#118 SEO-friendly Directories for WordPress ![rw-book-cover](https://wsrv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.wpcafe.show%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F02%2F17131034%2Fwpcafe-podcast-image-sq-.jpg&w=100&h=100) ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Café]] - Full Title: #118 SEO-friendly Directories for WordPress - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b3b2c842-b2da-42cd-a1c7-6be5e7d3f17e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Losing School Website Bid** - Mark Wilkinson shares their experience bidding on a school website project and losing mostly due to price. - They received feedback that content management and photography were factors but price was the biggest issue. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson And a little bit of spec and a little bit of photography, essentially, was what we didn't have. Mostly price, I think. I think it was the price was the biggest factor. So we were more expensive than the one that they went with. So yeah, that was disappointing. That was a bit of a downer, I think, when we finished that week. It wasn't last week, I think it was the week before, wasn't it? Keith Devon Yeah. I think we both said, and I was talking to my friend Nick this morning about it, I actually think that they might have made the right decision because going through that project they didn't Really care about the stuff that we are good at yeah but specifically like the content management side of things they didn't seem to care what that experience was like um they didn't Ask to see it they didn't talk about complaints with their old content management system it was effectively just we want it to look nicer than it does today and they didn't want a new section Mark Wilkinson Which i thought was strange like yeah and that exactly tells me that they don't really want to add content to the site so i do get the feeling that it will be a site that is built content is Added, and it literally doesn't change, or very few things change, like the necessities that need to change, policies, dates, and things, and so forth. Keith Devon If you think about the last school website we did, they're constantly changing it and constantly adding new sections. There's content all the time going on to that. So I think that's the kind of person that we should be working with. Someone that just wants a bit of a brochure where site, we're overkill for that. Our skills and our prices and everything. Mark Wilkinson I do wonder whether ([Time 0:03:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/57c805bd-51dd-4e80-990a-ec4a008660ed)) - **Show Clients WordPress Backend** - Demonstrate WordPress block editor to clients to showcase ease of editing. - This may spark client interest in adding content and extend project scope. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Do wonder whether this particular one, and with other ones as well, is that first of all, what have we learned? We should demo the block editor and the backend of WordPress that we're going to deliver because actually they might be sat there thinking, you know, we don't want to edit the site because It's horrible. Editing websites is terrible and we can't do it because it's all rubbish. We've actually, if you showed them the backend and think, wow, that is really cool and that is really easy to use, think about what we could do now with our website. We could add news and start doing this maybe. So I think even if they're not interested in seeing that, I do think we should demonstrate it because it sets you apart from the rest and it might spark something in the customer that says, Actually, we could go further on this project than we thought we could. ([Time 0:05:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2329c955-4692-4cda-bba2-6c3143b8172f)) - **SEO-friendly Dynamic Landing Pages** - A plugin was built to create unique SEO-friendly URLs for combinations of taxonomy terms on a post type. - This supports indexing of dynamic filtered content and boosts long-tail search traffic. Transcript: Keith Devon Combinations of jobs. So I want a landing page for all my legal jobs in London, or I want a landing page for all my part-time accountancy jobs or something like that. And one of the ways to do that is just to create a page in WordPress. And then if they're using a RecPress product, for instance, we can drop a pre-filtered job listings list on the page specific to that particular query, that particular sector or whatever. And that's where we've done that in the past. But wouldn't it be nice, potentially, to be able to do that for thousands of combinations of terms and taxonomies instantly. So that is what we have built. So one of our main clients specifically asked us to do this and quote for it. And we thought, right, this is the time we're going to have a crack. So we've we've built a plugin um that allows you to you install it you set the post type uh that you want it to be active on you give it a url slug uh that it's going to live at so and as an example It might be browse jobs just jobs or whatever it can be whatever you want it to be houses or exactly um and then what that does is it creates a a list of those post types um with filters