Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign with Bobby Machado
To work with you have or start over? That can sometimes be a very tough question to answer. If it’s just a few small tweaks you are talking about when re-optimization is certainly the way to go. If you have more work to do, like a fundamental change in structure and theme. It may be better to start from scratch and work on a parallel site offline.
About Bobby:
Bobby is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Signa Marketing, CEO at Sector 7 Apps, and a partner at Quick Job Products with his brother Cesar Machado.
As a kid, Bobby always had an interest in business such as providing landscaping services, training horses, or reselling “Tang” back to his parents during 5 grade. His experience in the digital world began when he taught himself how to code websites in high school, which turned into a way for Bobby to make money on the side while racing motocross, which remains as one of his passions to this day.
After he stopped competitively racing at the age of 22, Bobby decided to focus his full-time efforts in web development as a freelance web developer, which then introduced him into the digital marketing world. Being the analytical and creative type, Bobby developed a passion for digital marketing and data.
After working at an automotive digital marketing agency as a paid media specialist, managing a little over $300,000 per month in Google Ad spend for several auto dealerships in the United States, Bobby combined my passion for business and launched Signa Marketing.
Signa Marketing currently makes up about 70% of Bobby’s time and he enjoys hosting a Signa Marketing show named “Blueprint”, in which he answers any and all user-submitted questions on how to market their business online. New episodes are released on Signa Marketing’s YouTube Channel.
Overall, Bobby enjoys being immersed in anything “digital” that has a positive impact on people and humanity.
Signa Marketing Website
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Full Transcript Below
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. I’m your host, Roy. This is going to be the fourth installment of our digital marketing series on SEO. Uh, glad to welcome Bobby with Signa marketing back to the show. How’s it going, Bobby?
Bobby (00:17):
Hey, Roy. Great to be here. How you doing,
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (00:20):
Man? It’s going good. Uh, I just want, thank you so much. This has been an insightful series and for those listeners that may be just tuning in for the first time. If you’ll go back a couple of weeks. We put out episode one is an introduction and episode two, we talked about the on-site SEO. And then last week we talked about, uh, something, uh, that’s not really mentioned a lot, but offsite SEO and the importance. Because that’s, uh, you know, kind of some of the Google foundations are built on that. Off-site, um, the links back to our site. So today we’re going to talk about re optimizing or redesigning an existing site. And I guess this is for people that may be having neglected the, the SEO function for a period of time. And it may be easier just to kind of start fresh again.
Bobby (01:06):
Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of people, you know, have had an existing website and they’re like, Hey, you know what? I’m not happy with my current rankings or organic traffic. And there’s some, they’re finding ways of how to make tweaks to it and stuff like that. But usually the approach is kind of where a lot of people struggle at. And so that’s what we’re going to cover today.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (01:24):
Right. Well, let’s just jump right in. Uh, so what would be, uh, you know, w where do we draw the line between tweaking what we’ve got. And maybe just saying, throwing up our hands saying, look, we just need to start, start from the beginning.
Bobby (01:37):
Yeah, for sure. So a lot of times it comes down to the foundation and really assessing. You know, from, as your website’s foundation from an SEO standpoint, workable, and can we build off of it or is it going to actually hold us back from doing what we need to do?
And so a lot of times it will be even from a technical aspect. That the site’s foundation is just super outdated. It’s going to be incredibly slow forever. And always, it just really needs to be a hundred percent uplifted. And sometimes the cost of doing that type of work is more than just replacing the entire website. Uh, and so that’s, that’s why what’s what you’re looking to assess. Um, sometimes when you’re redesigning a well, actually when you do re design a new website.
The opportunity with doing that as that you can actually have the entire website meet your SEO objectives a hundred percent. Even from the user experience standpoint. And a lot of times you can’t get that type of impact if you’re uplifting a current website. Yeah.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (02:34):
I think you mentioned a good point, uh. In one of our previous episodes, is that really, that’s what SEO is all about. It’s about that user experience. And, uh, Google has been very good at figuring out. You know, uh, what users want or where we need to take them. And so it’s, if we can have designed a good experience on our website, then, uh, probably our SEO is going to be up there anyway.
But you know, this is a point that. I usually don’t try to put out a lot of plugs. But this is where I will say that you need to reach out to a, uh, an expert like Bobby and his team. Because you could spend a lot of time redoing or tweaking your existing site and spend time and money and still end up nowhere. And then, or if you make this decision to re optimize. It’s a big decision, take some time and energy. But you can do it wrong too. So you can redesign a site and end up right back in the same place where you were with your old site.
