Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 130: Is Showit bad for SEO?
464 Plays3 years ago
Today we're answering the question that we get a lot, is Showit good or bad for SEO? To help us answer that question I'm chatting today with one of Showits UX and website designers Chris Misterek. Chris going to help us understand what SEO is and provide us an overview of the different SEO tools that Showit provides to help us optimize our websites. We also of course discuss a few the limitations that they are actively working on. Also if that name sounds familiar that's because Chris joins us on episode 79 of the Brands that Book podcasts where he discussed how to get started with website design so be sure to give that episode a listen.
For show notes visit... https://daveyandkrista.com/audience-tutorial-how-to-use-the-showit5-seo-settings/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Showit and Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
I love Show-It, and if you go back and listen to some of the previous podcasts, you'll know that I didn't start building websites on Show-It, but when I found Show-It, that's all I do. That's the only thing I use just because of how great it is.
Brands That Book Show Overview
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands That Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:35
Speaker
Today we are answering a question that we get a
Is Showit Good for SEO?
00:00:37
Speaker
lot. Is Showit good or bad for SEO? And to help us answer that question, I'm chatting today with one of Showit's UX and website designers, Chris Mistrick. Chris is going to help us understand what SEO is and provide us an overview of the different SEO tools that Showit provides to help us optimize our websites. We also, of course, discuss a few of the limitations
00:00:57
Speaker
that they are actively working on. Also, if that name sounds familiar, that's because Chris joined us on episode 79 of the Brands That Book podcast where he discussed how to get started with website design. So be sure to give that episode a listen. We've also recently relaunched our YouTube channel
YouTube Relaunch Focused on SEO
00:01:14
Speaker
In the past, YouTube's really just been a place where we house tutorials for our template users. However, if you listen to the podcast, you know that I've wanted to do more with video for a long time now. And now that is finally happening. And you can find a five to seven minute YouTube video that provides an overview of show its SEO tools.
00:01:33
Speaker
over on our YouTube channel. And of course, I'll put a link in the show notes. And from what I'm told, it really helps if you subscribe, like and comment on the video and watch the whole thing. So please consider doing so if you are so inclined. More YouTube videos to come every Wednesday.
Engaging Audience Feedback
00:01:50
Speaker
Anyways, be sure to check out the show notes at DaveyandChrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands at Work podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at DaveyandChrista.
Chris Mistrick on Showit and SEO
00:02:05
Speaker
Now, on to the episode.
00:02:11
Speaker
All right. Well, we are back for another episode of the Ransombook Podcast. And today, I am joined again by Chris Misturk, but in a different role today. So welcome back, Chris. Hey, David. Thanks for having me on again. Super stoked.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to be chatting with you again. It's been way too long since we've seen each other in person, of course, due to the last year. But I'm excited to have you back on. For those of you who are listening, who are not familiar with Chris, go back and check out our earlier episode. And we talked about really kind of your, would it be fair to call it a side hustle? I feel like it's more than that, you know, becoming a self-made website designer. So go back and check out that episode. That was a great conversation. But I'm excited to be chatting with you again.
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you were one of the first guests on my podcast as well, which little self-made web designer podcast trivia, you still have the number one highest downloaded episode in all of my episodes. So you're just crushing it. You're amazing.
00:03:06
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Well, we'll have to do some repeat episodes. We'll have to make this more of a frequent thing. But today you're joining us within your role at Show It, which of course is one of our favorite website platforms. And we're trying to answer the question today really, is Show It good for SEO? And I feel like I don't know how many times a day do you all get that question because we get it quite a bit.
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say it's probably just about, I mean, I don't know how often you're getting it, but it's just about as often as anyone else would get. There's a lot of folks who, you know,
SEO Basics and Misconceptions
00:03:38
Speaker
SEO is important. It's an important factor into the success of your website, getting organic traffic. And so I think it is a smart concern. You know, it's not something that we take lightly. We try very intentionally to put things onto our website builder or take them off according to how it's going to help you with your SEO. So I'm excited just to kind of
00:03:58
Speaker
bring a little light to that and bring some clarification around the whole topic.
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm excited that you are even willing to talk about it. And like you said, it is a valid concern, but I can imagine that to a certain extent. I know for me anyways, you know, it's often asked in a way where it's
Keyword Research Importance
00:04:13
Speaker
like, well, you know, let's really get at what you're asking here. So I'm excited to dive into that with you, especially because you really have a good idea of, you know, what's going on behind the scenes that show it. And just from an outsider's perspective, one thing that I appreciate about the team that show it is that you all actually listen to, you know, feedback.
00:04:32
Speaker
and pay attention to what's going on in the tech world and then implement, you know, based on what you're seeing.