down The side so you can choose which taxonomies are displayed and you click on a taxonomy term and then it filters your post type by that term. But then you can keep adding to those. So I can I can click things like jobs in Germany. And then and then on the next once I'm on the German page, I can click part times, part time jobs in Germany. And then I can click legal part time jobs in Germany. You can keep kind of digging down but the key with this that I mean it might not sound very exciting to anybody at this point because you've probably seen that all before uh we use something Called facet wp for instance which lets you uh filter uh queries like this uh in a really really clever beautiful way, but it doesn't create your like pretty URLs. It doesn't change the page title, the meta title and anything like that. So effectively, it's all on one page and it's just query parameters on one page. Whereas our system is creating unique URLs for every combination of terms on the site, which can, in theory, be indexed by Google and hopefully will pick up some of the long tail search Traffic. And that's the theory and some of the practice. ([Time 0:07:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ffd52377-d626-4ac9-831d-b5ab868fb120)) - **Dynamic Titles for SEO Pages** - The plugin dynamically generates H1 and meta titles based on taxonomy terms. - Titles and taxonomy display can be customized to fit client needs and SEO strategies. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Importantly, it's creating a nice, friendly title on the page based on the parameters that you've set so for example in the example that keith gave you might have like the h1 on the page Would be like full time accountancy jobs in germany for example that would be the h1 title and also the meta title as well or you know the page tag, if that makes sense. So all that's dynamically generated and you can set what that title looks like in like a merge string. So you can set the different taxonomy terms that will be populated and what sort of format that will come in. So the client we're working with has got, I think they've gone for location jobs, haven't they? So it's like London jobs in accountancy or in full-time accountancy, something like that. Whereas we thought it was more natural to say like full-time accountancy jobs in London. But all that's settable. You can also set which taxonomies display. ([Time 0:10:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d4fb542c-71a7-4617-aa2f-55caa216d88c)) - **Demoing the Plugin Functionality** - Keith Devon demos the plugin on a local WordPress site showing URL changes and dynamic page titles. - The URLs reflect taxonomy term chains that update page H1 and meta titles to match filtered content. Transcript: Keith Devon But I do want to just demo just for a quick second. Go for it. And I'll try to describe it while I'm going. So I've set up a test WordPress site locally called Acme Jobs. And this is, I'm looking at a jobs page now. So I've got forward slash jobs. And what I've got here is a jobs listing page, filterable using facet WP filters. So this is RecPress. Am I right? This is RecPress. This is like RecPress out of the box before it's been styled. Yeah. So if I click, there's a job category section. If I click on that, it will update the job listings just to show the ones that have been categorized with technology, for example. Then if I click on job types contract, I'll click on that. Now I've got four jobs left. So that works really well. And that's kind of what people expect it to look like from a kind of user's point of view. Mark Wilkinson But the page title hasn't changed. The meta title hasn't changed. Keith Devon We're on a jobs page according to google so the url for this is still forward slash jobs and then question mark and then it's underscore job underscore industry equals technology and Underscore job type blah blah equals contracting so it's we're still yeah like mark said we're still on like a single page here and the page is forward slash jobs. And you can see that the title of the page, the H1 hasn't changed and the meta title hasn't changed. So it's still jobs dash Acme jobs in this case. Browse Jobs version of this over here. And this is key as well, is that you can run both of these systems at the same time. One of the kind of inspirations for this was the Guardian Jobs website. And if you go to the Guardian Jobs website, you'll see there's a Browse and a Search tab. The Search one does what I've just demoed, which is the kind of query string filters. The Browse version does what we've just built, which is these actual URLs to new pages. So I'm on forward slash browse dash jobs. It's the same list of jobs as before. Mark Wilkinson It is important to mention the difference in that if you're on the search job section, you can add multiple terms a single taxonomy. So you could say, show me all of the technology and accountancy jobs, both of which are job categories. Yes. You can't do that in the browse. You can only choose one term within a taxonomy at a time. One from each taxonomy. You'll see that in a second. Yeah. So they do differ in that respect. Keith Devon So I have the same taxonomies. So I've got job categories, job types, and