S5E24
· 24:56
Hey. It's Matt. Welcome to Money Lab. This is gonna be this is gonna be short because all I wanna do is figure out a weekly, possibly monthly, but we could start weekly and then move it to monthly, process or system for SEO maintenance. Alright?
Matt Giovanisci:That would be improving SEO, perhaps doing some backlink building, perhaps technical stuff, whatever. So what are the tools that we're using for that? Well, we have Semrush. That's our main SEO tool. I have I have switched if you have been listening to this show for a while, I used to use Ahrefs all the time, but I have switched from Ahrefs to Semrush.
Matt Giovanisci:The main reason is is that I actually liked Semrush's interface a lot better, and then it also has a lot of extra tools that allow me to just pay for one thing and not have multiple things. So, one of those things being like a backlink auditor, and they do a content creator similar to Surfer SEO, similar to Clearscope. They have that built in. Cost extra, but whatever. It's built in.
Matt Giovanisci:It's all one place. And I love tools that are all in one place. So SEO maintenance, how do we the tool that we use is the Semrush. So for Semrush, I do an audit that runs every week. K?
Matt Giovanisci:I believe it runs on Sundays, and then I get an email Monday saying, we rang your audit. Here's what, you know, needs to change or here's what needs to happen. So because of that audit, I'm gonna write down my board here, I'm gonna write SEO maintenance tasks. Alright. Underline that.
Matt Giovanisci:My marker is starting to run out. That means I've been using it a lot. That's pretty good. Alright. First task.
Matt Giovanisci:And this was one of my old tasks that I used to have. I I haven't done it in a long time, but it's fixed broken links. Now, that includes affiliate links, internal links, and external links. Although you can make the argument that affiliate links are external links, but I use Lasso for affiliate links, which will tell me if something is not just broken, but also out of stock. So fix broken links, and I'll also say, and out of stock.
Matt Giovanisci:And that's hard to say that that's a SEO task, but I do have that. I do that every week, actually. So every week, I go into Lasso, and I see, do we have any products that are out of stock, any links that are broken, and I just fix those. I just do that every week. Takes me all of about 5 minutes.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? And there's always something there, by the way, because I have, like, 500 links or something. Okay? So with the SEO audit that Semrush does, that will tell me if I have any broken external or internal links on the site. So I'll just go in, fix those links, be done with it, because that's something that once you have them all fixed, then only a handful should maybe hopefully not, but sometimes a handful will come up once a week.
Matt Giovanisci:You know, I get we link to a lot of government sites and EDU sites. They they love changing their URLs all the time. They don't have to worry about SEO. Alright? So that's one thing.
Matt Giovanisci:Number 2 is what did I used to have on there? I used to have well, we used to run a broken link checker. That was a big thing. It was a broken link checker built into WordPress. We don't have that anymore because no broken link checker really works well with WP Engine and, you know, server load.
Matt Giovanisci:So now we're just using these external tools like Semrush to do that. Maybe it's disavow links, if any disavow bad links. And then I'll also write white list good links. That's something for backlinks. Yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:So disavowing backlinks, you know, yes, Google ignores most links. I've always kind of never used a disavow tool because I'm like, well, Google should be smart. I don't know if I feel I don't know if I feel that anymore. So I'm just gonna go into any new sort of toxic links that come up, via Semrush. I'm just gonna add those to my disavow list and re up and replace in my disavow tool.
Matt Giovanisci:What else? What else? What else? Let's think about this. Is it clear scoping something?
Matt Giovanisci:No. Because that's what article writing. I'm doing that with articles. Is it make you know, when I saw this tweet the other day that was things that you shouldn't worry about is, like, making all of your Yoast. I use Yoast for SEO, my plug in.
Matt Giovanisci:Making all of that green. That used to be a big thing for me. It's not. Apparently, we're recording this tweet. It's like, don't worry about it.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm like, alright. So I'm not. I do, anyway. It's but but not something I would do every week. Alright.