SEO Tools and Skills
00:04:37
Speaker
And, you know, even recently rolling out some updates to show its tools around having the character counter, you know, in the page titles and meta description area, taking out the meta keywords box, which I thought was, you know, which was great, you know, because so many people are asking about that and using it and it's really, you know, sort of this outdated thing. But anyways, I'm excited to jump into this with you. So maybe we should just start at the beginning and talk about
00:05:01
Speaker
you know, what search engine optimization is. So, if you had to answer that question for somebody, you know, what is SEO? Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, first of all, I would just plug your course and say if you really want to get a good idea of what it is and how to do well with and show it, you guys have a fantastic training on it. So, you know, would highly recommend that. But the idea behind SEO, like the bare bones is
00:05:25
Speaker
You're trying to build or set up your site and post as much content as you can that eventually you land on the first page of Google when somebody is trying to search for something related to your website or related to your
Creating Valuable Content for SEO
00:05:41
Speaker
business. So that that is the very bare bones. It's real simplistic idea of what it is. And because it's so important to a online business owners business and income
00:05:53
Speaker
There is a lot of misconceptions, a lot of misunderstandings about what it actually is and what you can do to actually improve your SEO rankings for your website. There's a lot of snake oil salesmen who call themselves SEO experts.
00:06:10
Speaker
that will claim they can get you on the top page of Google and the keyword of your choosing. Sure. In five days or less. Yeah. And anytime you see that, you know, you should just completely ignore it and not even think twice about like having them work on your site. So, you know, the truth is, is that ranking high on any type of keyword. So anytime a keyword essentially is like,
00:06:37
Speaker
what a user is putting into a search engine when they're looking for a specific type of site or specific information.
Improving Search Engine Rankings
00:06:43
Speaker
It takes time. It takes a lot of intentionality. It takes thinking about what it is that the person is trying to find what keyword phrases they're going to be putting into the search engine and then building out blog posts, building out web pages, building out different types of content in such a way that Google is going to see you and it's going to say, OK, this
00:07:06
Speaker
is something that is in line with what this person is looking for. So I'm going to put them higher up on the rankings of that. So there's a ton to it. I'm sure we'll get into a lot of it, but that's kind of the general idea of what SEO and organic traffic is.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really good explanation. Like you said, I think there's just a lot of misperceptions out there in terms of what people think when they think SEO. And I always say too, if someone comes in and starts to guarantee number one rankings, I think that's a good sign that something shady is going to happen. There's one thing for somebody to come in with some confidence and some case studies and say, hey, look at the results we've got in the past, a whole separate thing to guarantee that you're going to be able to get somebody to
00:07:46
Speaker
the number one position for any given keyword. And like you said, it starts with keyword research and understanding what it is that people are searching for. And I think that's a mistake we sometimes see where people are optimizing
Backlinks and Content Authority
00:08:00
Speaker
pages for things that no one's searching for or things that they think people should be searching for. And so there's that aspect of keyword research. And then creating pages that are going to capture that searcher's intent or capture search visibility for a given keyword
00:08:16
Speaker
And a single page isn't going to be able to capture all of the different searches that you're going to want to optimize pages for. So like you said, there is a lot to SEO. But if we're just getting down to the basics, and we have, like you said, you're kind to plug our course, we really appreciate that. And we have a couple other episodes on search engine optimization as well that people can check out. But what are just bare bones, the sorts of things that you see move the needle for people?
00:08:46
Speaker
when it comes to search engine optimization. Yeah, and when a lot of people look for how to move the needle, they first start looking at what types of tools that they can find or buy in order to kind of boost their
Debunking SEO Myths
00:09:00
Speaker
ranking. So essentially, they're looking for a button that they can press that will all of a sudden just magically turn their page into one of the top-ranking pages. But having really expensive tools doesn't make a difference if you don't know how to use them.
SEO Challenges and Solutions
00:09:15
Speaker
It's like somebody who's trying to get into woodworking and so they go out and they buy all the most expensive stuff. It's been a ton of money, but they haven't actually put the things into practice to get those skills and learn the difference between.
00:09:27
Speaker
you know, the different I wouldn't even know because I'm not I don't even know what types of tools to call them. I don't know what's been scenario because I think it's a great analogy, though. So anyways, yeah. So, you know, I think you have to look at it. I'll do music, for instance, because I've got a little bit of a better background in music. You know, as guitar players, they're guitar players who geek out over their gear, right? Like what type of pedals they have, what type of amp they have, what type of guitar they have.
00:09:52
Speaker
But their playing is horrible because they haven't spent the time to practice, to hone their skills, to get their finger working
Choosing the Right Keywords
00:09:59
Speaker
in, to build up their hand strength. And so that is really how SEO is. It's good to have the tools, the tools are helpful, but really the most important thing are the skills. And so like you mentioned, keyword research is one of the biggest things that you can do to kind of boost those rankings for you.
