be more of probably three o'clock in the afternoon just before the courier was coming and seeing everything waiting to go. And the lorries would back up and it was like, yeah, man, this is all come from SEO primarily. Obviously in paid ads as well, but SEO and paid ads. But yeah, the tweaks we make.
So starting doing product descriptions 10, 12 years ago and then all the way through to some of the stuff I know you're working on now, which we'll start to step into. So technical SEO, why is it so important? What would you say to the listeners?

Kieran:
I would say, technical SEO almost is like the bedrock of your SEO strategy. And what I mean by that is once a user hits a website, you can have the most perfectly crafted content, beautiful web design, stunning product photography. But if that content's not getting crawled in index, then the harsh reality is that those pages aren't going to get found by the user without you paying for that traffic. That's the reality of it unfortunately, is if you don't get the user onto that site somehow, they're never going to see any of that beautiful content that you spent all that time working. So that's where I see technical SEO is the foundation of getting users to actually see that beautiful site that you've spent all that time, effort, and money creating.
I see it as something as well that can be a really good source of some quick wins, funny enough, despite the reputation it has for being a little bit overcomplicated or very scary. And I think they can be pretty hard to come by in the SEO world. A lot of the time, again, the harsh reality is once your business has scaled to a certain point, those quick wins have all kind of dried up, now it's like you got to do the real hard work and the hard yards and things get a little bit expensive and very time consuming. So I feel like if you can find a technical issue that's impacting something like the crawlability of say all your category pages, then comparatively that can be a pretty small fix there. That can have a huge impact on your SEO. Like I said, that's not something that you tend to come by too often in the world of SEO, so you really grab it with two hands when you see something like that.
I think as well, beyond the purely technical side of it, I see it as a source of your data as well that can be used to inform all the other decisions that you make with the rest of your SEO strategy. So for example, taking a real deep dive into where people are dropping off in your purchasing journey, kind of understanding that user behavior and then using that to inform the other decisions that you make. So making sure that all of your SEO strategy is actually led by data and led by fact and that you can verify that once you've made those changes and see it working. I think that's something that's really critical and it's not just making decisions based on gut feel and thinking, oh, well I think this category's got the good products and I think these are going to go. I think it's just making sure you're always making those data led decisions.
I think as well, it's something that is going to become a lot more critical as well once we move forward to the scary world of cookie-less 2024 and whatever that landscape looks like. I think there's still quite a lot that's up in the air on that. But I think again, once you start potentially losing some of that more detailed data, I think technical SEO is going to be ever more important in making sure that one, you're complying with those data protection requirements and handling the cookie-less transition and just making sure that your chances got every site to be crawled, indexed and perform well basically in that scary world that we're heading towards.

Richard:
I mean, I'm 150% sold. It's obviously, literally the bedrock of our business is technical SEO. But I think some of the things you step through there, let's just break a couple down. So there are listeners there, some of the horror stories we've had, me and Kieran. So there's instances where companies may have paid agencies to write over the last three or four years, a hundred blog posts, and then we have a little look on the technical side, their crawlability and what's been indexed and what's been blocked in the robots stock text and what's in the site map. Why isn't there a site map? Oh, those blogs have never been indexed. So it's three, four years more in some cases of work that has never impacted SEO in the slightest 'cause it's not been crawled, which, it's probably 50 grand worth of time being spent. I mean it varies obviously, but 50 K spent on the blog content, very good content. Usually the type of clients we work with, obviously it varies, but stuff just not getting crawled because it's been blocked.
So there's some simple checks you can do to check, but obviously products, you've got those products, every store owner's got, whether it's category, subcategory, sub-subcategory structure. If those URLs and that content isn't getting crawled and it's blocked, which we see. That's a rarer occurrence, but it does happen. You've got a whole new product range coming in and you get them all on the site and you get everything, you've got your content guide, rewriting all the product descriptions and sorting out your meta titles and blah blah, all that time goes on to going on there. But then obviously getting them crawled and getting them crawled quickly, correctly is so key, isn't it? As you know, you just not going to sell them and you think if you're not on the numbers properly, you may sell them through your paid ads probably, and you'd be like, oh yeah, we're doing really well, but hang on a minute, what's coming from the organic side?
So some quite sort of simple bits there to start with. But then absolutely, that's sort of taking that technical piece and the data that comes from that, and finding the opportunities, the quick wins, and then using that data to then inform strategy is the bedrock of any SEO strategy I think.

Kieran:
Absolutely. And even actually, it just came to me there when you said about the products or something like that, not getting crawled, there's kind of the inverse of that that sometimes gets missed as well. So if you are a site that's got content perhaps behind a paywall, if that's then inadvertently being indexed and someone could just make an organic search on Google and find all of your paywall content that you thought was behind a login or behind quite an expensive monthly subscription, that's terrible, right? And it's little things like that can just-

Richard:
I have to tell you, this is almost like a black hat thing, but if I'm looking at a site and I want to look at some of ... if I'm looking at say an information product site, which is still selling a thing, quite often you can find the actual pages where the products are delivered, the information product, just by doing a site colon command in Google, looking at all the core pages that are indexed, it usually puts them in a priority. And quite often, I know I've done this when I'm looking to go to an event, I went to an event not long ago and they closed the event down saying, oh ... and I was like, oh man, I missed the event. Well, I actually went to Google, typed in site colon, and I actually found the checkout, which then sort of moved, if you like, the actual old version. I found the checkout with the event and I booked the event and I went to the event. Whereas I would've had to ring them and sort it all out. But yeah, absolutely.

