WordPress SEO for Developers: Tools vs. Building Your Own with Wes Towers (Part 2)

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of building better foundations. We are almost building better interviews this time around. But yes, once again, we are continuing. This is part two of our interview with West Towers, and we are going to jump back into that fairly soon. But first, this is the building better developers podcast. This is developing or I am Rob Redhead, a founder of said building better developers development or also the founder of RB consulting, where we help you do technology better. We sit down with you. We walk through your business and how you do business. It is unique. It is custom. Within that, we help you craft a custom recipe for leveraging technology and improving your processes and integrating, simplifying, automating your business so that you can work on your business instead of in your business. We get you a roadmap. We help you execute that or we give you the instructions on how to execute that. Your choice. It is custom fit to your business and your needs. Check us out at rb-sns.com. RB dash SNS dot com slash product. If you want to just jump right into a technology audit or if you want to try one out yourself, you can check out matrix dot rb dash SNS dot com and go spend maybe five to 10 minutes and get yourself a quick and dirty assessment. But also it includes a nice little quick roadmap and things like that to help you out. Good things, bad things. Good thing is I'm looking out sunshine. I have not seen sunshine and like it feels like days and days and days. Finally, I guess the rains are pushing through a little bit. Things like that. It is that fall weather. It's gotten cooler. It's sort of it's it's sort of nice to have like, you know, you get that sort of warmish day and then a nice cool night. So those are some of my favorites. However, it brings some rain as well. And so you just don't see the sun as much. So the good news is, hey, at least we are getting a little bit of touch of sunlight and warmth. The bad news is that it's fall and like the summery stuff is going away. But in line with all of that is we're about to stumble right into the holiday season of like we've got Halloween right around the corner and Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, that whole thing. Always fun, always flies by this year, probably more so than it will in any previous years because of just all the things going on in the world. But more importantly, first, you guys get to hear another introduction from Michael. So dive right in. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mollusk. I'm one of the co-founders of developer. I'm also the founder and owner of Envision QA, where we help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most. And that is quality, reliability and support you can count on. Whether you're building something new or trying to fix what's broken, we combine custom development with thorough testing to make sure that your systems actually work before you actually hand them off to your customer. At Envision QA, we don't just build software. We make sure it's solid, stable and ready to support your business growth. Check this out at EnvisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. Similar to you, mine is with all the wonderful rain we've had since it is my allergy season, it has been miserable. I'm ready for it to dry out for a few days. On the good side, my favorite holiday is actually right around the corner from this recording. Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year and it actually falls on the day I can actually enjoy it this year. That is always rare, but cool. Wes has always introduced himself last episode, so you can check that out because we don't want to waste any time with an additional introduction. We are going to dive right back into our conversation with Wes Towers picking up right where we left off. So does your company have any, do you guys have like some custom built tools for managing that to keep track of their SEO and make sure that, hey, you're getting the hits that you need based on, you know, the particular categories or topics they're out there marketing for or are you out there using third party tools to kind of track and monitor that? Yeah, it's all third party tools at this stage and it's an interesting step. I feel as though we should go down that path of customizing our own and we could probably do a lot of it with vibe coding, but it might not be perfect. It feels to me, I mean, it feels to me, it's only that stuff's only going to get better. So maybe waiting it a couple of years. It can build really basic, as you guys know, it can build really basic things, but once you want to deviate and control it a little better, it's not so good. And sort of the design, because I'm a designer, I don't really like the styles. It's pretty bland oftentimes. So I feel as though we'll bite the bullet on building our own. At the moment, it's really a few pieces of software that we just purchase the rights to and do it that way. So since you're more of a designer, when you go into a new project for a new customer, do you kind of whiteboard or do you like some static pages, like just designs, or do you just jump in there and start building the site to their needs? It's an interesting thing. So