00:10:18
Speaker
And then being smart about what keywords you're going after. So there's the difference between what's called a long tail keyword and a short tail. So let me just kind of unpack this a little bit. There are really short and popular keywords. And we're talking about, you know, people are putting it in, searching in the volumes of, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands to millions a day. Like shoes or something like that. Right. Like a broad keyword.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, right. So good shoes to buy, right? Like, so when you go after keywords like that, you've got to think there are other really big companies who have a lot of marketing dollars and entire SEO departments who are just going after those keywords. And they're also putting a lot of money behind ads, behind
00:11:06
Speaker
CPC so where you know you're seeing the first thing that you're seeing is somebody who paid a lot of money to be in that first spot so if you're going to go after those types those short tail keywords it's going to take you a long time and you're not going to see a lot of results so long tail keywords is getting a lot more specific about what somebody is going to
00:11:27
Speaker
be inputting into the search engine. So there might not be as much volume, but you have more possibility to actually get up there on the page and have somebody actually engage with your site. So instead of saying, you know, buying great shoes, you say buy great shoes for men who have a 10 and a half foot or buying great
00:11:49
Speaker
basketball shoes for men who are trying to be like, you know, Michael Jordan or whatever, you know, so just trying to get as much more specific as you possibly can. And then the second thing after that is just is just being consistent with the content that you are putting out. You're not going to be able to write one or two killer posts and just expect to start showing up.
00:12:11
Speaker
in the top of Google's rankings. Now, is it possible? 100%, you know, but you're trying to send as many signals to Google or to whatever search engine you're using, trying to send as many signals as you can that what you are serving up in terms of content is in line with what people are using. So you're trying to, you know, like if you've got a website where you talk about buying shoes and then on the next post, you're talking about how to, you know, keep a toddler from crying at bath time.
00:12:39
Speaker
You've got a lot of work to do in filling out that content. So you want to kind of stay in the same vein of what you're going after, you know, when it comes to what type of content you're putting on your site. But somebody on Twitter asked like a high ranking VP at Google, like, what does it take to be a top ranking website when it comes to search engines? And his response was make awesome content.
00:13:03
Speaker
And that's the simplest way you can say it. You're trying to make something that people are actually looking for that keeps people engaged on your website. Asking yourself questions.
00:13:15
Speaker
post is this page interesting? Well, how do we make it interesting? Well, you make it really helpful and you add imagery. So realizing that we have the attention span of a goldfish, right? And so you're adding things that is going to keep somebody engaged along the journey. You're making it scannable. That's another thing that's really important when it comes to SEO is that
00:13:37
Speaker
You know, when a user visits a website, they're not taking, you know, 10 minutes to go through your content. They are looking at it and going, OK, this is for me. So let me read a little bit more. And so if you can't scan it and instantly know this is what I'm looking for, then you're going to miss out on some of those people who are really wanting to engage with your content. And Google is going to see that they're going to pick that up and they're not going to rank you as high.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a good summary of what it takes to rank a page within a search engine. It really does start with creating great content and just the authority and trust that you build with consistently creating great content. It's like if you are new to a group of friends or peers and somebody asks your opinion, just naturally by you being new and nobody knowing who you are,
00:14:23
Speaker
they're going to maybe weight your opinion, maybe a little bit less than somebody who they've known for 20 years has never given them a bad recommendation. So there's that aspect of consistently creating great content over time and getting other people to recognize it. So the second thing that I typically point people to are backlinks or other even I guess social factors to a certain extent, not maybe in the same way as backlinks, but others that are pointing back to your content that boost its authority as well.
00:14:51
Speaker
So, those are generally the two types of things that I point people to when it comes to actually moving the needle with the search engine optimization. And I would say, just right off the bat, typically, and again, kind of going back to the analogy you were using earlier, when people are asking, okay, show it bad for SEO or is this bad for SEO? Is that bad for SEO? It's like, well, if you're creating great content,
00:15:14
Speaker
and you're sharing that content in a way that hopefully builds backlinks. Maybe you're trying to get published in different areas or people are re-sharing your article, linking to your article in their own posts and pages, whatever it might be. Then as long as you're not using really outdated
00:15:30
Speaker
technology. You're probably fine. Certainly, most modern website builders,
Core Web Vitals in SEO
00:15:36
Speaker
there's nothing I think inherent about their technology that's going to really prevent you from ranking and show it's included in that and show it was actually rebuilt, as you know, because it used to use flash. It was the whole platform was rebuilt a number of years ago so that the technology would not hold people back. I think that
00:15:57
Speaker
At the end of the day, if you focus on those two things, you have a pretty good chance of ranking. Are there show it websites that rank well for competitive searches? Yeah, for sure. I tried digging down into this as much as I could. The truth is that the way Google sets up its algorithm is it's like, even if I'm searching in a clear web browser and it's safe and it hasn't seen my previous history,
00:16:20
Speaker
Like it's going to serve up stuff to me that's probably a little bit different than what it would serve to you in your side of the world. So I don't necessarily want to list specific websites, but suffice it to say, if you search wedding photographer in any major city, it is very likely that on the first page, there's going to be multiple show at websites. And the way that you can figure that out is by looking at the developer tools.