Kieran:
It's scary.

Richard:
Yeah. So I know you work on dozens and dozens if not hundreds of e-com stores since I've known you and obviously B2B stores and so forth. But what are some of the biggest mistakes that our listeners need to avoid that you see time and time again?

Kieran:
I think a big one that comes up really often is there'll be changes that's made to the website and there'll be changes that are made with the best of intentions. But I think the changes are made that consider the UI, consider the UX, consider everything like that, but then don't take into account the potential ramifications from a technical SEO perspective. So you'll see something like a lot of extra code snippets being added for example, to implement some new feature that you want to ship, but then that has a catastrophic effect on the page load time or something like that. Or you'll implement a bunch of scripts just to test them, not remove them, they'll just sit there making calls to a site slowing down your site again. So that's a big one that I tend to see quite often and it's quite an easy one to keep on top of if you're just removing them once you've stopped using a service or anything like that.
I think another big one I tend to see is when an infinite scroll layout's used on a category page. And it's something where from a user perspective, it's a nice experience that you're not having to tap or click through multiple pages of your categories. But it's definitely a bit of a minefield when it comes to the technical SEO side of things. And if they're not implemented correctly, they can cause big big problems with your categories not being indexed properly or the crawlers not being able to see past your kind of page one of the products. It's a real minefield. So it's something where it can sometimes from perhaps a shipping a new feature standpoint, you can look into your CMS and you can see, oh, I can just tick this box or enable infinite scroll, tick the box, infinite scroll works, and you think, perfect, that's done. But if there's not been some checks to see if that's impacting your SEO, it can make a big impact. And the scary-

Richard:
Yeah, people are too quick to install plugins and if you tick boxes, it fixes the problem. But then it's like, guys, you've now got an extra seven calls on your homepage, your site speed's gone down to X, the ramifications of that over the millions of visitors you might be getting a month or a quarter or whatever, conversion rates, you've installed X, it's knocked something else out. And then, yeah, it's too easy-

Kieran:
The scary part is when that's had a hit on your organic SEO, unfortunately, you don't install the plugin and then the next day you wake up and you see, oh, I've had a 20% loss in organic traffic if you install the plugin and then the quarter later you look back at the numbers and you think, oh dear, I've lost a ton of traffic from our organic SEO. What did we do 3, 6, 9 months ago that's impacted that? And trying to then walk back through that timeline and find just a change. You're not going to remember clicking that tick box in six months when your organic traffic's dropped. So yeah, it's a scary thing to do.

Richard:
Yeah. And it's documenting those changes, isn't it? That quite often, we'll have a client come in, oh yeah, we had somebody work on some technical bits. Well, okay ... I'm not sure what exactly, but they just said something about a site map and some ... and you're like, seriously, seriously, it's not documented. You didn't get a ... If it's not either annotated in your GA, if there is something that's relevant to annotating your analytics or there's some sort of log record Google sheet that you are liaising with your agency with back and forth with that shared sheet that's documenting all the change. So then if heaven forbid something does happen, oh, 14th of January, yeah, we had a 30% drop. Hang on a minute, what happened on the 14th? We put some new banners on the homepage and da da da or whatever it may be. You can obviously reverse that change.
But I think it's also setting alerts up, isn't it as well, if you got a traffic variation of maybe 10%, that's a problem, or depending on your numbers and stuff like that. But if you're used to getting a thousand people a day or whatever, a hundred thousand people a day, you go down to 90 k, you might expect that on a Friday maybe depending on the business. But that should be an alert. And that's how we do things, isn't it? Different alerts. We have all our clients' alerts set and then they come to a central point, which you see a lot of them, don't you?

Kieran:
Yep.

Richard:
So I was going to ask you about the future, but I think I'm going to ask you about that at the end actually.

Kieran:
Oh, okay.

Richard:
I think we'll wrap that up at the end. So we've talked about some of the biggest mistakes, but what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions that people have? 'Cause there's the mistakes that people make, but then there's a lot of, I guess, folklore out there maybe of what technical SEO is about. So what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about technical SEO?

Kieran:
Yeah, it's some interesting ones. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about technical SEO, something you mentioned right at the beginning is it's this super complicated and obtuse thing. There's just nothing but technical jargon. And I think because of that ... and I get it, you look at something like a Core Web Vitals report. You see all this technical terminology and at a glance you think, well none of this is actionable anyway. It's not clear from this report that I've got what I need to do, what I need to change, which of my scripts are essential, which of them aren't, which them can I load async, it's just has become a minefield. And you think, you know what, I'm just going to give up, ignore it, and whatever, technical SEO, that's just technical jargon stuff, I'm not going to bother with it.
And I think that's where a lot of people don't put the time into it 'cause they just see it as this complicated and difficult to understand. And I think that jargon is what contributes to this idea that you don't get anything actionable from it, right? You just get a report back that says, your site's got 50 problems. How do I fix it? Well, speak to a developer, I don't know.

Richard:
It's literally gold dust because that is the reality. And I would imagine most people listening will be like, yeah, I've had one of those reports, we spent two grand on a report and basically it told us that we're screwed, but they didn't fix anything and they didn't explain how to do it. And I think obviously you can get various basic reports through different tools that are out there, all the different platforms, but it's having that ability to organize that workflow in an order of importance and bottom line commercial impact to the business, isn't it? 'Cause there's no point in-

Kieran:
It is, yeah.

Richard:
Spend five days fixing 3000 alt tags. Well, I wouldn't advise doing that unless ... well I wouldn't as well if I was doing that at an hourly rate of whatever the going rate for an agency or a team member. There's better ways and better use of time, isn't there?

