You shouldn't have to click what more than four times from a homepage. I would even say three in a, in a good, in a perfect world to get to where you need to be to then make a decision. We work within Yoast.
We need to be reviewing every 3 months. Is that still relevant right now? And if not, what do we do about it to make it relevant? Heat. Heat.
Thank you for having me. Round of applause for me. Thank you very much for having me. I thank you. I understand I may be the first guest on one of these.
Is this true? I I Yeah, I got posh little timers for the office. Nice decorations. I thought maybe I'd use them. So, let's turn them all around cuz
I don't know how long they are. And let's see. We'll we'll find out. And I'll tell you as they're going as well. Um, neglect.
I actually think the answer maybe to both is neglect. You do an audit, you go through the audit, you do the fixes, it's all fixed now and that's it. And then kind of ignore it. And the same goes for pages as well.
Like that's performing well. Let's not touch it. Well, it may not be well forever. I think the thing that people stop to do and think about is review. Like it's all about moving forward, doing something new, new content,
New strategies. And actually, a lot of the time it's about going back and doing chores maybe on stuff that you've seen before. And I know that maybe on the technical
Side it may happen a bit more, but on the content side, if you think you've got a good piece of content, that stuff, especially now and what we work with in Yoast, we need to be reviewing every 3 months.
Is that still relevant right now? And if not, what do we do about it to make it relevant? Thank you. Um, I would say site structure and information architecture. Don't like make all your products go off on one
And have their own little one category with three products and that's it. Unless you're small, of course. But if you're scaling, there's always these orphaned categories with with products that that should be either recategorized or maybe cross-sold with,
You know, one of your internal linking um plugins and stuff like that. So I would think that, and again, it's neglect, isn't it? You put a new a few products in. Oh, they go in that category and then you kind of just leave it.
And then the thing is to maybe look at that and see the performance of the sales. Is it not selling as well because it's not a good product compared to everything else, or it's just not one of those that's great?
Or is it because it's dug somewhere that's hard to find? Um, so is is something hard to find? If the answer is yes, then make it easier to find. You shouldn't have to click more than four times from a homepage. I would even say three in a in a good,
In a perfect world to get to where you need to be to then make a decision because we're we're uh we're impatient, aren't we? Yep.
Uh, content calendars for one. So your head of content marketing or head of marketing should have some sort of schedule. But in that schedule again, are you just like, what are we doing next month?
And it should be, what are we reviewing from 90 days ago or 180? Whatever that is, whatever industry you're in. In my industry, it has to be like a week. Sometimes I go away a week on holiday
And I spend a day catching up from that week because so much is happening. You may own um a shop or be in an industry where not much happens, like you own a ladder shop.
Not much is happening in the ladder industry in the next two weeks, or maybe it is, I don't know. Make a story out of it. But in Exact. Hey, I like that.
I really like that actually. Look, this whoever's owning Ladico in the UK, then chat to one of us and Nick has a load of slogans for you. Um, but exactly, but yeah, reviewing is hard.
Going into those analytical tools is the best. Search Console, Microsoft Clarity, I've been using a bit more as well, which is really good. It gives you a lot of AI citation. It is good.
It's free. It it's like Hot Jar as well. So, it does recordings and because it's all it's because it's all integrated into Microsoft's AI capabilities, you don't just have to sit there all day and watch recordings.
You've got an analysis from it right then and there, which um, not to tangent too much, going to go back to Screaming Frog. They have an MCP, and I won't cover MCPs in this call. If you don't know what they are, have a little read about them, and I'm sorry if you go down um a rabbit hole,
But Screaming Frog now have an MCP. So after you crawl, you can technically ask Claude or Chat GPT or whatever your MCP is connected to natural language questions about that data
And then it might gives you suggestions based on analytical um data on what to improve and what to do. But yeah, reviewing old stuff, is it relevant? If not, why is it not relevant? And if so, is there anything to add or take away?
Um, yeah. And don't just scale just for the sake of scaling. Don't just make content for content. That's been there the whole time, hasn't it? Mhm.
