WordPress SEO Traps, presented at Search Marketing Summit 2017 by Peter Mead. Top 10 WordPress SEO Traps: 1. SEO Audit - Tripwire, 2. Spiders - Web Entrapment, 3. Migration - Stagnation, 4. Yoast SEO - Running Red Lights, 5. Website Speed - Radar Trap, 6. Penguin - freeze trap, 7. Duplicate Content - Cannibalization trap, 8. Promotion - Commotion trap, 9. Schema - Scheming, 10. Google & Bing - 3 monkeys.

1. @petermeadit

2. Peter Mead
Who am I?
* Been in Digital since 1997
* WordPress SEO Consultant
* Hands on, Technical, Strategic
My Ethos?
* Communication,
* Community,
* Culture.
My Contacts?
* Peter Mead iT
* Melbourne SEO Meetup @petermeadit

3. WordPress SEO Traps
Top 10
1. SEO Audit - Tripwire
2. Spiders - Web Entrapment
3. Migration - Stagnation
4. Yoast SEO - Running Red Lights
5. Website Speed - Radar Trap
6. Penguin - freeze trap
7. Duplicate Content - Cannibalization trap
8. Promotion - Commotion trap
9. Schema - Scheming
10. Google & Bing - 3 monkeys
@petermeadit

4. 1. SEO Audit - tripwire
How this will trip you up
You never do SEO audits
You skipped Auditing prior to starting
Means you couldn't see the issues
People don't use good auditing tools
People don't learn or upskill SEO
Did your agency supply an audit?
@petermeadit

5. Common Audit Traps, what’s the data say?
Most common on-page, technical SEO issues
SEMrush Anonymous data
● 100,000 websites
● 450 million pages
● Site Audit tool
● Top issues
● % of site affected
Link: SEMrush Audit tool
@petermeadit

6. The stats, how many audited sites for each issue?
Link: SEMrush Audit Data
@petermeadit

7. Avoid the SEO Audit tripwire
Run a regular audit, Use the Tools
Run your eyes over it, be hands on
SEMrush
Moz
Screaming frog
Learn & Understand fixes or use a pro!
@petermeadit

8. Advanced Auditing Checklist
Alan Bleiweiss - Spreadsheet with percentage scores
@petermeadit

9. 2. Spiders - Web Entrapment
You blocked resources from spidering, or
someone else did?
A former agency blocked in robots?
Crawler hitting errors like status 500
Blocking js & css in robots.txt
Render blocking code in Theme
Page not ready for mobile-index
Eg. mobile test cannot not see elements
@petermeadit

10. Get out of the Spiders web
Dig deeper into technical issues
Eg. ex agency disallow all in robots.txt… remotely in functions.php
Eg. PHP7 caused 500 errors for crusty pages, convinced dev to fix them, slowly…
@petermeadit

11. 3. Migration - Stagnation
What's the trap?
Let’s change our domain!
Changing your website URLs
Let’s redesign our site!
Platform or CMS change
Adding a shopping cart
The new design has new HTML structure
@petermeadit

12. How to get out of Migration Stagnation?
Migration should not be taken lightly, Get a website migration strategy!
GSC change of address tool notifies of new URLs. Do we need it?
Every migration causes downturn, causes re-crawling & re-indexing
Monitor URLs, Fix your structure properly, don’t just lazy 301
Multiple URL changes, 301 chains, leads to loss of juice
Get an SSL migration plan - Aleyda Solis
HTTPS rushing in, easy to do, so redirects gets missed, mixed content
Advanced migration strategy - Omi Sido
@petermeadit

13. Out of trouble after 5 years plus
● An example of a migration because of poor URL structure for years
● Melbourne client didn't know they were trapped, loved using Joomla
● Recovered quickly once URL structure & redirects were addressed
@petermeadit

14. 4. Yoast SEO - Running Red lights
Really about onsite SEO
Yoast is a great tool to guide you
Like everything, don’t rely on it too much
Red light means stop right? Not always.
What if your are scraping or copying content?
Syndicating and using cross domain canonical tags
What if whole site is copied, including tag manager tracking code?
@petermeadit