Kieran:
Yeah, there is. And I think once you get past the kind of terminology and all of that, or those issues that you get with certain reports and certain tools running these things, I think once you actually get around the terminology and understand the basics of crawling and indexing, you can start to actually see how technical SEO has a direct impact on your performance. And I think we as SEOs have a bit of a part to play with that as well. And I think sometimes maybe as an industry-wide thing, there's a bit of a tendency to over-complicate or obfuscate things. And I think instead what we should be focusing on is actually trying to educate the clients and educate those end users into understanding the kind of basics of the technical SEO. And I think a key part of that is though just understanding it ourselves enough that we can present a list of fixes rather than just giving a list of problems. So I think that's a key part of it.
I think there's also a bit of a misconception that technical SEO is always ... the fix is always going to be some kind of major site rework and you're going to have to spend hours and hours and hours of developer time. And I think actually there can be some really high impact quick wins and sometimes it can be even implemented without any developer's support. If it's just a case of something's not being indexed because of something not being set up correctly. A lot of the time that could be quite a quick fix and that's quite an easy to action thing with a really high impact. So I think, yeah, there's just a misconception sometimes that it's always going to need a developer.
I think there's a bit of a tendency as well, if it is something that does definitely require development support, I think there's a bit of a tendency of perhaps being not scared to get the developers involved, but kind of putting it off a little bit because ... and I get it, development time's expensive. And a lot of the time, especially if you're in the e-comm world, it's a fast moving industry so the odds are, unless you've just had a new site launched, you might well be thinking, well, if I look down at the roadmap in 12, 18 months, we're having a major bit of work done on the site. You've always got plans in the pipeline for a big change that you're going to have made in Q1 next year or something like that. So you're thinking, well, Black Friday's coming up in three months and after then after six months time we might be looking at another site rebuild. So let's just not risk it. We'll just leave it until then.
But actually I think ... I mean it's a bit of a cliche that there's a saying of like, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is today. So I think that's super relevant to technical SEO because the change that might need say, six to eight hours of developer time, yes, it's easy to say, well next year new site, we'll put it off till then, we'll just sort it as part of that and then the cost kind of disappears. But actually if the developers are given a proper brief, they're given kind of an explanation of what a successful result looks like and when they quote for the time, actually it might not be a big change to make. And when you look at the impact versus that cost, it's actually really worthwhile. So I think that's my main misconceptions is just a bit of a fear of going to development or a thought that, oh, it's always going to involve really expensive development time.

Richard:
Absolutely. I think hit the nail on the head there. Quite often it's end of the day a business owner's like, right, okay, it's a brutal reality of business. I'm going to spend five grand fixing that, for what? For what? So it's that educational piece. So it's that communication between SEO or agency or freelancer, whoever's working on your account with you, partner and that technical team, stroke management, there's a few obviously depending on the size of the business, these are the comms between. And I think that one of the biggest things is quite often as a business owner or heading up the marketing, you get hit with a list of 50 things with no priority, of course you're not going to do a great deal with that. So if that's what you're getting, you need to change your agency or you need to have a ... because it's a priority, isn't it?
Ultimately, if you are going to spend a day doing X and it's going to give you a 5% lift in Y, which could equal 50 grand a month, hang on a minute, of course we're going to spend a day and it's never quite that black and white. But clearly if things aren't being indexed and you've got a hundred grands worth of that stuff in your warehouse, you ain't selling any of it through organic, are you? For the sake of probably adjusting a robot stuck text file in three seconds, that page is now getting indexed and you're maybe just going to sell some in a week or five when it's started to go through the rankings and whatnot. So yeah, it's impact versus cost. And if it's not explained in that way, which I think is the challenge, because quite often a lot of technical SEOs, quite often they're brilliant people in their technical SEO piece. But then the comm side of things and aligning those tasks to the monetary impact is where I think a lot of agencies and firms let themselves down that comm-

Kieran:
I think it's that commercial awareness, isn't it? And from a technical side, we still have to be commercially aware that we're speaking to a business owner. They are going to be looking at ... correctly so, they're going to be looking at the bottom line. So if you can say, I think, this change that's going to cost you a grand is going to give you an ROI, then it's not going to happen.

Richard:
Why do it? And we've seen it. We've seen it. So brilliant. So I think what best we're to do now is talk about some actual campaigns you've worked on. Now if you want, I'm not sure you should say the names though, but I'll just maybe put that caveat in there, but ... well probably not. But talk about some of the campaigns you've worked on, what you did. So some specifics that might trigger our listeners to have a look at those specific things that made a real impact, monetary impact ultimately from the changes it made with their SEO.

Kieran:
Yeah, of course. So yeah, I think the first thing that's important to say is that I think a lot of people will start out by saying, oh, all my campaigns are a big success. You go on LinkedIn, that's all you see is people speaking about their successes. I'm actually going to start out with a campaign I did that was a complete failure 'cause I think it's important that you can also learn some lessons from this kind of thing. So I'm going to start, it's from earlier in my career and I think I was perhaps a bit naive, but basically I'd been reading a few pieces. We didn't have an agency on board at the time and yeah, I'd read a few pieces about SEO and I saw this thing in there about how important meta descriptions and alt tags are, which they do have their importance. They're not completely worthless. But I'd seen this and I was looking at our website and I was like, oh, you know what, ours aren't very good. I think there's a real piece of work that can be done here.
So yeah, I had a couple of colleagues working with me in the content team at the time and I was like, right, it's coming up to Black Friday in a few months. If we do this now, we're going to have a huge impact come Black Friday. So yeah, I did exports from the site, I put spreadsheets together, I tagged them to each member of the team for different categories that they perhaps knew more about and were more familiar with the products and said, right, we're going to hit this meta stuff hard, we're going to hit these alt tags hard. So we spent ... I don't know if I want to reveal how long we spent on that, but yeah, we did a huge, huge, huge campaign and did a big data import. That was kind of scary when you're doing a bulk up load on thousands of SKUs, that was a little bit scary, but I thought, right, huge impact. Looked at the figures kind of three months down the line from just my Kieran's meta and alt tag crusade-

Richard:
Project. Yeah.