locations. I've got the same list of jobs. But now, whenever I click, for example, on marketing under job categories, I'm going to click on that, we can see a few changes. So the first thing is the URL. So this is a new page. We're now at browse-jobs The H1 on the page has changed to marketing jobs and the meta title has changed to marketing jobs. So that's great, but it's going to be pretty hard to compete for that as a keyword. But what we can do now is we can click on part-time under job types and we've added part-time to the URL. So now we're at slash browse jobs slash marketing slash part-time and our H1 is part-time marketing jobs which is the same as our meta title and we can go one further by clicking on Glasgow Under locations. Now we've got an H1 of part-time marketing jobs in Glasgow. It's got a unique URL with slash browse jobs, slash marketing, slash part-time, slash Glasgow. And the meta title has updated too. So our hope is ([Time 0:13:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ddf7035f-55e5-40b5-9cdd-e2866dfde8dc)) - **Consistent URL Structure for SEO** - The plugin enforces a consistent URL order regardless of selection sequence. - A canonical URL is set to avoid duplicate content issues with SEO. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson So I'm going to point that out anyway. The URL structure always stays the same. So it doesn't matter which order you add them in, they will always be the same order. So in this case, it looks like the order is industry, job type, sorry, category, job type, location. So if I was to add Glasgow first, it would be slash Glasgow. But as soon as I add a category to that, it would be slash marketing slash Glasgow would change. They do work whichever way around you put them. Yeah. But we set a canonical URL on the page that's the correct way. Exactly. Keith Devon So if I take part time out, which is the middle of the three kind of query parameters, as it were, I can just delete it, actually. So now I'm in marketing jobs in Glasgow. And if I click on part time again, it'll go in between marketing and Glasgow again. So the links that are created are always of the same order so that we're not creating loads of different URLs for exactly the same page effectively. And that's one of the things that we were keen to do from an SEO kind of duplicate content point of view. So that seems to work pretty well. Mark Wilkinson Courtney has a quick question. ([Time 0:17:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4c738e9-d313-4a9d-8953-ae88be8f5dc5)) - **Leverage Sitemaps for Crawl Efficiency** - Including the main Browse Jobs page in sitemaps might suffice for Google to discover all subpages. - However, adding generated landing pages to sitemaps could improve crawl efficiency and indexing. Transcript: Keith Devon So sitemaps is something we haven't really dealt with yet. Mark Wilkinson Would it not be enough to just add the Browse Jobs page to the sitemap and then let Google do the rest once it visits that page? As in, tell it that it's there, and then you go and follow the rest of the links to that thing. Keith Devon So this is running on a client site at the moment. That's a very good question. I haven't checked if the Browse Jobs page has been indexed. I've checked if some of our generated URLs have been indexed, and I haven't found one that has been yet. But yeah, that's a very good thing. In theory, Google should be able to get to that Browse Jobs page and then go through all the links itself. It would take a very long time, though. And I think that's maybe where sitemaps are going to help because there's a lot of links to ([Time 0:19:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8f597d3a-fb77-4810-9000-258ee6451848)) - **Customize High-Traffic Landing Pages** - Customize headers or add block editor content for high-traffic landing pages. - Personalization increases relevance and user engagement on SEO landing pages. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson And also, you can use the block editor to sort of add content in that header area so that you could make a paragraph and put some buttons in or something or whatever you wanted to do. So you can, for pages where you know that you've got a bit more traffic to them, because I would anticipate, and again, this is all learning, I would anticipate that although I think in Your example there, there's about 4,000 different combinations of pages, isn't there? Realistically, there's probably going to be 10 to 15 that are really well-served pages in Google for any sort of recruitment agency, I would imagine. And it might be those pages that you want to really go ahead and customize the title and put some content at the top with a paragraph of text explaining what it is, etc. So that availability is built in as well. So hopefully that will help. ([Time 0:21:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1adc37dc-2e2b-41bb-b7c6-10361ec87b06)) - **Programmatic SEO with Taxonomy Chains** - The plugin fits well within the programmatic SEO niche by chaining taxonomy terms into SEO landing pages. - Naming the product is challenging as this approach is niche and not widely known yet. Transcript: Keith Devon I have no idea what to call it. And I don't know is