So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on Bing Webmaster Tools. We walk through what they are and how is it different from Google Search Console. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What are bing webmaster tools
- How is it different from Google Search Console
- What data to consider for your content planning
Upcoming Episodes:
- TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:23
Well, happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show. I’m Katie joined by Chris and John. This week we are talking about Bing Webmaster Tools. This came about because after last week’s episode of what to do when your SEO stopped working, I said to Chris, should we be paying attention to Bing Webmaster Tools? Is that a search engine that we need to care about? So behind the scenes, we started to dig into well, how much traffic this thing? Bring us? What are the differences? You can see in our issue of our newsletter yesterday, if you want to subscribe, go to TrustInsights.ai AI, slash newsletter, Chris actually explored a lot of the differences from a data perspective of Google Search Console and big Webmaster Tools. In a nutshell, they kind of operate the same way, but because they’re different searches, engines, different audiences, different intentions, you’re gonna get different results. So in today’s episode, we’re going to cover what is Bing Webmaster Tools? How is it different from Google Search Console? And what data to consider what to look at? So Chris, where would you like to start today?
Christopher Penn 1:30
Let’s start briefly by talking a bit about being itself. So Search Engine Journal does this roundup every year, and one of the things they noticed is that beings market shares round 10% of searches. But the critical part is this sentence right here being also partners with other search engines, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, eco Xia, MSN, Lycos, the Bing API is used by Alexa, for use by Alexa and other Amazon devices, pretty much. It’s a search engine that is not run by Google, it’s probably in some fashion fueled by being either in part or in whole. So that’s one of the reasons why we had to pay attention to it. And another related article, they calculated that something like 25% of searches are behind the scenes handled by beings dataset. So optimizing for Bing search engine, using their Webmaster Tools in their webmaster guidelines, is a good idea. That way we know that we’re reaching not only more of an audience, but also potentially a different audience, and possibly, depending on your efforts, a better audience. The other thing that makes being really different. Well, a few things. One, they have API’s for despite everything, and they want you to use them, right? Google has been notorious for decades now about concealing their data, concealing everything that goes on behind the scenes and stuff for good reason. Because people try to game it being outright says, Hey, here’s how we rank your content. And you know, they give you a bunch of the technical factors. Now, this is not down to individual data sets. But they’re pretty open and clear that here’s how we decide what’s relevant. One of the interesting things that sets being apart from Google, is they do a little bit more with exact match keywords, Google has switched fully to natural language processing. So being Is there still some of the older school SEO, but interestingly, they take social media signals into account. They overtly say we pay attention to stuff like things that are trending on Twitter and stuff because it’s influential, you are hard pressed to argue that that major social networks are not influential. And they take that into account their algorithm where Google has said, we don’t count that as a ranking factor. It’s not something that can be used for indexing. Now, whether Google actually does not we don’t know. But being openly says that is the case, we do count this stuff. So given all that, it’s probably a good idea, at minimum for companies to have Bing Webmaster Tools set up and see what their what’s happening behind the scenes. So
Katie Robbert 4:21
I think it’s interesting, because I think, you know, so you’re saying that Bing, plus all of the other search engines IT partners with is 25%, market share, give or take. And so if you think about that, in terms of the potential traffic 75% 25% of your potential traffic is not insignificant. Especially we have done and this is, you know, a little bit off topic. We had done a calculation for one of our clients about how much potential revenue organic search traffic brings into their company. And this was an enterprise sized company that 25% of their potential revenue. would have been, you know, at least a few $100,000. And so it’s not something to just bypass completely, you’d be like, Oh, well, I have Google, that’s good enough.
