Latest / The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection / Episode 9: Part 2 - Talking Website Optimization for Everyone with Tech Director Justin Ferrell

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Episode 9: Part 2 - Talking Website Optimization for Everyone with Tech Director Justin Ferrell · The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Hey there, welcome to the Same Side, a digital marketing podcast rooted in human connection.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Jonathan Dance, Director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Last episode in this two-part series on web optimizations that just about anyone can do, Justin, our technical director here at Digital Relativity, and I focused primarily on image optimization.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Compress those images, people?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, while this might not be the most exciting work, the topics we're discussing in this series are key to building a solid foundation for search engine optimization and, just as importantly, the user experience.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: In this second part, we dig into getting rid of needless elements like outdated plugins, stale content, and dead pages.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: We look at updating broken links or outdated redirects and some tools that can help.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, we close with a discussion about your metadata, page descriptions and titles.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: If you're into sports metaphors, think of this as the offensive line doing the unsung work while the guys who move the ball get all the glory.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a gardener, think of this as the weeding and fertilizing needed in order to get the beautiful bloom or the delicious fruit.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: And if you own a home or car, think of this as the routine maintenance that keeps everything functioning as it should and ensuring your investment lasts.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, enough with the metaphors.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get going with part two of talking website optimization for everyone with tech director Justin Farrell.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: What else?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: What other hijinks do you encounter that could save people time, especially on the uh user side?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I would say unused anything really on the internet.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like we made the joke about the images being way too big, but just as often it's like, oh, we had to load this uh heat mapping tool.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good example.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: We had to load this heat mapping tool at one time to be able to like perform these kinds of analytics.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we since got a new one, but we never turned off the old one.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it's the exact same deal as the image.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what would all 15 million of those people do with their second if we gave it back to them when that heat mapping tool that we weren't even using was loading?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, plugins in WordPress.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned at the top that uh we're a WordPress shop, and it's just kind of the nature of these things, like, oh, Jacqueline is working on this thing and she needs a plugin for it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then several years later, it's it's the ends of the roast.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is this plugin installed?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this plugin's always been installed.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Jacqueline's come and gone, Jaclyn's replacement has come and gone, and the plugin isn't actually being used.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I would take a harsher eye to those things than you probably think you need to.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Train yourself to get a little uh a little dopamine hit every time you uninstall a plugin because it it's only for the good.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's a net positive every time you can get rid of one.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: The one thing I want to talk about real quick, when we talk about performance, there are two things I think of, and you you probably have more, but I think of the like Core Web Vitals as a measuring device of your performance, but then there's also the user experience, right?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh in a previous episode, I was talking about least contentful paint, like you're trying, I'm trying to chase this number.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: And ultimately, like there's a diminishing returns of trying to like hit that 100 uh rating from Core Web Vitals.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can use, I feel like if you use an incognito window, you can look at that site and see how it loads from just like a user experience level.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And if it's loading fine, then it's it's fine.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: You don't like Google isn't gonna like shut your site down or put you on page 1900 of the search results if you're if you're off by one, I don't even know what the second nanosecond, uh, whatever.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I I do think there is some truth to that because so much of it is based on real world experience.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you when you uh look at those core web vitals numbers, like if you use uh page speed insights specifically, it gives you what it calls a laboratory score in a data center somewhere.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: It runs the test on a server connected to the internet on a cable as big as my forearm.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It gives you that score, but it also gives you a rolling 30-day score for real Chrome users out in the world.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you are one of those people who is just like totally metric pilled and is like, I want to get this score through, I gotta get these numbers up.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It it can delay the gratification because you make the change, then it's like, well, we need to come back in 45 days and we need to run this report again and see what actually happened to people using Chrome out in the world.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, it's a Google product, so they can only tell you what happens to people using Chrome.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: But no, you're you're exactly right.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: If I uh like that, the old thing about bringing your dog in when it gets cold.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you're cold, they're cold.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: If if the site's slow for you, the site's slow for other people too.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, you could chase that to the end of the earth.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many things you can do to optimize performance for end users that are just impossible to measure on a person level.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like we do a lot with uh content delivery networks and digital relativity, and this is this is the technology that for the most part, when used, is invisible to the developer and to the user.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: But like every website we manage within reason is behind Cloudflare, and as a result, like the actual images that you see are served to you from a data center that is physically close to you, and like that's really cool.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: It does make the website faster, but you're racing the speed of light.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like you're you're literally talking about how quickly you can get these bits to Europe.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Does it make it faster 100%?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is it quantifiably faster?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but I you just made the point about nanoseconds.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many, I would say, like bigger picture optimizations that once the site feels good, you should probably focus on rather than like gotta get this site green.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, granted, I'll admit this because it happened on the digital relativity site recently.