TRANSCRIPT: 2.2.2017 How to Effectively Use Yoast SEO with Your WordPress Online Store Bob Dunn: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the WP ecommerce Show. Bob Dunn here. Also known as BobWP on the web. Today we are lucky to have the founder of the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress on the show and, yes, I'm talking about Joost and his Yoast SEO plugin. Chances are if you have a WordPress site, you are using his plugin. I've been using it myself for as long as I can remember. Today we are going to talk more
about the ecommerce aspect of the plugin, but before we dive into it, I would let to tell you a bit about today's sponsor Our sponsor today is Mode Effect. They are an expert WordPress and WooCommerce consultancy. While providing work for brands you trust like Disney and Automattic, they also work to support WooCommerce store owners with valuable resources and support. You can learn more about them later in the show or visit ModeEffect.com. We know that search engine optimization is important for any site. We also know that if you have an online store, it's very critical to make sure that potential customers can find you. With that said, I would like to welcome Joost to our show. Joost de Valk: Well, thank you. Bob Dunn: You are coming from across the pond. Way across. Actually across the United States for me and the pond. Joost de Valk: Yeah, no, I am. I'm in lovely Europe where it's not sunny or warm. I hail from the Netherlands, as does most of our team. Bob Dunn: Yeah. We're in the Pacific Northwest. Washington State. We're rainy and not sunny and warm either. Joost de Valk: Okay. Bob Dunn: So I can relate. Joost de Valk: Good.
Yoast in a nutshell Bob Dunn: Well, I'm excited to hear about the nitty-gritty around your plugin and ecommerce, but first for those who don't know what you do beyond the plugin, can you give us that in a nutshell? Joost de Valk: We do a lot of things. The plugin by now has become the biggest part of our business, but we have services around that and some other plugins like a local SEO plugin and a new SEO plugin, etc., that sit on top of Yoast SEO or Yoast SEO Premium. We have an SEO care service that's actually sold out at the moment so I can promo it, but you can't buy it, where we help you... Give you monthly advice on how to improve your site. Then I still do some consulting on the side as an SEO consultant for some of the bigger brands in the world. Bob Dunn: It's all SEO all the time, right? Joost de Valk: Well, yeah. To be honest, the type of consulting I do becomes more digital strategy than just SEO because it's usually at board level for pretty high... Large companies. Stuff I did, for instance, the migration of The Guardian from theguardian.co.uk to the theguardian.com. Those kinds of projects are what I like to do and what I get asked for a lot. Bob Dunn: Yeah, boy, I bet that was a huge undertaking. Joost de Valk: That was ridiculous. It took us a year and a half and it was... Yeah. Some of the best team I've ever worked with and it was a gigantic piece of work. Bob Dunn: I can imagine. Well, I'm going to dive right into these questions and hopefully they won't take us a year and a half to answer.
Joost de Valk: No. Top tips for getting the most out of the Yoast SEO plugin Bob Dunn: Let's start with somebody installing your plugin on their online store. Can you give me the top three tips for them to get the most benefit from it? Joost de Valk: I'll just start... I would make sure that the online store of your choice is doing all its post types, etc., correctly so that if you look at your XML sitemap, that everything that you'd expect to be in there is in there, like your products, your product categories, etc. And everything that you'd expect to not be in there is not in there, like your invoices and user accounts and stuff like that. I use the core APIs to get all of those and if they declare their stuff correctly, then all of this goes right. With WooCommerce, for instance, there is no problem whatsoever, but sometimes there is stuff in there that you really don't want to see. Wouldn't be the first time that people go like, "Hey, why can I find my invoices in Google now?" Then we go like, "Oh, no." Make sure to not... That's not actually going to benefit you. It's going to hurt you if you do it wrong. Second thing I would probably do is look at... Okay, you've got all these URLs on your side, but you probably have... If you've been online for a while, you probably have some errors in there already. I would do the Google Search Console connection that we have in Yoast SEO and check like, okay, what errors has Google found and what can we do about those?
