Best SEO Plugins For Your Membership Website
Find the perfect SEO plugins for your membership website. Boost search rankings, optimize member content, and drive more conversions today.
In this video, we dive into the essential SEO plugins that can elevate your membership website’s visibility and performance. Discover how these powerful tools can optimize your content, improve site speed, and enhance user experience. Whether you’re just starting or looking to boost your existing site, our expert insights will guide you to the best choices for your needs.
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 139. In this episode, we’re going to look at the best SEO, SEO plugins for your membership or community website. Additionally, we will be examining the rapidly evolving landscape of SEO in 2025. There’s been some dramatic changes. In the second half of the show, we’ll examine those changes and offer you some advice and insight. Then, in the second half, we’ll be looking at some of the best SEO plugins, including a couple that we recommend and some that we don’t. We’ll be explaining it all. I’ve got my great co-host with me, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:00:55.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hey, folks. Kurt von Ahnen here. I own a company called Manana Nomas. We also work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic.
[00:01:03.060] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. I also want to take the opportunity, folks, to say that we’ve got a great course at a great offer price that shows you how to build a website on WordPress a membership website from beginning to end. It’s actually done by Kirk himself. It’s normally around $50, but if you go to this particular page, you can get it at half price, around $29. Additionally, when you purchase the course, you will receive 50% off the first year of the WP Tonic Startup Hosting Plan, which normally retails for $420, but is available at half price. It’s a fabulous offer, the course and the hosting package. You can get both by visiting WP-Tonic.com/deals. Com/deals. And a load of other freebies and great stuff from the sponsors. What more could you ask for? So, Kirek, let’s go straight into it. So if you’re doing one of your great consultations and somebody brought up the subject of SEO, what would be your initial response to the inquiry?
[00:02:39.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
The initial response to the inquiry would probably be a lot like that sigh sound I just made. Seo, I’ll be honest, I have to be super transparent here. Seo is not naturally one of my strengths. I fall into that category where the question is, ‘Do you have decent content?’ Do you do content on a regular basis? Do you follow the white-hat approach to SEO? Good content for people adds value. However, there’s also all this other SEO work on the back-end. So, for me, I want to make sure that my client comes to the table with decent content, all that stuff. However, when it comes to more advanced SEO tasks, I have team members who assist me in running certain programs. And I know that you’re also very active in SEO on the WordPress side. So I go mostly with, Do you have content? Do you have stuff? Do you have stuff to work with? And then from there, it’s like, what are some base tools and best practices? I’ve got to be honest, Jonathan, when I talk to other providers in the space, I hear a lot of things that make me question, is that legit?
[00:03:51.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
Is that real? Will that be penalized later by the gods at Google? The idea that we are all in this together and we’re subject to the wins and losses of this giant organization, as far as where we rank. And I know you’re going to bring it up later, but that latest change with the 100-page thing, that to me is like, If you invested a bunch of money in these tools and you were following a certain strategy, one that I probably don’t advise very well, that could have very well taken a lot of steam out of your plan. And so you always have to be on your toes. I go with content first. Do you have the content? Are you committed to making good content? Then, if the answers are yes, we have a strategy we can employ using best practices.
[00:04:40.620] – Jonathan Denwood
I think Kirk is referring to a change that occurred this week, where Google will no longer provide data for over 100 websites and their positions. They’re only going to show the top 10. It does affect a number of quasar professional SEO tools, such as Aref, Rush, or C’est not sure. Zamra, or there are about four or five of these professional-level tools. I’m not that surprised, actually. I’ve got to delve into it myself in a little bit more detail, but I have to say I’m not that surprised. Now, I think when it comes to SEO, obviously, Google still has a tremendous dominance over search, but over a year ago, they introduced AI overviews, and I can see it in my own traffic, which impressions, impressions are articles or content that you have published your website is being indexed, is being seen by Google, has gone up dramatically for the WP tonic website. The impressions have dramatically increased. Unfortunately, the clicks, i. E. Links that take people to the WP tonic website have diminished by a third, even though the impressions have gone up doubled. Double, I’ve increased because I produce a lot of content, and Kirk knows I put a lot of effort into it.
[00:06:40.040] – Jonathan Denwood
However, people are reporting that this is happening all over the internet, and it’s clear that many are using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini when searching on Google. However, I believe the primary factor affecting search volume has been Google’s AI overviews. It has had a dramatic effect. In that way, it’s linked to AI, but it’s really mostly linked to the way Google has used AI overviews. Also, this is a fluid state area. They were giving a lot, and they still are, a lot of real estate to forums like Reddit and other similar but a lot of attention to read it. There are techniques that you can employ, which is what is called top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. I used to do, still do, but I’m trying to get my mind set, so I really concentrate more on the bottom funnel. And what that really means is that the top of the funnel is very general content that answers very broad questions. Middle gets more Pacific and niche, and the bottom of the funnel is where people are really looking for a Pacific product or looking at two Pacific products, and they’re very close to actually buying something.
