Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello and welcome to this latest episode of SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to talk about, yeah, why you should always get a second opinion on things. This is inspired by a bit of work we're doing here at the moment at Keywords People Use. We're just at moment, um, in the process of almost launching a new piece of functionality. In fact, it might actually be launched by the time this podcast airs, because I'm a little ahead of myself at the moment um, and yeah, the work is basically, we're trying to take keywords people use the next level in terms of not just sharing you what content you should be creating from scratch, but also now working with your existing content and understanding your existing site or sites, and to do this, we are integrating with Google Search Console. So you can now go to Google. You know link Google Search Console to keywords people use. We can pull in data from keywords people use on the queries that people are using on Google to search for your content and which you are appearing on Maybe not getting clicked on, but appearing on. And then also we can then crawl those pages that are ranking for those queries and we can understand the content on those pages, which is a real core thing thing. And then we can start to look for the mismatches where you are ranking for keywords and queries but you haven't quite got the right content on the page to really rank higher. So this is where we're trying to help you find those areas where you can quickly and easily improve your content and, you know, get ranking higher quickly just by you know updating that content to hit those keywords and those queries that you're missing in the content. But Google obviously likes you and thinks you're relevant for, but have to boost that relevancy with the content and there'll be more about that coming out soon. You might even have heard more about it because this podcast can make it push down the schedule a bit. But the reason that this podcast has been inspired is because we're going through the process now of testing it.

Now it started with obviously, we, you know, amongst the team, we decided right, yeah, this is something to do and this is how I want to do it. But who's doing this? Who's developed it? He's gone away, spent some time built it and, you know, I like to leave it pretty loose for people. I don't like to specify to the nth degree how an interface should work and things like that, because sometimes these things kind of start to work as you are building the tool. You, you can work out things you need to do, which you know flat, which he's done. I know he's listening, he listens to podcasts. So, um, you know, um, this will be very familiar to him when he when he listens to the podcast, so this will be very familiar to him when he listens to it. So, hi, vlad, if you're listening Now, when I started using it in a testing environment, I'm coming to it.

Although I know what the background of the tool is, we're going to get this data in and we're going to crawl the pages and we're going to look for these mismatches and come up with suggestions and stuff when it actually came to using it for the first time or the first few times, I haven't got all the knowledge of exactly how it's been built, and just me using it, um, just helped surface a few usability issues that that might become an issue for people using it. Because one thing is when you develop or write or do anything with a bit of content or make a tool, obviously if you're the person that's developed it or been heavily involved with speccing it, then you understand it inside out. When it comes to using it, because you've built it or been heavily involved, you have to sort of keep in mind that the further and further removed from that process people are, unlike any user, any paid user, any free user, anyone who's coming to it for the first time, it's going to come to with with so little knowledge about what the purpose of the tool is, how to use the tool and what the assumptions. Until they've been built with, you kind of have to almost idiot proof the interface to sort of try and prevent people getting into situations where they think it's broken but it's not necessarily so. An example being, within this, one of the things you can do once you've connected a site in and we've pulled the data in, you can explore the queries and the pages, and part of it is we. The interface allows you to select a date range for the data. So now, by default, we pull the last 30 days worth of data because, while Google Search Console has up to 18 months worth of data in it, really there's only so much use at looking at stuff 18 months ago when we're trying to improve content, because you know what's the real point. You know lots of moves done in the last 18 months. What's more relevant to you is the kind of last 30 days. That's going to be the key. How's your site performed last 30 days against different queries? Because there's no point checking 18 months ago because there's been so many updates, so many things have been and gone, gone and changed. You might be ranking better or worse for those careers or not at all, so useless looking.

When I was going along and testing it for the first time, I didn't know that that assumption had been put in and the selection box allowed me to change the dates. The date range for the data allowed me to go back as far as I wanted in the past and as far forward in the future, which meant that I could go back. I thought I'll put in 18 months and see what happens. And it didn't change the amount of data, or it changed it very slightly. You know a small number, but so to me it was like, well, this is broken. Is it not pulling extra data or is it um only pulling in the first bit of data? And then there's some kind of overflow issue where there's like we can't handle all the data. And I had all these questions and it left me feeling doubtful about how reliable was the tool. So I went back to Vlad and said you know what's going on here, how come it's not pulling data in? And we had a discussion and he explained why we do the 30 days. And yeah, of course that makes complete sense.