Christopher Penn 5:10
Exactly. Now, the nice thing is that Bing and Google do share the majority of marking. ranking factors, for example, have good quality content, and get links to it. That’s, that’s pretty common. So there’s not a whole lot of, you know, you’re not going to create content just for one search engine than the other for the most part, you’re gonna create the best content you can, regardless, but they do. There are some differences. You know, in the more technical side of things, Google has all of its core with vitals being really looks at load times, they very much care about, you know, just how fast can you load your page? Not too much. Like, how much is it jumping around, or you know, the cumulative layout shifts and things like that, that’s not as important to them, which is make your pages fast, as fast as possible. So maybe in another time or another show, we can talk about different ways to doing all that we did cover that in the Cloudflare episode, a few episodes back. So when you pop into Bing Webmaster Tools, you got to go through and register your site, as usual, prove that you own it. And then you end up with a an interface that looks pretty much like Google Search Console, except that there’s a few more tools, few different tools that you have here that you don’t have in Google. So let’s start with good old fashioned search performance. One of the nice things that Bing has that Google does not do is they put your errors right inside the tool as well. So you can see like, hey, there’s, you know, the site there crawler, ran into some issues on your website, please go take a look at it. And you can, we’ll get to where that is located later. But you can also see your index pages. How busy was the crawler, and then of course, your clicks in your impressions. Like Google, you can get your keywords and your pages to see what pages are getting impressions and clicks, the metrics are pretty much the same. So impressions are the number of times that you showed your site showed up in search, and then clicks, the number of times those listings got clicked in Bing. So that’s, you know, that’s what’s in the search performance section.
Katie Robbert 7:16
John, have you ever I’m putting you on the spot. But have you ever looked at which search engine traffic comes from for marketing over coffee?
John Wall 7:25
No, actually, we haven’t. I mean, I have in the past, but it’s been years since I’ve looked at it. And so I mean, this is always fascinating to me, because most places I’ve ever been, you know, being has been less than 10%. So it just gets left, you know, ignored completely. So it’s just interesting to see, like, I didn’t realize this interface has come this far. I mean, it’s I mean, it’s funny, it’s a total Google knockoff. But it is interesting to be able to drill down and see this stuff.
Christopher Penn 7:50
It is, as with, you know, Google, you can look at a URL, it’ll tell you if there’s issues, like one thing that constantly highlights on our site is that we have multiple h1 tags, and a homepage, which we do. It will also let you see your technical markup your your schema to see what’s in there. And it’s always a good idea to look in there and see if there’s anything that’s glaringly wrong. There, Site Explorer lets you dig through your site and see individual pages and crawls your site maps, you can see how many sitemaps and how many pages. It’s discovered. Again, as with Google Search Console, if this number is not the number of actual pages you have, you probably have had something go horrendously wrong. One thing that’s known about being that is different Google is Google stops by and checks a lot more often than then Bing does. Bing usually seems to stop by about once a day, Google can depending on your site can stop by like hourly.
Katie Robbert 8:47
Is that something that you can change in the settings? Or is that something that’s just completely out of your control? Like, I know that you can manually submit URLs and sitemaps. But in terms of the automated checks, can you change that cadence?
Christopher Penn 9:01
You can and we’ll actually get to that in the configuration section. There are ways to put some controls on that. Now, two things that are different than Google. One is Bing has an API called index now, where you can submit your URLs and you’ll see there’s a URL submission here, we can manually submit URLs. But if you have coding tools, or SEO tools that can talk to it. It will be will actually take data from your website in a programmatic way, and update its index. So on the Trust Insights website, we use a plugin in WordPress called rankmath. And we have configured that every time you hit the publish button, it proactively notifies Bing, hey, new page is up to come take a look. And that is a very, very useful utility. Also, our caching software Cloudflare does the exact same thing. It looks every time you clear the cache and reload it. It will send the snapshot of the URLs it knows about to Bing and say, Hey, a bunch of new pages come on over and take a look. You can submit you can submit up to I believe it’s 10,000 URLs per day. Now, obviously for for site our size, that’s kind of silly. You know, we wouldn’t need that. But if you are, say Amazon, you could use that up pretty quickly. So one of the things that Bing does recommend is that you have some kind of internal scheme for which you know, which 10,000 URLs Make the Cut each day. So, you know, if we have sold a few or Amazon, you might say, Okay, well, what are our best selling products for today, let’s make sure those are in the top 10,000. That way they get they get indexed and crawled. That’s the basic performance section. Now. This is where stuff gets fun. Bing offers SEO tools, right, built right inside for it. Obviously, Google does not easy things like backlinks where you getting links to your site, what pages are those links coming from? Was the anchor text on that. So you can see lots and lots of where links are coming from, I think I’ve still when for links to the Trust Insights, website. 6500 links, that you can see things like podcast players press releases, Libsyn, which is where our podcast is hosted. Spin sucks Talkwalker. So lots and lots of stuff. And of course, you know, one of the things to always do with these things is if you see something in here, you don’t recognize, you should probably click on it and then see if there’s an opportunity to do some additional link building.
Katie Robbert 11:33
just eyeballing it. The nice thing is that it looks similar to the Google Search Console data, at least for you know, what backlinks we’re getting. So that’s good news.