[00:08:33.160] – Jonathan Denwood
That is the classical way of explaining bottom of funnel. But it’s a dramatically changing climate. Also, you’ve got the large learning models, and basically, when they’re recommending products, they’re basically looking at the landscape of links, of mentions on third-party websites. Are you producing a lot of video? Are you on the major social media platforms? Do you do video? Do you Are you podcasting? Are there a lot of people recommending your product? They’re trying to judge where your brand and your product is positioned in the market. And this can seem quite more sophisticated than Google, but actually there’s a lot of information from the SEO community that in some ways It is much more difficult to judge how the large learning models are making their judgment call. But it’s also quite evident in a lot of cases, it’s more simplistic than traditional SEO I know. It’s a bit of a contradiction there. Am I making any sense here, Kurt?
[00:10:07.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
You are, and I just want to drive the listeners and viewers back to something that you said in your answer or your description there, Jonathan, and that was this idea of the difference between impressions and clicks. Because I talk to general people a lot. Say you go to an entrepreneur meet up or you go somewhere and someone’s like, Oh, our impressions are going through the roof, and they seem happy about it. But I don’t think people have made the recognition yet that impressions doesn’t equate to any viable business metric, really. It doesn’t equate to conversions. It doesn’t equate to your point to the clicks. I mean, we need the impressions, I guess, to lead to a click, right? But it seems like the impressions metric has just vanished off of the strong consideration. Whereas 15 years ago, if you saw, I’ve got so many impressions on a Facebook post, you’d be excited. I’ve got so many impressions on this blog post. You’d be like, That’s great. And now it’s like you see these impressions and you’re like, Well, that could be from anything crawling my website.
[00:11:13.340] – Jonathan Denwood
I think They do matter to some extent, but they are impressions, and impressions on all social media is a quasar vanity metric, but it does still have some importance in brand building, but that very tight connection of if you get more impressions, you will get more clicks has been broken. Now, obviously, it was a lot more complicated than that because You could get a lot of people come to your website or come to some of the major pages of your website, but because through bad copy, through bad page layout, a poor speed, a number of different elements, you might not be able to convert them. Or the other factor, which is not properly taken into account, if you’re at top of funnel, a lot of these people might not be really at the position to actually buy your product, your service, e-commerce, what we offer at WP Tonic. There was no guarantee that they in the buying journey at the right stage. A lot of them would read the article or they would hit a web page and they would bounce straight off. It’s a difficult one, but it’s definitely made things much more complicated.
[00:12:51.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I think one of the other factors, and I might be wrong here, is that at the present moment, especially some content expert, an SEO expert, that brought out this term AEO, called answer engine optimization. I’m not totally sure about it. I think you should still produce content, but I think I produce a lot of video content. I try and mix it with the articles. Try and do podcasts like this one, and I’ve been going on other people’s podcasts. That’s a good external link building methodology, but that will take time. I’m doing a couple of other things. Obviously, I think traditional SEO has a place, but I think at this clear connection between you get this volume of traffic, you will get this volume of purchases has been broken to some extent. What do you reckon?
[00:14:15.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree with the phrase broken. I think more people are more people are confused than ever compared to people that seem to have a grasp of the concept just years ago, just a few years ago. I’m curious, if you were to compare today’s AI to an old method of SEO, what would you describe as the old method of SEO?
[00:14:42.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I would say it was keyword stuffing, concentrating on high volume keywords. Obviously, you needed domain authority. Domain authority is a large metrics of how old the domain is, have a person owned a domain? How long have they been giving signals to Google that they’re a legitimate company or individual business? That gave you a domain value. If you tried to compete on certain keywords with other domains that had a much larger external link print and had higher domain authority and some other metrics, you probably couldn’t really compete. That’s been turning in its head in some ways because with some basic SEO techniques, you can now be more competitive to very established websites which normally you wouldn’t stand a chance because the large learning models don’t really care about domain authority. It’s not something they’re concerned about, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. They’re not concerned about domain authority. That’s one of the strange factors, is that if they don’t seem to utilize that, are they using external link authority? That’s a difficult one. I think if it’s high quality links, probably. But I think Google had been utilizing AI for much longer than people realize, because the last five to six years, they had been decreasing their reliance on external link quality as a way of determining a page quality or website quality.
