Matt Diggity Reviews My Mattress Pads [Live SEO Audit]

Key Takeaways

let's take a look at an affiliate website called my mattress pads now this is a simple website in the Amazon space reviewing mattress pads and earning Commission simple website but still a lot of good stuff to learn now in this audit we're gonna go after a lot of things but including algorithmic penalty recovering and how to recover from basically when when the algorithm puts you in your place and also things like how to build trust on our website keyword cannibalization and of course some conversion rate optimization take a look so what I'm probably gonna do these always freestyle and I don't know where this will end me up but I'll never look at things from a CRO perspective just so be CRO is not just about making more money but about increasing user experience and making people or clicking through on your website not just leaving it the first thing they see and then I'll get into some technical SEO stuff and then some content optimization and then lastly backlink we'll get into backlink strategy the reason I go in that word because this is the order that will get you the fastest and most effective returns obviously if you're making $10,000 a month and I give you a CRO trick that increases 10% now you're making $11,000 a month you know that goes right okay so let me just ask like how is the website doing both with traffic and earnings so in terms of traffic increasing in the last six months or so so we have left it it's almost double its traffic this side actually got a from the update in early November where it cannot lost a lot of kind of longtail keywords my head of assumption at that point is like the structure of the sign movement which was supposed to be so like that but in time I only had like two categories like you know an expert review and information so I have now like even a fool like site like a flatter sign architecture just retailing like a week or so and actually also mapped out all the longer contact the possibility to the site so like biggest ID right now has like 90% or 95% of its content is commercial and only you know five or 10% since it's informational it doesn't have like you know the next x4y article but there's no real kind of supporting articles we need to write some kind of trying to focus too to that in order to you know gain a little bit of getting the traffic and the keywords at the position okay got it okay so like I said these things freestyle we could go in different directions we've already gotten down a different one so what what I had to say about this November update so there was only one update throughout the year that looked different than other ones and I believe is in like October or maybe September something like that that was backlink focused so the fact that you weren't on that one it just means like for me this November 1 and which is I can't I honestly can't remember all like this probably Bert I think or something like that yeah and then you know like they're all kind of iterations of each other and they have to do with that quality score like doing all the things right and a lot to do with relevance and stuff like that ignore when people say Bert is only about being able to understand search queries better because that's one thing they did that's the only thing that Google mentioned that a release notes that doesn't mean that's the only thing they did I also just think about like there's changes the algorithm every freaking day like what about that noise on top of the out like everything right so right so knowing that this is probably content related and knowing what's going on with your site like let me give you some feedback so one earlier in the year a bit thing believe is around we had it's been a long time since we had any canal Grasmick penalties and we had one website that kind of got dinged a little bit and from what we we looked at is or what we were able to uncover it's pretty easy to do this debug you you look at keyboards that used to be in first place for and you see okay it just dropped down to number four who moved in the first second and third and then like you were already hinting out before everyone above me had more topical relevance on their website for that topic so let's imagine what would be like I don't know imagine I was ranking for like Taylor Swift's favorite songs or something like that so and maybe I just I have a website about like guitar guitars or guitar lessons or something like that and I used to be number one for some reason I dropped down number four now I only had that one article on that site about Taylor Swift but if I were to do a site colon on the people in first second and third I would see that oh this guy's talking about Taylor Swift with 500 pages one two hundred this one one hundred it's like a direct line they're just talking about they're more relevant on that topic and Google put me in my place so that's one thing that would definitely take a look at and just see you know what are the keywords that went down and you always need to triage this kind of stuff you always need to like take a snapshot of your rankings before and after and then do Excel to look at a comparison and see okay what kind of pages got rocked is it every single one of them or was it just like was it just my electric mattress pads page you know and then maybe it's because I only wrote one electric matched pad article and I just needed write more about electric versions stuff like that so that's one thing another thing with relevance I mean this is if you think about it algorithmically like how can Google really figure out like how relevance a website is in terms of different topics and stuff like that well you know they they you have to remember at the end of the day it's like it's not it's not a human that can go in it's not gonna see like like all this stuff on the page it's not gonna like get this vibe that's about sleeping and