Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about what minimal viable SEO is. We know what the MVP is. That's the minimal viable product. Minimal viable SEO is just the basics of what you need to win with SEO. Neil, you want to go first?

Neil Patel: The basic thing is you need to make sure your URL structure is right. It's really hard to fix later on. You don't want to have a ton of 301 redirects, so make sure you fix your URLs. What I mean by that is clean, simple URLs, no extraneous characters, not too many sub-folders, no dates in them. It should ideally be words over numbers, and you should be using dashes instead of underscores.

Eric Siu: Also, you have to think about your titles. Titles, that's the first thing they see when they look at a search result and also your meta descriptions, too. The meta description, even though it's not a direct SEO correlation, it does help with your click-through rate, so it kind of is an indirect correlation. You have your title, direct correlation, and then you have your meta description. Get those right. Get those right across the board. Even if you have a really big site, you want to make sure that you give your devs the right template to roll out across the site. That way, you get that part taken care of, and you can move on to the more important things.

Neil Patel: With SEO, make sure that whenever you're starting off, you have clean code. I see a lot of people, when they're starting off their website, they're like, "Oh, we're not going to make it SEO-friendly." That's okay, but if your code is messy and then you got to fix that later on, it's a pain in the butt, and the easiest way to keep simple, clean code is by using a CMS, because with CMS, you can just start adjusting everything at once versus having to go back in manually and adjust things one by one.

Eric Siu: Then the tool of choice or the plugin that Neil and I always recommend is the Yoast SEO plugin. This actually ties into my next point, having breadcrumbs on your site. Yoast can include breadcrumbs, and there are other plugins that can do that, as well, if you're using ... I'm talking about this in the context of WordPress. No matter what, make sure that you have some breadcrumbs in there. Ideally, if you have blog posts, you have internal links, as well, linking to related posts because that's the same thing as eCommerce sites, too. You want to have internal links that help spiders get across your site, see other pages, crawl [inaudible 00:02:31] so that you can get more organic traffic over time.

Neil Patel: I think that's pretty much it for the basic SEO stuff. One last thing for me is use unique title and description tags, meta tags, on every single page because if they're duplicate, they won't do as well. Don't worry about having [inaudible 00:02:46] optimized. You can always fix that later on.

Eric Siu: The final thing, and this is a bit more controversial, there are some star SEOs that have talked about this in the past, but when you have your blog on your sub-domain, you are subject to losing around 5-10% of traffic. I've seen this happen in the past, but here's the thing. I remember a long time ago when I was at Treehouse, our site was built on rails, and the blog was built on ... Well, it was hosted by WP Engine. Obviously, it's a PHP thing. Whenever we tried to put it on a sub-domain, the site would just crash, and the blog would crash and we'd have to keep resetting it so it became a pain in the butt. Our devs had to deprioritize it and then, overall, we had to put the blog on the sub-domain, but if you can, take it off the sub-domain. There are some case studies out there, especially on Moz that you can read about. I've certainly seen the same thing.
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