00:16:44
Speaker
on a web browser is getting a little complicated, but there's plenty of tutorials out there to do it if you're really super interested. You can look at the developer tools, look at the source of the HTML, and we tag all of our images with static.showit.
00:16:56
Speaker
you'll see that, okay, this is a show website. And you can also do that with Squarespace websites. Like Squarespace even puts it up at the top of their page to say, this is a Squarespace website. They know people are looking at that source code. So it's 100% possible.
Creative Freedom in Showit Design
00:17:11
Speaker
I mean, we've got websites that are the domain authority in their field, where they're getting hundreds of thousands of visits every single month.
00:17:19
Speaker
on their website. And so, you know, like it is all about whether or not you want to put in the effort and to really kind of do what you need to do to start ranking really well. Our goal at Showit is to give you as much creative freedom as you possibly can have with building your website. And so that means in a lot of ways we're putting the decision making into your hands. So you've got a methodology like Squarespace where
00:17:49
Speaker
you know, they're kind of putting you in a box. I mean, they literally call themselves squarespace to try to keep you from doing things that are bad for your website, right? So, and that works for a lot of people who don't really want to have that creative freedom. They just need a website. It needs to be decent looking and they want it up and they want it quick and they don't want to think about it. And so, you know, not downing on squarespace, obviously a lot of people use them, but with show it, our goal was to put the decision making, put the creative freedom back in your hands.
00:18:17
Speaker
And so with that, it also comes with some responsibility. It comes with you thinking intentionally about your SEO and how different things on your page will help or hurt your SEO and making sure you're making wise decisions. Yeah, absolutely. And another tool to use to check whether somebody's using a show website or whatever content management system they're using is built with. So if you go to builtwith.com, you can just plug the URL in there. It'll show you kind of a list of the technology that they're using, including the content management system.
00:18:46
Speaker
For those of you who like to just, you know, I started glazing over when developer tools was mentioned, I totally get it and try built with. But yeah, I would 100% agree. And for our wedding photography business, we had a show website and did really, really well in search and really, you know, in no way did show it pulled us back. We have a lot of friends who you show websites who rank really well for their respective searches that they're trying to target. And then we just know of some and you know, we don't have to go into specific but
00:19:12
Speaker
bigger brands that rank in some pretty competitive industries for searches. Like you said, and I think that's just true of search engine optimization and maybe anything else, it comes with trade-offs. There are certain things we can do
Trade-offs: Speed vs. Design
00:19:28
Speaker
on our website.
00:19:29
Speaker
especially when it comes to speed, for instance, where we know it might slow down or put more pressure on our server. And so maybe the page loads a little bit, not as quickly, but maybe it's just awesome or it's just something that we need to put there because we feel like it's really going to make the content that much better. So I think that's important to mention that aspect of trade-offs. And I think that's a key difference between Squarespace and Showit, what you mentioned, which is
00:19:55
Speaker
you know, Squarespace. And this is noble, you know, they don't want you to be able to create an ugly website or a, you know, a unusable website. But I think show it a little bit of a philosophy difference in that, you know, you all want to provide people complete creative control over their websites. So,
00:20:10
Speaker
Maybe we should shift the conversation a little bit. Let's start with just the bad of SEO and show it. And then we'll move into all the different tools that show it provides, because we don't want to. And I know you all don't. You all are very honest about different limitations. And that's something that, again, that we've always appreciated. But what would you say are a couple of limitations of show it when it comes to search engine optimization?
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, like you mentioned, these are all things that we're actively listening to our users, to our customers, and we're actively working on to try to enhance or improve or figure out workarounds. So, you know, I mentioned all this, but just know that we realize, you know, where we have some work to do and we're in the process of fixing those things or maybe even enhancing them. And I think the main thing is
00:20:59
Speaker
what we're talking about. With the show website, you have more responsibility when it comes to how your site is going to perform in SEO because you have more creative freedom. There's more responsibility and the Spiderman phrase that gets repeated over and over again with great power comes great responsibility. You have a lot of power. You have a lot of freedom to make your site exactly how you want it.