So this is a great time for, I guess, that SEO audit. Where somebody like yourself and your team can really have a lot of input first off. Making the go, or no-go do we need to change? Do we need to redesign. But then what are some of the components that we need to capture in that redesign?
Bobby (03:49):
Yes. Yeah. A hundred percent. Actually, I mean, whether you hire an agency or even do it yourself. You always want to conduct an audit to understand, you know, where, where are you at? You know, what, what do you need to do? And so you can make those decisions, uh, that are best for the business. Um, doing a, uh, an SEO audit. Of course, you want to start with benchmarking, uh, stats.
So some really high level stats. While we’ll, of course be like analyzing your, uh, organic traffic, uh, year over year to see, you know, are you trending in the right direction? What are the pages that make up the most of your traffic? Uh, what are the top ranking keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site? Uh, stuff like that. There’s going to be some other indicators that are a little bit more underground. But there are strong indicators like domain authority, uh, and then also what we call citation flow, uh, and trust flow.
And I know those are almost kind of like jibberish there. But even if you do some Google searches, you’ll, you’ll start to see why these metrics are important because they’re indicators. To letting us know our, where are we trending in the right direction? Or actually, are we doing stuff that is very unhealthy for our SEO ranking? Yeah.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (04:54):
A couple of questions I have, uh. First off is that, you know, this is a long, this is a long play. And so you, um, it’s not recommended that you put your side up. And after two weeks, you’re wringing your hands about SEO, wondering what we can do to. I mean, we’re always wanting to do to make it better. But a couple of weeks is not gonna, uh, you’re not going to have a huge amounts of traffic, uh, flowing over to you.
But the other thing I was thinking about too was, so what about stagnant sites? I mean, just somebody that built the site five years ago, even though it may be optimized for mobile, and it has a lot of the right features, but there’s been no update or no new activity, does that penalize you, do you need to be refreshing your content quite a bit.
Bobby (05:38):
And the best way to answer that question really depends on the actual industry and the service itself has your. As your service actually changed. You know, because you don’t want to necessarily change things just to change it. Um, you want to make sure that you’re doing everything with the purpose. Um, and so, I mean, to this day, of course we do. We still see certain static websites that haven’t been touched in eight years, still rank at the top of Google. It happens. Absolutely. Uh, you know, and so every site and industry is different. Because each market micro market in the census is different in different players or are doing different things.
So if you’re in a very competitive market where everyone is really doing a lot of optimization work, well, then you’ll most likely have to match that speed or surpass it so that you can provide more value to the end user, but are there certain industries that are, you know, much slower in terms of how they move? Absolutely. And at that point, you know, the competition is probably less and everyone’s more static in that point. Okay.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (06:38):
Yeah. And, and even at that, I think a good way to differentiate yourself is always putting out fresh content, answering people’s questions, because even, you know, like what I think about is different situations that come up in my day, uh, they’re not always the same. And so being able to ride or do a video about what was that certain situation that, uh, it, it never hurts to put it out there because you can probably bet that somebody else is having that same problem and they’re searching for an answer. So it might as well be you that they, uh, hit to find that answer.
Bobby (07:09):
That’s exactly right. Yeah. But, but yeah, I mean, when it comes to, to reauthorize the site, that’s what is going to kind of, uh, well, we touched on earlier is it’s gonna have to do with your foundation and really assessing, Hey, is this foundation workable or not? Uh, or is it going to cost me more, you know, just working off this foundation or, or is it going to be more effective and more efficient budget wise, just replacing the whole thing?
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (07:34):
Well, things, again, we talked about in last episode is if, uh, you know, back in the olden days when they actually had to hardcode sites and they weren’t, uh, automatically optimized for a cell phone. So again, probably more important if you’re in the B to C space, then you know, B to B may still be a lot on computers, but you know, that’s something to look at is that it’s not going to do you much good, uh, to really tune in your site. If, when people look at it on a phone, it’s just a total mess. So that would be a huge key.
And the other thing I think is speed, uh, you know, Google wants our stuff to load faster and faster, and it’s, it’s kind of counterintuitive because we also need to use more pictures and more videos. So those, you know, those have a drag, but there are ways to compensate for that. But those are the kind of things I think that really, uh, some of the big points that you may want to look at before undertaking redoing a whole site.