Try to fix all of those errors and really look at them in depth because you'll often encounter places where you're linking to stuff that is 404ing from within your site. You're giving customers a very bad experience. Google tells you about that. Most people don't care to look at it, but in a shop, you really should. You should look at it and fix it. Then, lastly, the best thing you could probably do is look at your titles and descriptions for your products and go through them and say, "Okay, what are my top-selling products? What do they look like in the search results and what can I do about improving the copy on the pages and the title on the description that people see when they find those products in Google?" Bob Dunn: Excellent. Those are three top recommendations I hear a lot, especially around ecommerce and probably around in the sense except for the first one, around most sites. Joost de Valk: Absolutely. The weird thing about ecommerce SEO is that it's basically just normal SEO. Just the stakes are higher. Tell us a little about the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Project Bob Dunn: Right. Yup. Now there is thing called AMP. Can you just tell us briefly the importance of AMP and how it works with your plugin? Joost de Valk: AMP is accelerated mobile pages. It's a project that was started by Google. It's open source. It basically aims to create simpler versions of pages that load a lot faster and by a lot, I really mean a lot a lot. They aim to go for sub-second page loads, which is not something that your average ecommerce system will do normally. It does that by applying
very strict rules to your HTML. It actually is a subset or a new set of HTML called AMP HTML. That allows you to do a lot of things, but it also doesn't allow you to do everything that you are used to in normal HTML CSS JavaScript. Google has been pushing it hard. It's always a bit of a hard discussion because I'm in the Netherlands. I'm probably in one of the countries in the world that has the fastest Internet connections around. I'm in this office on a two-terabyte connection. There's no way that people could have this type of bandwidth and need AMP. At the same time, one of my colleagues recently went to Africa and was explaining how he'd learn to stop loading very quickly when the text had loaded on the page because everything else was just way too slow to wait for. That's where AMP is really important. Large parts of this world don't have these super fast Internet connections and for those parts of the world, AMP's very, very important. Having been in California over the summer for a month, I have to say that large parts of the US seem to suffer from that as well. Bob Dunn: Oh, yeah. Exactly. Joost de Valk: Even in the US, it really has a benefit in terms of people actually being able to see your content faster and to see what you sell faster. That's what AMP is. There's a plugin for WordPress that does AMP that we had a Glue plugin for and now all of the stuff that that Glue plugin was needed for has been merged into the general AMP plugin. I think you're good. I haven't tested it in the last two weeks, but I think you're good using just the AMP plugin and our Yoast SEO plugin now. Bob Dunn: Excellent.
The beauty of simplicity Joost de Valk: It basically just works. It creates an AMP version of all of your pages. It doesn't necessarily look very good immediately so you have to look at that a bit and you have to let go of a lot of stuff that you want on a page because AMP simply doesn't allow you to, but there is beauty in that restraint as well because pages do really become very, very quick. Bob Dunn: That's what I love about... Well, you mentioned this plugin and your plugin is a lot of times it just works. When I've done workshops, especially on your plugin, I mean, there are certain things, but I'll tell people a lot of this... Don't sweat the details because it works. It does its thing. We don't really know what it's doing, but it does it well so I'm good with that. Joost de Valk: And I'm happy to explain to people all the stuff that we do and we do a lot that matters for ecommerce like stuff like rel=canonical and stuff and other things that we do that WordPress core doesn't by default, but what we really try to do is take away all of the pain of all of the technical SEOs where you don't have to know and we just fix it for you. I find more and more that the hardest bit of maintaining a plugin is to keep it simple. To redirect or not Bob Dunn: That's for sure. Now I'm going to go back to... You'd touched on a little bit in the first question. Redirects. When somebody actually drops a product from their online store, what is the rule of thumb with redirecting or not redirecting it? What should somebody do with that redirect?