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The new DR site went live and we got all green on four web vitals.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I gave myself a little fist pump at my desk and but I should not have.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was putting too much weight on metrics when I did that.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's good to see.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody loves an attaboy, but uh if it feels good for your users, I would argue that's oh I was gonna bring something up, and this might be a whole other episode, but I was thinking when you talk about unused plugins, things that you're not using, I was thinking about some of the uh uh whatever WYSIWYG uh website themes like Avada or Elementor and how how much of those you don't use but has to load for your site to render.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're looking to build a new website, we don't recommend going that route for that exact reason because it inhibits your website performance.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: It can be tweaked, it can be cleaned up, but if you just built it cleanly to begin with, that would probably be a lot better.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Is that fair to say?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: This uh this feels like for my uh Marvel fans out there.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like when the page builders come up, those are like my winter soldier wake words.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: For as much as I hate poorly optimized images, those page builders, I see them everywhere.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: They are very popular, um, unfortunately, kind of like accessibility widgets, visual tools like that, um, kind of necessarily obfuscate the kind of optimizations that are are necessary, in my opinion, to really make a website sing.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: But if you as the developer are like, you do not see code over the course of you building a website, then there's a good chance the code that's getting written probably sucks.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's a good chance that what is getting delivered to the end users is uh what I affectionately call hot garbo among uh among the dev team.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's something that as time goes on, DR compared to some other organizations, and some of this may just be the fact that I've been doing this so long, and most teams I think are kind of inherently younger than ours.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: In in that way, but we I'm I I don't want to overstate this, so I want to make sure that I say it correctly.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: There is not a single bit that is sent to the user that we did not send to the user when a page loads.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So much of my everyday is like instilling this in the folks on our dev team who have not been doing this as long as I have.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: We take very seriously that like when we build a page that is going to be viewed by a public does make up a number, a million people.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be the reason that a million bits of just useless data were moved through the internet.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: It makes page performance worse.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It makes obviously campaign and marketing performance worse when pages perform more poorly.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's just bad craftsmanship, frankly.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's that joke.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you finish putting together a piece of IKEA furniture and you have pieces left over at the end, it's because you were very efficient.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: You pointed this out about Elementor.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, well, imagine if you shipped every possible piece the model could have to every single person who bought the model.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is the third thing today I'm going to say makes the hair on the back of the restaurant.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: I will say for a shop like ours, it makes sense to not go that route, right?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, because we can provide a much leaner but also very effective website.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: As someone who is a uh an avocational dev, I I refer to myself, like or you know, Wix, Squarespace, um, WordPress using those page builders, they're fine.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: They're fine because most of the people who are doing those kinds of sites aren't building super complex sites with a lot of functionality that's going to load the site down.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: And man, if my blog loads 30 seconds, that's a long time.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: All right, two seconds or three seconds later than it would if DR built it.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody cares because it's my blog site.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: We're not here to poop on those tools in the right context.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, for a professional website developing company, using those feels more like a crutch than it is a value to the person that you're providing the website for.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is it is hard to see agencies selling sites built that way for what I would consider far too much money.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had a friend in high school who uh we we we were all musicians.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: We we all fancied ourselves musicians in high school.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy worked at a grocery store, and he saved all of his paychecks for literally, I think it was three months, and he bought a$1,500 microphone to just to just record music in his bedroom.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And like it didn't make him sing better, like it didn't, it didn't make the music any better, but he was like, I need this.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: This the the record needs this.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he he spent more on uh that microphone than you know a lot of people do on rent and the uh the spectrum that you just described, where like he he very easily could have gotten a$50 microphone and it would have met his needs.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there there are situations like everyone does not need an artisanal hand-coded website to meet their needs, but that does not mean that market does not exist.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: There there is someone who needed that$1,500 microphone.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't him.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: He could have he could have used that money elsewhere.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really good point.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like doing what you need to get what you need done, done.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, which I was gonna say, my grandfather said, but he he never said that.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um so far we've done image compression and sizing, we've done uh you know all this unused stuff that we were just talking about.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I know I know this is running long, especially compared to other podcasts.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: So let's kind of blow through the the next three because I feel like these don't require a ton of explanation necessarily, but they are also super important and and they're easy to take care of.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one I would say is stale content, dead content.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: We see this a lot with people who do a lot of paid media, where you throw up a page for a campaign and the campaign ends.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh nope nobody likes to be the one cleaning up after the party.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: No one uh no one wants to be the one washing the keg and no one wants to pick up all those red solo cups.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say actually going in there when a campaign ends and just taking that information down, timely information, seasonal information.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing worse than getting a message from someone that's like, I showed up to this event and that building isn't even there anymore.