Bobby (08:31):
Yes, that’s exactly it, a hundred percent. And with, um, the CU the cool thing with redesigning a site, even from a technical, like a technical standpoint, is you can at least build it in such a way where it is faster. It is ran green photos, uh, much quicker and stuff like that too, because sometimes to take an existing site and really have to nitpick and do those types of optimizations can cost lot of time.
And a lot of times you’re kind of just there’s conflict and more friction in that sense. Um, but, uh, when you are redesigning a website, the benchmarking aspect is huge because, uh, you may have a site that is actually ranking really high for certain pages, you know, and there’s a lot of traffic and you don’t want to disrupt that. And so that’s why I read it. When you approach redesigning a website and replacing a whole site, you really want to make sure that you are not disrupting, what’s already working.
Bobby (09:24):
And so that’s why the benchmarking aspect is so important. Uh, one, one, uh, example of that would be making sure that you don’t really mess with the URL structure too much in, in such a way that it’s going to disrupt the rankings. If you have to do that, which sometimes you absolutely have to do that to reorganize, uh, information on the site. You want to make sure that you have three Oh one redirects, uh, in place, which means that you’re telling Google, Hey, this URL doesn’t exist anymore. And here’s the new version of it permanently forever. Here it is. And so, as long as you’re setting those rules and, uh, in, in that sense, um, in guiding the search engine, then you’re following a process. That’s very safe to maintain those rankings that you already achieved. You’re just directing traffic into a different area.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (10:09):
Okay, awesome. Yeah. So what about, what is, uh, let’s talk about domain authority. I think we’ve touched on it, but if you could tell us a little bit more about that.
Bobby (10:18):
Yep. So domain authority is a metric, uh, created by, uh, uh, MAs as a company, uh, ammo Z. And so if you even type in domain authority on Google, you’ll see their article most likely pop up at the very top to explain, you know, why they created this metric, but essentially it is a metric to gauge the authority of a particular website.
And it’s, uh, it’s graded between zero and a hundred. Your Facebook and Google is going to be 99. You know, they’re extremely high. Uh, but a lot of mid level sites will tend to sit between, you know, that 30 to 50, 60 ish around there. Once you start the game to some pretty heavily authority sites, that’s when we start looking into the 70 eighties, uh, and then maybe even nineties, those are like your big publisher sites and stuff like that.
However, yeah. But it all local businesses and stuff like that, you’ll start to, you’ll see local businesses sending between that 30 to 50. Ideally what you want to do is get to fifties 30 is kind of considered healthy, but you’re not ranting and raving about it either, uh, in, over be reflected in your ranking. So it needs a 50, 40, 50 is really optimal, uh, at that point.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (11:28):
Yeah. And if I’m not wrong, you can go on Moz. And, uh, I think you can just plug your domain in there and they’ll, it’ll return what that is so you can get a good idea.
Bobby (11:37):
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that’s why, when, when, when about to, you know, start your SEO journey as a business owner or publisher, you have to think long-term and no, okay. I’m going to start right now. And a year from now, we’re going to start being, you know, getting some pretty good, consistent traffic, you know, six months you’ll start to see things happening.
Absolutely. If you’re doing things right, but the maturity of that traffic is definitely a year out and then hardcore really solidifying and building that even further is two years and above after that. And so that’s why the question of sometimes we’ll hear a question of when can I stop SEO? And it’s, that’s almost like, well, when do you stop your business? A business money stops coming in. And that feels the same way you can, you know, a business, say, for example, you have cat, capital’s stashed away from all the, you know, businesses you’ve stirred up. Maybe it’ll last you some another year, but it’s gonna slow down at some point.
And with SEO, it’s the same thing. It’s a momentum game. So if you stop SEO after a year, well, you’ll still probably absolutely be gaining traffic and stuff like that. But you are, you’re opening the door for vulnerability because you have competitors really trying to take over your position. So that’s why SEO is actually just a effort that actually never stops. It’s something you always have to be involved in.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (13:00):
Yeah. Because it’s like being at the top of the mountain, even if you’re at the top, there’s always people that are trying to unseat you from the top. So it’s, it’s always, even if, um, you still remain very relevant, there’s always other people out there creating content and doing other things. And, uh, you know, again, we’ll mention that this is such a, long-term play that, uh.