Joost de Valk: I honestly feel that you should always redirect. I've done SEO for some of the largest ecommerce sites on the planet. I've worked for ebay in the past and I've done a lot of optimization for a lot of their different sites. What we used to do there pretty much always was, when you had proper categorization of products or even listings of things that were not your product, when that product drops, you redirect it back to the category, preferably in such a way that people will get a warning like, "Hey, that product is no longer available, but here are other products in that category." That last bit is actually not trivial so you'll need a developer to do that. It's something I've been wanting to do in our plugin for a while. We're looking at how we could do that, but a redirect back to the category's always better than giving someone a 404, because giving someone a 404 basically tells you like, "Hey, someone had linked to this product. We no longer have it. We don't care about you or the fact that you wanted to buy that and we're not even caring enough to give you something better or something newer." It gives a very bad customer experience. I would never give a 404. I would always redirect it to somewhere useful and preferably with a note telling them, "Hey, this is no longer available, but we have this." Bob Dunn: No, that's good. I like that, the category. I never really thought of that. That's a good tip. Very cool. The most common mistake people make when using the Yoast SEO plugin What is a common, or I should say, most common mistake you find that online store owners do when using your plugin and what is a solution? Joost de Valk: The most common issue that we run into on ecommerce sites is something that we don't necessarily improve immediately. In the last few years, you've seen the increase of faceted search type options on sites
where you have all sorts of filtering systems. The annoying thing is that every time you create a new combination of filters, you basically create a new URL. You wouldn't be the first site that has like a thousand products and has over a million filtering URLs that Google is trying to index. Even though Google can index an awful lot, giving them so much to index is usually a bad idea. What you at that point should do is decide, okay, so which filters do we think are very important and make those into categories or whatever they are in your type of ecommerce system so that they have nice URLs and block a lot of the other filtering URLs in your [inaudible 00:13:59]. Even blocking them with no index means that Google still has to crawl them and that is just... On smaller ecommerce sites that can be death because Google will be busy crawling those filtering URLs for months and will never see your new products. Bob Dunn: Okay. Yes, that would be a common mistake. Joost de Valk: There's a lot of sites with filtering problems that have that and to be honest, I have not yet come up with the right solution to it that is like a one size fits all. Bob Dunn: Yeah, that's a tough one. Too many variables there. Joost de Valk: Yeah, exactly. We probably will at some point figure out how to ask you a set of questions and based on that set, set a proper setting for your site, but that stuff is really, really hard. Bob Dunn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It boggles my mind. I can tell you that much.
Joost de Valk: Yeah, that is the kind of stuff that I wish we can take away from store owners, because I don't think they need to know or should have to think about all that. They probably need to know that's a problem, but they shouldn't have to think about the solution at all and we should just give it to them, but as I said, making stuff like that so simple is very hard. Bob Dunn: It always sounds so simple and yup, there's just too much behind there. Joost de Valk: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Mode Effect, today s sponsor has served numerous clients with their expertise in WordPress and WooCommerce. Their WordPress development services are built to create solutions for you business through effective conversions and fast delivery. With a focus on WooCommerce, the team at Mode Effect are ready to deliver you an online store that is ready for you to start selling your products and services. They understand that your online store s priority is to drive conversions and work without you having to worry about issues that may come up. With their professional skills, you don t have to worry about what s under the hood, as they strive to be your strategic partner for your ecommmerce site. Whether you are looking for a redesign or a complex integration, their experience will leave you one happy customer. The people behind Mode Effect encourage customers who are looking to embark on challenges with WooCommerce and enterprise companies who are looking for a trusted web developer partner. To learn more about what they can bring to the table, visit them at modeeffect.com. Bob Dunn: Now on the last question, you have a WooCommerce extension. WooCommerce is obviously one of the most popular ones.
Joost de Valk: Yeah. What about the WooCommerce extension? Bob Dunn: What is the benefit... I've set up the WooCommerce extension. I used it. It's very simple. It's not like rocket science. Joost de Valk: No. There are a couple of features to it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I want to recommend people buy it at this point as we're going to probably be rolling it into our Premium plugin. Bob Dunn: Interesting. Joost de Valk: Because the problem we see is that people buy that and don't buy Premium and I actually think you need Premium more for WooCommerce store than you need the WooCommerce SEO one because you need the redirects. We are in the process of migrating our own site to WooCommerce. That's news, by the way. I don't think we've said that publicly yet. Bob Dunn: You have now. Joost de Valk: One of the reasons that we are migrating to WooCommerce is that we want to dog food what everyone else is using. We are going to use WooCommerce for everything on Yoast.com and with that we will probably improve our WooCommerce integration quite a bit, but it also means that I actually want to tie it into Premium because of... Some of the things I just mentioned like deleting a product and then redirecting it to the category where the note is. The only way we can do that right now is to tie it into our Premium plugin because our redirects are in our Premium plugin.
I don't want to make it all too complex. Since the WooCommerce SEO plugin has become smaller and smaller over the years because most of the stuff that we had over there in the past has been slowly rolled into WooCommerce, I don't think we will have a need for it much longer. Bob Dunn: Okay. That's good to know and that's something to look forward to too because I know I use the Premium version. Joost de Valk: Yeah, I think it... That'll happen fairly quickly because it's actually... The plugin itself, if you look at the code, it's ridiculously small now, the WooCommerce SEO one and the couple of things it does are to make sure that Yoast SEO doesn't try to fight with WooCommerce on which box is where on your added product screens, etc. It should just do a lot nicer and integrate nicer, but we will be better at doing that once we have our hands on WooCommerce a lot more than we used to. Which we are having now because we're switching. I'm in WooCommerce now almost every day instead of every once a month. I don't necessarily know whether we're going to regret that maybe at some point because we do run a fairly large shop, but at the same time, it's how we've always worked. It's how when all the stuff that... All our best products are the stuff that we use ourselves on a daily basis because that is when you really dog food what you're doing and well, I don't really think that we could do it any other way. Bob Dunn: Well, everybody heard it straight from the horse's mouth, so to say. Breaking news. Joost de Valk: It was a tough decision, to be honest, because it's a lot of work. At the same time, it's a lot less work than I was expecting it to be because there are so many good extensions for WooCommerce already.