mattresses from the images it's only gonna be able to look at the content in Brett you know they can parse images and see texts and images and stuff like that but they're not gonna they don't they're not confident enough to put it into their algorithm stuff like that so we need to focus on our content in order to like get relevant so people argue that like Google doesn't look at stuff like keyword density tf-idf and all that kind of stuff but based on testing it tracks quite well with getting better results in in websites and top positions simply are not missing words like the people in lower positions they are using all the common words and phrases and stuff like that so think about it like this is when this happens to you you let's it's kind of like let me guess there's like every single page on your site lost some traffic or was it was it boiled down to like just a few probably all know so you know you can see from from actually from the graph that when those first rankings they lost that much but it was actually like a lot of the longtail know one page run for a honey keywords but traffic didn't drop that much initially and then the rankings maybe them that I wouldn't like number one two or three then it dropped to three or five right so so so yeah so it definitely you was kind of all over all over the place it was pages yeah okay so think about this kind of theory the Google the ranking Google is like a constant battle of one of each other like let's say you wrote an article on the best mattress for side sleepers right so what are you gonna do when you write that article you're gonna look at who's in first second third place you're gonna find out what they did right and you're gonna do better than them and then you send some backlinks to the the page and you get up to number one and guess what they didn't like that so they're going to same thing right back to you what did this guy how did this guy outdo me and then new people are entering the niche all the time so they're doing the same thing so it's all about one upping now over time you're completely perfect article starts to get shittier like it starts to get not as good as the some other pieces of content on the page and the way I kind of look at it is eventually there'll be enough of this added up on like this page isn't a lot not as relevant that page is not as relevant and then when an algorithm update comes down that's focused on relevance and stuff like that they're just like okay my mattress pads calm is not as relevant as we used to think it was on mattresses he used to be a hundred out of a hundred now we think it's probably about an 85 out of a hundred so let's drop 15 percent of its rankings in traffic it's just got a 15 percent muting factor placed on it so that's what's really important for you to go in and make a schedule for yourself so this is what I do this is a process that I do basically what I do is every quarter I'm gonna export out all the keywords that I'm ranking for and we'll keep that safe somewhere next quarter I'm gonna do the same thing again and export all these out and then use Excel to look at what are the differences between the rankings if any pages was static or dropping I'm assuming something's going wrong because I'm sending backlinks all the time sound like I'm not giving the website more value I should be increasing if not I'm assuming that my contents getting stale and then it's time to open up to like surfer SEO and look and see okay how did the syrup change and how can i how can they want up these guys again we'll get to that in a sec but let's get back on track and I'll like take you through my thought processes and stuff like that do you run any kind of site audits or anything like that I've actually just started to use Surfaris eons ago mentioned to try and really try to understand where to my optimizations on the existing pages and then on that but on the other side also trying to understand what type of supporting articles should I be building maybe to some of those pages too to help them improve in their writing so some a little bit more in a short term with surfers do and a little bit more kind of long term starting year with you know the supporting articles okay but I haven't run out like that the more time let me know if you okay do that and that's great that I see that you're still doing this well with just flying blind on the technical side of things technical OS users are great so if you find some keyword cannibalization or some weird rerun 301 redirect chains or something like that fixing that can just be a game changer it's really quick to resolve those kind of issues one aspect of technical SEO is index management so I've looked and see like some some weird pages that you might have indexed so you have archived pages indexed but it's actually four Oh Lord so get that out of the index go to Google search console and request no indexing on that well let's see well yeah so it's you told Google not to to index it but it's just sitting around so just force the removable search console same so you got your mattress like category pages no looks like your paginations index you have a category index you have more pagination stuff here's a category you don't want indexed yeah just get this stuff out just get this stuff out categories things like a landing page like a Content link into the two articles like like a hawk page right but the problem with that is like you can do that for navigation type purposes and stuff like that but I wouldn't index it because it's just simply it's it's just it's like there's no keyword volume for it right like this can't be optimized for anything and it's really hard to like if even if there's like five articles here if it's a feed it's gonna change all the time and it's kind of like it's not gonna rank for anything if it doesn't rank for anything it's just a liability and has no asset value you know I'm saying right okay so so you for