Christopher Penn 11:44
Exactly. Keyword research, is one of those tools where Ben can start to suggest things for you upset, but you can also do, let’s do marketing analytics here. It’ll help you with some basic keyword data. So if you don’t pay for an SEO tool, this isn’t that bad. Now, these are beings results in Google’s results and stuff. And we do know the two indexes are very different in the composition, but it’s not bad. You know, it’s it’s not the worst thing, it’s a lot worse for the world. And for the low cost of zero, it’s hard to complain about. So for coming up with ideas, you can put keywords in, it’ll show you the rankings for that term. Again, pretty handy little tool. Nice. Let’s go to SEO reports. So this is essentially, this is similar to the page experience panel in in Google Search Console, this just tells you, hey, there’s a bunch of issues on your website. Here’s what they are multiple h1 tags, which that It’s interesting being flagged that as a high severity issue, whereas Google does not really look at that Google says, I’ll use that to understand the structure of your page. But that’s about it. What our challenge here is, if we would have to go back to our web design and say we need you to completely redo our theme, because
Katie Robbert 13:06
we’re not about to do.
Christopher Penn 13:07
Yeah, we’re not about to fix.
Katie Robbert 13:10
But the description being too long or too short or too short, is something that I’ve been working on, because that is the snippet that is shown as the preview for the page. So if you Google, you know, what is Trust Insights, you should get a result that says, you know, Trust Insights, and then a little description, like trusted so it says a marketing management consulting, blah, blah, blah, and it should be enough information for you to be able to read and understand what we do so that theoretically, you’re like, Oh, yes, that is exactly what I’m looking for. Let me click on this link.
Christopher Penn 13:43
Exactly. One other thing is interesting is a Bing does use the Meta Keywords field, whereas Google’s ignored that for like, a decade now. They don’t use it nearly as a ranking factor they do you use it to determine page relevance. So the project that you’ve been doing of making sure that you know that each page has an anchor keyword, actually does still matter for being. So that is not a waste of time. Good. Yeah. And then just site scan stuff, again, does bid is being picking up what is supposed to be picking up. So that’s what’s in the SEO section, the configuration section, this is crawl control, this is where you can say, hey, this is when I want you to stop by my site. And this is when I want you to give me a break. So I have it set, you know, for Eastern time. And then when do we get most of our traffic Eastern time, you know, 9am to 5pm. Now, you could manually set this up as well if you were busy. If you were a a European company, we don’t want to switch this and maybe if you’re a European company that also does business on the East Coast, you might have you know, peaks and valleys for different times. But what this does is then during business hours, Bing will hit your site less right so it will you know, the crawler will will not come as frequently. If you’re a publisher Like Digiday, or the, you know, vice or whatever, you might want to have this set all the time, like come by swing by as much as possible because you’re publishing around the clock. So you might want to time this your publishing frequency as well, we might want to say maybe stop by, it’s okay to stop by between eight and 11am every day, because that’s when new blog posts and, and stuff go up on our site.
Katie Robbert 15:23
Now, I remember this is going back, you know, good 10 or more years ago, there was, you know, an unsubstantiated rumor that your site being crawled by an SEO tool slows it down. I’m assuming that that is not true.
Christopher Penn 15:43
Well, it’s like any other visitor to your website, you know, every visitor does it enact a performance penalty of some kind. It’s just not necessarily a lot. If you’re using modern, a modern Mar tech stack, it should be a non issue because a service like Akamai, or CloudFlare, or something would be able to serve up to those bots, what they need without everyone else taking a performance hit. 15 years ago, yeah, if the web servers under some guys desk at your office, and definitely the quality is going to exact a penalty on it, you’re going to hear that, you know, the hard drive thrashing under the desk. But these days, with everything being in the cloud, if you’re on a any kind of decent web hosting, you set up a CDN, it’s a non issue. Now, if you have not set up a CDN, you probably should.
Katie Robbert 16:31
All right, John. So it sounds like Chris is describing the hard drive under your desk that houses 15 years of marketing over coffee episodes,
John Wall 16:39
you have no running away. I’ve had the entire CRM system shut off when the Secretary who had the computer under her desk, you know, turn it off at the end of the day. So yeah, they used to happen. Thank God for the cloud.
Christopher Penn 16:54
Exactly, yeah. No, we actually did a revision of marketing Okapi earlier this year, we moved on to CloudFlare, put it on the CDN and all that stuff. So it finally got some love.