[00:16:56.540] – Jonathan Denwood
The reason they were doing that, Kurt, was that they knew that there was a whole industry that was utilizing what is called Gray Hat, SEO or Black Hat. I call it Gray Hat. To some degree, it’s still there, and it’s called Parasite SEO. But they were using techniques to build external link structures that were full in Google, because Google has to use technology, and they do have a team of human assessors. It might be very large, but the internet is enormous. But they knew that the results, they were being fulled by these networks. They were using AI and large language models to actually determine the actual language of articles and using that technology to make an assessment on the quality. They were diminishing the reliance on external links.
[00:18:03.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it was funny because as you were talking, I was thinking way back, like ’95, ’96, ’97. I remember there would be footers, and footers, it would be like a blue footer and then a bunch of blue words in the blue footer. It was all the keyword stuff in the bottom, right? And then that fated away. And then people went to like, backlinks or link farms or directory pages that listed categories of things, right? And then that fated away. And now it seems like It’s much more based upon, I think, the quality and the structure of your content and the way that they’re using AI to analyze that more effectively. But then there’s also SEO tools that help elevate beyond that. Is that a way to say things in a way that makes sense?
[00:18:48.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, in a way. But I think even the high-end, ARF, Rush, Moss, they’re the three biggies that I know I think they’re becoming less relevant. I think they know it as well. But I think looking at the competition, looking what they’ve written, I look at a particular subject I might write, and I look at the competition, and I look at something called the skyscraper. Basically, I look at the three leading articles or the five leading articles. I look at what are the particular topics, what might be missing. There was a guy called Brian Dean that produced this concept of the skyscraper. Basically, I just utilize AI and editing, and I try and produce an article that’s better in content. And then I mix it up with video as well. Another factor that probably is going to become something I’ve been looking at, but I have really adopted is placing what is called micro web apps on the page, little applications that can give more information about the topic that you’re writing about. There’s a number of AI tools. Loverboy is one of them, and there’s about half a dozen of them. I’ll probably look at that to build these mini application on particular content pages.
[00:20:35.000] – Jonathan Denwood
But there’s one tool that I do utilize, but I’ll be talking about that in the second half, and that gives you a general idea on how competitive a particular subject is. And I don’t choose very, very competitive terms because my domain authority, but I’m not even sure about that because linked to my remark that the large learning models don’t seem to take domain authority so as an important indicator now.
[00:21:13.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, this is interesting to me, Jonathan, because as you know, in my own personal space, I have tried to increase my local SEO, my local searchability. I’ve begun playing with some different tools, and I went into some AI tools. I like Grok, so I asked Grok. I said, Hey, who would you recommend a website in my town? And it made three recommendations, and I wasn’t one of them. And then I said, Well, so why didn’t you recommend Mañana Nomás? Then it came up, said, Oh, Mañana Nomás is this great company. It listed all these great, wonderful things about Mañana Nomás. But then it said, I didn’t recommend Mañana Nomás because of X, Y, Z, and this company, this, and this company, that. I was like, Okay. Then I said, so-Are you prepared to give one or two of the reasons that it gave you that you wouldn’t recommend, or you were off to keep that to yourself? Well, so this is the interesting part. When I first did this exercise, I then asked Grok. I said, How did you make the determination to recommend those three and not Maniama Nomas. And it said the primary recommendation source was, it said it was three things.
[00:22:23.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
And the first thing was search engine recommendations. Search. So this is in the middle of everyone saying, well, SEO is dead. How many times we see SEO is dead? And I’m like, well, SEO is obviously not dead because the large learning model, the LLM just said it was the primary way that it made recommendations. And then I said, Well, how can I make my… This is when I first started this journey. How can I make my site more attractive to large learning models in searches? And it came up with stuff. It said, You don’t list your hometown in your X listing. So Mañana No Mas, it didn’t say Hutchinson, Kansas. It said the same thing. It said, So change your X profile, change your Facebook profile, change your YouTube profile, change your LinkedIn profile. Make sure you mention your town in all of your profiles. I said, Okay, well, that makes sense. Because I had been entertaining national business for so long, I hadn’t focused on local. And so it said, Do these recommendations. I did that. Then it said, If you’re part of the chamber of commerce, you should take your chamber of commerce headshot picture, profile picture, whatever, and put that on the home page of your website and reference your local chamber of commerce.
[00:23:43.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m part of the chamber of commerce. So that made total sense. I put that on the home page, and then I recheck. And so about every month or so, I go back in and I ask Rock, and I ask ChatGPT, and I ask perplexity, who would you recommend locally? And slowly but surely, I’m starting to climb up and become some of the recommendations. But I’ve had to work really hard at it. But when people say SEO is dead, I’m like, Well, it’s obviously not dead.
[00:24:08.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, obviously, we’re not going to… I don’t know if this is the right show to discuss it. We had a show on another podcast we both do together where we discussed local SEO quite a bit. I’ll make sure the link to that show that we did last week is in the show notes. But local SEO is a bit different to regional and national. But the things it was recommending to you is good advice because it would be the same advice I would give you around local SEO if I was trying to rank for a particular local area. So I agree everything they were telling you.