I was listening to a podcast the other day about somebody posting some videos and they said it took them like four months of posting daily videos, but they finally saw that pop in there. So, um, you know, we, we just can’t expect, maybe we get lucky and we, something goes viral. There’s always that chance. But you know, for most of us normal people, it’s like, it’s just that daily grind of doing the things that you’ve got to do every day, putting out good content, uh, you know, working for those backlinks, just trying to put this whole thing together, as you said, it’s a, it’s a big puzzle. We’re just trying to find all the rap pieces that fit.
Bobby (13:59):
That’s exactly it. Yes. It, I mean, and SEO can pay dividends and when you invest in it, you do it right. I’ll pay dividends, uh, from a bid perspective. Um, because I mentioned earlier, I mean, when you’re sleeping, you’re, you’re attaining traffic, right? It’s not a campaign, a campaign is a faucet of traffic. You can turn it on, turn it off, but when you gain organic rankings, uh, it’s something that’s very consistent, as long as you keep feeding the momentum. Right.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (14:24):
Right. So, um, so we’ve gone through our benchmarking and, uh, w well, before we do that, you mentioned trust flow. I want to ask what is the, the trust flow.
Bobby (14:36):
So trust, flow, and citation, or two metrics that are created by a tool and a company called majestic. Um, and so trustworthy is going to be a measure of the trustworthiness of the links that are pointing to your site. Okay. All right. Citation. Well, is the influence that these links have, uh, on, uh, in terms of, uh, uh, rankings on your sites or in the authority on your site. Okay.
So those, those two metrics are really important to make sure that you’re attaining healthy back links and that you’re not, you know, getting links from sites that have really low trust, you know, scores and stuff like that, that, that would be a bad indication. So that’s why you want to make sure that those two metrics are, are healthy and getting as close to the number 50 as possible. Um, that that’s why you want to strive for.
Bobby (15:23):
So, and typically those, those two metrics are something that’s, um, really used by SEO. Strategist is not necessarily something that business owners have you huge involvement in, even when it comes to domain authority, the way, the way that we convey results is, is through organic search traffic. And is that traffic converting into leads or calls or sales. And so, um, so we always recommend that when you start, you know.
Really working well, we recommend the moment you have a website to have Google analytics, but if you start to do SEO, you want to make sure that your Google analytics account is set up and that you have goals set up within, so you can, uh, measure contact, form submissions, phone calls, stuff like that. Uh, because yeah, I mean, even though it’s organic traffic, we want to make sure we’re getting the right traffic, that’s making a difference to our bottom line.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (16:17):
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s, uh, uh, I guess that’s one of the bad points about trying to buy traffic is if it’s not really a sustainable. And the other thing that we’ve talked about is time on a site. So if we’re getting click clicks on a page and then they’re exiting our website, you know, that’s bad. So we just, when I try to tell everybody is just, you need to have a lot of patients formula form, it, formulate a plan and just stick with it and carry that out. It’ll be much better than trying to take a shortcut because you may, some of these shortcuts may really, uh, may have a pop for a day or two, but if you get caught, they can penalize you for the next six months or a year to come. So anyway, just always want to reiterate that.
Bobby (17:04):
Uh, absolutely. I mean, and anyone that, uh, logs into your Google analytics account is going to tell when they see a spike of traffic, just go up out of nowhere and it’s going like this, and it just stops. They’re gonna be like, okay, well, what was that a paid campaign or something, but if it’s organic track traffic farms,
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (17:21):
Because it, you know, uh, we kind of get back to a more, this is more social media related, but, you know, there’s a difference between vanity likes or vanity traffic, just so we can say we’ve got a big number versus that quality of somebody that may actually be a potential buyer. I mean, and that’s what it is. I, I would rather have one website hit with the guy that bought than have a hundred or a thousand people just say, yeah, we really liked the site.
You know, I usually use this example that, you know, the other night we went out to eat and I pulled out my thousand likes from Facebook and tried to pay the bill with it. And they didn’t take that, you know, uh, was only like, so now we’ve gone through our benchmarking, we figured it out. Uh, we want to start, um, we need to rebuild our site. We’re just going to start from scratch. So kind of where do we go from there?
Bobby (18:12):
So, so from there, uh, once you’ve actually made a decision of like, okay, you know, as my foundation workable or not, then the redesigning process kind of how we were touching on us. You want to make sure you’re careful with it, and that you hire the right agency that understands how to redesign websites while maintaining SEO rankings.