Yeah. And I think the other test I do, I um use my, my parents as user testing because they know nothing. They know nothing about technology, but it's actually interesting to them to watch because they're sometimes your customer,
Right? The tech, the technophobe. They're not, well, they're not phobic of it, but you know what I mean. They try, but they still call a printer a machine, and they only just now trusted to put their credit card into Amazon,
Right? That's how far behind they are. And yet, weirdly, they chat GPT. Well, do you know what? They're using Gemini every day. They no longer use Google.
And no, no, no. My dad, who's just turned 80, right? He's well aware. He, he now doesn't understand why the world was like it was when we were doing our own research.
He doesn't. So now he's thinking, so a year ago, because he wasn't using Gemini a year ago. A year ago, I, if I wanted to find some, some product,
I had to search for the product and visit 10 websites and read them all myself and then make a decision. I'm interrupting today's episode to talk about email and SMS, which should be powerful, not painful.
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Okay. Okay, don't think about online for a sec. Think about what marketing was like before the internet existed. Because marketing agencies like you and I existed. We've all seen Mad Men.
That was my realization that marketing was around the whole time. And I was never told I could do it as a career. But think about it. It's it's word of mouth. Positive word of mouth.
You go to like, I don't know, the hairdressers and you've got the magazines on the front and you just read and you're all chattering about something you may have bought. It's that word of mouth. So that word of mouth does correlate online.
That's why Reddit's great because that's your perfect word of mouth and you can talk about its um citations going down in the last week or whatever. But when it comes to third party citations,
You just want people to say good stuff about you. Um reviews are the best thing in my opinion, especially as a shop owner. A review not just about the products but about you as a brand. You've got places like judge.me who are another app with
Shopify who are I think even bigger than Yoast. They are bigger than Yoast in terms of the Shopify app. They they they are and they're great. And the reason why is that um that third party perspective is never going to die
When it comes to commerce. You will always get influenced by something external to the brand. And Nike and Adidas and all of these massive brands, they didn't get there just because they entered and went, we're the best. They kind of entered
And made the claim and then the claim was confirmed by others who weren't professional. So getting that. But okay. Well,
Links were the only thing that would connect A to B or A to B to C, right? That that internal linking was how the web worked. Now with LLMs coming in, it doesn't necessarily go that way. And in the past, SEOs would optimize with anchor text,
Which for anyone who doesn't understand the actual text that the link is, I know, I know we are going back. And that you would optimize that and then scale it. So if you sold shoes, the main goal was to have just the word shoes
And then to have trainers or walking shoes and that would go to the different categories. And that that's all fine. But you also had companies that would abuse that for doing black haty stuff like never mention the brand name.
If again, I'll use Nike. It's the easy example. It's like doing link building just for the word shoes but never mentioning the word Nike. You need to build brand authority
As well as general online authority to do that. But now LLMs don't need the link necessarily. They just need to understand that there's a mention. So now there's mentions and citations. So let's go with that.
A citation, I in my opinion, is just a fancy word for a link. Now it's it's just they're actually directing you to that place. But a mention is like me talking about winning with Shopify on some random blog and not actually linking to you.
It's still a mention and it can still be found by an LLM because I'm being talked about, you're being talked about in passing elsewhere somewhere else. And it might and I think with that just being mentioned, that's the word of mouth.
So here again, it's like me saying, oh, I just went and bought some new shoes. Check them out. That's a mention, I guess. But a citation,
Which is me telling you exactly where that shop will be, you know. Um, so it's just it's the natural course of things. You start asking people about the shoe, they'll tell you it's a nice shoe. You'll tell them it's a nice shoe.
That's the mention. But then I may want to delve further into an actual, well, I want to do something about it, like buy them, which is when you ask for directions. So that's kind of what we're doing online.
Um, I did get tangented then, which was quite good. I'm impressed. I hope that kind of answers. Mhm. Mhm.
Mhm. Other places would be relevant forums. So, social networks, I think, is a bit predictable, right? Go on TikTok and Instagram and do some video. Brilliant.
Do those things if those are the platforms. But going into forums. So, if I, if I go, I'll actually use another example. I've got some old remote control cars that my dad got from the attic. He found them.
And I'm using Claude to revive them. It's amazing tension. Myself, but it's, it's interesting because now you go back and you fix all of those things. And doing that research made it go to all of those sites,
But it also makes you connect back to the old thing and make you fulfill that task as well. So, being able to do those things, I think, is, um, is, is way, is way more useful than it used to be.
