Are SEO Plugins even Helpful? Ep. 583

howdy welcome back to another episode of the unknown secrets of internet marketing the best seo podcast my name is matt bertram i'm your host for today uh got a great topic uh today is are seo plugins even helpful so i had a debate with a uh probably a 15 year seo uh the other day and we were talking about it so that's what we're going to get into uh before we get into the meat let me talk a little bit about the potatoes so uh i've been having a lot of calls uh through the office hours i appreciate everybody reaching out um i have done some or started to do some agency coaching uh and that is is going well um and i got a lot of requests actually from small business owners that may not um maybe they want to do diy i guess you want to do diy um seo you found this podcast um you want to rank your site you want to get better you're hearing some of these things and then they're hard to kind of like how how do i execute that i would love to see some visuals i would love to see some walkthroughs uh maybe whiteboard session i have specific questions that's when we develop the profit plan uh or it's private consulting on the ewr site and uh we get into it with you help uh understand where you're at what you're trying to do where you're going i just did a profit plan today actually i did two um and uh both are interested in a small business coaching program so i think that might be something that we're going to roll out um also thank you for uh the review i don't have it in front of me but i will read it next time so thank you for leaving a review we are running a review campaign uh on a number of different platforms so uh i would love for you to support the podcast by buying a profit plan um by

leaving a review uh letting me know uh that there's value in in this so um awesome so we'll jump into it uh and i'll kind of get into my story uh that that spurred this are seo plugins even helpful so i was having this debate not a debate but i had hired a guy that used to work for us while ago to come back on you know uh a lot of people have a lot of different seo experience um you know there are guidelines but everybody does it a little bit different um you know there's a lot of i guess uh viewpoints on on what works what doesn't because it's you know no one knows exactly the formula although you can look at some of the ip but you usually kind of try something you know have kind of a variable that's static and then compare it against and see what works right and and not a lot of people are doing this anymore we've been doing a lot of it internally and i really need to post some of this stuff and get that out there to you um hopefully these these groups maybe private facebook group will force me to to really start sharing that information uh because we got it pretty dialed in i mean there's been a lot of changes over the last 36 months but we have it pretty dialed in on how to rank in the maps how to rank you organically you need to be in the top three positions if you're going to rank period okay if you're not in the top three positions it's like not even worth it to do seo so you've got to be better than everybody else how do you do that there is a methodology that works and guess what it's not a secret everything we're doing goes back to the beginning and the fundamentals now certainly uh weightings change there's some specific things but and that and and guess what that's actually where the foundations of the seo plugins come

from there's some best practices maybe industry best practices that people have created and um they put them in a in their own little algorithm that uh you know spiders your site or uh audits your site and tells you what they think you should do based upon maybe like a target keyword for example so i was talking to this 15 year seo guy and um there's a number of sites that are pretty complex that uh i was doing the seo myself on okay and uh you know when you're getting into language tags and um you're like uh multi multi uh country stuff like it gets kind of complex so uh i had i guess reached out to this consultant hey come on uh i have some work for you i'm getting a little overloaded let's let's try that again so we started that conversation um got um you know him working on the site uh and then we were reviewing it hey how's it going what are you doing you know we had worked together before what are the steps where you at i'd give him our steps like here's here's really what i want you to do we found this to work well and then you know he came back well i got my own strategy and we started talking about it he goes hey matt none of the the the keywords were we're in we use rank math you can talk about yoast i'll go through those in a bit um but he's like none of none of the keywords were in there and i said yeah i don't i don't really use um the seo plugins for seo and he's like what are you talking about you know he his goal or what he does is he optimizes it to as best he can to 100 you can run these little audits internally okay well let's talk about that right i'm almost to the point of like getting rid of the plugins now there are some great features okay um yoast rank math

um what do they do right you can time search console so you can see the data when you log in great right um it auto generate site maps great you can do schema fantastic you can do bright crumbs fantastic you can add keywords in there and you can do keyword tracking in there okay very cool well what is the cost of all this stuff right and and there's more stuff okay like um it'll tell it'll help you guide like what pages maybe you should link to based on this keyword things maybe you should include how long the uh seo description should be like it gives you like a framework that you should follow okay um and i don't know where these rules came from i don't know how they made them up like you know i can tell you uh having your seo description a certain length i'm not sure exactly where that came from um i can tell you that i've found that longer seo descriptions work quite a bit better um because you can be more descriptive the search engine understands what you're doing i think okay things are changing uh with with semantic search um so again right this debate um i i know what i'm trying to optimize for when i look at the website if you're not they're kind of like trading wheels they help you but they wait on the site there's a cost to all this stuff uh we did move away from yoast i think yoast yoast premium great whatever uh gold standard everything like that it was just really heavy and and the more things you can remove even the facebook pixel if you're not doing facebook retargeting slows down your site on the calls like you want your site lightning fast and if you're using a framework on the back end you're slowing it down so i can tell you there's a lot of things you can do to speed up your site and if you're not using these plugins to the maximum ability consider