this something that people are already talking about is there terminology for this already that we should tap into uh you know what would people search for if they Were looking for something like this do they even know it like do they even know to look for something like this is this something we're going to have to educate people on rather than capture Searches that are already happening there's all that stuff uh to figure out um yeah i've put a bit of a landing page up but it doesn't the product doesn't have a name and like i said i don't Mark Wilkinson I don't know what words i'm supposed to be using so um that's the next challenge um court this is pretty cool i suppose it would be like work for other industries like elliot richmond said Yeah so that's our our thoughts as well so we and recruitment is is our thing and that's where that's why it was sort of invented if you will but i think it could easily work for house sales Or estate agents so three-bed semi-detached houses in london you know that sort of search type thing that could really work well. Sort of directory sites, I would imagine, would be quite good. Keith Devon And there's probably, possibly WooCommerce. I think e-commerce is a massive potential for e-commerce on this. Why not? Mark Wilkinson But don't know whether WooCommerce already does that. I don't know. I would think it might. You think it might? I've not used WooCommerce for so long. Well, I have, but not properly for an e-commerce store type thing. Yeah. But yeah, there's surely other niches for this as well. And I suppose one of the marketing strategies is instead of trying to sell this as a whatever we call it tool, I've started off by calling it browse content, but I don't like it. Dynamically generated SEO landing pages, whatever. Instead of calling it that, you just call it, you know, this is an ultimate directories plugin, maybe. I don't know. Keith Devon Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I can't remember what Nick said this morning. Nick came up with something I thought was half decent. Mark Wilkinson So if you've got any ideas for a name, we're open to it because we literally are a bit clueless on what to call it. Yeah, directory landing pages pro. I don't know. It's just, I don't know, because that's kind of what it is. I don't know, it's tricky. It's tricky. But yeah. It doesn't really get across landing pages. It does more than a landing page. You can create a landing page in WordPress anyway, so that doesn't really tell you what it does. Keith Devon Yeah, and there's other landing page plugins that are nothing like this. Mark Wilkinson It is creating landing pages, but that's not really the benefit of it. The benefit is it's creating them all for you with nice headings, nice titles, friendly URLs. Keith Devon So the name for this in a generic sense is programmatic SEO, I discovered. Right. But most programmatic SEO that I found was like you take a spreadsheet of data and you create a template that ingests, you know, and some functions that ingest that spreadsheet and spit Out a whole load of pages. Like this is similar, but it's different. It's based on the taxonomies that you've already got. And it's, you know, relevant to a specific post type and it's, and it's, it's very direct. This is very directory driven, uh, focused. Mark Wilkinson It's almost like do you have a content type in wordpress that is heavily categorized with multiple taxonomies yeah whatever that might be and if the answer to that is yes do you want to Generate landing pages for every combination of those taxonomy terms automatically in SEO friendly versions. There you are, I've just nailed it. Keith Devon Sold it. Right. I have to watch the recording back to remember what you just said. But yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. We'll see. ([Time 0:22:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2a0a9b71-cf6c-4ab9-ba88-fe7c924648bc)) - **Entering Independent School Market** - Mark and Keith reflect on building two independent school websites and gaining inquiries from word-of-mouth. - Independent schools offer good budgets and pleasant teams but face strong competition in the market. Transcript: Mark Wilkinson Yeah. What's next? Next up is positioning ourselves in the independent school market. Yeah. So for those who listen regularly, you'll know we've built two independent school websites in the last couple of years. It doesn't sound that spectacular when you put it like that, does it, really? Wow, two websites. And they've been really successful, both for the clients, for us. We've enjoyed them. They've been really lovely teams to work with. And we've since had about three more inquiries for independent well two for independent school websites one for just a what do you call it a non-independent website a state school maybe Is the word and um all off the back of the two we've we've we've built they've literally seen the name on the bottom of the page and thought, who built this? Clicked it and then got in touch with us. So I think it's a really nice niche for us to get into. I agree. I think there's various reasons for that. I was a teacher, so there's a little bit of a connection there, which is nice. The people that you're working with