00:21:24
Speaker
kind of the thesis where we started the rebuild from show it back in 2015. Like we want to give people complete power and complete creative freedom. So with that you've just got to be intentional. And so it's not a lot of work. It's not like it's going to take you days and days and days. But you've got to be thinking about for instance how your content is showing up on your canvas. So let me backtrack a little bit and just kind of explain
00:21:48
Speaker
what is happening when Google is looking at your site. So they have a crawler and it's going through your entire site. It's going through your HTML. It's going through your text. And it's trying to make a synopsis of what your page is about. Right. And so if you have a scenario where you've got two paragraphs on two different elements on a show at Canvas and they're sequential. So you've got a first paragraph and a second paragraph.
00:22:12
Speaker
By default, when you create a paragraph, it shows up at the top of a canvas. And the reason for that is because we don't want you to create a canvas element and then not be able to move it around. If it's underneath everything, you're not going to be able to click on it and move it to where you want it. And so when you create a new element, it shows up at the top. So let's say you've done your first paragraph. Now you're doing your second one. Well, if you just leave it at the top, that's kind of a weird signal to the Google crawler to have the second sequential paragraph show up at the top of a section.
00:22:42
Speaker
So you just want to make sure that you drag that and put it underneath the first paragraph. And again, it's not super tough, but it's something that can be really helpful. Another thing that is very helpful is making sure that each of the elements on the canvas are tagged correctly with our HTML tag. So let's, we'll get a little bit technical again. I'll try not to go too deep into the woods. So there's an HTML element called a header and it's tagged by the,
00:23:10
Speaker
h1 h2 h3 h4 Reference and so those headers are a signal to google about the main topic of that page, right? And the saying is that you want to have only one h1 Header so only one h1 element on your page because that is the title that is the biggest summation of your entire page So if you've got a lot of h1 elements
00:23:34
Speaker
then, you know, it's going to be kind of confusing to Google to say, okay, it's about this, but it's also really about this. And it's also really about this within show it, you're actually able to choose which HTML tag is assigned to a different piece of text. And so by default, that's all set within your design settings. So when you go in and you create your different fonts with your title, your heading, your subheading and your paragraph.
00:23:59
Speaker
that's where all of those things are assigned. So when you create a title element, you know, go down and click title within our web builder, the top element, that element is going to be an H1. And so if you're just creating a ton of titles and not going in and actually changing it to H2 or H3, then that's going to be a little bit confusing. So again, you've just got to be thinking about it and being intentional.
00:24:22
Speaker
about how that is working and setting up. But those are kind of some of the biggest things that you've got to be thoughtful of when it comes to creating your show website.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So a few things I want to mention right off the bat is, one, we'll link in the show notes to some help articles from ShowIt that have been written on each of these things, especially HTML tags.
Effective Use of HTML Tags
00:24:42
Speaker
It might sound complicated, especially if you've never messed with any of this before. But once you go through it, you'll see exactly how simple it is. So very straightforward. And same with just kind of rearranging elements on a canvas. Again, if you haven't even been in ShowIt, and maybe you're just doing this as research,
00:24:57
Speaker
get this question answered before committing. Once you actually jump in and show it, you'll see exactly how easy it is to rearrange some of these things. Something else that I want to mention that I think has been largely fixed, but maybe you could speak to this a little bit, is with Core Web Vitals. And we have a whole other podcast on Core Web Vitals, so I'm not going to go into what all of that is. But Core Web Vitals have replaced largely the page speed
00:25:21
Speaker
you know, ranking factors and not replace so much but as, you know, I guess is the new umbrella in which they live under. And basically, there are three main errors that can show up on a site and one of them is cumulative layout shift. And basically, you know, when a page loads, you know, that shifting you experience on a page occasionally, which is bad for user experience.
00:25:42
Speaker
you know, even before it rolled out, once they had made those, you know, basically, I guess, the tests live, so that it was registering as an error in something like Google Search Console, we were seeing a lot of cumulative layout shift errors in Showit or for Showit websites specifically. However, since the rollout, we've done a couple audits on Showit websites, and they've passed all of the Core Web Vitals tests. Has that been something that Showit specifically fixed? Or is there some resource that you all have put out that maybe has, you know, helped people avoid that issue?
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know, we wrote a help doc, well, a series of help docs. So I went to sit down to write one help doc and it actually ended up being like three different ones because I was like, man, there's a lot of talk about here.
Cumulative Layout Shift Errors
00:26:24
Speaker
So hopefully those help docs are helping people. The cumulative layout shift specifically is, is something that is mainly an issue within our mobile
00:26:34
Speaker
pages so the mobile rendering of your website and the reason for that is how we render the CSS which is what makes your site look the way it does on the mobile side of things and so that is something we're actively working on to kind of improve and fix you know it's kind of a it's a big thing and so it's something that's it's just going to take some time for us to kind of work out but on the positive side of things is that there are a lot of things that you can do to really help your Core Web Vitals score when it comes to
00:27:04
Speaker
thinking with a lot of insight when it comes to what you include on your page and what you don't. Like you mentioned before, you might add something that maybe dings you for how your page performs, but you're like, but this is really cool. It's going to really engage people and keep them on our site longer. And so that's what's called a performance budget.