Unknown Speaker 17:04
That’s good. Exactly. Of course,
Christopher Penn 17:07
you can tell Bing, hey, don’t crawl these URLs, as well. So that there are specific pages that you don’t want that are all that are not in your robots dot txt file, you can block them here. The best practice though is put them in your robots dot txt file. And that way everybody knows, don’t crawl those pages.
Katie Robbert 17:25
And there’s also pressure Chris, what is a robots dot txt file?
Christopher Penn 17:30
I’m glad you asked a robot, that txt file is a configuration file that lives on your website that tells search engines either to look at a place or don’t look at a place or for certain robots to tell them to buzz off. Right? So here you can see the the Trust Insights when we’re saying any kind of browser come on in, it’s fine, right. Whereas if we wanted to specifically say exclude Googlebot, we could, if you were if you had some, for example, if you had a section of your website, maybe you’re a health care provider, and there’s a section of your website where patients could log in, you would say I want to deny all search crawlers, I don’t want you to even try don’t even knock on the door. We don’t want you here. Because you know behind that this is a whole bunch of pH I you would hope they’d be additional access controls. But this will be yet another layer will say you have to get out in our case, like, that’s fine, come on in. And then we have you can either have allow or disallow statement. So in this case, we’re saying, hey, search engines don’t crawl our thank you pages, you know, yes, we have them, we don’t want you to crawl them, we don’t want you to index them. Because that kind of defeats the point of having a registration page. So we can find it right in search. And other things like our matomo instance, which is our open source, Google Analytics alternative. We’re telling the search engines don’t bother calling that either. It’s there’s nothing useful there. You can also if you’ve got a whole bunch of unusual IP addresses in your web hosting logs, you can see if if all that crawling was being or not you just type in the IP address and it will tell you yes, that was us or no, that was not us. You also can see if being hacked if someone has filed a takedown notice, for content on your site to being you can see what that is and approve or disapprove here. This is the same as like if you’ve posted a video on YouTube and YouTube flagged it as a copyright issue. This would be kind of handling those disputes, by the way to the independent musicians who have just used GarageBand music. You are competing with us at our videos too, because we’re using GarageBand stock also so we get copyright disputes every week with so what
Katie Robbert 19:45
was not aware of that?
Christopher Penn 19:46
Oh yeah, I got to notice is after every show, like say, hey, it looks like you’re using copyrighted music like nope, and just file a dispute and every week, you know, 20 minutes later, like, okay, it’s fine. You’re all using the exact same snippets. Maybe someday we’ll hire an independ In a musician to make her own theme music. someday, someday, of course, you have your user management and Microsoft clarity, which, if you’re not familiar with, I believe we did a show on that last year, clarity is Microsoft’s alternative free alternative to hot jar and Crazy Egg and all those UI testing tools. And it was was made part of being last year. But it is also what it’s, I thought put that in a essentials tool, like it’s, there’s no reason not to use it. It’s a terrific tool, and does some really good stuff. So that’s sort of the walkthrough of what’s in Bing, and how we could probably spend, you know, a whole bunch of time that we spent like three hours talking about the Google Search Console course, you could spend about that same amount of time on Bing. But what I do want to highlight is, when you look at the results between Bing and Google, they are different. And as Katie said, you can see this in the Trust Insights newsletter from this week, we can talk a bit about them here. When I search for when I saw this spreadsheet by clicks from Google Search Console, DS, the sort of the list of terms. And what’s interesting is that every term that’s in the Google calm is also in the Bing calm, we may not get Bing clicks from being on them. But Bing does know about them. If I do the reverse, I search for Bing clicks. Look at how many blank spots there are in Google. Right? For now, some of these are things like, you know, specific to fresh content. So what’s interesting is being seems to report back fresher content. So we put up our LGBTQ hate crimes data, blog posts this year, we put it up just before pride month, every year. Google has no knowledge of those search terms when it comes to our site. So we’re not showing up in Google foot. But we are and we’re actually getting clicks for it in big. Again, that’s that’s really refresh content that goes to what the or is in beings webmaster guidelines. They like fresh content, they like new stuff. But there’s also other stuff in here that isn’t in Google that we would perhaps like to be like issues with predictive analytics, right? Maybe not Pumpkin Spice Latte demographics, although I yeah, I’m gonna do that next month. But your your newsletter open on the unaware audience, right, that is showing up in being and actually got a kick out of being the 12 days of data. stuff, there’s, like I said, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that Bing is sending us traffic for that, you know, here, Trust Insights, AI, YouTube, for B2B Trust Insights podcast. And that’s someone looking for us very specifically on Bing. And so there’s a lot of stuff in here that that isn’t showing up in Google. So either people don’t type those queries into Google, or we just don’t rank for them. Because of the the type of site being is it again, it has a different audiences, different searches and stuff like that. And so there may be opportunities for us to get traffic from Bing, that we may not be competitive for on Google, right. So if we can’t get it on Google, maybe we can get out of Bing, because a click is a click. Someone who wants to learn about Trust Insights. Come on over, we’ll take any way we can get you.