are really nice people, lovely teams. Everyone we've spoke to, we've literally come off the course and thought, wow, they were really nice. We could really work with them. Yeah, absolutely. They have a good budget because they're independent schools, which means they have a marketing team because they literally need to sell their school to parents to come and pay for their Children to go. Yeah, they're more of a business than state schools. Exactly. So they have a model there that requires their website to be successful in that sense. So they have a budget to put towards it, which is nice. And the other one is that the websites themselves, they are not that complicated in that they are essentially brochure sites with a bit of, what's the word? I don't know. The odd thing that's a bit different and a bit challenging, but they fit really well within our skill set. So we feel that when we get those sorts of proposals through, it's like, yeah, we can really deliver that to a really good standard for them. There's not an awful lot there that's going to worry us totally. Some things, calendars is usually one that comes into it, which pushes the boundaries a little bit. Again, not out of the question, though, which is nice. So yeah, I think they're a really good fit. But the problem is it's a hugely competitive market. It really is. You've got several players, big players, who are just geared out to hammering out hundreds of school websites every year. Keith Devon And annoyingly, they're quite good-looking websites. I don't know what they're like behind the scenes. It could be an absolute mess. But when you look at the portfolios of these companies, they're like, oh, they're good. Mark Wilkinson There's a couple in particular, isn't there? You can see, let's say there's 10 providers. There's some at the bottom end, you can tell straight away. There's some in the middle that look all right. And then there's like one or two at the very top end that produce some really, really good sites. Obviously, we don't know what they're charging for those sites. And I don't think they're using – well, no, one of them is using WordPress, aren't they? Remember, one of them is using WordPress. But again, we don't know what they provide to the customer. Do they get to edit everything? I don't know. Keith Devon Yeah, is it Debbie behind the scenes, for example? Yeah. Mark Wilkinson We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. So there's a lot of competition there, but, you know, there's a lot of schools, so. Yeah, and then it's just like, where do we position ourselves in that market? Keith Devon Because we actually went in pretty low price-wise for us on the last one, and we were still 50% more expensive than the person that was. Mark Wilkinson But they weren't an independent school, don't forget. They weren't, you're correct. That's true. That's true. And that's why I think all they really looked at was the price in a way because they will have been so restricted on budget. Like, we can't just spend 50% more. Like, it's impossible. Whereas an independent school would have much more flexibility to say, no, we've chatted with this team. We really like them. What they're going to deliver is excellent. We think it's worth. And then they'd have more scope to say, yeah, let's go with it. Keith Devon Yep. Yeah, so maybe, it's still hard to know. We've got a really small sample size of schools that we've worked with, so it's difficult to say, yeah, schools want this or want that or they care about this or that yet. And I think we've got some inkling. ([Time 0:26:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/35ecf33e-d95b-4374-89ce-b03b8b32818a)) - **Pricing Challenges in School Market** - Pricing in niche markets remains a difficult balance between winning work and delivering quality. - Limited inquiry volume limits experimentation with pricing strategies for school websites. Transcript: Keith Devon Science but i think the problem for us is that we don't have the numbers of inquiries coming in where we can experiment. It's like you get one or two of these inquiries a year and you really, really want to land them. You can't start fiddling around with, oh, well, we'll just try really high pricing with these guys and just see what happens. Well, you lost that and you haven't really learned anything from it. Mark Wilkinson I think it's hard to be the you know these guys really know what they're doing so we're going to be the more expensive one not that we don't know what we're doing because we do uh it's just If you're up against school website provider a and b and c who are building 100 of these a year then yeah like they kind of know what they're doing they've got the background proof that They know what they're doing so we've got to be different to suck to some out of them and i think we can be i really think we can be it's the same with recruitment you know how many how many People hate the recruitment website provider or website that they've got and we can we can deliver something that's much better for them i think we can probably do the same with these But yeah something to look into. Something ([Time 0:32:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8867f797-0d17-4b18-a6c5-c906d22e9ba7))