Joost s biggest frustration when shopping online Bob Dunn: Yeah, that's for sure. Very cool. Well, I am going to step away now. I think we've gone over some good stuff here so far, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions I ask a lot of my guests and I want you to put your own shopping hat on when you're shopping online. When you're out there, you're on a store, what is the most frustrating thing personally that you find when shopping online? Joost de Valk: When I'm trying to buy something and they won't ship to the Netherlands. That happens more often than you want to know. Bob Dunn: Oh, no. Is there a particular reason for that? Joost de Valk: No. It's always hard. This will surprise a lot of people, but in the Netherlands we don't have Amazon. We have a store that's very much like it and very big, but Amazon.de and.co.uk do deliver in the Netherlands, but sometimes some of their products will not be deliverable in the Netherlands. That's very annoying. Bob Dunn: Yeah, that would be. Joost de Valk: Actually if you consider it, I live 10 minutes away from the German border. Bob Dunn: That's even worse.
Joost de Valk: So yeah, that is one of my biggest frustrations. Another one is payment methods. Payment methods in Europe are very different. People don't use credit cards quite as much so when they don't offer proper payment methods that I can actually use, it's sometimes quite annoying. Bob Dunn: Yeah, those are two big barriers. That's for sure. Joost de Valk: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Is there anything Joost would never buy online? Bob Dunn: Is there anything that's available online for you to buy that can be shipped there that you would never buy online? That you still have to buy in person? Joost de Valk: Other than a house, I would probably say no. Bob Dunn: Okay. Joost de Valk: I have bought quite ridiculous things online and I buy a lot online. The Netherlands is a very, very mature ecommerce market so people spend thousands and thousands of euros online. Yeah, no, there's not much I wouldn't buy online. Bob Dunn: Okay, I think somebody else once said the same thing, the house, that would be the one thing. Joost de Valk: Yeah, I'd want to see that before... The thing is with the house is that you probably do plan to move in so you might as well go there once.
Bob Dunn: Yep. They're always going to take pictures and show you only the best angles and the best spots [crosstalk 00:21:53]. Joost de Valk: Oh, yeah, no. They're just like other salespeople. Bob Dunn: Well, now we know that you will buy everything online. Now we just need to get everything shipped to you online except the houses. Joost de Valk: Yes, yeah. If Amazon could just fix that because they heard it on this show, that would be awesome. Bob Dunn: Yeah, really. I'm going to tweet to Amazon, say, "Okay, now listen because there is a special request here from Joost and you got to get on it. Come on." Well, I think the things we covered, some really good basic stuff. I know we could talk forever about SEO, but those are some good things. I'm sure we'll have you back some time because there might be another angle here. Joost de Valk: Always. Bob Dunn: And who knows by that time what your plugin will be doing? You know, have all the WooCommerce stuff integrated. Joost de Valk: We tend to build quite a few new things every few months so yeah, we'll be good. Where to find Joost (and Yoast) online Bob Dunn: Very cool. I'm sure a lot of people out there now can go back to their sites, revisit this plugin, make sure they're getting the most out of it. I
just want to thank you for taking the time to join us. Besides Yoast.com, where can people find you? Joost de Valk: I'm @jdevalk on Twitter. Similar on Facebook and well, lots of other places, but yoast.com is probably the best resource for you to check regularly. Bob Dunn: Yes and I d encourage people to connect with you and check Yoast.com so again thanks for being on the show. Joost de Valk: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Bob Dunn: You bet. I want to thank everyone for tuning in and especially I want to thank our sponsor, because without them there would be no WP ecommerce Show. Don t forget to check out ModeEffect.com and learn how you can get that WooCommerce site you have always wanted with their team of experts. And watch for our next episode of the WP ecommerce Show. Thanks to our Sponsor: Mode Effect
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