[00:24:50.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it was interesting to me that LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, according to the large learning models, those were all websites of authority. Those were all things where they said, These are the spots, right? And it didn’t even mention local business directories. It went straight for-They have been some…
[00:25:12.000] – Jonathan Denwood
It depends on the industry, really, Kurt, They’ve been implanted in a lot of areas by the social media platforms, but they’re not totally… It does really depend on industry to industry. I think this is a good place for us to stop for the first half. When we come back for the second half, we actually will be looking at some of the WordPress plugins that you can utilize on your membership website and give our honest feedback of what me and Kirk thinks of them. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks, we’ve had a feast, a feast of knowledge in the first half. Hopefully, I’ve not left you two behind. If you’ve got any questions, I’ve got a great free resource where you can put them. If you have got questions, obviously, you can leave them in the comments if you’re watching this show on YouTube, or we’ve got another great free way to answer any questions that might come in your mind about this episode. That’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook group. It’s totally free. Go to Facebook, put in the Membership Show Facebook group, and it will come up and you can join for free.
[00:26:27.920] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a great resource. Totally free. You got any questions, you can put them, and we will attempt to answer them for you. Let’s go and look at some of these plugins. I would say the Big Daddy, the big daddy, the big gorilla in SEO still is, is Yoast SEO, the free and the pro version. Before I put my comments, what are your views on Yoast?
[00:27:00.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
This might not go over very well. Using it seems easy, but that’s the problem, I think, with it, is that too many people see these things and they go, Oh, it’s easy. And then Yost, especially with green light, yellow light, red light, right? Everyone’s chasing these green lights. I actually did some technical writing for a client, and I consider myself a pretty decent writer. I don’t need AI to get the inspiration. I can write. And so I wrote something. Then it was like, well, now we need to conform it to this SEO tool. And I got to tell you, chasing the green lights with something you’ve already written, that is a real task. And what we had happened was I was real happy with the piece. And then we started changing this, and then we changed the title, and then we changed the buy-line, and then we changed the H2s. Then we changed the… Jonathan, by the time we were done, the voice of the product was not… It wasn’t cohesive. It wasn’t my voice. It certainly wasn’t my voice. And I felt like we were trying to make something other than a human happy.
[00:28:08.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
It didn’t seem like a quality informative piece anymore. It seemed cobbled together to implement some tooling that to me, the effect of SEO should be that you write something for someone in your audience and they should enjoy it. And I don’t feel that… I think the overuse of took the human enjoyment out of what the content was.
[00:28:35.380] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they encourage that with their green, amber, and red night system, which is game humanisation, and encourages people to try and get a total green. I think having a particular keyword, that’s why I look at a particular titles, and then I find a particular main title, a subject title. I check it for how competitive it would be, and I might manipulate it a little bit, but the key phrase will be in the title, and the meta description is important. I think having some keywords in the H2s is important as well, but don’t overdo it. Don’t attempt to get an article by using Yost that you get total green because it would drive you bonkers, basically.
[00:29:42.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
I did not enjoy the experience.
[00:29:44.530] – Jonathan Denwood
No, It’s a bit… And you shouldn’t do it, and it won’t help anyway. Basically, they also do things around redirection, other back-end things that are pretty ugly. I don’t rate it as a plugin to be quite truthful. I would never recommend anybody to use it. The free, the pro, I think is a total waste of money. It has a load of add-ons that I just don’t think it’s the best. I think it dominated the market. The people that founded the company sold it a couple of years ago. They got out just at the right moment. I think they saw the writing on the wall, and I just wouldn’t recommend it now. I actually think around some of the things it does around the back-end and to the database and around redirection, it could be damaging It’s challenging, actually, but that’s my opinion.
[00:30:48.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
I come at it from the consumer perspective, and that is, it’s like these Squarespace ads, Hey, have a website up in 10 minutes and be in business. We know that that’s false. I feel that way. It’s like that with this. It’s installed it. It’s easy. All you have to do is follow the lights. It’s like, no, it’s not that easy. I found it very complicated, actually, to get traction with it, especially using it for a client.
[00:31:16.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s just really the title, the meta description, some of the H2s, having some structure and making sure that you answer some of the that you look at some of the articles and you write out a title layout where you can answer certain sections. It’s really important now at the top to answer the main question in a summary right at the top, or put a video, mix it with video, mix it with a summary, have some frequently asked question section, and make sure that you answer the question at the top, the key question, and don’t flannel it out too much. I think as long as you keep to those basic concepts, you’re going to be reasonably okay. You really got to invest in some powerful SEO tools to move it. I have, but I chose to buy those tools, and you know I use a number of tools, and I spend a lot of time on this. It’s been really painful over the last eight months. I’ve just plodded along. I’ve I’ve seen a decline. It’s been very painful, but I’ve also learned and adapted, but it’s been painful for everybody in this sector. On to the next one, the All Wean One, AIO SEO, it’s free and pro.