Katie Robbert 23:20
So now what’s interesting is with Google Search Console, you can tie it together with Google Analytics, so you can at least get some high level demographic data interest, things that they’re interested in those affinity audiences, that kind of stuff. You can’t necessarily get that with Bing, is that correct? Because then, I mean, it would almost make it too easy to be like, Oh, this is what my audience looks like on Bing. This is what my audience looks like on Google.
Christopher Penn 23:51
Yeah, there’s there. To my knowledge, I don’t believe there is demographic data available about your website, you can get technographic data. So for example, here’s Microsoft clarity, right? And in clarity, I can look and see like, what kinds of browsers, what kinds of devices, what kinds of operating systems we’re getting, that’s interesting Mac OS, being substantially higher windows.
Katie Robbert 24:17
But I can’t get like ages or gender or anything like that. It’s just that datasets not available, and you can’t get interests. That’s correct. Can’t get interesting. Because those would be the things that I would be most interested in personally, of, you know, what kinds of topics are people interested in that are coming to your site that you can get from Google Analytics at a high level? So you could say and I think we did an episode on this, you could say like, a lot of our audience is interested in cooking shows. So we should be writing about, you know, tying in together how our data recipes or like cooking shows zero, sort of like bring the two ideas together kind of a thing.
Christopher Penn 25:01
Yeah, we that that’s not available here at all, I would say still have to stick with Google on that. The other option would be if is to serve an x ray, you know, a publicly available audience, something like maybe Twitter, like our Twitter followers, thinks would be one potential avenue for doing that, which we did a show on that already. Another option would be potentially, I’m trying to think if you could do some other social media data, you could also do mailing list enrichment. So you can get some additional data. If you were to upload the Trust Insights, newsletter list to an appending service and get some some data that way that still is more technographic and firmographic, than it is individual. But that would be an additional way to get some of that information.
Katie Robbert 25:54
It looks like services like statistics, offer high level audience overviews of the types of people who use Bing as a search engine, like the thing that came up first was like, majority of users of Bing are over the age of 35. So you know, that’s helpful to know, I don’t know what I’ll do with that, but still helpful.
Christopher Penn 26:13
Well, it’s one of those things that if you have a buyer in that segment, that would be a helpful thing to know, if you’re reaching more of that audience. You know, if if we’re looking to do business with CMOS, statistically, CMOs tend to be over older rather than younger staff. Not always. But that is the general trend, so wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to know about. The other thing that I think is useful, and we talked about this in the newsletter is that Bing has a much greater efficiency ratio. So when I just do a quick summary on this call this 408 clicks to our website from from Google 179, from Bing. So that’s, that’s a two to one difference. But then there are 325,000 impressions from Google. And only 8000. For big, so big head, sends fewer impressions. But the clicks to impressions ratio is much, much higher on Bing, which means that essentially, when we show up in a Bing search, we’re much more likely to get the click, and when we show up in a Google search, so it is a more efficient search engine for getting us traffic. So if we want to spend some time maybe optimizing, you know, taking a look something like issues of predictive analytics, you know, right now we have that disadvantages of predictive analytics, because maybe we need to write up and issues of predictive analytics blog posts,
Katie Robbert 27:39
there. It’s the complimentary two disadvantages. issue is the original post from 2018. Disadvantages, I believe, is the complimentary that I wrote earlier this year.