us that's right exactly the only time I would is like something like this were like this is literally ranking for SEO news but I've optimized the out of it right so like title tags h1 like it's all set up like for ranking and for certain keywords that Google is expecting rotating content and stuff like that but for something you're trying to do it's not gonna be helpful so get it out of the index you can you can use it for for UX but I also don't see your site being so complicated that you would need it at this point maybe later though so schema is a good thing to do definitely let's let's just check like I do not absolutely did not believe in EA t the Google doesn't have the resources to go in and like check to see if whoever like wrote a website is a real person but they do have the resources to check for the opposite of eat which means there's they can't find any owner or author or anything to do with the website which is sketchy to them so we can beef up this about page there should be a name on here there should be an address it shouldn't be this weird tube content down here this weird stuff like this can the nav bar is completely gone on this page this weird kind of stuff will hit you negatively in terms of your quality score for your website and that'll stack up when it comes to when algorithm updates are coming around if you have just like weird things that our dignity quality squash so if you want inspiration look at the wirecutter health line like you want multiple authors on the page fine create a location for this website like a name address phone number make it up or I go to the extent of getting a real Google my business and then I'll even send business citations to the website that matches up with that with that address and everything with name address phone number actually business intention was actually for like local businesses and you also kind of recommended for before affiliate ok well the the name of the game is to not look like you're an affiliate yeah so yeah you want to try to make it look as much as possible like you're a real business so real businesses trying to remove the Spanish as much as possible real real businesses like want you to contact them that's how they make money so there would be also a name address phone number here's our feedback Department here's our returns department here's how to get in touch with media requests and here's our name address phone number if you want to drop in all that kind of stuff and then using the scheme on these pages to to even set it up further so like you put your name address phone number in the schema but also really leverage that same as feature to say this is like this is my Facebook page this is my youtube channel like all this stuff I'm not just an affiliate website I'm all these things check it out you want to show Google you're more than just an affiliate website yeah so let's see here excuse me let's check if you have any like cannibalization problems you need rankings are pretty good you got a lot of keywords on page one at the top of page one doesn't look like so far that your cannibalizing I'd like a couple of pages are you know be feeling like on the like hospital hospital topic then there is this weird word doctor or like best mattress pad and best mattress topper which for bullets out of the same and and so what I wanna do is like 301 and merge the content into like the the highest ranking age yeah that's wise thing to do but I mean if it's if Google doesn't think it's cannibalizing then don't worry about it but if one of those pages has no search volume then it's literally a liability and that's like what you're worried about so it's okay I mean this page used to cannibalise before but seems to be okay now but it's also not performing either so maybe it's still cannibalizing but outside the top 100 so I'd probably look at this best mattress Thomas that one for the key of the keyword is pillow top mattress topper and obviously you want your pillow top mattress pads page to rank for it but your best mattress toppers page probably got the word pillow on there too much or it has some anchor text with the word pillow going to it or something like that so the optimized actually pillows not written on the page you probably have some anchor text going to best mattress top Stoppers page with the words pillow in it or pillow top or something like that check that out okay we skip CRO stuff so just a real quick once over the we do some commercial context or maybe do go a little bit down on the home there is like a pack and play post which one look the one within like the baby white t-shirt I can play that's best if I complain your thing is this is mattress pads for cribs oh she's in there one for like that oh the eggshell yep can you keep on okay so 301 redirects too hot to hospital mattress pads is that correct yeah yeah okay yeah and so what what is the play so we actually kind of relieved the design this is or we're going to display on the rest of the site we kind of took runners killing a little bit as a inspiration to put like the you know the first product the first review product first we're trying to consolidate a lot of the text with like read more options so it's not that long and we're trying to make some contrast between the color so like having all the kind of see tae buttons it like yellow it I'm still kind of struggling to to determine like what's the color of the assignment to be right now it's like white with like green and yellow buttons okay anything else don't mean it hack away at this yeah no yeah okay so your website's green and white and the hands down like that's just what's up here it's it's the theme of your website so you want an opposite of complementary color like red to be used for your call-to-action buttons so we got red here my eyes are drawn here but I can click that and it doesn't doesn't make me you any money this is red but you really want it to just be red