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a cornfield now.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because they found an event listing from like 2019.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is great too, because then it dovetails with the next one, because when you take those pages down, you don't want to just take them down, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: So um the next one would be just making sure those uh those links redirect when those old pages are taken down.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: We typically see this if you've ever worked with someone in web development or marketing or any of those things, and you've ever heard them talk about 301s.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: What they're talking about is a URL that sends people to another one.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you an example.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you go to digitalrelativity.com slash a11Y, the abbreviation for accessibility, it redirects to our accessibility page.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a 301.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: The 301 is the kind of redirect that it is, but it really just means you go to one URL and you end up on another one.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is kind of a cutting the ends off the roast thing, but uh coming up in web development, I was always taught like never use a 302, never use a 302.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference between a 301, again, these are types of redirects.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: A 301 is permanent, a 302 isn't.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as I've gotten older, again, you're learning that code not to write.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm finding many instances where like this really should have been a 302.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: So much heartache would have been saved had this been a 302, because 301s get cached, not in a browser level or in a website level, but like in the network card of your computer, in a way that like on the Mac to clear like the 301 cache, sometimes you have to go and like to the terminal and do it.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking of like all the redirects I've run into, like in the last year, where it's like, hey, we need this to redirect to this page until Friday.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: At which point it redirects to this one.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And again, like you're cutting the ends off the roast and you're like, make it a 301.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: We always make it a 301.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's like, oh, now everyone who looked at that link sees the wrong one until like I give them this incantation.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the the the important thing, again, knowing that these are kind of geared towards things folks can do without having to uh work with a web developer, almost every web platform has some kind of mechanism for managing these redirects.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Less common is one that monitors and logs when links are broken.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: I would say take the time to invest in one of those.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a WordPress plugin called redirection that we use for this.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And just every few weeks, just get in there and like, oh wow, like this page from five years ago, like that link's broken, and 1,500 people have seen it in the last month.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is really helpful to catch that stuff because that again, it's an inefficiency, it's just a waste of traffic.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whichever one is appropriate, 301 or 302, send them, send them along to whatever relevant content you have.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that leads me to think about the the scenarios in which links do get broken or they become outdated.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the uh when I'm thinking about it, I think about there's on your website where maybe a page that you link to internally is no longer there, but it still links to so you get the 404 error.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Or in the travel and tourism industry, we see this a lot where you have these legacy listings from five, six, 10 years ago that link to some way outdated either domain or page, and people are still hitting the heck out of it because it seems like it should have good information and you didn't do the redirect on your side, and so you're missing out on traffic and you're you're getting uh dinged for that experience as well.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, 100%.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say too, um, this is something that it I don't want to say it's hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around, but I don't think it's the first thing a lot of people think of.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: You may think to yourself, like, well, we're not linking to that anywhere on the website, but that misses like years of emails, social media posts, like how many of your print ads are sent sitting in dentist offices around the country right now?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you you can't unsend that email, that could be anywhere.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: I would challenge folks who are like, Well, I mean, we don't link to it anymore, but you did.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the internet to to a certain extent is kind of written in ink, and you you can't you can't reel all that in.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and man, it's you you you'll never get it done, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: But you can always chase the dragon.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what you call it, but you can always give it a shot.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: You do the best you can.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and especially if you're in GA4 and you see that you're getting all these 404 responses.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if if you're getting a lot of traffic to a page that's a link that's broken or page has been unpublished or whatever, focus on that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have to chase every single one because sometimes people will type in a URL, they'll get it wrong, and it'll 404 and be like, well, we're not gonna redirect that because that's a one in a million.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: So much of this is related to SEO, right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like when we talk about SEO, most people's minds go to keywords, you know.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: I want to rank number one.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: People still say I want to rank number one, which is terrible.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: But this is the kind of bedrock work that's going to do you, along with your great content and your good site architecture, that's going to help your site do well in search results.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so this last one I think is particularly a good place to close because it I think it really bridges that gap between the technical side and then what you see on the search side.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that's super true.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh unique meta descriptions and page titles and uh shameless plug.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: I just gave a talk at the uh West Virginia Governor's Conference on Tourism.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually an accessibility win too, something that can go a long way for folks using screen readers to convey the substance, the meaning of pages they may be looking at.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're talking about here, if you, like many of us, have Googled something recently, and uh you've seen results, hopefully, that weren't um just like Google first party results, but you actually saw some blue links to websites, as uh as Google was so fond of showing folks in the distant past.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: In your mind's eye, picture that you have Googled something, the title would be the blue link, and then the bit beneath it traditionally would be the meta description.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there there is a little bit of uh fuzziness to this because Google will generate new titles and meta descriptions.