00:27:23
Speaker
And so with every page, you need to have an idea of a performance budget because I did a lot of testing on short websites with Core Web Vitals. And the pages that scored perfectly were blank pages with simple text, right? Like one paragraph. They got 100 every single time on both desktop and mobile. But obviously, that's a bad experience for
00:27:47
Speaker
a user like a user is going to go, I don't want to be here. This looks dumb, right? And so that's the give and take. That's the playoff. And every website does it. Like even if you search, you know, put New York Times into core web bottles, you're going to see they're not scoring awesome. Even YouTube, right? A Google-owned company is not scoring awesome when it comes to
00:28:06
Speaker
the core web vitals so you just you kinda have to say what is worth it to me and what's not and what's gonna make the biggest impact because there was a lot of fear around how core web vitals were gonna really impact seo rankings and then it all rolled out and then of course like it this always happens google makes
00:28:22
Speaker
some big decision that freaks everybody out and everybody's talking about it and then they roll it out and it's like there's crickets. It didn't make that big of a difference. And that goes back to the fear. There's a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to SEO. And so people are like, oh, I should be worried about this. Well, I'm very worried about it. It's like, well, no,
00:28:43
Speaker
You know, that's kind of the sky's falling mentality. Like if you're just wise about it, if you're smart about it, show it gives you the tools to be able to work on those things and fix them in your website. Yeah. It's like the interstitial update a few years ago where everybody thought pop ups were going to be, you know, killed off or whatever you'd never be able to do.
00:29:00
Speaker
And of course, you go to any website and it still has pop-ups. I mean, you can name a dozen different examples like that, but I'd agree. I think at the end of the day, a site that was serving great content before and ranking really well because of it, even if they're dinged for some core web vitals related stuff, chances are they didn't fall out of the first page.
00:29:19
Speaker
you know, whatever. And again, just, you know, I'd encourage people to go check out both your article on Core Web Vitals as well in the show at help docs, if you're worried about show specific stuff. And then we have an article published on Core Web Vitals as well, which kind of gets at that point, too, which is if you look at the rest of the web and how they're doing, you know, you'll feel a lot better, I think.
00:29:38
Speaker
Anyways, not too bit stuck in the weeds there. Let's move on and let's talk about some of the things that Show It provides really to help people optimize their website. One of those things that we can just cross off the list is you all have a very well built out set of help desk articles that people can access. We'll link to that just broadly in the show notes as well.
00:29:59
Speaker
those would be easily found in Google. And then of course, you have like the show it built in chat. But beyond that, maybe we should start with show its built in SEO features. So where can people find those in the builder itself? Yeah, so there's two sides to this. There's the show it specific page. So I'll just kind of talk about this, because I think we're going to dive into WordPress in a little bit. But the show it specific pages, if you go into your settings,
00:30:23
Speaker
on the main page, there are five different things. There's page info, page background, animation, and the fourth one is SEO settings. And that's gonna be where you're gonna add your page title, which is what shows up in the meta description. When somebody's searching, that's the first thing that they see. And then that also gives you, we just rolled out, like you mentioned, a character count to show you, okay, don't go past this because once you do,
00:30:50
Speaker
Google's not going to be seeing anymore. It's going to cut it off. You're gonna get ellipsis and you want to have you want to summarize it as much as you can with that. There's also like I mentioned before, being able to click on certain elements and assign them a specific text tag with h1 h2 h3 paragraph. So
00:31:07
Speaker
that's super helpful when it comes to SEO, then there's a few high level things when it comes to like Google Analytics to be able to input that into your website to be able to track what pages are performing well to see, you know, what you're doing that's working and then make some, you know, guesses about why that is so that where you can have some insight and
00:31:30
Speaker
to what you're going to do on pages in the future.
Built-in SEO Tools in Showit
00:31:33
Speaker
And that's another aspect of SEO is testing things out and being able to see like, okay, this is doing really well. Why is it doing really well? Where is it doing really well? What demographic is this hitting? So Google is analyzing all of those things. So there's also the alt descriptions and SEO title within your images. And this is something that's really important that I think a lot of people neglect.
00:31:55
Speaker
There's a high priority on accessibility right now in the world of web development. And so what that means is making a web page or web application accessible to somebody who might have limitations when it comes to being able to look at it or, you know, maybe they have a tough time with movement and so they're not able to move their mouse around as much.