here and another piece of advice is check current price is much better than check price because check current price implies that it can change and if you don't click this you're not gonna find out what it is today which could be a big deal right okay so make this red and then chill out on red everywhere else and really just stick to like a few colors right now we're tasting the rainbow or looking at the skittles pack dumped out on a mattress part of the punt but yeah people this green and black and stuff and then make that pop with red when you have like so orange like all these other colors were very complimentary to red so it doesn't pop as much like nothing nothing is really standing out it's all kind of just like blah together so so maybe we just put it like reason we can stick with you on you yeah this again yes exactly and then this here so I recommend like this button needs to be bigger make sure this table is very responsive and you know like definitely yeah definitely like load it up on like the mobile-responsive checker and make sure like are these buttons even clickable when I'm looking at this on mobile and then this isn't enough information here for me to buy something like I need more stats here like first off there's no ordering here so I don't know which one you're actually saying the best is and if I if I'm like the other attention deficit disorder people on the internet if I don't see what it is right away I'm gone so when we get down to here and see mattress toppers so these are it looks like you got different categorized categories you know so pressure relieving format toppers gel and foam mattress toppers so there's actually two here a crate there's two here natural I think you need some kind of navigation here because I I thought I was about to read a because I got here because I googled best Hospital mattress pads if you that's what you're trying to rank for by the way you need the word best and review and you need this h1 and titles like key real estate for putting keywords in there like if you want to rank for best type stuff you need to put the word best in there in variations top we've used all that kind of stuff now we're getting the on-site SEO stuff but okay so most the time you you're probably not gonna rank for Hatchin hospital mattress pads that's an e-commerce keyword and you're gonna be up against the e-commerce sites and your intent for your website it's a lot different so I googled best hospital mattress pad so I'm expecting to see what's the best one so this is good it tells me which is the best one right away but then I get to this table and now I'm confused which one's the best is it ten where Proform could be but didn't which ones this like this one do you name on it now I'm like super confused like is it is this one the same one is this like I you need to remove all confusion from the buyers mind and then now we get down here and I was like I'm still expecting to see like a top ten list but I haven't seen any what but you decided to break it down into categories and whether that's the right move or not yet need to look at the search result and see whether the other people do if they've broken it down into categories and you're doing the right thing but I think you need some kind of navigation here didn't say it like you know what exactly are you looking for and then a button here relieving pressure number two gel or foam and with me number three egg crates and whatever so it's just like a clean navigation if someone picks like okay I want the egg crate one so go down here and they see okay egg crate mattress toppers so he's got this one and this one which one's better you know which which one's better again I want to see in number one here I want to see editors choice and then I want to see something like different this is our our best dollar saver or something like that yeah yeah and then for these like cons here so there's red we want to reserve red for this that makes you money so what you can do instead because I you want it you want to indicate that these are not good things if you want my one thing you can do is just do you do something like you got your to do this will be your prose right and then we can just do something like this which still looks the same but we're gonna invert it okay yes right you're not gonna take away the eye from the okay where are we okay we're at the end of the road so I think you got a bunch of takeaways you got a lot of things you can do definitely like work on the stuff we talked about the beginning with the technical and stuff like that and yeah we're worried about the topical relevance run surfer like your life depended on it and stuff like that and unfortunately sorry we can't talk about backlinks but we only have half an hour with these things but usually this is helpful for you yep one question that you were actually mentioning about like you know the title what I was ranking for so what are the things that actually happened with these scientists I'm not sure if it's because of the so heavy on commercial content but it actually runs for a lot of e-commerce terms so it doesn't rank for like best mattress pad it actually runs for some I'm actually like position 3 for with like in between so one of the things that I was actually when I was running you know surfer SEO I was like should I be running like for the term that I actually right now should I actually changed I'm saying okay who needs to run for you know best complain yeah and then make the change that so would you suggest that's like the right move yeah so consider it a gift for now I think Google just hasn't figured out in categories to properly yeah though don't get it eventually yeah think yeah don't don't plan on pulling them forever yeah yeah okay all right brother thanks for the call thanks for supporting charity and all that and I wish you the best of luck let me follow up with me later and let me know how things get along okay