Matt Giovanisci:So what else? What else is in that? So, like, you know, I'll just say remove, audit errors. Is there any and that and that's, like those come up. They're always different.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, it might like, one of the things that keeps coming up for me is I have pages on the website that have more HTML than text and, pages that don't have enough text on them. So, like, we have a page and it's really weird. So we have pages on our website where we collect, you know, like, their category pages, essentially. We don't have a lot of posts in those categories. So the text to HTML ratio is skewed.
Matt Giovanisci:So it'd be fixing those little things. Some of our articles have an h one, and it like, so they have duplicate title and h one tags. This one's new to me. I didn't know that this was a thing, but it does kinda make sense in why you would wanna use it. So what I've been doing is when I write an article, I have the base title and I have the SEO title.
Matt Giovanisci:Those are different things. And so, for example, I'll I'll give you, like, a really stupid example. So I'm walking around, like, how to use a Sharpie marker would be my internal post title. Right? So how to use a Sharpie marker.
Matt Giovanisci:But in Yoast, you can add something to that title. And so that's when I'll use a tool like headline analyzer or headline studio, and I'll come up with something that'll be more enticing for someone to click in the SERPs in Google. So it would be like, how to use a Sharpie marker, parentheses, and save a ton of money or something like that. Like, that's not something I would print on the website itself, but that's something I would print in the title. And so having those, it just allows you to utilize multiple things on the page.
Matt Giovanisci:So I'm like, okay. I tend to agree with that. I think that's better, but I'm not super anal about them being completely different all the time. But as I'm updating post, I am doing that work. Is there any technical thing I can do?
Matt Giovanisci:You know, is it like cleaning up, you know, something that's a long time? Yeah. There's like is there backlink building stuff? So would it be, you know, reaching out to a bunch of would it be emailing, like, 10 companies asking to be on their resources page? I mean, that wouldn't be really that hard to do.
Matt Giovanisci:Let's let let me just write it. I'm not gonna I'm not saying I'm doing it, but could be an easy process to put in place, especially if I get a if I create a really good template. Right, for and this would be simply, to get on people's resources page. So, for example, I think we could reach out to the problem is, like, finding those people and finding their email addresses and reaching out. But, let's let's just call it I'll just call it backlink outreach for now.
Matt Giovanisci:Not something I wanna do, but I'll consider it. I'll consider it and see how easy it is. It's worth trying for a month and seeing what the results are of that. You know what I mean? Especially if it's something that I could just do once a week, It's if it's an easy list to grab and just send out a link, I might just try to do that on a more consistent basis.
Matt Giovanisci:If if I feel you know, it might just be, like, 10 reach outs a week or something like that. Oh, I know one, and I had something I have not done, recover links. I'm gonna do link recovery. So what am I talking about? I haven't even looked into this yet, but the idea being that, you know, throughout the existence of Swim University, I've had links that people link back to my website.
Matt Giovanisci:Maybe I did a infographic back in the day, and they're still linking to me, but that page is being redirected to another page because I don't have that anymore. So I can do 2 things. I can either take that old URL that I used to have and recreate that URL and build something from it. You know, maybe I just create a page on the website where I now that link makes more sense. I know one.
Matt Giovanisci:So that's one thing. And then, you know, or re do a reach out to those people with those links and say, hey. We updated our blah blah blah. Could you just update your content to reflect this new link? So that's link recovery.
Matt Giovanisci:The other one I just thought of is internal linking. Now not just internal linking, but internal linking to orphan posts, to orphans. Now I use like, so right now, when I part of my process for creating articles is to create internal links or take that article and link out from it to other links on my website. Also, external links as well. So I'm doing that when I'm updating a post, but there are a lot of posts on the site that I'm it's gonna take me a while to get to.
Matt Giovanisci:In the meantime, what I could do is I am using a tool called Link Whisperer, which is from Spencer at Niche Pursuits. There are ways that I can sort of auto generate or or quickly create links to orphan posts. So I have about it's not many, but there there are, like, maybe 40 orphaned posts on my site, meaning no other content on my website links directly to it in the content. It may link to it in, like, a related post thing, which is automatic, but, ultimately, we don't have that. And that is something that also comes up in the site audit.