Christopher Penn 27:51
Okay, then we should fresh in that went up. Because again, we know Bing likes fresh content. So it’s probably time to put that one on the content treadmill. Yeah, going through the keyword list quickly to say, Okay, what’s in here and what things to be freshened up. The same is true with pages too. So if I search here in March smallest. On Google, we see a whole bunch of stuff that matches up with Bing pretty well. But then if I search for the same thing on Bing, there’s actually a couple of blind spots like the LGBTQIA. Post here that’s missing from Google index, the Instagram outage post is missing from Google’s index entirely. So anywhere we see an NA, assuming it’s not something that you know, we don’t want shared, how to research efficiently. That’s an old so what episode, these are things that we need to go into Google Search Console, say, hey, what gives like you should, you should have this page you don’t even if it’s not sending any traffic, you should still have knowledge of this page.
Katie Robbert 28:52
So it may indicate, so we put that in manually.
Christopher Penn 28:55
Yeah, we put that in manually. If the opposite were true, let’s go ahead and just do a search here. Let’s scroll down, see if we’ve gotten any. No, actually, I don’t see any entries in the Bing list that are missing. That’s kind of a curious if there were we could submit them obviously to Bing but it’s kind of curious that there aren’t any missing. Its coverage of our site is actually better.
Katie Robbert 29:32
Interesting, so I guess this this comes down to so we know especially right now, marketers are stretched super thin, like we’re all doing a million jobs wearing a million hats. You know, we’re trying to sell things we’re trying to, you know, take care of our clients, your marketing, all that sort of good stuff. So, you know, what’s the so what because it sounds like you know, if I take a step back, you’ve just added one more thing to my plate that I have Look at so, you know, how do I make this most efficient for me, as the person who has to do something with this information? Where do I look? What do I pay attention to?
Christopher Penn 30:12
It depends on how much is wrong, right? So the bare bones minimum is in any of these tools, if there are things that are glaringly wrong, things are throwing errors, and they’re fixable errors, fix them. Right? That’s, that is sort of the table minimum, if you don’t do that, I’d say you’re missing out. So first order of business, anything that being says, Hey, this doesn’t look right. And and it’s fixable, fix it, like in our case, the multiple H ones, we’re not going to fix it, we’re just going to accept that that’s the reality.
Katie Robbert 30:42
Second thing is it doesn’t have to be every day or every week or whatever. But going through and looking at the results, the differences between key words and pages in one search engine than the other. Maybe you do this quarterly. And you look through it, you say okay,
Christopher Penn 31:02
are we missing things in one or the other that are of value? And if we are, do we need to create? Do we need to look at pages that mentioned those things and tune them up? refreshed, and like we’re at the age of predictive analytics that’s in 2018. That needs a revamp, I can guarantee I mean, if it was written last week, technically, it probably needs a revamp, but it definitely needs a revamp, it’s over a year old. Anything about machine learning data science, AI needs a second set of eyes, and maybe a fresh coat of paint. And that would go into your content calendar. Because we know that those pages are already getting traffic. We know that in some cases, they’re old, and they need they need some tuning up. And because it’s it’s less work, to tune something up than it is to create something net new. If I go in here, and I look at these, these numbers like that 2018 post this and 2019 posts in here. We need to change we need to go into those up. We talked about summer slowdown. That’s where the winter slowdown if you’re in B2B, you know after after Thanksgiving, your years pretty much done. Except for all the sales guys tried to close the year end deals. But short of that. That’s the time to take this list of of pages and say yeah, let’s let’s brush up what needs to be brushed up. Let’s get rid of stuff that, you know if you’ve got pages in here that are getting zero impressions, zero clicks, yeah, it’s time to retire them.
Katie Robbert 32:35
So would you remove pages from your site or archive though? Archive and redirect them? Archiving? Interesting.
Christopher Penn 32:44
If if they just get it zeros across the board, that’s the important part is if they’re still delivering traffic and impressions and stuff like that, that’s fine. But if I search goes all the way to the bottom here, you know, and you guys got some stuff that is just on the zeros page like this. MAE CON talk from MAE con 20, I want to say it was the 2019 MAE con, it’s probably time to retire that one and then redirect that to someplace else. Other pages. Like this one here. This is a new one how to know if AI will take your job. It’s just not really charting right now. That might be one to put in the newsletter again, or or as we know, from Bing. And it’s it’s social stuff. Maybe you share it on social and see if we can get any jump out of it. But there’s based on what we know about how Bing works, it might be an opportunity to get some these pages noticed again.
Katie Robbert 33:39
All right, John, your list just got pretty long, I hope Yeah.