Yeah. That’s super important. So just vet that part, because there is a way to go about that, um, and how to be careful with them, et cetera. Uh, if you are able to take the current site and uplift it in terms of, uh, applying SEO, optimizations and upload theme from that perspective, then you know, that that may be something that you can do, uh, internally if you have the resources or you will have to hire, uh, an SEO agency that has the development capabilities to implement those items too.
So, you know, it’s not just SEO, but technically what has to happen on the site from a development perspective to do things correctly. And so that’s what you’ll look for is to make sure that those capabilities are within that agency to make sure that you make the right decision.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (19:19):
Yeah, I touch on too. The difference between, um, being able, if the fundamentals are the, the base of the, the website is good and we want to stick with it, maybe it’s just some other technical tweaks, the difference between working with the live website versus, uh, you know, sometimes like when you, when you restart and just redo from the very beginning, you kind of have that dummy site setting out there, uh, by itself that you can make all your changes on. You can see what’s happening, but you’re really not messing with anything that’s live. So tell us a little bit about that differentiation.
Bobby (19:57):
Yeah, absolutely. So as far as any development process, you always want to make sure that you’re making changes and updates on a staging site, uh, which is a copy of your live site and make making sure that everything’s really just done on that first to make sure that there’s no issues or anything like that, that you’re not going to cause any functionality errors. And then once everything goes through a quality assurance process within the firm, then all those changes get applied and pushed to the live production site.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (20:27):
Okay. Yeah. And it’s always good to have, uh, either yourself or somebody on your team, uh, actually visit your website every now and then, because, um, you know, a friend of mine, we were talking the other day and so tried to send her an email and it wouldn’t go through. And so I said, well, maybe I got the site wrong. So I went over to the side and the site was down and, uh, you know, it’s something that we don’t think about it. We just think that it’s always up and running, but somebody kind of needs to be in charge of, you know, looking at that periodically just to make sure it’s still up and something didn’t happen.
Bobby (21:01):
Yeah. You never, you can never go wrong with a good QA process.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (21:05):
Exactly. Exactly. All right, Bobby. Well, is there anything else you want to add about the redesign before we move on?
Bobby (21:13):
No, I think that wraps up, uh, the re optimizing and redesigning aspects. Uh, there’s a lot of variables that go, you know, after, uh, after the last step of, you know, making sure that you, that whether you have internal resources or you’re hiring and out that you make sure that you have the capabilities to follow the process, uh, safely for redesign or how to approach, uh, re optimizing a current site. Um, you know, that’s, that’s really gonna be the next step is making sure that you are covered and have the right capabilities to execute either, either route.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (21:45):
All right. Well, Bobby, we thank you so much for, this has been a great series. Uh, again, I want to just go back in the, in the episode, one was the introduction. Then we went through onsite SEO. Then we went through offsite SEO and went through the re optimization or redesign of existing site. Thank you so much for your insights and for doing these series a, these have been great. I’ve enjoyed it and learned a lot as I know our listeners have as well. So, uh, first off before we get outta here and tell everybody how can they reach out and get ahold of you either at, uh, Cigna marketing or at blueprint?
Bobby (22:21):
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find us online at signamarketing.com. That’s spelled S I G N as in Nancy, a marketing.com. Uh, and then you can find us on social media at Signa marketing is our, uh, handle, uh, we have a great Q and a fun show called blueprint where I answer any and all digital marketing questions. And so if you have a question out there that’s super specific to your situation, I’m more than happy to provide answers for it. Uh, feel free to just, uh, submit your question as a comment or a direct message on any of our social media platforms. And we’ll make sure that it gets answered in the next episode.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast – Digital Marketing Series 2 SEO Episode 4, To Re-Optimize or Redesign (22:54):
Okay. Well, thanks so much again, for taking time out of your day to be with us. We appreciate it, and hopefully, uh, we’ll be looking forward to you putting the, putting the nun one together. Awesome. All right, well, that’s going to do it for us today. This is the business of business podcast, and we can be found thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. We are on all the major social media networks.
Of course, a video version of this interview will go up on YouTube when it goes live as well. So you all reach out and, uh, you know, get some help from Bobby, get your SEO dialed in. It’s something that you, uh, you definitely need to do. It’s, it’s always a challenge it’s always changing. And so, um, you know, if you can keep up with it yourself, great, if not reach out for some professional help and guidance until next time, uh, I appreciate, uh, the listeners very well. And until next time, take care of yourself and take care of your business.
Signa Marketing Website
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