00:32:17
Speaker
as an able-bodied person might be able to. So thinking about it in terms of that and your images, the easiest thing to do is make sure that you're adding a alt description to them so that if somebody has a hard time seeing, they're going to be able to read, okay, this is what this image actually is. It's a person who's standing taking some wedding photos or
00:32:37
Speaker
It's a couple who's just about to get married and they're looking into each other's eyes. You want to make sure that you're adding those descriptions and show it gives you those tools to be able to do that and to perform well when it comes to accessibility.
00:32:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so for alt text specifically, I believe it's under, so if you click on the image, right, you'd have SEO title and SEO description. And so the alt text is going to come from the SEO description, like within show, right? Okay, awesome. And then, you know, same thing for each page to, you know, going back to kind of where you started where, you know, that module on SEO tools, you want to make sure you put in your page title, your meta description, meta description, not necessarily ranking factor, but, you know, can increase click through rate, which, you know, of course can increase your rank, but
00:33:18
Speaker
Page title, if you don't put in a page title for the – or an SEO title rather, it's going to pull, I think – what does it pull automatically? It's like the title of the page or the – Yeah, the top paragraph of the page itself. Doesn't it pull though, if you share it to social? For instance, if I name that page in show at home.
00:33:37
Speaker
It's just going to pull like home or whatever. And of course, you don't want that shared across social media. I mean, it's just such a wasted opportunity, right? Someone's sharing your website and it just says in the thumbnail home and then the meta description is just the first couple sentences from whatever page they're pulling it from.
00:33:55
Speaker
So, going through that, and I feel like such a – we've seen pages go – yeah, we've seen pages go increase pages worth in Google just by adjusting the page title and meta description. So, page title is important and simple thing to hit for sure. And then for your HTML properties as well, where do people find that? Is that text properties?
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So you click on a text element and then over on the right hand side, there's a tab that says text properties. And then under advanced, you'll see text tag. And then you've got just a ton of options to choose from there. There's div H1 to H3.
00:34:32
Speaker
There's nav, which is obviously for your navigation. And then there's P, which is for paragraph text. Yeah. And of those, you know, again, if that's something that's real new to you, you know, if you read the help desk article on it, it's very, it's very straightforward. This is something that you can learn on your own in an hour, and then probably go through most of your website and make those adjustments.
00:34:52
Speaker
pretty simply. So there's a lot of different stuff here, including that Google Analytics integration, which you would find, I think, in your site settings. And then on the WordPress side of things, show it still has, as far as I know, so correct me if I'm wrong, a basic blog tier and an advanced blog tier. Is that right? That's right. Yep.
00:35:07
Speaker
Awesome.
Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress
00:35:09
Speaker
And on the basic blog tier, it comes already pre-installed with Yoast SEO. And I think you have to activate it if you want to use it. I think it comes pre-installed but deactivated. But you can do all the same things we just talked about on the show it side of things in the WordPress side of things using something like Yoast. Yeah, absolutely. Anything that you would want to do or be able to do with a WordPress site, you are able to do with a show it site.
00:35:36
Speaker
It takes a little bit of an understanding of WordPress, which is common in any WordPress website, you know, but Yoast is, you know, the industry standard for when it comes to helping you with your SEO. So if you are on tier two or tier three and tier three doesn't, you know, the difference between tier two and tier three is that you can choose which plugins you have, you know, so with tier two, we have.
00:35:57
Speaker
a list of the most popular plugins that we found that most users need. But with Tier3, you have to go in and kind of add those yourself. So, but you're able to add whatever you want. So with Yoast, it does a lot of things for you. It creates a site map for you, which is kind of like, you know, the architecture layout of your site that you're giving to Google to say, like, kind of, here's this page and that page. Here's all those are all connected.
00:36:22
Speaker
which is really helpful, but it also helps when it comes to, like you're saying, the title and the meta description, but it can also be really beneficial when it comes to showing, giving you cues or indicators to how well your page might do when it comes to SEO rankings. So it's gonna kinda, it's kind of like just a little miniature coaching session in like what you should be putting on your page or what you shouldn't be. So it's a really helpful tool, especially when it comes to blog posts and everything like that.
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, I have a love hit with the Green Dot system. Because on one hand, it is helpful. Like you said, it is a nice little miniature coaching session on what should be included in a blog post. On the other hand, I think people think that if they have a green light from Yoast that somehow Yoast is communicating that over to Google and Google is going to view their
00:37:11
Speaker
their content more favorably because they got all green lights in Google. And again, it's really just Yoast telling you like, hey, we see these things on your page based on the keyword that you put in the box and things look good from our end. So yeah, for sure. I will say we used to be big fans of Yoast. We still are big fans of Yoast, but we've been starting to use a rank math, which we've really liked. Again, if you are on the advanced blog tier or is it tier three or would it be tier two?