[00:32:53.880] – Jonathan Denwood
I despise this even more than Yoast. It’s a God forsaken plugin that you please don’t install the free and for God’s sake, don’t buy their pro version. No, the Yoast, the pros, 180 a year, that’s That was the price when I did my research on this over the weekend. The all-in-one SEO, they got a free version, but the basic then is 99, and then they go up to 199, and then free 99, and it’s got a army of add-ons. It’s installed in WooCommerce, and it really will f your website up big time. Some of these add-ons will slow your website to treacle. They conflict with other major plugins. It is a nightmare, in my opinion. The company behind it, I despise, are And please don’t use it. But that’s my opinion, folks. That’s my opinion. I would not recommend it.
[00:34:10.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
My critique might be a little less toxic than yours. I’ve used the free version almost successfully, almost successfully on the free version. Where I have experienced issues was looking at a pre-existing client’s website We could not get the page speed working right. We could get the performance out of it. And we start auditing the plugins, and they have every add-on in there that you could imagine. I’m like, How in the world are there 10 things in here for all-in-one SEO.
[00:34:47.760] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s ridiculous.
[00:34:49.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
As we deactivated the all-in-one SEO plugins, the performance of the site began to increase. Of course, clearing the cache with each change. We saw that this had been bogging down the website tremendously. Is there a conflicting plugin that caused that? Is there this? I mean, everyone’s going to say, Well, what if it was this? What if it was that? But here’s what I’m here to tell you. When we turned off the all-in-one SEO add-ons, the site began to behave more like a regular site.
[00:35:20.200] – Jonathan Denwood
You do not need to have 10 plus add-ons on the SEO plugin. Other people will have a different opinion. They will attack me. I I don’t believe it. I see no reason for this madness at all.
[00:35:36.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Like I said, my own personal experience, I have used the free version of All in SEO successfully. It’s worked, we’ve put it in, hasn’t locked up the website, and then results vary. It depends on the work you put into it. Jonathan already said this takes time, takes dedication, research, all of this to make these SEO tools work. So when it comes down to which tool is the best, I personally struggle because I think there’s so much to do in the space as far as the labor goes with these tools.
[00:36:13.980] – Jonathan Denwood
On to the next one. That also has an add-on model, but it’s nowhere as bad, in my opinion, as all-in-one. That’s Rank Math. It’s also better price in the pro. I’m not sure if they do a free version. I presume they do. But they got a pro for 699 business at 2099 Agency, 499 paid annually. It’s okay, actually. It’s not the one I’m going to recommend. They’ve got a very good YouTube channel and also the website. They’ve got a ton of written resources, tutorials, and it’s good content, actually. They’ve spent a lot of time on their educational content, and a lot of it is good. They’ve got a really strong YouTube channel, and they’ve got some good content on there. Obviously, there’s no shortage of SEO tutorial content on the internet, but a lot of it… This is aimed at the beginner-intermediate. I find a lot of the SEO content on the AREF YouTube channel, or Rush, or Majestic, or Moss. A lot of it’s high-end. When I’m listening to some of the leaders, they all tend to use AREF, but they only use about three particular elements of AREF. It’s got about 100 different reference points, but most people only use 2-3.
[00:37:49.740] – Jonathan Denwood
The three that you’re using can differ, but they only use three clear metrics, even when they’re doing consultation for clients or running in SEO campaigns. I wasn’t object to somebody using it. Also, I don’t think I’ve been involved in somebody using it on live website, so I can’t tell if it slows the website. I would hope it doesn’t have the effects of Yoast or the other one we talked about. I don’t think Yoast slows. I just think It encourages awful SEO and a total time waste. It also does bad back-end things to your redirects and that. They had a tremendous security floor in it as well, which came up a couple of years ago, and they suppressed it for over a year, not telling people that they knew they had a major security floor, and they suppressed it. I I haven’t got much time for Yost to be quite truthful about it. But Rank Math, I think of the other two that we’ve talked about, I think Rank Math is a lot better. What do you reckon?
[00:39:13.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
The thing that drew me to Rank Math, if we go back in the time machine, there was a time where I was somewhat addicted to WordPress meetups. I was going to a ton of WordPress meetups, and that and post status and the WordPress slack. And for a while there, a few years ago, Rank Math was just the darling of the people in that space. And so as somebody that is not an SEO expert, coming into these spaces working with peers, not clients, but with peers, people in the space doing what I do, running an agency. There was just for a while, two, three years ago, Rank Math was just the number one recommendation from everybody. I mean, it was just It was the cream of the crop. It was really rising to the top. And that got me interested in trying it. And I have used Rank Math a little bit and have no complaints, like zero complaints about it. Again, results vary. It depends on the work you put into it. And I don’t think I’m an expert in SEO on my personal projects. The stuff that we do for clients, I have someone else on my team that manages the SEO side of it if we sell SEO services.