I've changed it dramatically over the years. And the way I started initially was just how when I was employed, that's how they did it. So they always did three concepts for everything. That's just the way they pitched. They said, we'll do three design concepts, didn't matter what it was. And then they'll choose one or cobble together a couple of them and work down from there. I stopped doing that because it created more confusion than anything else and just made things slower. I dropped it just to one design. And for the bigger websites, we'll do wireframes and we'll map it all out. But that's kind of rare. It'll just be a simple understanding of the menu structure, really. So the site map is all we probably need for most sites. And then we get started on the design. So they see just one design that's closely aligned to it. We'll discuss other websites that they like. We won't copy them, but just to get an understanding of their styles and preferences. And we find it's just so much better not confusing them with too many options. It seems sort of counterintuitive, but they seem to be happier with one. I think because their life is easier because they haven't got to decide. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like the watch advertisements in the magazine. If you want to sell watches, you really should have one or two watches, not 20 watches because you're just going to confuse your brand, essentially. So yeah, I like that. Yeah, I like the quote. I think Henry Ford was something like, you can have the Model T in any color you like as long as it's black. Yeah, I love that. Brilliant. Sometimes simple is going to be much better. It's particularly something like that where they're not, they just like we start out. They want to get the job done. They're like, all right, I want to just get out there. I want to get this, get the word out and move forward with it. I do want to ask because you actually sort of brought it up a little bit. SEO and the whole search engine, optimization and marketing and all that kind of stuff within the world of AI, because now this is one of those areas where I'm a little bit sad for some people that are very SEO focused companies because it's so much, it's been owned by Google for so long. And now you're very quickly, literally within periods of months, you're starting to see people switch and they're using AI engines for their searches. I'm starting to see just even non-technical people on a regular basis. I'm starting to see like they'll just go hit, you know, perplexity or chat GPT or something like that and use that for their search instead. So now what are you, how are you, if you are, how are you adjusting or maybe even trying to prepare for what's next as this becomes, obviously it's going to be a different landscape and we're, I don't think anybody necessarily knows exactly what it's going to look like. Yeah, it is really interesting. We had to have some difficult conversations with long-term clients who, when Google and the new tools sort of transformed a lot of things with SEO, everyone's getting less traffic to websites simply because the answer is in platform, whether that be Google or chat GPT, perplexity, whatever you're using, you're getting your answers elsewhere. But the answers are being drawn from everything that's published online on websites. So the goal is to publish quality content that has the potential to surface on all these platforms and all the platforms are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to surface the very best information for whatever someone's having a query about. So the long-term play, it doesn't matter how the tech changes, the long-term play will always be true to that. So producing quality content that answers people's needs, that's closely aligned to your business is the key. It is challenging because you can't measure like you once did. So back in the day, you'd choose half a dozen, whatever it is, a dozen keywords that you want to rank for, Plumber, Melbourne, for example. And so you would track that, you would see the ranking improve and you could show a fancy report and you could see the ranking improved, therefore the traffic improved and therefore the return on investment could be easily measured. But now they're getting their answer on platforms that you can't track a click because there is no click. So it can be challenging. We had a client who won a $140,000 project just recently and he was found on ChatGBT as the very best person in Australia for his field. He only knew where they came from because he was asking the question of them. They were having a large conversation with ChatGBT and they said, hey, who's the very best in Australia? And according to ChatGBT, he was. So that's kind of where it's at, but that's really difficult for people like me to measure. I would never have been able to track that. He had to have the conversation to find that out and realize, hey, the work we did, I did for them and our team did for them, paid off dividends really quickly. That was within a couple of months of working together. Yeah, it's definitely a whole different challenge. And I guess that actually goes back to, again, the customers you're dealing with is, part of it goes back to, yeah, you can generate AI content all day long and do stuff like that. But when you're to get the real