not using them consider having maybe five plugins or 10 plugins max okay you myself again okay there we go uh i don't know uh internet kind of waffy right now but i don't know um i don't i don't know where i left my train of thought um look these plugins i'm not sure but we had this debate about putting the keyword in there and and there was a even a yoast plugin a long time ago they were talking about uh what was it uh meta keywords right uh bing thinks they're spam and bing's not very forgiving okay uh google's a little more forgiving they do algorithmic penalties then they do the you know you get outside the standard deviation they do the manual review um you know you can kind of walk it back if you over optimize right and you got to be careful over optimizing for a word but okay so um you know putting that keyword in there i don't know if it pushes it through to uh the the meta keyword spot it used to give uh the search engines a lot of good direction on what that page is about but people have like over optimized and spammed it and so now google says hey i don't even look at that and that's like a yoast article so what we're saying is putting and and look google is following new no followings now too right so maybe but putting uh a keyword in the keyword target for the page to be able to run the little uh their own algorithm to tell you what you should do on the site he's telling me by putting that keyword in there it it makes the page rank better i think it gives you direction on what you need to do but i don't think it makes it rank better and i could be totally wrong and and if you have some data out there that says i am completely wrong please share it with me because i do not know everything uh

i just don't use it um i know what i'm trying to optimize for i know what's going on with the page i i have a different process to look at the page using off page tools and then i and i optimize accordingly so i'm using these plugins less and less and less um yeah maybe this is a product review um what else can i tell you so i have this article here that i would love to continue to follow the format of articles and it's let me pull it over it's called uh it's by wordpress it's in the tutorial section and it's do you need to use seo plugins for your wordpress website so i thought that was kind of appropriate right um and i love the lead in here it says search engine optimization seo is the cornerstone of successful websites great websites can leverage search engines like google to get hundreds or thousands of users to visit your site all you need are the right tools fortunately wordpress.com comes with many built-in features that help you optimize your site such as automatic sitemaps on page seo tools uh these will be sufficient for some users at the same time using an seo plugin can also help you identify which aspects of your website you need to improve and take steps on in this article we'll talk about the basics of seo what the tools of wordpress.com offer and how to optimize your content la la la la la okay so uh i'm gonna kind of just go with the headers right um what are the basics of seo i think everybody here probably know the basics of seo uh some of the things they highlight you know user experience everything's on mobile ssl certificates write great titles meta description tags uh links internal links external links gotta do a lot of uh you know podcasts on on linking linking and link equity um huge opportunity there uh video videos or supporting meta videos images other types of media to engage widgets all that

sort of thing right really important then they go into keyword research which you know we've talked about extensively how wordpress helps you tackle with the four key features so talks about the automatic sitemaps again like hey if if wordpress is doing it for you and again um wordpress.org is this for or or wordpress.org or wordpress.com um is different than hosting somewhere else so you can use the wordpress instance or you could use the wordpress site okay so there's a delineation there um but uh automatic sitemaps sitemaps super important if you don't know what a sitemap is you and and this is a debate out there too we could do a podcast about this about crawl right or crawl budget people talk about you don't really know how much crawl budget you have from the different search engines they crawl your websites when they want to and you can kind of send signals to them and say hey k could you update this and when you're on the back end updating your different pages and blogs you can kind of say hey this is what i would rather you look at first but those spiders are going to do whatever they want um you know and this is where search console comes in it's really really important um but when you're updating those sitemaps um you know when you update new pages it's really really important so search engine to find them also you could have three uh internal links maybe one two external links always good for other ways for people or the spiders i guess to come into your website and find that particular page and then again your content needs to be organized in a way that they understand it um even on your sitemap page um if there's a lot of like stuff that is not super relevant might want to include limiting that because you're gonna spiders are going to go everywhere and they're not going to go where you want them to go so you can try to direct them