John Wall 33:43
Well, I was wondering about the h1 tags, too. That’s kind of weird. But I do like in WordPress, each one is considered a title. So you think there’d be only one. But, you know, in some ways, it doesn’t make sense. Like, it’s just another layout. There’s no construction on h2 through five or whatever. So
Christopher Penn 34:01
that’s right. What’s happening is that search engines in general look at h1, h2, and they build what’s called a Document Object Model Tree. And essentially, that is like an outline like it’s an outline of a book or a table of contents. An h1 is like the title of the book. Right? So you wouldn’t have five book titles, right? You have one book title, then you have chapters below that. And then you have sections inside the chapters will be h threes, and so on and so forth. When you have five titles on a page, everyone’s like, so what is the title of his book? Right? It’s not, you know, issues of predictive analytics, and then you have other stuff. That’s how crawlers work when they’re doing when they’re crawling your website. They’re trying to build that model of what the page is about based on the logical order. And so what you’d want to do ideally is have that one h1 This is the title of this page and the h2 is your your big sub heads and the h3 h4 h5 and so on. So fourth, if you do that in like, for example, the markdown language, you know, some parsers will not even let you have more than one title tag like, No, you have to have a logical structure to this document. fixing that, it depends on how on what’s going on with your theme, right? A lot of designers will just set different classes for like h1 and h2 is to make them look a certain way on the site, not realizing that messes up how crawlers work.
Katie Robbert 35:32
So you basically just reinforce why teams should not work in silos, but really, there should be more of a collaboration, regardless of the fact that it’s the creative team versus the data team. Guess what, they still need to work together. So thank you, Chris, for reiterating that point.
Christopher Penn 35:51
Exactly. And, you know, when we look at ours, it’s it’s our fault for not highlighting when we were commissioned our website designed to say, Hey, you’re only allowed to have one h1 tag on a page. You know, I don’t care what you do with the style sheets, but it structurally has to look like this. Because, again, that’s good information design, your architecture should be different than your appearance, right? So function and form should be separate from each other so that you don’t screw up the architecture trying to make it look a certain way.
Katie Robbert 36:19
Well, in a lot of companies, they do have an Information Architect versus a designer. We just happened to be a very small company who could not afford both.
John Wall 36:29
Exactly the designer. That’s where I’m at.
Katie Robbert 36:32
Oh, no. I like it’s okay.
Christopher Penn 36:36
Yeah, it’s totally fine. But like, I’m even looking at like my own personal site I was looking at yesterday when I was trying to fix a broken plug. And I’m like, wow, the theme that I’m using, I think it’s probably time to move on noticing more and more issues. One experiment that I’m running in the background is looking at how accessibility, ADA compliance, how our sites look that and you know, Trust Insights has like 35 violations of accessibility. My site’s got like 300, like, the theme I’m using is so bad for accessible, like, Okay, it’s time for this theme to go. Well, if you’re curious, by the way, I will post the results, probably it was for sure certain, we’ll post them in the analytics remarketing slack group if you want to see the results of whether accessibility has any correlation to search outcomes, but you should make your stuff accessible no matter what, because it’s just a general best practice. But what maybe let me in next week’s newsletter, too,
Katie Robbert 37:30
I was gonna say that sounds like a future live stream. So stay tuned for that.
Christopher Penn 37:36
So that’s it. That’s that is the reason for being it’s one of the things that you know, extra traffic, and it might be more qualified traffic or certainly more efficient traffic. It doesn’t cost you anything to sign up for Webmaster Tools. It doesn’t cost you anything for Microsoft clarity, it doesn’t cost you anything except time to learn the interface. And there could be some goodies in there that frankly, Google isn’t surprising. One of the things that we talked about, once it was on a previous podcast episode was Google’s eating more and more and more clicks. They’re there with the one box and with all this and snippets and featured text and stuff. They’re getting better and better at returning useful information to the searcher that doesn’t send them to your site. And so that’s one of the reasons why that’s impressions number is so high. And yet the clicks number is so low because someone could be searching for Katie Robbert Trust Insights, right. And it’ll display your bio from our site without sending the person to our site. So we have no idea. We don’t get the traffic. We don’t know what the impact of that is, whereas Bing will still probably just send them straight to our website. So if you’re trying to measure, search, make sure that you’re taking Bing into account as well.
Katie Robbert 38:52
All right, John, what are you going to do tomorrow?
John Wall 38:54
Yeah, my being on. MC
Christopher Penn 39:03
sa we’ll talk to you all next week. Take care. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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