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Seemingly at random when it feels like it, when uh when they when they feel they have the data center capacity and they have to justify its existence, they'll use it to generate page titles and meta descriptions for pages that already have them.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: But there is still a ton of value in actually creating these yourself and actually taking the time to write these.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And again, what I'm talking about when I say meta title, meta description, you'll see them in search like that, assuming Google hasn't rewritten them.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're looking at a page in your browser and you see like the title that appears above the address bar in the tab, that title would be the page title.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then the meta description, this isn't something you typically see, except in search engines.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: You might see a snippet of this, like if you send someone a link in like Discord or on Facebook in the link previews thing, but they're exactly what they sound like it's the title of the page and a description of the page.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Where people get into trouble is that WordPress, configured properly, will generate these for you.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And having something there is better than nothing.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, let's say your website has a calendar on it, and let's say you have open mic night every Friday for the next five years.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: If those are all just called open mic night, that page title is gonna be you're gonna have every Friday for five years, that would be many pages.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not 250 pages.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: 260 pages.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: You would have 200, you would have 260 pages, several, you would have a non-zero number of pages.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Two gross pages, anyway.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um four pages, four score pages.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: You would uh you would have all these pages, and their title would simply be open mic night.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, better than nothing.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: It does give you a title, but when it comes to search engines, it it basically makes it impossible for search engines to differentiate between them.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Something that we have started doing for folks that we work with is on pages about events, the title has the title of the event, but it has the date of the event dynamically injected in there too.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it does still convey information, but it's also unique.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you still see a ton of this, especially across, again, folks doing a lot of uh campaigns, a lot of paid media.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm just gonna make up an example.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even thinking of a specific website, but like say you're running fall campaigns, you have fall in love with West Virginia as a tagline, and oh, we had a blog post titled that.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's actually a paint and sip.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a paint and sip titled that.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, um, there's a campaign landing page that has that title.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: You would be shocked how many pages you can accumulate that have the exact same title.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's just nothing worse because when Google looks at them, it just kind of throws its hands up and picks one.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorites.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Favorites along those lines is when someone duplicates a page for a whole new content, but they don't change the meta description.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: So their page on Outboard Motors is still talking about snowshoes in the meta description, you know, that kind of thing.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's really worth just taking the time to do it right to make those unique.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: I compared it to uh K2SO and Star Wars Rogue One when he says uh I find that answer vague and unconvincing.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of what that's kind of what 250 duplicate page titles are like.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're vague and unconvincing.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Man, there's so much stuff here.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's also there are really five things that we focused on during this conversation.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: There was the image compression and sizing, removing unused plugins, widgets, embedded scripts, anything that that is getting passed along that doesn't need to, especially the plugins and widgets.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's stuff that a non-techie person could get into and fix.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um stale content and dead pages, broken links and outdated redirects, and then unique meta descriptions and titles.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, there are a ton of resources on the web about how to go about this.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there are a couple of uh YouTube guys that I've mentioned in the past, Analytics Mania and Loves Data, both a little bit sort of stiff and corny in their delivery, but they really have good information.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: You could probably hit those guys up or just Google any of these things and you'd be fine.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I suspect uh in one of our future episodes that we'll definitely have Justin back on here.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but also uh Caitlin, our resident accessibility expert.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: She and Justin have been working together.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, some of these things that Justin was talking about made me think about that.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh that might be a two-parter, even just because there's a lot to get into there.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: And like anything that involves regulations, to try and present it in a way that is A, understandable, and B leaves you with things that you can do that aren't out of the realm of like feasibility, right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh yeah, you need to do all of your P all your 2,000 PDFs, make those accessible.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's probably not going to happen for you unless you have scads of money.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but maybe things like alt text and meta descriptions and those super, super easy things to do.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, man, it's it was awesome.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed talking with you, just like we do every day, but uh it's fun to actually have time aside to do this kind of stuff.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: And and to really, I don't know, this helps me because it it makes me think about this on a more concentrated level than when in our normal work a day, right?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're just trying to get stuff done.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you have any parting words for for listeners or for yourself or anybody.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: One, thank you for having me on here.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: This was a ton of fun, and I can't wait to come back after being a completionist for the duration of the podcast.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to be a guest.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: This was a ton of fun.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: I really hope I get to come back on.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I would just say, I said it at the top, and I'll say it again: compress your images.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: If if you take one thing away from this, it should be squish.app and put put put your images through it.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's better for everybody.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks so much, Justin, and thank you all for listening.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we'll see you next time on the same side.