Ep 063 – Face-Bag with Guest Host Rebecca Swanner

Theory of Content is back this week. Joshua Unseth is joined yet again by Rebecca Swanner of Let’s Eat Cake for a mailbag filled episode!

Joshua and Rebecca begin by hashing out the best breakfast food. It quickly turns into a fast food debate, and the differences between the Los Angeles and Florida dining experience soon become clear. 

There’s a lot of Mailbag covered today so get ready! Rebecca and Joshua begin by taking a question about website speed. Joshua dishes about an upcoming Mediavine project named Trellis. Although not available yet, it soon will be in open beta and ready to optimize your site speed. Also, we hope to get more information on this service very soon, so stay tuned in the coming months for an episode covering even more ways to use Trellis on your blog. This topic leads to your hosts examining how important site speed is to SEO, because as Rebecca points out, there are many high ranking website with terrible speeds. 

The next question from mailbag is about keyword competition. One listener struggled with ranking due to a poorly designed website that had a backlink coming from the New York Times. This can be frustrating because it is apparent the site is not ranking well because of its content. Joshua lends advice on how to use the competitor website to your advantage, and analyze how it is doing so well. In this specific case, the listener is starting a travel blog, so Rebecca and Joshua create hypothetical travel blog posts to beat out the competitor.

Lastly, your hosts take a question about SEO traffic drops. While there are ways to improve SEO rankings after a drop, Joshua stresses the importance of paying attention to the seasonal nature of some keywords. These types of keywords have both pros and cons. While they can guarantee traffic to your site at certain times of the year, how do you maintain traffic in the off-season periods? That is what Rebecca and Joshua examine at the end of this episode. 

Thank you so much for joining us at Theory of Content this week. Be on the lookout for new episodes coming soon with even more new co-hosts, and in the meantime make sure to catch our last few episodes if you haven’t already.

Mailbag

===========================

Dear Theory of Content,

I need a little help. This isn’t for the podcast or the facebook page. I’m looking for a website troubleshooting tech referral. 

My site ain’t broke, but it’s got flat tires I don’t know how to repair.  I’m looking for someone to comb through the code to repair my mobile site speed.

I rebuilt my art site using Elementor/Astra over the Fall and Winter, and launched in February. I pulled archived posts in from 2005-2019. I did it myself, so perhaps therein lies the trouble?

I’ve reduced plugins to 16, tried using a CDN (made things worse, so I removed it), WP Rocket to cache the site, Imagify to serve images in next generation formats, Lazy Loading offscreen images, added breadcrumbs, disabled emojis, alt tagged images, and used keyword research to write better posts and titles. Traffic is improving ever so slowly. (My goal, like so many others, is to qualify for Mediavine some day.)

In google, I consistently get a red score of 12-19 out of 100 on mobile site speed.  https://www.belindadelpesco.com

The mystery to me is that the list of recommendations to increase load time from Google Site Speed Test, GTMetrix and Pingdom includes all the stuff I’ve already done.  They recommend Lazy Loading (showing images that are already lazy loading), serving images in next gen formats (examples cited are already re-formatted), deploying a cache (I’m using one, and I clear