Matt Giovanisci:And so just going through and doing a couple of those and not going overboard and making sure, you know, ideally, I like doing that manually because I get to control what is being said and how things are being linked. But, ultimately, I think this is really the way to do it. It's just use Link Whisper, and I can get a lot done very fast. That certainly will help improve my site audit score and perhaps, you know, feed me some link juice. The reason I thought of it was I was like, oh, in the link recovery portion, when I was just talking about that, I mentioned, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:I you know, somebody's linking to a post or linking to a page on my website that doesn't exist anymore, and I probably have it forwarded to another page. Right? But I don't have what I what I what I was thinking in my head was if if I do recreate that page so let's say it's an infographic, and I decide, oh, I'm gonna add this infographic back to this page or make a page that makes sense. Well, now I have that link coming in. That link is now valid.
Matt Giovanisci:Let's make that page have some link juice and link out to other things, almost create sort of like a sneeze page. And if you're not familiar with a sneeze page, it's basically a page that has content that is useful, but its main purpose is to link out to other things. You could call it the the hub and spoke. It's the hub of of of everything. You know?
Matt Giovanisci:People call it a sneeze. I've heard the word sneeze page. It's just like you sneeze a bunch of links out, I guess. And then there's also a squeeze page, which is the opposite of it is a page where the sole purpose is to get somebody to subscribe. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:So you're just, like, kinda locking them in. Anyway, terms that are probably not even being used anymore. Okay. So, yeah, internal linking, for sure. That's an easy one.
Matt Giovanisci:Fixing, you know, fixing links or so so, yeah, we have fixing broken links, but, I should I should call it backlink recovery because I'm gonna get confused. Let me just write a note to myself. Like asking owners to update old links to me, something like that. Okay. Now the remove audit errors, a lot of these are, like, pieces of the audit errors, so I probably won't even have that as a a thing to check off the box.
Matt Giovanisci:What else could I do? What else can I do? Yeah. The backlink thing is interesting. Is there is there so I almost feel like these are just general, like, technical maintenance tasks.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? And and maintenance is it's I guess it's maintenance care. Another, another article or sorry. Another podcast we could do is develop a tighter social media funnel because right now, the way that we do social media, my brother is using a tool called and I'm only thinking about social media because I'm thinking about, okay, what are some other ways that we can sort of, like, elevate the power of SEO? And to me, I I call it, like, I call it goosing.
Matt Giovanisci:I don't it's like I wanna goose the the the page a little bit, like give it a boost, if you will. So the idea being that, like okay. Let's say we have an old post. Or alright. Let's say I go and I go ahead and I create a bunch of backlinks or sorry, create a bunch of internal links pointing to an orphaned page, making that page no longer orphaned, right?
Matt Giovanisci:Okay. So now that I've gone and done that, that page has been orphaned for a long time, and maybe it doesn't rank very well. So I wanna kinda throw a signal out there that this page is worth ranking. And this is, again, all theory and just perhaps stupid, but there's no harm in doing it. And so the idea is, like, let's let's feed it some traffic.
Matt Giovanisci:Let's let's give it something, you know, let's give it some traffic and see if it gooses a little bit. Now we do this so so how I would goose a a post is simple. I would email it to my list and promote it. So we get some traffic that way. Right?
Matt Giovanisci:That comes from our email list. We own that. I could pay. Right? I could pay an ad and and run traffic that way.
Matt Giovanisci:I could post it on social media, Facebook, Pinterest, places where if you clicked it, you actually go to the post. Facebook's really the best place for that. So or or a story where I can have a link. It's not gonna get much, but it's, you know, it's not nothing either. So that's sort of like goosene it.
Matt Giovanisci:It's basically like feeding it traffic. Now we we practice this. We haven't been doing it for a while, but we started doing it again. Every time we publish a new video on on, YouTube, like a long form video, we just had this idea, like, let's give it a boost. Let's help let's help it you know, let's get it some views, essentially.