[00:40:25.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, you do. There we go. On to the one I use. I use it on the WP Tonic website. I use it on a couple of other websites that I own, and I’ve got no hesitation in recommending it to you, and that’s SEO Press. It has your Facebook posts or your Twitter posts or your LinkedIn. It will normally take the feature post image, but you can set it up with a separate image, and it will… If Facebook, it will use that. And it’s got some other on the pro version. It’s 49 year for one site license. A five site license is 59, and unlimited is 149. I think these are good value, logical and fair pricing. It doesn’t affect the speed. It doesn’t do odd things to the index file. It doesn’t do odd redirects. It doesn’t slow your site to tree call. It doesn’t try and install a dozen add-ons. Why for SEO plugin, you need to install half a dozen plugins, God knows. It just does the job. I’ve been really happy with it. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:41:57.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
The feature that you had pointed out to me is a big draw because let’s just think about some of the social sharing tools. It’s like Instagram pictures are squares and Facebook pictures are 16 by 9, YouTube, thumbs are different sizes. The idea that you can have different elements for different places that it gets shared, I think-I don’t think it does that, to be honest.
[00:42:27.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I might be wrong. I think it will just allow you to choose one image that will be different to the feature image.
[00:42:35.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, well, then I take back everything I said. I’ll just go with you.
[00:42:39.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but I’m not sure about that. But I did I had the misfortune to choose all in one for that feature, but then I found out all the other baggage you got with it, and I’ve just stayed with this. I think there are social media plugins that will allow you to do the things that you… I think Brian Jackson’s social media plugin is the one I would recommend highly for that. I can’t remember the name of the plugin, actually. Yeah, I used to use-I’m not sure if he sold it, actually. I don’t think he did. I think that and his optimization page speed plugin, they still have, and I quite like his social media plugin.
[00:43:26.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
I used to use a social media sharing tool called Sprout Social, It would do. It would resize your images based on the platform it was going to go to. It was really cool. But man, talk about an expensive tool. I haven’t found one since that does that and doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars.
[00:43:44.180] – Jonathan Denwood
If I’m right about Brian Jackson, I will put it in the show notes. I need to check that out because I always recommend him, Brian, because he’s a great friend of the show and he’s a really decent guy. Seo tools. I think Google Analytics, really powerful tool. There are some… I should have listed them. There are some plugins that will link to Google Analytics, and in the front page, they will give you a panel and give you the most important elements. That’s how I use it because it had an upgrade over a year ago, and it’s got a lot- Before. It’s got even worse than it was before, I think. I just use Google Search Console and it gives me the fundamental data that I’m looking for, and it’s free. You got to set it up when you got a new customer on the website and they haven’t set up, and you got to have a Gmail address. But after it’s set up, it gives you some really good data, and it’s free, and it’s not the beast of Google Analytics. And be quite truthful, unless you got a very large website or e-commerce, it’s probably not worth the effort to be truthful about it, but people would disagree with me.
[00:45:26.360] – Jonathan Denwood
One, a paid tool that I paid for my itself, and it was recommended by Brian Jackson to me, and I’ve had it for over five, six years now, is KW Finder. It’s from Mangoos Tools. It’s not ridiculously priced, but it’s not the cheapest either. Basic is 49, premium, 69, agency, 129. I think it’s actually a little bit more expensive more expensive than that. I don’t know why, but I think I’m paying for the year a couple of hundred dollars. Basically, you can put in a keyword phrase, up to 80 characters, and it will give you a list of websites that are ranking for that key phrase. It will give you a domain difficulty score. You got to know roughly what your domain is. There’s some free tools that are there. Aref will tell you, but there’s some free tools that can tell you the domain authority anyway. If it’s very high, the competitive ranking, I don’t bother. I aim for medium to low. It does mean the traffic that will be generated will be low as well. But I write quite a few articles. But like what we said in the first half, everything’s up imploded anyway, so a lot of the metrics that you’re utilizing don’t apply.