Kieran:
Yeah.

Richard:
Your 10 grands worth of time.

Kieran:
Yeah. My 10 grands worth of time.

Richard:
Zero increase in organic traffic.

Kieran:
Yeah, but in my little world I'd signed off on that. I was really excited for it. And yeah, obviously we didn't see 10 grands worth of extra business come in from that. But I think it's important that the fact is that we looked at what we did, we looked at what the impact was and I wasn't afraid to hold a hand up and say, yeah, that campaign didn't work ... I didn't try and hide behind it or say, oh well we saw a bit of an increase in sales from direct. I think maybe they landed on us from organic 'cause of my meta and then they went away and then they ... it's like, no, I wasn't going to hide behind that. I held my hands up and I said, look, it didn't work. And I think that's something that's important to look at, 'cause now we learned a lesson for the next time, maybe don't spend 10 grand a time making a change like that.
Now, I'm going to segue on something that was a bit more successful than that. So yeah, in my previous role, I was working on a website redevelopment project, actually it was for one of our business areas. The site was a few years old and it was being replaced and I wanted to make some big improvements, firstly in the visuals, also improve the mobile friendliness. And I wanted to work with some of my colleagues in the marketing team as well and make sure that the content was ... it was being reworked anyway and I wanted to really make sure it was on point from an SEO standpoint. So I think the first time it had been written more from just the plane, describe what our services are and someone had perhaps knocked it up in an hour or two and that had sat on the site for years and kind of gone unchanged.
So beyond that, I really wanted to focus on getting the fundamentals right. So my whole favorite well-worded meta content, but not just that, I wanted to make sure there were really clear CTAs on all of the key pages, relevant structured data markup, and then also just really clear messaging on our landing pages to funnel that traffic through to our conversion task. So we were in an industry that had a lot of, without getting into too much detail, that had a lot of extremely large national and multinational competitors. So focusing on getting those keywords that we were targeting right was absolutely critical because we were never going to rank against these huge organizations for the really broad matches. We had to find those long tail keywords and make sure our content was crafted around that.
And more than anything, I made a really big push to simplify the site structure. So I'd kind of looked at the results from the site that we had been running and the key landing pages were actually quite far down in the nav. And the URL structure was such that it was something like, homepage, category, subcategory, then the page. So I made a really big focus basically on getting those fundamentals right from day one and really simplifying the layout of the site. So it was a lot less, you're going down into subcategory after subcategory.
And yeah, the end result from that, once the site was launched, was actually a really big increase in our organic conversions across all of those different services. So I think before, although they were indexed, they just weren't getting discovered, they weren't getting the rank passed to them because they were so buried in that URL structure. And I felt like it was a real validation for me of the fundamentals, I suppose, of technical SEO that even in a world where you're up against some really big players ranking some really competitive keywords, if you get your fundamentals right from day one with a big project like that, you can make sure that the-

Richard:
Well, that's pretty much our not official motto, but ultimately we love at the agency going after the big boys, but obviously not... It's like going to battle, isn't it? You're not going straight on with your 15 chaps against their hundred. You go around the side, you go around the back finding the topics, the clusters of the areas that they may be a little bit weaker on. Chipping away, chipping away, hang on, hang on, we've got and now, we've took 20% and then hang on a minute, year down along we took another 20% or whatever, it obviously varies on industry, but picking the right battle to go after as opposed to, right we want to rank on the page one for houses for sale in the world. So yeah, picking the right strategy, that comes back to, doesn't it ultimately, and I think this is where most projects go wrong.
Well we've been working on SEO for three years, we've see no results, okay what have you been doing? Well ... and then, okay, so yeah, you can't crawl the site properly or Google isn't crawling your site properly, you're not producing any content. You've got no structured markup, so on and so forth. Your products are the same descriptions as everybody else, da da da da. The images aren't marked up. There's like one image, the same image, there's many images missing, your checkout doesn't work properly. There's products at level five. It's like, well I can't find them. Google's not going to find them down there, are they? Sort of thing. Yeah, no, brilliant, brilliant. Yeah. So campaigns, obviously that was a few years ago. Obviously now your focus is very much on the e-commerce side of things, working with a multitude of e-commerce stores. And I know you've been working with a team on what we refer to as our Catalyst framework. So I think it'd be good to explain that to the listeners and what makes it sort of work and why it works so well.