15. When Panda hits it hurts!
Panda #25 hit in March 2013, due to low quality issues
Client suffered until 2016! Finally redesigned website, and fix content
@petermeadit

16. 5. Website Speed - Radar Trap
My site is too fast?
Slow web server response times
Theme design, render blocking code
Plugins are low quality or too many
Bulky images and files
The perception of speed, use lazy loading
Rushing into AMP the solution?
@petermeadit

17. PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights tool
Not a benchmark speed test
Read the about page after running the test
Score of 100 points, connection independant
85 or above & the page is performing well
Does a lower score mean the site is slow?
Dig deeper - work on the suggestions - Can you get 100/100?
@petermeadit

18. Waterfall - how and when elements load
@petermeadit

19. GSC Crawl Stats
Time taken to download the HTML of a page
Milliseconds - try to stay under 350 ms
Perception of speed
@petermeadit

20. 6. Penguin freeze traps
It’s about risk… exact match anchors?
Unnatural link manufacturing
Granular & vertical penalties, pages & phrases
Footprint; spam links to spam
Would you link to a spammy site?
3 main reasons people link to your site:
1. Interesting & Engaging content.
2. Valuable information and resources.
3. Relationship with the reader.
@petermeadit

21. Penguin unthaw
Penguin 4.1 hit October 2014, Client panicked, 301 multiple domains. Messy.
Turned off 301s, cleaned up links, Penguin 4.0 recovery Sep 2016
@petermeadit

22. 7. Duplicate Content - Cannibalization trap
What's the trap?
No such things as penalty for duplicate content
But it can cause problems
Which one is which, which page wins
Your non-preferred page might rank
Near duplicate content, similar meaning
Poor content planning, avoid Cannibalization
@petermeadit

23. Getting away from duplication
Canonical to definitive page, passes juice like a 301
Taxonomies, noindex them or optimize them
Keyword research, based on services/products
Group keywords into topics and map them to important main pages
Plan your content based on topics, and layer using internal links to main pages
When Blogging, have a unique meaning, instead of the same thing each time
Have a Strategy to avoid cannibalization - Dawn Anderson webinar
@petermeadit

24. 8. Promotion - Commotion trap
What's the trap?
Investing heavily in creating ‘Great Content’
Not promoting it out effectively or at all
Promoting poor content, too salesy
You don’t have a strategy or plan
No runsheet, target platforms for sharing etc.
@petermeadit

25. Plan your promo strategy
Develop and plan a Content promotion strategy - Peter Mead
Use a runsheet/checklist for after you hit the publish button
Get in front of the right audience, which platform for the audience
Pay for targeted outreach to, use the audience tools.
Pre-prepare social images, text snippets, shortened links etc.
Pay for targeted brand promotion - Purna Virji
It takes time, 4 - 12 months to see results, be patient, don’t give up
@petermeadit

26. 9. Schema - Scheming
What's the trap?
Not doing any schema
Doing it poorly, validation errors
Not marking up Address in footer
Aggregate ratings on your site
Get the 5 stars appearing in the SERPs
Eg. Can fake facebook reviews helping rankings?
@petermeadit

27. Testing markup
Bing & Google tools
Take your pick
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
https://bing.com/toolbox/markup-validator
@petermeadit

28. 10. Google & Bing - 3 monkeys
What's the trap?
Not connecting
Google Search Console
Analytics, Adwords,
Google Tag Manager
Bing Webmaster Tools often forgotten
@petermeadit

29. Get connected, focus on metrics
Connect up your 3rd party tools
SEMrush & Moz, connect your Analytics & GSC
Define your goals, What User Actions contributes to your bottom line?
Don’t set up a goal for views to your about us page for example.
Establish metrics, rather than focus on rankings, they are a byproduct
@petermeadit

30. Avoiding WordPress SEO Traps
Understanding technical SEO and WordPress Websites
How much risk are you willing to take?
Do you know you are taking a risk?
Do your research, learn, upskill
Don’t be too proud to ask a pro, for help.
@petermeadit