And, um, I hope I didn't tangent again. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. Yeah. Well, if I go back to the remote control car, that was a forum entry. So, I found all the parts through a forum,
But then I ended up buying things. Well, I, it was quite interesting. I bought something from an online shop that I'd never heard of before, about some random parts. Now, I know about that store.
And because it was an old, it's called Tamiya. It's some Japanese or Chinese make and it's from the 80s, but they still produce it now. So, they have a UK distributor and you learn all these things quite, quite quickly that they're still in existence.
But, I have two cars. One's really rare and the other one's not as rare for parts, right? So, I could buy the parts for this. Good. Good.
Well, the new one, the other one, interestingly, was quite rare. So, I had to go a bit deeper. And then my LLM research only got so much in forums and they were like,
No, you need to get a new one. So, I had two options. One of them was to buy one from eBay and pay $10 for a part and $80 for shipping. And I went, Before I do that,
Because I am prepared to do that, because nostalgia is expensive, but it's worth it. I want to have a look elsewhere. And I went to Facebook and I was like, There's always a group. There's always a group like a forum.
There's always a forum and a group for everything. Whatever you're doing in your niche as a site owner, there's someone who's interested in what you're selling. Someone somewhere, right? No matter how many, how few there are, there's still one.
But I found, um, just a special group on Facebook for the brand. And then I found Facebook groups about the car because it's a rare car. And then I found some guy who lives near Derby who, for free, sent me the part because that guy just didn't want money.
He just wanted to know that I had revived the car. That was, that was the money for him, right? So it's a nice story that goes up. He just wants to pay it forward. I don't know.
I don't know because it didn't mention in my research and maybe I wasn't doing it well enough and I didn't say, Go into Facebook. It didn't actively go into Facebook. It said, Try other places, and I thought of Facebook.
So no offense, Claude, but you didn't do your job that day. I had to finish it for you. But then I came back and it confirmed all of those things and told me how to do all the fixes
And found the old manuals and did all those things that I could have done in four hours, but I did in one because of the LLM. But the LLM's doing that research and that research really does spread far. So back, back to getting links,
I think it doesn't matter how innocuous it is anymore. Domain authority is really useful. 16 seconds. Doesn't matter how big the domain is. If you're small, go for the small ones and like word of mouth,
It spreads from there. Go into the hairdressers and go, Hey, have you heard of this brand? And you wait for everyone else to talk about it. That is how word spreads and people start buying stuff.
Oh, this one's ran out, so I don't know how long we've been going. Right, this one's still going. And this one, this one might be a 60 minute. That's got to be an hour.
That was a good question because you can probably get that in 10 minutes, actually,'cause I was like, Oh, have you got three hours to talk about the future? Um, Shopify. Shopify, quite they are.
Right. Okay. So Harley Finkelstein, the, the, is this CEO or founder? What is CEO of, of Shopify? He's, um, very forward-thinking. Yeah, very forward-thinking.
He's very maximalist in the future, which means that's good for Shopify. Um, so for example, compare that with WordPress. You've got a generic readiness inside Shopify in core, out of the box, doesn't matter what theme you get or anything that WordPress is just not there yet.
So they have agents.md, they haven't done LLM.txt, but Yoast does that in their app. Um, they do other things like, um, content negotiation. M, did I say that in my, my god, this is the nine minutes, it's all coming out in, in,
In our app, in our app. This is the pressure. This is the pressure you get. So we do LLM.txt, but it does other things like, um, I don't know if they've done ARD and OKF,
Which is agentic resource discovery and open knowledge format. Got them. So those are like markdown outputs that are better for agents to read content. We've also made schema map. Um, it's not in Shopify unfortunately, it's in WordPress,
But that kind of aggregates all the schema entities together and shows them out. Dixon Jones, who owns inlinks and he was Majestic SEO, he's made something called the entity map as well, which is a cool thing that again, I don't know how it would work with Shopify.