valuable content that you want to really help distinguish you from everybody else, that means then you have to invest. In your case, your customers have to invest some time too. They have to be part of generating that content or doing the things to distinguish themselves. How do those conversations go? Is it something they typically are like, OK, yeah, we get it. We're going to have to do part of this or is it more like, no, you guys, you are the tech guys, you guys figure it out. Yeah. So we'll do a lot of the drafting of content for them, but it really is just a draft. But once they've got that better down, the goal is for them to massage in their own unique stories and case studies, examples, everything that only they can bring to the table that I or my team simply wouldn't know. And that's the unique parts that are really important. There's a lot of concern and fear about AI written content not doing very well. But I think it's a little bit of a myth. I don't think AI is going to penalize AI so much. And certainly the websites we're working with, we haven't seen anything like that. What's going to happen is if there's nothing new, it's not going to surface because they're sophisticated and realize this is just all generic content that's published elsewhere. Why should we mention this brand? So yeah, so I think creating using it as a tool to create the first draft, first dirty draft and then working in your own messaging is really important. And the great thing about the content production is you can create really great prompts, really sophisticated prompts to make sure it's on style and brand. It's in the voice and the style that they like. That was always part of the challenge with having a copywriter work on material, because I mean, some of the big companies, they'll have a massive style guide document. So the copywriter would read through it and go, yeah, I get it. Get started on the work. But it will be soon forgotten because it's just so hard to remember all that stuff. But, you know, I so call it remembering a pretty lengthy piece of info. I know we discussed earlier it can get things wrong a little bit, too. But for the most part, it'll it'll keep things on on track and on brand. So that's kind of how we're working it for clients or even. So we had a website recently who had just changed gears from being a business to business solution and a business to consumer. He wanted to drop the business to consumer because our headaches and a whole bunch of other concerns and just less profitable. So I was really great at just reworking, tinkering with his content really fast to remove the B2C nuance in there and then just to tighten up some things super fast and easy and just quickly aligned him his website to where he is right now. Yeah, that does make it easy to pivot as a business, as I found that that it is really about saying, OK, take this and shift the tweak the the the content or the target audience a little bit. It's things like take out these kinds of references or add those kinds of references and it can get that work done very quickly and tends to be pretty thorough about it. Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, so that's the that's the way we're using it mostly for content production for the for the to attract search search engines and and large language models as well. And first drafts and so on. I did speak to another podcast guy who's really heavily involved in the vibe coding. He's almost a side hustle for him. It's probably not a venture I would go down as a service, but you can kind of see where things are headed. It's it's exciting and terrifying, I find. So with the tools, so you mentioned AI and we've talked about GPT, Copilot, things of that. Are you using any specific coding AI tools like CodeWeaver or anything like that within your tool set for building the WordPress sites? No, we don't we don't really have much need for any of that. The developers do the Copilot, Chachapi, it does. So basically what we're mostly doing is taking a bunch of plugins and we're trying to keep them as lean, you know, keep the plugins as minimal as possible because it just makes things easier to deal with. But yeah, they're putting them together and then they're then they're basically troubleshooting most of the time through the through the tools to find the solutions quicker and getting it getting it done. So yeah, it's it's not we don't have really complex websites very often. So yeah, it's more the troubleshooting aspect, which as you guys know, that can that can be a nightmare sometimes. There's most what seems to be the most simple thing might take half a day to deal with, but you just these days you might have it within a prompt or two. Yeah, I know we've also been talking a lot about the SEO pieces of this as well. Kind of want to throw something out there that I've run into over the years as well, the WordPress sites or websites in general, but the CDN is always trying to like off source all that static content to load your pages faster to make your site score higher on Google. What are some of the challenges you've had with dealing with that as well with these pages and that that you're building? Yeah, caching is always been just caching in general, let alone CDNs, but caching in general has always been a bit of a challenge, particularly with the people we're