Does your Marketing Agency offer Search Engine Optimization services?

Yes we do. However, we usually heavily qualify our clients to make sure they will actually benefit.

What do you mean by "Qualifying Clients," in regards to the question about SEO?

We just want to be sure the client has realistic expectations, budget, and is going to allow us complete control over their brand.

Is there a minimum SEO budget required?

No, but it should be a significant amount. It's about ethics. The SEO Industry is riddled with charlatans' and people promising big dreams for very little money. We know better and just want to be sure our clients do too.

Why do you need complete control over a brand to take an SEO job with them?

SEO is like a symphony. It's not just about putting some keywords on the page and presto. There should be many moving pieces to any given SEO campaign.

What are those "Moving Pieces?"

There are many examples, here's a brief one. You have your money page, you then write a relevant post, connect it to the money page, launch a PPC Campaign with the posts link, and finally acquire some backlinks to connect to the post.

So Social Media Management is a part of it?

Yes it is, but again it's just one part. We need to control the entire brands web presence and connect all the dots as it were to get the results we know we can get. If we see we wont be granted that kind of control we pass on the job.

Do you also Host clients and the Web Sites you build them?

Yes we do. We're WP Engine partners and use the GCP Frame Work/Advanced Network, giving our clients the most elite web performance possible for their site type.

Do you mean to say different types of sites will result differently in terms of preformance?

Yes. You can think of a site as a home. The bigger to Home, the longer it takes to move that home. That's what a site is; like a mobile road show, only these roads are digital. The simpler the faster, but simple is not always best so you sacrifice speed.

Tech SEO and Site Hierarchy Permalinks - Birdie Digital Marketing Agency

Introduction

This case study was done on a (BDMA) Birdie Digital Marketing Agency client brand. Its purpose is to examine Google Indexing issues as they relate to Site Hierarchy, specifically as it relates to permalinks.

Tech SEO Case Study

About Permalinks

TLDs (Top Level Domains,) are not a part of this conversation. A typically misused term, we instead will in its place use the term “root domain”

There are numerous granular topics regarding the permalink category of Tech SEO. You have the technical Flat URL Theory, which states:

A root domain should click depth one and two but never three or more.

Google’s context = users are inconvenienced by having to click too many times in order to finally arrive on the most useful page

Articles should always have a buffer in-between the article extension and the root domain.

In our context, it should be the article category

Lastly you have the actual site hierarchy concern.

Click depth 1 and 2, and how you decide to route everything “parent pages, category pages, etc. etc.” throughout your site therefore distributing Link Equity properly

How to Set Permalinks Correctly

There’s no “one” right way to do this, but for us at BDMA, we almost always go with the category as the click depth 2 buffer in our permalink structures. We have found this to be the most effective way to spread link equity throughout the site as well as make sense of the URLs in a way that actually helps our users. Here’s what you will want to set in WP Admin Permalinks:

Use the Custom Structure Field to set it as yourrootdomain.com plus /%category%/%postname%/

Case Study Details

The Tech Issue We Noticed

Now that we have some of the contextual elements of this case study understood, we will get to the fine details of the actual case.

In this case, we noticed a message from Google about indexing issues. If your not familiar, this notification comes from Google Search Console indexing/pages/Discovered – currently not indexed.

The Notification

Here’s a look at the actual email message they send:

As you can see it’s very straight forward. Time to take the needed actions! Lets go.

What We Discovered in Google Search Counsel

Apparently we’re not perfect always. We discovered for some of the URLs that we had a redundant category that almost perfectly matched the 2nd click depth end destination extension of the URL. This is a problem in Google’s eye’s because you have 2 different click depth that might as well all be covered with one click depth. It’s a redundancy and Google will not index redundancies. Right away we realized that we needed a better broad category that leads to click depth 2 granularity. This is hierarchy.

Here’s an example:

❌ https://ajductcleaning.com/air-duct-cleaning/time-to-get-that-duct-cleaning-done/

✅ https://ajductcleaning.com/cleaning-services/time-to-get-that-duct-cleaning-done/

Here you can clearly see the redundant nature of the 1st URL VS. the logically orientated version of the URL. You will want to think it through and make sense of your click depth 1 extensions. Make sure those extension are complete with the needed meta and that they nicely cover the broad category your covering in the specific click depth 2 topic.

The Last Step

Lastly, we then submitted the new URL VIA Rank Math instant API and in a short time we found the page had finally been indexed.

Do not forget to 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.

We recommend leaving the 301 in place for at least 3 months before you can then if you like put a 410 status code on it and eliminate that old URL all together from Googles index. This concludes our study.

Tech SEO and Site Hierarchy Permalinks

Introduction