SEO Analysis #1 – Rotten Tomatoes
– Hey, so in SEO Analysis Number One, I'm going to analyze Rotten Tomatoes, and this is a new training series that I'm going to be publishing
on my YouTube channel hopefully every single week,
and so I'm just gonna be analyzing different
websites and then giving you practical information that you can use for your own campaigns, and I
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access to this course. Alright, so let's jump in
to SEO Analysis Number One of Rotten Tomatoes. (upbeat music) Okay, guys, so I am going
to start this audit, and don't mind my raspy voice, 'cause I haven't been feeling too great, but the first website that I want to do a complete analysis on is Rotten Tomatoes, and my real goal of this
is so that you can learn based on kinda my thought
process that goes behind trying to optimize a site of this nature.
And I'm gonna do many
different types of websites, so that means I'm gonna do
not just huge monster websites like Rotten Tomatoes, but
I'll also do some more medium to even small sized
websites, so if you want me to audit your website publicly
I can do that as well, and one thing that's really
interesting you'll notice is the thought process that goes
behind trying to optimize a website like Rotten Tomatoes compared to trying to optimize
a micro or smaller website is gonna be totally and
radically different.
So when you're working with a website that's already successful,
from an SEO perspective, you have to be a lot more careful with the actions that you take, and so in this case, we
know that Rotten Tomatoes is a very successful
website, and so to prove that what we'll do is we'll go to Ahrefs, and you'll see I already
completed a search for them, and according to Ahrefs, their
Ahrefs rank is around 2,600. I don't really care a
whole lot about that. What I really care about is looking at their organic keywords and we'll go ahead and filter this to see,
so what you'll notice is they get a ton of branded searches, and something that's
actually interesting is they get branded plus the
keyword target as well. So this is a very, very
big trust signal for them. And so, Google's gonna see this and say, "Oh, wow, people are really
interested in seeing what "Rotten Tomatoes thinks about
these particular keywords." That's the way that
Google is looking at it.
And so this is a very,
very important thing, so if you're creating
content and you're creating keyword targeted pages,
you would want to see these types of search queries, 'cause this is a huge trust signal. And so that's the first
thing, and you know, getting branded searches in
general is a huge trust signal, and so the way that you
get branded searches is unfortunately, there is no easy way. The only way to get branded searches is through adding a ton of value, and that's exactly what
Rotten Tomatoes does and has been doing for a very long time, and so they're very deserving
of these branded searches.
So then the next thing I would do is I'd want to look at their current keywords that are not branded, so
their non-branded keywords and see if there are any
opportunities where they can increase the amount of
long tail search traffic going to these pages, so what I would do is I would go to this position filter and I would do from 11,
and what this is gonna do, it's gonna show us all of the keywords that they're currently
on the second page for, and so what you'd want to do is you'd want to try to
optimize these pages more so that you can push these
keywords to the first page.
So, and either, it may be the process of adding more content to the page. That's usually the best bet, but the other thing you could do is you can actually drive more backlinks to these specific landing pages, so let's take a look at this particular landing page. So you'll notice that if you analyze Rotten Tomatoes' website, you're gonna notice that
they do a lot of things really, really well from
the SEO perspective, so first of all, they know how
to optimize their title tags, which is the most basic element of SEO, but the other thing they do really well, they really focus on hammering
their target keyword per page so in this case, this
page is about nothing but Ricky and Morton Season
Three, not anything else. And so what you'll see is
they use a combination of different media types, and
this increases the dwell time on each page on the
website, which as a result is going to increase the trust.
So they have five total videos here, and this is really great because what happens
when you click on this, you're actually gonna
stay on the page here. You're not gonna leave the page, and so it just opens a Lightbox so that the user stays on this actual page and that's really, really important from the SEO perspective
because you don't want the users to be leaving the website. You want them to dwell on this page and dwell on the website in general for as long as possible, so it's a really strong trust signal,
so in addition to that, you've got 18 different photos.