Kieran:
Yeah, of course. It's actually a really exciting kind of new project we've got on the go at the minute actually. So yeah, like Richard was saying, just for anyone unaware, Catalyst is what we're calling our new framework to improve the e-commerce category pages of our client sites. And what it basically boils down to is adding some really key elements, the category pages, and it kind of switches them from just the traditional, how many e-com stores have you been on? You go onto a top level category and it's just a heading, paragraph of text and then a list of product links, basically that's it. That's all that's there.
And think about it, if you are a search engine and you are crawling that page and you're looking at how you're going to rank that, that's going to be pretty challenging. 'Cause what have you got to work off? You've got a list of links and you've got paragraph text and maybe an H1 tag, right? It's really difficult. So what we're doing is we're using our expertise in content creation and SEO. To first of all, write some additional supporting content to help the category itself rank. We also create kind of supporting Bane guides, which we can add as links on the category pages. And that's to assist not only in SEO but also your ... and I think this can sometimes be forgotten in SEO, but you are also trying to convert customers, real people. And those kind of guides are to help people who are maybe unsure about their purchasing decision.
And linked to that, we also do the research and write a helpful FAQ section. So that'll be kind of researching key questions that customers often have right in the FAQ section to sit on that category page that addresses all those, obviously fully marked up as well with the FAQ schema. But yeah, it's right in there. And not only does that help with the search engines and directing people who are looking for an answer to that question, it helps your customers too, 'cause at the end of the day, having someone in your office answering a phone to address a customer product query or something like that, that you've maybe answered 10, 15, a hundred times before, when you can just include that on your category page and reduce a bit of friction in the buying journey, why not just include that? And yeah, finally we've just got some links to other categories on the store. So generally that tends to be kind of common upsells or often purchase with items or links to perhaps other categorizations you might have in your store. So we've considered things like shop by brand.
And yeah, basically I think the important thing to note here with the Catalyst work is that we're not reinventing the wheel. This isn't us coming in and saying we've got this bit of an experimental approach. We're kind of giving it a go. This is us saying we've got tried and true techniques and SEO principles that we're following here. And to be honest, we've probably all considered including them on the category pages. The catch I guess is, there's a lot of work to do this. If you are working internally, it's not us saying, hey, we've got this one simple trick that we'll get you onto page one of Google with your category pages. It's us saying, hey, there's a lot of work to be done to make a number one top quality category page and we are going to use our expertise to make that happen for you. So we are going to go ahead and we're going to do the keyword research, we're going to write the content for you on-page SEO and we're going to deploy it too. And that's where our Catalyst is like a framework to simplify it from a business owner standpoint. And also what we're saying is this'll lead to a improvement in your SEO performance, these pages. And it's not magic that we're working on. This is tried and true.
And I think just recently in the news, funnily enough, actually, I think just about a week ago at the time we're recording, there was the leak of the copays for Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google. I'm sure a lot of people have seen that in the news. And one of the things that revealed, obviously it's not Google, but there's definitely going to be some parallels there. And one of the things that revealed was that crawl depth is a ranking factor. So if you've got categories, top level of your site, just one click away from your homepage, why not make them the absolute best they can be? So that's what we're setting out to achieve with our kind of Catalyst framework. And yeah, that's really exciting to throw that out.

Richard:
I think as listeners guys, if you go to Google now and you're going to search for your category, not so much a product, but think of the category. So if you sell ... let's think of something, we were talking about lawnmowers earlier on a previous episode, so let's go there. So you've got your Honda 9742, whatever it may ... lawnmower, but the category might be called lawn mowers or self-propelled lawn mowers. You go to that category subcategory, what have you got there? And typically what we see is at best some content either above the fold or below the fold. And then your 12, 15, 16 SKUs, that's normally a standard category.
But if you go to Google and search for lawnmowers and then go have a look at the category pages that might be ranking. Obviously it might not all be category pages that are ranking about actual products and manufacturers and different types of content. But to rank a category, I personally spent days researching different products on what was ranking and it was like categories are absolutely key for eCommerce stores, aren't they ultimately. So working through sort of Kieran's checklist there. Obviously it varies but obviously to be able to add in three or four guides on choosing the perfect lawnmower, preparing for spring with your grass with the such and such mower option has two guides, third guide. The third guide could be ... I'm thinking on my feet here, but the third guide will be a 12-month calendar, what you need to do to your grass. And then obviously there's a lot of different things in terms of fertilizing this. So you've got three guides on that page now. Well I bet nobody else has.
Okay, so then what we're going to do, rather than just a little bit of intro text, we're going to create a nice bit of more proper probably obviously keyword research, intro text to the lawnmower category. But we're not going to put a big block of text on there 'cause that's going to look a mess, isn't it? So we've got to use the code and there's various ways to do that, whether that's a concertina box, whether that's ... there's all different ways. Click here for more and then it expands it. So obviously it wants to look nice for the user. So you've got to get that balance, haven't you? And then you can link off to maybe five other blog posts. Hang on a minute, we've got three guides, we've got five blog posts, we've got 400 words on the page, I'm not even getting going yet. That's maybe 10,000 words, graphics, the whole shebang. And then we've got also bots, then we've maybe got reviews, that's a bit more of a challenging one, potentially depends.
But ultimately compare that category to the out of the box category and what's going to rank. There's other factors of course to do with the overall sort of authority and links and people pointing to that. But then once you've built that, you can then really turn the nozzle, turn the volume with them building PR to those category pages, can't you? Yeah. Yeah. It's very exciting I have to say some of the early results, isn't it? It's very, very, very exciting. So I think, let's move on. So you've worked both agency and client side?

Kieran:
Yes.

Richard:
What would you say are some of the biggest red flags? Or what to look out for when choosing an agency partner. Obviously we were your agency almost a lifetime ago, probably 10 years ago. Our agency's coming up to 14 years old now. But what are some of the red flags our listeners should be looking out for when looking to work with an agency?