[00:47:05.580] – Jonathan Denwood
The last thing is AREF. Now, obviously, you’ve got Roche and you’ve got Moss. I’ve found that most of the SEO experts that I respect use AREF. It’s not going to look great. The prices are ridiculous, though. I’ve got an account, I shut it down because I wanted to buy some other different tools. I might go back to it, but I just was using one-tenth of it. But if you really want a professional tool off the basket out there… But obviously, we just had the announcement from Google that they’re only going to show the 10 website. This will affect all these tools quite drastically. It starts the light. The problem with AREF is it’s not the cheapest, even at the lowest thing. And I wouldn’t say they cripple it, but they do cut down on the functionality quite brutally, and so does the competition. So the light starts 129 a month, the standard 249 in advance, 449. So unless you’re a a real SEO agency or you’ve got a main… It’s really important for your business, you’re not going to pay those type of prices. So that’s all I got to say. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:48:43.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
The pricing is what drove me away from it with the AREFs. To your point, I think you need at least the standard, because when you look at what’s included, you just get so much more functionality with the standard, but then you’re at $2. 49 a month, and that’s for one user. And according to their pricing, if you want to add users, it’s add five more users at $60 a month each. That just turns into crazy money, crazy money. And I Maybe I’m being a little too transparent on this particular episode. I’m not going to dive into it full-time. And so I’m not going to spend that money for something I might spend half an hour, 40 minutes a day on. It just seems like a lot of money to spend for the results that I may or may not receive. Again, results vary with the effort put in.
[00:49:38.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think- So just being honest, I mean, I’m the guy that could hook up to Google Analytics install Site Kit as my plugin and just get some basic exposure and try to make some educated decisions.
[00:49:52.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I’m more of the mindset of what you mentioned at the very beginning, and that’s varying the content. Like I’m really big on, I take a podcast, I take the transcript from the podcast, I get a summary done, I make sure I got some keywords in my title and my whatever, I add the original video, the summary based on the transcript, and I think to myself, hopefully that’s enough organic material from varied sources that it’s going to be treated like a legitimate piece of content.
[00:50:22.940] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll give a little tip before we wrap it up. Internal links is important. There I’ve got some plugins. I forgot the one I use, and I do use it religiously. I don’t check it as much as I should because you’re supposed to edit them, but I just haven’t got the time. But I think having the internal link structure, there’s the concept of categories and silos. You have a main page and you have silo pages around certain topics. It can get quite complicated. But I think mixing out, giving them signals that you are a expert or you are talking about a subject. Podcasting, that’s what WP tonic does. Wordpress, membership, videos, written content, going on other people’s podcasts, posting on LinkedIn, posting on Facebook, posting on giving links to the search engine and the large learning models that you are regularly talking about the subject. Having a brand. We sell hosting, Boutique Hosting institutions. I’m trying to give all the signals I can that it’s a legit business and we are what we say we are.
[00:51:56.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
From this episode, and maybe I should I apologize in advance, I’m putting you on the spot. But from this episode, from a listener and a viewer standpoint, what’s the first step to SEO, Jonathan? Is it listening to everything we said here? Is it trying to find an SEO expert that’s not going to bank to disrupt you. And if you already have gone down the path and have an SEO expert, you want to audit the results. You want to be like, are they actually doing what an SEO expert should be doing? Are you leveraging your internal links? Are Are you auditing that for efficiency? There’s so much that goes on with SEO that I feel it’s such a large topic. That’s why I hesitate to call myself an expert. It’s like, I know what I’m doing, but I’m not going to call myself the expert. I’m going to have someone on my team that focuses on that solely because I think it’s that important of a job.
[00:52:48.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s a difficult one. I think it’s very difficult to hire somebody at the present moment because the whole area is in such a flux. I predict that the HubSpot have been very controversial. Like I say, it was HubSpot, their podcast, and they had the HubSpot conference recently, and they’ve been hammered. Hubspot has been absolutely hammered over the last year. It was one of the top websites when it came to search over a number of articles, but they had a very broad article publishing landscape. They just published articles because they got traffic about any digital subject. Google’s looking now for expertise for non-AI content that proves that you know what you’re talking about, because otherwise, they They’re just going to go to Reddit. If they can’t see anything, they’re just going to find a Reddit thread and put that at the top of search, or they go to YouTube. But YouTube, there’s a AI slot, but they’re pushing back on that because they want to see a real human being on there. But it is in flux. This will calm down in the next year, my prediction. The digital marketing industry will find ways to manipulate the large learning model results.
[00:54:26.220] – Jonathan Denwood
They will become more more expert on that and the results will be more clear-cut. The problem is that as this happens, I think there’s a level of naive trust in the recommendations that AI are giving to people, and I’m not talking about them making mistakes. It’s a black box in a way, and you don’t know really What has influenced them to recommend a certain product? As the market has become more sophisticated in manipulating those results, people’s conference, conference, conference, will diminish. I might be totally wrong here, but I don’t think I am. So it’s going to be interesting times, but I think there’s a honeymoon period that we’re in that people, I’ve got this recommendation from the large learning model. But as it becomes more that is manipulated by very sophisticated digital marketers, I think your confidence- Confidence? Yeah, sorry, I’m a lot of it, is going to diminish quite rapidly. What do you think? Or do you think I’m just talking gibberish? Well, in some ways, I have been talking gibberish I can’t pronounce. Suddenly, I can’t pronounce a word, can I?