working with who are less tech savvy, because as you know, some of the caches can sometimes be pretty stubborn to clear. So there's that side of it, the browser based on their local PC. But yeah, the CDNs is a great one from security standpoint, security, which is a firewall more than a CDN, but it has a CDN side as well. So when we inherit a website that's really, really old and it's going to be a pain to deal with, we put the firewall on there because it's a simpler solution to get them through till they do a new website. So we did that for a Joomla site, an archaic Joomla site that we took on. The intention was to build them a new site, but he's just delayed on that a little bit. So get them out of trouble with the CDN. So, yeah, everyone's sort of wanting to get the site as fast as they possibly can. The real important thing is the quality of the hosting as well. So when you get a cheap host, it's just not worth it. Get a quality host. It's only a few extra dollars realistically, and it's going to be far more reliable. Usually, sometimes you just get unlucky and get on a bad server. I'm sure you've all had that scenario. Yeah, running into that quite often, and that's a bit of a pain. One other thing I'll touch on with your site. So, I know you probably don't want to give away too many of your tools of your toolbox, but static images or images in general, Adobe is usually pretty good, Gimp, Photoshop. What are some of the more, I guess, current tools that you might be using, especially with AI around to get some of these images up there, refine them and make them smaller and that's what they load faster or are better images for your pages. Yeah, so we ideally get real photos as much as we possibly can, but to optimize them, imageify is really great. It can go through and crunch them really nicely. There's the other one that's free, Smush. We don't use that anymore. That was a few years ago that we were dabbling with that. Just had too many headaches with it, breaking things and so on. So, the Smush system, it's low cost and it does it really well. In terms of stock photos in WordPress, these days you'll see pixels, however you say it, pixels, pixels. For us, it's sometimes a bit of a challenge because particularly for the construction, the style of buildings aren't necessarily the same here in Australia as they might be internationally. So, sometimes it's a bit of a challenge finding suitable images in those circumstances. Now, do you have, I guess that actually just brings up a sort of a random question. So, are your customers, do they tend to be international? They tend to be more Australia based or? Yeah, mostly Australian. We've got a few international, just dealing with a real estate agent who, so it's kind of construction, but not really. He does a bit of development and real estate and so on. So, he's in the UK and got a few steel companies internationally. For some reason, we've done a heap of steel, so building materials, steel companies. I think what happens is people, the advantage of doing what we do, we have our little link in the footer, which is great because people always check out their competitors and so on. And they follow the link and they find our business. So, that's nice. We've only had a couple of people say, we don't want your link in the footer. Most people are really fine with it. Yeah, it seems like that's sort of the, like that's the accepted practice is if you're going to have somebody build your website, then you're going to have to essentially advertise for that company a little bit by saying, hey, this was designed by these guys. If you like it, point it that way. Which I guess it just makes sort of sense. It's like, you figure normally if you find somebody that does any kind of job for you, well, like if you found somebody that did construction for you, well, and like, hey, they built this building, great. You're going to want, you'll refer them on to other people to them. So, I would think the website would be a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, go ahead. Speaking of that, that made me think. So, when you're building these websites for your customers, are you custom building the themes for them or are you just modifying most of the common themes that are already out there? Yeah, it was fully customized for a long time and now we're building on Cadence, which is fantastic. So, it's blocks and so super simple to do really fast. And that's really important because we're going for one design. We need to be able to adapt it fairly quickly, otherwise it'll be a nightmare. So, because we're jumping straight into that design and development process all at once, it just gives us the capability of moving things around fast. So, we're finding it's the best right now. It's fast loading, it's lightweight, it's simple to use. So, when the client takes over the website to edit things and so on, they can do it pretty easily. And they are spruiking their AI version, so you can press a few buttons and it'll try to build a WordPress website for you. It's not great, but they're trying and some people are probably using it for low level websites. We're not, but you can see kind of in the future, maybe it's to a level in which we will start to use some of those tools. They're a pretty big player, they're very popular. So, I think they'll be one of the