So we then decided to make a small change to the interface to just limit the dates that you could pick to only the dates that we have data for, and then people can't pick outside that date range so they can't get confused, um. So that's just like a little example of of how just making one usability change um could make a big impact on how people, when they first use the product, may experience it, because some people may never change that date range and they wouldn't even know, but some people will, and they wouldn't know that they're potentially picking dates that are out of the range of data that we have for them. So this way it kind of just like covers it. So it's a small change, not a big technical change, but it's just a little small thing that makes it a better interface for people.

Another thing, another small change that we put in based on my feedback, was you can switch between views. So you can switch between a query view, so that's where you see mainly all the queries first, and then you can dive in on queries. Query view, so that's where you see mainly all the queries first and then you can dive in on queries. Or you can have a pages view, where you start by looking at pages and then dive into the queries that those pages are ranking for, and to switch between the two views. There's a huge amount of data in the back, in the background here thousands and thousands and thousands of rows, tens of thousands of rows of data, much more than you're getting for your search console. Um, because the google search console it limits to a first 1,000 rows of data, whereas because we connect via the Google Search Console API, we can pick out essentially an unlimited number of rows, but it's way in excess of the 1,000. I mean, I think we've got some sites that have got 30,000 or 40,000 rows for the past 30 days. Now see, when you're switching between that amount of rows and that amount of data, it is quite a heavy load on the systems to do that. So it can take maybe 15, 20 seconds to switch the views.

Now, as it was coded originally, you know, you just click the link to switch between the views and it just gave no indication that it was doing anything. And it's even myself who understood, like why it would be slow. But after, after a while, I click it again and I click it again. I click it again and what it really needed was just a little indication that yep, we're updating these rows and it gives you a message to say rows updating, updating data. Even so, just giving someone a message to say, yep, we acknowledge your click and we're loading the data in makes it a much nicer experience because the user doesn't have the anxiety of wondering well, hang on, has my request been acknowledged? Has the link click worked? And that kind of anxiety can build over, you know, because especially nowadays when pages load so quickly and the main and most websites will load really quickly. Obviously, a tool like this with so much complex and a huge amount of data yeah, of course it's going to take a bit of time to work it out, but even so, people are more accustomed if something's going to take a while. Now they're going to get a message that it's going to take a while. So just that again, that small change will make the site seem more reliable to people. It'll seem like their request has been acknowledged and it'll seem like you know that their request has been acknowledged and it'll make it hopefully a smoother experience for people when they use it.

Um, and there's been a few other bits and bobs that we're going through and we're we're just picking little bits and bobs up like this, and I know it. I know as a developer myself in the past. You know when you spent a lot, a huge amount of time getting something live. And then the client. You know who you're working for in this case because essentially, in this one I'm the client to. You know who you're working for in this case because essentially, in this one I'm the client to. You know, to Vlad, because you know I'm the one who sort of initiated the project in the first place and then wants to get it right for launch.

If you're the developer, you've done all the hard work essentially the really complex stuff which is under the hood and isn't necessarily always appreciated and then you get to this final bit and people go, oh, can we change this, can we change that? Um, and you know I always try and make sure that you know I don't ask for anything unreasonable, um, but it's just little things like this where, because I was unfamiliar with the interface that had been designed, that unfamiliarity helped me probably give better feedback than if I'd been heavily involved with designing the interface in the first place. That's why I would say, if you do do something like this where you have built something at all, no matter how simple it is, it's always worth getting someone who doesn't really know anything about it to come along and just say to them use it, watch them, use it. You can get a friend to do this, colleagues, you can. Also. There are services that you can actually use online. There's like usertestingcom and others like that, where you can actually pay people remotely to give them tasks to do, ask them, and they screen record themselves trying to do things and you can pick up problems like that as well, like this, using tools like that. But I just thought I'd just share this example of how we've done it internally here. It keeps people used and how hopefully it'll make this bit of functionality, this, uh, this, this sort of new feature work so much better for people than if we didn't do it all.

Right, that's it, for I hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.