So someone who's really
interested in this, they may want to look at these photos, and of course, it's gonna
open with the Lightbox as well and then the other thing
that they do pretty well, which, you know, if I was doing the SEO for this particular website, I would probably get a
little more aggressive with the text because
they don't really have, I mean, this is literally
just about one sentence about this season and, of course, there's some additional content down here explaining each episode,
the challenge is when you go here, now we've just
gone onto another page, this is no longer the page
that they're targeting and that's okay if someone is searching for that specific episode but I would try to keep all this isolated on the one page so they
can really dominate for it.
So that's the one big change
that I would probably make, is add a little more meat to
this page as far as content and, of course, you know, you're gonna have all the
user generated content here from the people that do these reviews and so that's certainly gonna be helpful but if this is a page that isn't performing particularly well,
relative to the other pages, then it would probably be a good idea just to add just a little
more meat to this page and that should be more than enough to push it to the first
page and if it's not, then that's an indication
that maybe it needs more backlink equity going to this page.
So what we'll do is we'll
go ahead and look at how this page is actually performing
from a link perspective. So you'll see that they do have, they do have links from
pretty strong websites, like Vice and Looper, so they are getting the backlinks they probably need but what you'd wanna do
is you'd wanna actually, you actually wanna compare this keyword relative to their website. What we wanna do is we go right into the key ranks explorer
and what you wanna see is, you know, how is Rotten Tomatoes doing relative to the competition? And so we look at this and
it looks like the top ranking results here have a
decent amount of backlinks but these ones don't really have a ton.
So this is an indication that, you know, they can easily push
up onto the first page, if they just increase the
amount of content on the page and maybe even acquired some
more backlinks to this page because this is pretty weak overall. Now, of course, these (chuckles), these particular domains
are very, very strong but this one here, Watch
Rick and Morty Season Three, this is an exact match domain, or at least a partial match domain, so it's getting some
added benefits for that. So they can certainly pass it because Rotten Tomatoes has
way more authority than this website so if they did
focus their effort on this page, then they should definitely
be able to pass him and then definitely pass
these Dailymotion videos, because video content, obviously, it's very hard to beat a
page like Rotten Tomatoes where they have a lot of text, a lot different types of media, so they should be able to beat this and then these Amazon, you know, Amazon's really hard to beat but they can certainly be
beat if you have a page that is more content rich.
So, like I said, I'd go
through all these keywords where their website is
ranking on the second page and I would try to optimize these pages a little more aggressively to try to bump these pages to the first page because I know this would
be the quickest win possible for a website that's
already doing really well from an SEO perspective, so, you know, going from position 14
to maybe position eight for a keyword that gets (chuckles) over a million searches, is a
pretty substantial improvement and so that could be a huge increase in long tail traffic and just organic search traffic in general, so, and imagine doing that on multiple pages, you're gonna see a huge
compounding effect by doing that and so this is one of
my favorite things to do when I'm trying to figure out
how I can drive more traffic to a website that is already
getting a lot of traffic.
So the next thing I really like to do, is I like to go under pages and then best by link section, and obviously for a website like this, you know, you have to very careful with the types of internal links
that you add to the website because it can really disrupt
the organic search performance and that's one important
point that I wanna mention is that when you're working with websites that are already performing well from an organic search perspective, you need to be very, very careful with the changes that you make and, you know, it's the classic quote, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So you have to be very, very careful and one thing that I like to do when I'm working with websites that are already doing really well, is I just make daily
small incremental changes and then I test it and
I see what's going on. So what you can do is
you can make a change, annotate that in Google Analytics and then see what happens
after that change.
You need to give most changes at least a couple weeks,
maybe even a couple months, to really see the impact of that but when you're working with
a website like Rotten Tomatoes for example or something
that gets a ton of traffic, they're also gonna have
a very high crawl rate, which means Google crawls
their website very frequently, which means changes will
probably be reflected a lot faster compared to a website that doesn't get a lot of traffic. So you can usually see the impact of whatever your action
was fairly quickly. So, anyway, what I like
to do in this section is I like to see the pages
that have the most backlinks and the reason for that
is because these pages can be leveraged to drive
authority to other pages on the website that
aren't performing well. So what I would do is I would
just look at these pages and see, you know, is
there an opportunity for me to possibly maybe inject a
link on a page like this? And, you know, maybe a page that they have that's relevant to Batman or Superman isn't ranking very well so what you can do is you can find an
opportunity on this page where you can inject an internal link to whatever that page is
that's not performing as well and so this is a very,
very powerful method.