leaders who get it right from WordPress AI building. So, that's kind of why we went down that path. So, yeah, it's really good. So, anyone can jump in with a little bit of technical know-how and they'll be able to evolve a website. So, following that thought, for those of our viewers in that, if you know, a lot of us have played with WordPress in the past or currently build WordPress sites today. For those watching or listening, what is some advice you can give to those wanting to get into building a WordPress site or maintaining one? What is your advice to them? Yeah, so I would definitely avoid some of the page builders like Elementor or so on, Divi, just because it's heavyweight and it bloats the site and it's completely unnecessary. There was a time back in the day where there was an advantage for it because it's more closely, you see what you get as you're editing it. But these days with Cadence, you see what you get, but it's lightweight. So, it's faster and everything's better. So, oftentimes we're inheriting websites which are built in some sort of page builder and they're always slower loading than they need to be. And doing basic things, if you want to do some sort of style change throughout the site, it's a bit of a nightmare because you've got to go in and edit each page because it's built with this crazy page builder. Yeah, so those sorts of things stay away from those complicated page builders. They might feel enticing because, you know, they've got their advantages. But once you start trying to change things and edit things and you want it to perform well, fast and fast loading would use your experience, you'll run into headaches. So, the stack I would always recommend is Cadence as the theme to build upon. But for SEO, Rank Math, in my opinion, is the best. I know lots of people were using Yoast for a long, long time and still it's still pretty good. But you needed to get the upgrade, the pro version to unlock some of the local SEO and so on. But with Rank Math, it comes straight out of the box, a lot of those features. It also has the AI capabilities to write all your titles and descriptions with a click of a button and does a really good job. So, it'll just work out what's on the page and then write something that's meaningful for the page to the right length and everything like that. So, they're the core things. Security. Wordfence is a free one, which is really good. If it needs a higher level of security, the website firewall, that's a paid for service. What else? In terms of forms, I think Gravity Forms is the best because it just has so many integrations built in. You can buy a higher level and it can integrate into whatever CRM you like pretty much or do whatever you need it to do, take payments, etc. So, they're some of the core stack that we would typically use, but there's always a nuance. There's always something unique in every website, but that's a good starting point. That's excellent. So, I want to thank you so much for your time and for hanging out with us. In the pre-show, I talked a little bit and said that we've never had a bad guest, so I put a lot of pressure on him and yet he just has shined and we continue to have never had a bad guest. I'm pleased. So, this is a great conversation. This was one of those I was hoping to get into some of these things, which we did about having a presence and really talking outside a little bit of the technical side of just a website and what you're getting there and some of the things that you want to do and being consistent and things of that nature. So, this was excellent. I'm sure that a lot of people in the audience would love to have been intrigued by this. What's the best way for them to get a hold of you if they have a construction company or some other where they want to make use of your services? Yeah, sure. So, uplift360.com.au is the website and you can book a meeting directly with me if there's something people want to discuss. I'm happy to chat. There's no obligation with that, but all the social media you would typically find is on the website as well. It's the easiest place to find everything there. Excellent. And we'll make sure we've got links in the show notes for all of that as well. Just in case they don't understand your Aussie accent there a little bit. Okay, sorry. Uplift, let's try it again. The main thing is the website. Uplift360.com.au. Don't forget the AU being Australia. I'm just joking. It's always fun to have. People get caught up on those things sometimes when it's like it's really not that hard. But that being said, I really do appreciate the time. It's been a great conversation. Everybody's listening. Feel free to reach out. Obviously, he's a very accessible guy, great guy to talk to. And so, again, appreciate your time. Thanks for being here. And I'll see you next time. Thanks so much. And we'll sign off and let you get back to your day. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Michael. It's been fantastic. Thanks, Lyd. You have a good one. Take care. And that wraps up our conversation. Now, you may get to see a little bonus material with Wes. Maybe not, depending on how you look at this. But this wraps up our conversations, I guess, with him. Two episodes. Again, as always, I just want to thank Wes for his time. And I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.