Technical SEO / prioritization

As search engines are getting taken over by AI responses, there are now more and more things you need to do to show up in the results. And I have a bunch of other videos going over those things.

In this video, I wanna talk about the things that you can stop doing because the only way you're gonna make room to do all these new things is if you stop doing some of the old things that don't work anymore or never worked in the first place. First of all, stop taking technical audits seriously.

If you run essentially any website online through a technical audit like hrefs or Semrush, you're gonna find a ton of errors. The thing is, 95% of these errors aren't an issue at all, or at least not issues worth addressing.

When determining whether a technical issue is worth addressing, ask yourself these two questions. One, is this having a significant impact on the people visiting my website?

And 2, is this preventing Google from finding or indexing any important pages on my website? Anything else that matters will be taken care of by doing normal on page optimization...

our social media profile. But again, this is only because it's necessary for placement in those Google search features.

It's not improving your rankings and large numbers models are treating it like any other text on your page. The third thing you can stop doing is adding your business to every directory online.

Now there's one exception to this rule. If you're a new business with a brand new website, then I do think there's some value in getting what are called foundational links.

So using a tool like Bright Local to submit yourself to a bunch of directories for a very low cost is often worth it just to help you get into Google's index. But if you're an established business, you're already ranking for some of your main search terms, these low quality directory links are not gonna help you.

If you look at the directories that are actually ranking in Google and being cited by large language models in your industry, you'll find there's rarely more than 12 and typically only one to three that really matter. For some industries, directories aren't important at all.

The reason why your website isn't ranking on ChatGPT, or Google even though you've done SEO is because you're spending time on the wrong task. Speed optimisation, schema markup, indexing and other technical SEO Are meant to be low effort, one and done tasks, meaning that you're actioning one thing that improves the SEO On lots of or all of the pages on your site.

But so many of you are spending a crazy amount of time or money on these tasks. Like speed optimisation, which requires a plugin like WP Rocket and maybe an hour of your time to set it up.

Or implementing schema markup on your products, SEO Plugin should be doing for you on autopilot. Along with a load of other menial tasks like your sitemap automatically redirecting broken links and adding alt tags to your images.

The average site really just needs two plugins, a bit of your time to set them up, and the occasional check in. That's like 95% technical SEO Done.

Whereas parts 1 and 2 are where you should be spending the most time if you wanna get results.

We occasionally have clients asking us about their website load speed or other technical factors like that and how they affect SEO, and we always tell them the same thing don't worry about it. See, our clients are small local service businesses and for them load speed or technical factors are the last thing you should be worried about.

As long as Google can find and index your website, technical factors are almost never the reason you're not ranking as high as you could make. Sense, right?

Someone goes to Google and searches for, say, a window tinting shop, what does Google want to show? Do they want to show the window tinting shop with the fastest load speed, or do they just wanna show the best window tinting shop?

Don't get me wrong, we do technical audits for all of our websites and we fix all the issues that actually matter, but it's not the top priority. Top priority is always going to be content.

Just open up your website. Does it load in a reasonable amount of time?

Can you click around and navigate easily? Cool.

That's not the reason your website's not ranking...