Kieran:
Good question. I think for me, one of the biggest ones, and I remember just being absolutely infuriated by this time and again, is you'd be presented with a report and I have to say usually a very beautiful looking report, very well-designed, looks the part, and then you click past the front cover and all the nice looking images and then you get to the actual data in the report and then you kind of look through the stats and they're all just kind of the vanity numbers. So I remember once I got a report in and it literally just included stats, like impressions and clicks and I just remember thinking, what am I looking at here? Yes, they're important numbers. So you want visibility of them, but you're not going to pay your employees salaries in impressions. You're not going to say, oh here's 10,000 impressions to our website.
So I remember that was absolutely infuriating. It was something actually that when I was a client of Econ One, it was something that kind of caused their reports to stand out because they actually had numbers that were relevant to the bottom line. It wasn't just look at us, we generated-

Richard:
The pound sign, yeah.

Kieran:
Yeah, we generated 10,000 visits to your website. It's like, well great. Did they immediately leave the site? Did they go on to purchase? Was it quality traffic or was it just numbers? So I think that was a big one for me. And I think sometimes agency partners can be scared to show them. Sometimes I think even if they're good 'cause I think there's this fear, or from the impression from the client side I got was there was this fear that oh well one day these might go down. So we don't want to establish the precedent that we include the stats that are relevant to bottom line because if in six months they go down, then Kieran's going to say to me, well why has this gone down? We're still paying you. So yeah, there was just this fear.
I think another thing that used to really bother me, and we touched upon it a little bit earlier was it was usually when perhaps an SEO agency was approaching us to try and work with me on the client side. And generally they'd send some kind of initial report over or they'll have produced a report. And again, I know that takes time and appreciate that they put effort into that, but a lot of the time it would just be this report and they kind of say, oh yeah, we've been looking at your website and we got a list of issues, we found numerous problems on the site and issues. And that's what the report would be. It would just be a list of problems.
And I think, well that's great, but what am I going to do with these? You guys are saying to me we found a thousand problems, what are you going to do to fix them? Is this going to be, you're going to spend two minutes and they're all going to be gone? Or is this going to be, I'm going to have to spend 50 grand and there's still going to be 200 issues. So I think that was really frustrating for me and I felt like it didn't start any kind of relationship with them on the right foot because it just felt immediately like, it wasn't a partnership, it was like a scare tactic almost of like, oh, you got these problems and it wasn't starting the relationship off on the right foot.
And I think a final thing that used to really frustrate me is if we're working with someone on a partnership basis, we'd have started working with them, let's say three months in, they'll be saying, look, we've carried out all this work over the last month. We've done X, Y, Z. And they kind of look back through the list of tasks they sent me that oh, we've completed this and this, very impressive long lists, but then it would just never get brought up again. So I'd get a report that says like, oh, we've written this, this, and this and we've made improvements to this page, this page and this page. And then three months down the line I'd be thinking, well three months ago you made all these changes, did that do anything? It was like, oh we've done all this work. Yeah. So it was frustrating to have to say to them, you guys have done all this. Are you checking to see if what you've done works? Did that do what you wanted it to?

Richard:
Yeah, that's a great point, isn't it? You just, all right, we're doing this, we're doing this. Well hang on a minute, we've been working with you six months. Can I have a bit of an update on the work that ... okay tick box, tick box, tick box, you're doing a workflow, but are you doing the right workflow? Because if you were, you maybe would've told me that, oh on the work we did last ... we did the category work over the last three months and now we can see that these five categories, the click-through rate and the sales from those were whatever, 10 grand, now they're 40 grand, whatever it may be. They're giving you that confidence in your partner, your agency, but also just making sure that they really have that commercial attachment to the SEO rather than, right here's the load of things we did.
But the SEO never ends. There's always, I think we have about 400 things in our various lists, don't we? Somewhere there, I know we've got sort of technical lists and it's close to 400 things we could look at. But it's like any business, you can be a very busy fool, can't you? As a marketer or a business owner, but ultimately you want to see positive results.
So reporting is a good one isn't it? Because if you're getting a report from anybody that's working with you, for you and there's no sort of commercial side, it's like, well ... yeah, if there's no pound sign, I need a report that's saying, right, the revenues are this, that, and the other. Obviously that's not everything. But yeah, I quite often find that the larger companies that we deal with, they need different types of reports for the different stakeholders in the business. You're a marketer, yeah, they want to see the pound sign, but they're all ... and they're right, we did 400 grand this week, whatever it may be. But they want to see the numbers that make up that, whether that is organic traffic and so forth and rankings and things.
But as a business owner that's having to sign that fire ground retainer every month or the finance guy, then they want different reports. And I think that's where quite often a lot of people are using sort of reporting systems that are just quite rigid and maybe not that great. Whereas if you're using things like Locus Studio, data Studio, which we use, we can take data from anywhere and anybody asks us for anything, we can build it or you can build it.

Kieran:
That's it. It's like you say, there may be some people who are kind of saying, well look, I've got maybe five minutes in my day carved out where I look at this report each month and they'll just want to see, give me the high level numbers, obviously the commercially relevant ones as well. And then they'll be other people in the business, they might be saying, Hey, we're doing a really big internal campaign where we're pushing our blogs a little bit this month. Can we see how they're performing and give us a top 25 pages of that. And that's where we have that flexibility, like you said, to build the reports that you as a client need.