00:37:37
Speaker
Tier 2 is Tier 3. So if you're on Tier 3, you can install any plugin that you want. And I would say, again, it's not that a Tier 2 website can't rank or anything like that. I would say most of the time we recommend people go with Tier 3 just for that added bit of flexibility that they get in terms of determining what sort of tools. And that's I think one of the biggest benefits of using Showa is that it does integrate with WordPress in the way that it does.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so you get access to some of the power of the WordPress ecosystem on your show website. So again, like I said, you can definitely take advantage of the free SEO plugin, but the premium tools do typically come with some, I think, superior features for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. There is that little bit extra of control over your website. So it's like, do you want to have
00:38:29
Speaker
everything kind of set up for you and just be served up what is helpful. And like you mentioned, using Yoast is going to be good. It's kind of like, which tool do you prefer? Which tool helps you the most? And some people are going to like what you said, rank math, which I'm going to have to try now that you've mentioned it because I trust everything you say.
Comparing SEO Tools
00:38:45
Speaker
But some people swear by Yoast, some people swear by other things. Yeah, SEO presses. Yeah, these are tools that will help you, right? And the tools won't do the work. They won't make your site
00:38:58
Speaker
magically show up on the first page, but they can be helpful. So people are going to have preferences in the types of tools they use. That's true of any craftsman, but ultimately it's about building the skill of what the tool is helping you to do more than anything else.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think we can emphasize that enough. I would say Yoast, SEO Press, RankMath are three of my favorites and they all do. They're going to share 90%, 95% of the same features. Whatever you decide to use, like you said, Chris, they are just tools and it's not going to fix bad content.
00:39:31
Speaker
So, and I like to compare, you know, my friend Tyler Harrington, who very much, you know, has helped me with all things tech, you know, we start talking about computers and he has this like PC that he's basically, you know, it has all these different parts that you can go by and, you know, put together and, you know, I'm like, I know that your computer probably will offer me
Trade-offs in Website Builders
00:39:51
Speaker
you know, it could offer me potentially better performance, right? But then it would require me going out and putting all of these different things, you know, together, right? Whereas I have my Mac and it, you know, I know it's going to give me good enough performance for anything I need to do. And it's pretty much ready for me out of the box, you know?
00:40:08
Speaker
All of those different sorts of tradeoffs I think are important for people to remember when choosing a website platform. And one thing that Chris and I always say is that the best website platform for you is the website platform that you feel comfortable going in and updating, right? Because at the end of the day,
00:40:24
Speaker
you could not use a page builder or website builder at all. You could just hard code your website and that's probably going to give you maybe the leanest option. But then you got to learn a lot of different things in order for you to do that and maintain it well.
Showit's Improvements and Feedback
00:40:41
Speaker
Anyways, Chris, I really appreciate you. I really appreciate Show It and just you taking the time to join us and have an honest conversation about some of Show It's limitations and a lot of Show It's strengths. Like I said at the beginning of the interview here is one thing I really appreciate is some of the updates, maybe they don't roll out quite as quickly as a person might want to see, but you all are always listening. You're always working on those things and anything serious that needs to be updated, you guys take care of. That's why we keep building lots and lots of Show It websites.
00:41:11
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Now thank you, Davey, for having me on to talk about show it. I love show it. And, you know, if you go back and listen to kind of some of the, well, the previous podcasts, you'll know that I didn't start building websites on show it. But when I found show it, that's all I do. That is the only thing I use just because of
00:41:27
Speaker
how great it is, number one, with the creative freedom, but also with being able to hand off to clients and say, you don't need me with this. You're set up. If you want to take that image and move it wherever you want to, you can. So I love it. I'm a little bit biased because I work there, obviously. And like you mentioned, there's a lot of great options out there. I don't want to dog on any website builder because there's a lot of intentionalities at UX Designer.
00:41:50
Speaker
There's a lot of intentionality that goes into why buttons are where they are and why there's not that type of button where somebody might want it to be. There's just so much that goes into it, but we are actively working on improving it, making it better, and making it a good experience for as many people as we possibly can.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And we might be a little bit biased as well. But, you know, it's not, you know, we're not tied to any specific website platform, but we consistently, you know, I would say 75% of the time we're recommending show it as the best, you know, website platform for whatever client it is that, you know, is considering working with us. And we just really love the platform and appreciate all the hard work that you all put into it. So thanks.
00:42:32
Speaker
Thanks, man. Well, we're huge Davey and Krista fans. Appreciate y'all. And if you haven't worked with Davey and Krista, please go do that now. You're not doing yourself a favor by avoiding that. Thanks. You're too kind. Well, we'll have to have you on again as well and keep the conversation going. Sounds good. Thanks, Davey.
00:42:52
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to devianchrista.com.