Matt Giovanisci:So what we do is basically send an email out that says, hey. We got a new video, and that feeds it some views, which may or may not sort of, like, signal to the algorithm that, like, people are watching this shit. I don't know. So that's the only reason I'm thinking about SEO or sorry, social media right now, which is right now, it's scattered. We have my brother who is posting his long form videos, all the social stuff, on a company on a platform called Later, which costs us about $40 a month.
Matt Giovanisci:Not a huge expense. But the really the only reason to do that is because he can create one post, and it goes everywhere. We tried a month of, you know, not publishing, or, sorry, publishing natively only, so not using an external third party tool to publish. And we saw no difference. So then we thought, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Let's just use the 3rd party tool because it makes our lives easier. But I am also publishing on social media separate from my brother, but I'm just publishing quest like engagement posts, essentially links to our content and, like, questions, polling to get data from our audience, and having a conversation with them essentially. Right? Just just feeding the social algorithms. Now I'm doing that natively within Facebook using Facebook Business Suite, and it's fine, but it's only Facebook.
Matt Giovanisci:So I think there's gotta be a better way. Now we can use buffer, but that I don't want them to be separate. I want my brother to be able to log in and do his work, and then I log in and do my work. And in one calendar view, we can see all of the social media that we're doing. There's one company so people have I've I've gone on Twitter and be like, what's who who's who is doing that?
Matt Giovanisci:Because, yes, I could technically do that with later, but there's some things that it's just not very good at. I think it was, like, built as, like, an Instagram tool, and then it's trying to be all these other tools. And the interface is fine, and it's just, like, not giving me exactly what I want. It feels somewhat janky. Now there are old stuff back in the day like Hootsuite, there's Buffer, there's Sprout Social.
Matt Giovanisci:These I mean, Hootsuite and Sprout Social in particular to me felt like they were more geared towards Twitter and have had to adopt this new sort of display. The one that I haven't tried yet, somebody recommended it to me because it has an interesting feature that I'm looking for, and it's called cosechedule. I'm not endorsing it because I've not tried it yet, but it's on my list of things to try. Because what it can do is you can do something called re queuing, which is you can basically keep a bank of your most popular content and republish it. And I think it does it automatically.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, if you don't have a post scheduled for that day, you can tell it to just pull something from your your requeue folder, and it'll just publish that thing. I have to look into it more, but I would be that would be interesting to me is to have that more centralized than it is right now. So back to maintenance tasks and to sort of wrap this up because I'm gonna keep this one short. I I actually have it's, I'm actually recording this on a Saturday, and I wanna go out and have a drink. So I wanna go do that.
Matt Giovanisci:SEO maintenance task right now, here's my process. I'm gonna do this every week. I'm not gonna do all of it every week, but just enough and maybe I'll add a number. So it might be fix 10 broken links and out of stock links depending on how big that number is. Disavow bad links, new bad links.
Matt Giovanisci:So I've already disavowed all of our toxic links, and any new toxic links that pops up, I will disavow those. 3rd is come up I had to as is a process I have to come up with, but a backlink outreach program or system that I basically execute once a week. I do a link recovery, so I need a process for that as well. And then linking to, orphan posts or just more internal links in general. So those are my pros those are my ideas.
Matt Giovanisci:That's my checklist. I'm gonna try to do that next week, and then I'll keep refining that over time. If I come up with something that really hits, that really that over time. If I come up with something that really hits, that really feels like it's working, I'll revisit this podcast and sort of basically list out, okay, here's exactly what I do and why I do it and why I think it's working. So I think that would be helpful.
Matt Giovanisci:So this is this was just more of a brainstorm. And if you have any ideas for SEO maintenance tasks that maybe you do, that you think would be beneficial for me to do, I'm all ears. I would love to hear it. Email me, matt@moneylab.co. And if you have anything that you share with me, just know that my plan is to either if I like it, I'm gonna include it in my plan, which probably means I'm going to share it at some point.
Matt Giovanisci:So if you don't want it shared, don't email me. But if you don't mind, please do. Matt@moneylab.co. Alright. That's it.
Matt Giovanisci:Bye bye.
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