[00:56:05.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I sound like a hypocrite because I just told everybody that I’ve been working with LLMs to try to figure out my own- That was correct.
[00:56:11.820] – Jonathan Denwood
I think what they were saying to you is about… It I’m giving you the crux of traditional local SEO.
[00:56:18.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I’ve implemented some of it, and I think some of it has helped.
[00:56:25.560] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m talking about recommendations around products, services.
[00:56:29.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I can’t help, but Jonathan, I go back to the idea of, does your content drive you as an anchor in your space? And I just find that when we work with clients, so many people are lacking in content. They haven’t done the work. They haven’t put in the reps, and they want results without having done the work or put in the reps. It’s It’s like talking to somebody who is obese and eats like crud, talking about how if they could just lose that 20 pounds, it’s like, well, do something. To me, it’s the same in business. It’s they want the results, but they haven’t put in the work. And I think that SEO is an interesting conversation, but it only becomes interesting to the people that have the content and have done the work and can leverage it to establish their authority and get the eyes to their Yeah, but you’re totally right.
[00:57:33.140] – Jonathan Denwood
But the thing I want to point out, SEO is a very long term. You said to hire somebody, if they’re going to help you produce content and do a review of the website, you’re going to have to sign a contract for six months to a year, at least. It might take eight months before you see any real… They should produce a monthly report. It shouldn’t be war and peace. You’re not going to read it anyway. They should be able to give you. But the problem is the normal metrics that they would utilize is all up in the air now. So it’s a difficult… But all the platforms, I think I’m a member of a couple well-respected private Facebook groups that got a lot of Facebook agencies. That’s all up in the air. That’s internal. Some people are reporting great results with Facebook, others, they get a great result, and then it just falls off the cliff. Google AdWords, I don’t know what the situation there, but with AI snippets and AI overviews. Obviously, they plan to have product placement in the AI overviews. But the problem with that, that causes a bit of a conflict.
[00:58:59.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you really going to say to me that they’re going to recommend separate products in the written AI overview than the products they’re listing on the right? I don’t think so, do you? Or am I being too much of a cynic?
[00:59:14.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think money speaks volumes.
[00:59:17.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Pardon?
[00:59:17.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
Money does a lot of talking.
[00:59:19.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m a bit cynical that you’re going to see that. I think that’s a bit of a problem. Then you got YouTube advertising. Something I might look at because Facebook is so expensive and it’s internal, but they’re dealing with a load of AI-generated YouTube slop. They’ve been totally swamped. YouTube is trying to fight back because if it’s really poor, AI-generated content, I tell them I don’t want to see that channel anymore, as I’ve had enough of it. Because A lot of the main creators on YouTube have been complaining because they’re making a lot less money, Kurt, from YouTube adverts because they rely on clicks, on views, and their views have been going down because any video that’s generating or any channel that’s generating a lot of views, you’re getting these AI slot creators, and they’re just hitting those channels channels hard. It’s a very interesting time in the digital landscape in general, Kurt.
[01:00:44.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. I’m interested in seeing how the change from 100 pages to 10 pages works, because I think it’s going to impact the big players significantly. They were using detailed, long reports to filter things down, and now the amount of data they were working with is substantially reduced.
[01:01:07.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So, Kirk, what’s the best place for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[01:01:14.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m still active on LinkedIn. I’m there almost every day doing something. So, on LinkedIn, I’m the only Kurt von Annen, which makes it easy. And then Manana Nomas for business. If they’re interested in getting in touch, simply visit manananomas.com, click the button, and we’ll initiate a conversation.
[01:01:30.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I want to point out that if you’re listening to this podcast, we also have a Facebook group. I do a fantastic weekly newsletter. I haven’t been doing that for the past couple of months because I’ve had a lot on my plate, but I’ve started it up again. It’s specifically designed for membership and WordPress, and it’s a great resource. We got the Facebook group. We got the newsletter, which you can sign up for free on the WP Tonic YouTube channel and WP Tonic website. We also have a YouTube channel, where I’m publishing a number of videos. We have a ton of free resources for you if you’re looking to build a membership website. But I have one other request to ask you: if you’re listening to this podcast on your phone, on Spotify, or on iTunes, it’s really easy to leave a review, good, bad, or indifferent. Both Kirek and I would be very appreciative if you could leave a review, as it really helps showcase the podcast to a lot of new, potential listeners and viewers. So if you could do that, both Kurt and would be very appreciative. We will be back next week with a topic that will help you build a successful membership community website and make it a success for both you and your family.
[01:02:50.720] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ll be back soon, folks. Bye.
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