In this episode, we cover:

Today, we speak to Chris Gregory, the founder of DAGMAR Marketing, which is a local SEO company in Jacksonville, Florida. His agency’s work in both local SEO and SEM was recently recognized with awards in Search Engine Land’s international search marketing competition.

In this episode, he will speak on website development for SEO.

Stay tuned for the next podcast episode, where our guest, Tim brown, discusses link magnets.

Show Notes Explanation

Hey guys, this is Senthil. Welcome to another episode of SEO On-Air. Today, we have with us Mr Chris Gregory, he is the founder of DAGMAR Marketing, which is a local SEO company in Jacksonville, Florida. Chris, welcome to the show.

DAGMAR stands for “Define Advertising Goals Measure Advertising Results.” The reason why Chris chose the name is because he wanted to focus on marketing tactics that can be measured.

Chris is also a frequent contributor in Search Engine Land and covered a lot of articles on technical SEO. So today’s topic is also about technical SEO and the pitfalls to avoid. Let’s begin our podcast.

Time Stamp: 02:12-04:46

Q. What would be your recommendations to webmasters who want to improve their page speed score?

• It is something that needs to be built into the overall workflow of monthly maintenance
• You need to have some kind of tools to analyze it every month
• Prioritize mobile page-speed score
• Speed up your site by optimizing various page elements
• It’s not that you have to be the fastest, but if you are in the 20s or below, there’s a devaluation of websites
• Look at the score but also analyze with your eyes whether your site is actually slow.
• It is good for WordPress sites to have page speed score of at least 60-70

Time Stamp: 05:21-10:30

Q. In your experience, what are some of the essential steps for websites for a better migration to a new domain?

• Research and preparation is the key
• Don’t rush into submitting the new sitemap after a site migration.
• Do a content review; you can crawl the site using tools like Screaming Frog
• Find out the orphan content and those content that are not visible in the sitemap
• Also, do quantitative analysis and shortlist the content that needs to be worked on
• Look into your 301 redirect list and see that the redirected content are relevant to each other. Redirect mapping is an important element when it comes to website migration
• Leave the old sitemap up for a couple of weeks to let Google know that the URLs have changed
• Ensure that the internal links are going to new URLs and not to the old one
• Run a post-launch checklist to avoid any errors.

Time Stamp: 10:50-15:47

Q. What are some of the common mistakes that can take place during such new design/development?

• There are a lot of things that can happen unfortunately
• As a developer or designer, you need to understand the marketing side of a website
• If you redesign a website, you’ll have to ensure that the website content is not lost, the URLs are not changed, or you are not hurting the organic traffic of the website or decreasing the page speed.
• Developing the page speed is not taken into consideration
• So, you need to have a checklist to ensure nothing is missed or no mistakes take place during the design or development process

Time Stamp: 16:22-18:31

Q. How do you think schema markup is going to be shaped up in the future?

• It’s hard to quantify in terms of loosing out of traffic
• Google announced that in 2021, the quality of your site would be a bigger ranking factor
• Backlinks are obviously important, but there are other things like content quality are on the same pedestal
• The more you can markup your site, the better the quality score you can receive from Google
• By adding different schemas, such as location schema or FAQ schema, you are helping Google to understand your site well
• Prioritize on schema depending on its chances of appearing in the rich snippets

Time Stamp: 19:01-21:15

Q. Which type of websites do you think should enable AMP and what is its future?

• Since Google is focusing on user-experience and AMP is not improving user-experience but just making your page speed load faster, it could be a feature that Google might drop in the future
• But that claim cannot be proven right now. However, AMP doesn’t work well for all websites
• If you are a publisher, you should utilize AMP, but small and mid-sized businesses can skip it
• Service pages shouldn’t use AMP because it limits the user experience and doesn’t give them opportunities to convert