but the again they're going to do what they want ssl certificates hey uh it's kind of almost required there's a lot of big sites out there that don't have it um you know some of the old sites are a mess some of them are secured some are not secured but what you don't want is that big old warning to pop up and say hey this is an unsecured site do you want to proceed because you're going to lose a lot of traffic i think it's just really standard to have an ssl certificate across the board so not going to go into that too much okay on page tools on page tools there's tons of awesome on page tools there's tons of third party on page tools so think about it you have to use resources for uh these tools to run these reports to have access to this data it's going to slow down your performance um so if you can get the insights that you want um off page i would encourage you to do that and not have that code on the site weighing it down also once you really start understanding what you're looking for uh maybe you use some of these things as a checklist more but it's like riding a bike like you don't need training wheels all the time in my opinion uh if if you're doing it a lot again if you're a small business owner and and that's not your core business but if you're a digital marketer at some point like you should know what you're looking for um and there's a little bit of art to this uh because we don't know like we know that there's one keyword combination for every uh well there's one algorithm that's a perfect keyword combination for one word to rank perfect score right we're trying to get as close to that perfect score as possible or we're trying to kind of shotgun effect try to rank for as many words as possible per page uh without deviating too

much or doing anything where we're over optimizing for it but you know the more a bang for a buck we can get out of one page so we don't have to create another page for that intent or for that keyword is really helpful and we want to stay away from kind of spammy strategies right um but golly um there is a perfect formula for every single keyword in a different space so um you know it's really hard to say oh this seo is perfect right that for what exact combination we don't even know that and then if you change a few words add a few words um you could dramatically change your rankings and your results um also how people are interacting with your site there's outside influences if you're doing pr more people are searching for your site or you know something's hot in in trends like there's a lot of things that go into this um but again yeah there's there's some fundamentals that you want to look for all right google analytics yeah soapbox i hate ga4 i don't know if any of you out there uh really like ga4 i'm not seeing a lot of good use from it i'm looking for other options uh the goal old google analytics i thought it was pretty good um i just feel like they're not showing you a lot of data they're taking away attribution um i just don't see what's going on with the site there's a lot of good other good options out there i think some of these other platforms i think like hubspot uh for example you can start uh getting a lot better idea what people are going on and and if you have their information where they're going uh there's good stuff like that there's like seo clarity and um you know what is it uh lucky orange and um a hot jar and a crazy egg that can show you uh where what the sessions are and what people are are doing on the site and

and there's a lot of bolt-on analytics you can get you and analytics is going to be customized for you on what you need sometimes it's information overload sometimes the information is not helpful uh when we work with clients we figure out what they're looking for what their kpis are and we try to really streamline and clean it up there's certain things that we look at in-house and then there's things that the clients need to see but i can tell you almost almost none of our clients get the exact same report we've we've tried uh many times to standardize it and it just seems like everybody's coming from a different angle and so we try to tailor that to you um okay let's see do you need to use seo plugins with wordpress.com um what do they say what do they say huh doesn't really give me a definitive answer um hopefully from this podcast you've kind of made up some of your own conclusions it depends where you're at in um your your your understanding of this um i think that some of these paid plugins could get really expensive per site uh if you're managing a lot of sites um you know it's a trade-off right you're trading off performance for some direction um some some of these things just have too much stuff involved uh i like to keep the code kind of clean um so yeah my opinion is you don't need them i don't think that you need them uh i think they're helpful um but i think once you really understand what you're looking for you can look at the page and go what am i trying to do here okay what do i need to do and also many times i'll come back to a page based on a different campaign or a different strategy uh or how the page is performing and say hmm i need to make some changes to this to to optimize this better for xyz right and there's different reasons that people are searching

for this or that etc uh and that's all i got for you today um i'm gonna try to uh keep these on point and to let you know what i think you need to know nothing more nothing less kind of like seo content you don't need to build skyscrapers okay you just need to answer the question better than anyone else anyways um yeah so if you're interested in a small business training program um we're going to roll that into a course down the road if you don't want to pay for that or you don't need something uh customized to do if you would like to connect with us uh with me um hey reach out to us if you want to support the podcast um hey buy a session let's hang out and talk and let's get to know tell me what's going on with you i'd love to connect um you know uh this is something i try to get done uh every week or every other week i take time out of my day to try to share this hopefully you get value out of it it really started as internal training for our team and then we decided to share it so that's you know you're getting a piece of what's happening um uh and and i think that in-person training and the whiteboard sessions and everything would put it all together for you so we are going to be rolling that out we are doing some amazing training i got kids that are trying to get in my door right now so until the next time my name's matt bertram bye bye for now