“Let’s Fix Your Website” Recap & Podcast – May 23, 2019

This month we held the event a new coworking community called Lokaal. Lokaal donated the space for our meetup which featured pizza, drinks, chips and cookies for the first time ever. A nominal $5 fee covered the food, and the community and fellowship was excellent indeed!

Robin Macrae recorded our May 23 2019, “Let’s Fix Your Website” meetup in downtown Toronto. Instead of laborious notes, why don’t you enjoy this recording made on his iPad. It is surprisingly good, and the recording should give you a flavour of the free-wheeling “Let’s Fix Your Website” meetup. The list below features an index of timecodes of several interesting conversations.

• 7:47 Everybody has something on their site that can be
  improved.
• 8:14 The hope is to develop the equivalent of a buddy system,
  a self-help group, à la Happiness Bar.
• 8:52 Use the Meetup post for requesting assistance.
• 9:11 First 2 of the requesters were no-shows.
• 9:24 Rima: SEO, blog content not showing up in SERs.
• 10:11 AS: No SSL.
• 10:40 Is it indexed? Use site: syntax (Site: dressingthenation.com; could also search just on that domain). Yes, it’s indexed.
• 11:57 The issue is the site’s content ranking.
• 14:06 Solutions?
• 14:10 Change the domain name. Unlikely.
• 15:17 (The first link in the SER is “Try Google Search Console” [GSC].)
• 15:43 Use GSC to find what keywords on the site are indexed and their popularity.
• 16:16 She had used GSC after verifying her site.
• 17:35 The 2 key SEO factors are original content and keywords and in-bound links (confer authority).
• 19:23 (In-bound links at also know as back links.)
• 23:36 In forums, comments and other places, you can use your own site’s links and Google will consider them in-bound links.
• 20:52 Intent is Google’s fundamental search criterion but extremely difficult to discern for a lot of reasons.
• 22:10 (No one has asked if she has uses Yoast et al.)
• 22:28 AS’s post on free access to Lynda.com through the TPL gets 200 views a month and is an example of a good traffic draw.
• 25:15 Why do you want people to visit the site? Help people with dressing fashionably. Accordingly, the name is less important than the content. Think of that name as a brand whose value is to remember and return once you’ve visited and found value. (Al’s comment.)
• 27:29 Social media is another way to generate in-bound links.
• 28:40 AS has a link to a non-technical intro to SEO that he’ll provide.
• 29:03 Fran’s a no-show. [She arrived later.]
• 30:03 [Name?]
• 29:23 BlueHost has been dunning her About SEO. AS: can they create quality in-bound links?
• 30:52 Matti used to do SEO work as a consultant.
• 32:16 For traffic analytics, the key is to have clear objectives against which you can measure your changes and evaluate what’s working.
• 33:15 Moz and Semrush are two good services with free tiers.
• 34:01 Fernne loves Semrush and takes advantage of the 10 free keyword searches per day.
• 35:17 [Search operators is the term for the prefixes and other syntax for searching.]
• 36:58 Alex prefers to monitor the results for posts he writes and see what results he obtains instead of using these services in part because
  of the work involved.
• 39:17 SE.com is recommended by Matti. [URL is wrong.]
• 39:37 John, WooCommerce issue.
• 40:52 This is a car club which sells memberships and
  merchandise (one product in the first and many for the other).
• 41:39 Alfaclub.ca. Gorgeous site.
• 43:47 Uses the WooCommerce subscription plugin.
• 54:49 Matti found the Customizer setting.
• 58:32 Dan’s solution is to add a function to the functions.php that filters this out. He added a link to a page with a code snippet to a Meetup comment so it could be copied into the file. (Google search: how to hide WOOcommerce category from Shop page.)
• 63:11 Alex recommends not using the WooCommerce subscription addon and thinks Etsy or Shopify are better for this site. The membership one isn’t suitable as it’s geared to controlling access to content.
• 65:17 Consider changing to members have access to content that non-members don’t.
• 66:50 Chris Lema has a good writer-up on membership plugins although 2015 vintage.
• 67:06 Robin recommended Restrict Content Pro.
• 73:02 Matti: get the filtering by stock numbers working. Retromatti.com.
• 73:51 Filter by size change to stock number.
• 80:46 Ask Mitch Calalhan (Robin will email his number and email.)
• 81:11 Alex: Could also consider WP Facets.
• 81:49 GDPR compliance question. She’s not collecting any data so no problem. Oops, she does collect emails for a newsletter. Add a field to ask a subscriber where they’re coming so that GDPR’s application can be determined.