Richard:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We need to wrap this up. I've just glanced at the clock, we're getting carried away here. This is a bumper edition. So I think tools is a bigger place to go to. A lot of different tools out there. A lot of options, you can subscribe to 20 things. I think we've subscribed to probably a hundred different tools over the years and we've condensed that down now to quite a tight tool set within the agency. But there's always new things popping up to try and some good stuff as well. Some very, very progressive sort of agencies that have got tools as well. And then very progressive sort of tech teams that have got various tools, whether that's technical, whether that's content, et cetera. But what would you say are the best tools that you would recommend for technical SEO?

Kieran:
Well, funnily enough, Richard, I actually recently wrote a blog on just this topic, which is live on the recently redesigned econone.com website plug. But as with the blog, I think I don't want to waste everyone's time by explaining for the millionth time that you need to be using tools like Google Search Console or that make sure you got Google Analytics, it's a waste of everyone's time. If you're at a point where you've got a six figure e-com store, you've already done the low-hanging fruit, right? You've already got all of the basics covered. And that was what I found when I was doing a bit of research and I thought, crikey, the same blog's been written a thousand times here and they all just tell you to get these tools. But you've already scaled to that point, you already using those things, you already know about them, you've got the expertise.
So I think for me, a bit of a weird one that I use, it's a bit like field actually is I find myself using archive.org quite a lot and I use it to see how websites changed over time. Those snapshots that it captures are super valuable. So like we were saying earlier when we were talking about the pitfalls of technical SEO that you introduced the change and six months later you've seen a drop in traffic and you don't know why. Having something like archive.org to go back through those snapshots, the amount of times I've found a snapshot from nine months ago and been able to compare it to the site today and see, oh hang on a minute, this didn't used to be like this. And then match that up to my analytics graph and see, well actually it was around this time that this decline started and that's how you can build a bit of a picture of changes makes the website over time and what kind of effects they've had. And you don't need that peak and trough on analytics that you're not going to get with organic traffic. So that's a super useful one to me.
And in terms of another tool, I actually want to give a bit of a shout-out to Sitebulb. I think it's an amazing website crawler. The UI's like streets above the competition, technical tool's got a bit of reputation for being a bit unuser friendly. I think Sitebulb, despite being a very powerful tool, the UI is spot on. It can also crawl with the headless version of Chrome. So actually renders the page JavaScript and all in the same way that Google does to getting a great picture that's really accurate to how Google will see your site. I think as well, just the way that it prioritizes issues is super useful too. So you're not just being given a export of a thousand rows of a CSV file, you've actually got the beginnings of an actionable list that you can then as a technical SEO go and look through and think, well actually this is going to be my number one priority. That's number two. It really just gives you a great starting point. So huge hack, Sitebulb I think is great.

Richard:
Brilliant, brilliant. I love it. Yeah, I mean brilliant pair those. I think archive.org as well can be quite a trip down memory lane as a business owner as well. So, you guys that have been with the business sometime while you are the business owner listening, go to archive.org, put your domain in and you've got to step back from the beginning of time almost. It doesn't always go right back 'cause I did it. I remember when I set this agency up, I actually actually created a blog, which was a different domain name and I basically put a blog out there and the first post said something along the lines of, I'm going to set up an agency, I'm going to set up an SEO agency and it starts today. And there's a blog out there with that post on. And obviously fast-forward 14 years 'cause the agency is about 13 and a half years old now we are as an agency.
So to be able to go to archive.org and see that post, it's like what? And obviously now as you see the different iterations of the site, that site now isn't on there for some reason. I'm not quite sure how ... I think I only had the site for about two years and then I just carried on with the agency sort of thing and stopped the blogging really. So I think it's not there. I tried a couple of that, not long ago to try and find it 'cause I thought it would be quite cool to find this blog post, but it was there for a few years. But for you guys that have got stores, obviously they will have been there from the day you started to go and have a look at that first version of some e-commerce platform or custom build that you had back in 1989 or whatever it may be, all the way through. It's so cool to see.
On my old e-com stores, before the agency, we had platforms that were built and don't exist anymore, I don't believe. I won't shout them out just in case they do. But yeah, so built on very ... as it would've been sort of 18 years ago I think, somewhere there. So yeah, it's quite a cool tool for that as well. Okay. So I think we're going to wrap up with a couple of final questions. So Crystal ball time, what do you believe is the future of technical SEO in SEO?

Kieran:
Well, now, I've actually got a bit of a controversial viewpoint here. Bit of a controversy to close out the episode with. So I'm going to preface this by saying it's not a concrete prediction, I don't think of what will happen. 'Cause everything changes so quickly in tech, right? But my kind of controversial take is that I can actually see a future where Bing is no longer just a big player in the market and it's actually the dominant search engine. That sounds crazy 'cause ... a bit controversial. I know. So to dial that back, I've got a logical reason for this, I feel.

Richard:
I'm looking forward to hear it.