You'll have to bug him on LinkedIn or Twitter to ask him that. Um, so there's lots of different things and and Shopify are forward-thinking in the way that they've been upfront. They've been talking to OpenAI and Google before things happened. Um, and when it comes to things like UCP and ACP,
Not ACP, which is a Gensive Commerce protocol, which is OpenAI and Stripe's thing, you've got UCP, which is the universal commerce protocol, which Google made. I know, sorry, all of the all of the typings. Sorry about this guy.
There's a glossary on Yoast that explains what all of these acronyms are, so go there. Um, yeah. So that that's all the formats. So Shopify dealing with that.
App developers like like Yoast and Judge Me and whoever are all doing these things to help things with agentic readiness. Um, but then I don't know Shopify really helping with all of those things,
But even after that, you've still got to maintain it, right? So it's all very nice, it's all agentic ready, but is it going to be ingested well? And that's where content comes in. Um, I've been talking at a couple of um,
Conferences and I've also done a post on Search Engine Journal, which if your editing is right, there should be a link over there, right? So, there's a link over there and I talk about data integrity. And there's a few things that go in there,
But I made uh a nice little corporate triangle diagram of the five layers of of um, data integrity. The first thing is an entity. So, here I would use a running shoe.
There's just here's a product, running shoe, which we always use as the product. And then you've got relationships, which may be a different something that goes with the shoe, like a sock that's ergon ergonomic, whatever, or laces,
All of those things. Um, then you've got format and structure, which may be more important to you site owners there, because the first two things, like Yoast, deal with already out of the box um by adding schema and structured data.
But format and structure, very useful. Yeah. And Kyle Rristley from um Shopify, he mentioned in a post about product structured data and stuff. Again, another link there.
I won't go through it. Read it. It's quite interesting about the future. Loads of loads loads of links. Um, and where was I? I don't even know where I was now.
Um, yeah, format and structure. Yeah, looking at the shoe. So, what does So, make sure that the description is concise, but it doesn't blabber on. Like, we like a story, humans,
But agents have no interest in stories, right? They just want factual data that's accurate, concise, and also corroborates with other things, which is where relationships come in. So, you've got formatted structure, headings, titles, tables, lists, all the nice things that go into nice formatted stuff that go on.
The next thing is actions, which is a bit geeky, and I won't go into it too much, but that's the agentic readiness stuff. So, soon agents will be able to buy that shoe on your behalf. It'll already know what shoe size you are.
It'll know your preferences. It'll probably know all the other clothes that you've got to so so it can match it and tell you even all of those things, which is again where all the relationships between entities come in. Um, but it'll take action soon.
So schema does some of that, and I don't think it's in Shopify, but things like UCP and ACP allow allow an agent to use your account or your credit card to do a purchase, and they they do everything.
Look into UCP. Yeah, keep the guardrails on. Definitely preapprove. Preapprove. But those um those are the things that I
Think are going to be really important there. And lastly, after actions, there's perception, which is the off-site stuff that we've kind of just covered in the other segment. But perception is everything to a brand
Because if no one's talking about you or talking about you badly, then it's not good. And I don't think in the LLM world that no news is good news. I think no news is bad news. Bad news is actually good news
Because at least you've got some sort of presence somewhere to repute that negativity. And that's a bit of online reputation management, but that's for another session. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah.
Yeah. Mhm. Um, I'll add something to what you're saying here, which is the FAQ and hiding things is very important. Don't hide things, right?
And then the question you need to ask is, if I don't hide everything, is there too much content? And if the answer is yes, trim it, right? It has to be unique and helpful, but don't just do words for words sake.
And don't just answer questions that don't need to be answered, like, I don't know, what is a shoe? But some people will literally write that down. So there's just word salad. And then the other thing to think about
When you're doing in content is word salad. That's what it is. And if someone's asking a question in an LLM, you have to work backwards, right? You want the answer to that question.
The question you need to make is, every sentence that you make when you're making content, something it can verbatim take out and put into the answer. If the answer is no, then improve that content. So for me, editorial standards are going to get higher,
Which is a good thing for the internet because there's going to be less crap, less mediocrity, more accuracy, and the internet may be a more seamless place for not just agents, but for us to work in in the future.
Thank you. This is half an hour. The middle, the middle one is half an hour. And this is, this is halfway. Heat.
Heat.