Kieran:
We've all seen the hype, right? ChatGPT, you've seen it everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. If you spend any time on LinkedIn, anytime anywhere, you've seen ChatGPT. I've got my own thoughts on ChatGPT as a whole, especially pricing models not been revealed yet. Who knows how that's going to work. If you are using it for writing all of your articles and basically you've just hired a content writer who can write grammatically correct, but doesn't fact check any of their work, so you've got to go in and redo it. So got my own thoughts on that. But here's the interesting thing. So again, as we're recording this, fairly recently, just over a week ago actually, Microsoft has invested a $10 billion into OpenAI. They've created a ChatGPT if you haven't heard of them. And that's not the first investment in it. They've made previous billion dollar plus investments, small change to Microsoft, but huge investments.
So one of the areas of height that you might see, and if you've been following the ChatGPT progression, is the fact that it might be this so-called Google killer, is it going to be the new search engine? Are we going to see complete shift in how we search for things and the traditional search engine with the 10 blue links is going to die. So this is where I find the connection interesting, right? Because Microsoft and OpenAI, that's an interesting combo. When you look at something like a ChatGPT powered Bing. So obviously I'm not saying that Google are completely just sitting back and watching this. They've obviously poured huge investments to their own into AI research and all of that.
But if you're looking at a natural language chat bot driven search engine, I think one of the big challenges these guys are going to face is like, we've seen it with other tech as well, is how do you monetize that? So it's a great product, potentially game changer for search, but how are you going to monetize that if you've not got paid blue links at the top of a search? So this is where my angle comes in. So I can see Microsoft as having a bit of the advantage here. So not only have they got the investment into OpenAI for a ChatGPT integration, but when you look at the revenue breakdown for these businesses, and you look at Google, so over half of their revenue comes from their search ads. So they're going to be under a lot of pressure to just monetize this pretty aggressively, if they're looking at potentially 60% of their revenue massively disappearing.
Whereas if you look at someone like Microsoft, they're a bit more divested. They've got a lot more revenue streams, they can conceivably ... I mean when they started Bing, huge investment basically ran it at a loss. It's actually profitable now I believe. But yeah, they've kind of got that kind of advantage there I kind of see where, when this first comes out, then it needs to be kind of monetized in this from day one. I can see them running this at a loss and I can see it slowly creeping in. So it becomes like, oh hey, someone says to you on LinkedIn, or someone has a chat with you and says, you tried Bing lately, it's actually really good now. And then slowly over time it becomes a dominant player.
And I think this is where I see it linking into the future of technical SEO to kind of segue back onto the topic at hand, because I can see it be in a future where how are you going to optimize your site for this kind of ChatGPT powered search engine. And if you are going to, we're kind of getting towards the point where now's the time to be thinking about that. If this is potentially going to be such a big game changer. And again, I'm not saying stop looking at anything to do with Google indexing, just go all in on this. But I'm kind of saying, maybe just have that in the back of your mind and I'm thinking here for something that's a bit more immediately actionable, maybe now's a good time to focus on optimizing maybe a little bit for Bing as well. Maybe don't just put all your eggs in the Google basket. So that's one of my potential predictions there for the kind of future of search. So maybe don't just forget about Bing when you're-

Richard:
Yeah, I mean we sort of say obviously not to that degree, but we do a lot with Bing ads and we've got quite a few clients that run those and it's normally we can predict and it's a percentage of Google, a small percentage of Google. I wasn't talking about paid now, but yeah. Is it going to switch? Like you say, they've got a lot of other interests, haven't they? Lots of billions coming from a lot of other office type products and various things. You can't sort of go on the internet without GPT this, GPT that. My kid's talking about it every day at school and stuff. And in the office it's actually we've got our departmental meeting booked in for tomorrow and it's on the itinerary tomorrow again to talk about it. Yeah. Oh wow. I think we maybe have to do a whole ChatGPT episode soon. We're going to miss the boat on that one for the ... but it's good to get it out there first. But I think more on the SEO and ChatGPT episode.

Kieran:
Yeah. How's that going to look? An interesting one, right? The minute it's not connected to the internet, but when that starts pulling from live data, how do you go about optimizing that? I think it's exciting 'cause I think you're going to get first mover advantage if you're hitting the ground running with this.

Richard:
Yeah, it is. I mean, my mind's all over with it in terms of the opportunity for e-com stores to some of the stuff we do. It's just how far you go with the AI. We use a lot of AI in our ads business, in the ad side and scripts and technology. And that's something I have to admit, we're probably a late adopter with that. And as probably a little mini regret or big regret as an agency really. Obviously we've been many years into it, but we could have been many more years into it. We've done various episodes on PPC and AI and the machines. But on the SEO side, it's very much creating ... everything's unique and so forth and so forth and is done manually.
But hang on a minute, if we can do 10 times the workload for a client, it goes back to that ultimately if a client's paying X amount a month, what's the best time to spend on that client's project? Whether it's technical SEO content, et cetera. But if we can use AI to mean that we're doing 10 times the amount of work or five times the amount of work. So it's just trying to find that sweet spot. I think at the moment we're just playing with stuff at the moment on the ... but yeah. Interesting. Yeah, we further, but we're going to have to pull this in. So thank you. It's been an absolute blast running through all things technical SEO. I'd like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book to recommend to the listeners, Kieran?

Kieran:
I do indeed. It's completely unrelated to the world of technical SEO. But yeah, I'd like to recommend Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Just find it absolutely hilarious. It's just my sort of humor. And I could try and make some kind of loose connection and say, oh, sudden drop in your traffic feels like the result of some kind of demonology or something. But no, honestly, it's just a really good story. Highly recommend it. And yeah, I think you gave a good laugh out of it.

Richard:
A bit of escapism from the day-to-day workflow work-

Kieran:
Absolutely.

Richard:
It's not a personal development book or a how to write schema book. Yeah, I know. That sounds great. I know we've got a lot of listeners that'll be into that. Well, thank you Kieran, for coming on the show. For those that want to find out more about yourself and what you're doing at Econ One, what's the best way to do that?

Kieran:
I'm on LinkedIn. If you search Kieran Wright, you'll find me at Econ One. So yeah, it's probably the best place or articles on econone.com.

Richard:
Yeah. Brilliant. Well, I'll see you soon.

Kieran:
Fabulous. Thanks Richard.

Richard:
See you later. Bye-Bye.