I actually call this the
authority transfer technique and this is actually something I do whenever I publish a new piece of content, I immediately look for existing pages that already have
established link authority and then I put an
internal link on that page and drive that back to the new post. So right away out of the gate you know that that post is gonna
perform a lot better because it's already getting
some authority and link equity going to it and so this
is a really quick way to get some quick wins and, you know, these first two tactics I've showed you, which, you know, try to boost the pages that are on the second page, try to push them up to the first page, and then also leveraging
pages that already have a lot of authority and backlink equity, just these two methods
alone are a great way to increase organic search traffic without a ton of effort.
What I do is I go to the
broken backlinks section and this is a way for you
to reclaim lost link equity. And so you would just go through all these opportunities here and you would see if these
backlinks are actually broken and so in some cases it
looks like, you know, these are just gonna be 301
redirects or in some cases this is just gonna be a
broken link in general. So we'll actually just go
ahead and just copy this and then we'll see if this
link is actually broken. So this links to the Wikipedia
page for Rotten Tomatoes but this is the one we
really care about here. It looks like this is a 404 error. So what you'd want to do is you'd want to, in the case of Wikipedia, you
could just get this changed by reaching out to the editor, but if this was a different website, you know, a website with
an editorial process, you'd wanna outreach and just ask them if they can fix the backlink. And so going through this list
is one of the fastest ways for you to recapture lost link equity and this is really one of
my favorite techniques, especially when you're working with a website that has so many backlinks, like Rotten Tomatoes,
this is a really quick way for you to recapture a
lot of that authority, which will as a result probably increase your organic search traffic because the more authority your website has, the better it's going to perform.
So then the next thing I would do is I would go to this broken links section under outgoing links and the reason is it's just a bad user experience if someone clicks through on
one of these external links and it takes them to a 404 page. So we'll go ahead and see if
this is an actual 404 page. Maybe we'll search for
something like this. So it looks like this is linking out to, so, yeah, so this page
is officially a 404 page.
So what you'd wanna do
is you would just wanna go through all these opportunities here and clean up all these
broken external links because it really is a bad user experience when you're linking out to
these different websites and they're totally dead or 404 errors. So anything that is going
to negatively impact user experience on the
website is something that needs to be fixed
because that's something that Google really cares about as well. So if Google's crawling
the site and they're seeing that so many of these outbound links are going to broken resources, that's gonna decrease
the trust a little bit and so it's just a good general practice to go through and fix all of
these broken external links.
So that's pretty much it for using Ahrefs to kind of analyze what's going on. One other thing you can do
is you can actually go ahead and analyze their competition as well. And so to find their competition, you just need to go down
here and what you can do is you can actually just copy these URLs, so what we'll do is
we'll actually go up here and we'll use their
Ahrefs content gap tool and this a really, really awesome tool because you're gonna be
able to see the domains that you compete with and
you're gonna be able to see what keywords you're not
currently ranking for relative to the competitors, so, we're gonna go ahead and just copy maybe three of these people here. Maybe AMC because Amazon's too general, so I think I'm just gonna
go ahead and skip that. Okay, so what this tool's gonna do is it's gonna show you all of the keywords that these three
competitors are ranking for but Rotten Tomatoes is not ranking for and so if I was Rotten Tomatoes, I'd go through this and see, hey, okay, look at all these different keywords that we're not currently ranking for.
So like right away a few, you know, some of these are gonna
be branded keywords and movies near me, this
could be something that Rotten Tomatoes would wanna rank for but I feel like some
of these other things, such as AMC Walking Dead, this could be something
that Rotten Tomatoes would wanna rank for or Walking Dead cast, or Denzel Washington movies, these are all different types of keywords that would be a good thing for
Rotten Tomatoes to go after. So what you would wanna
do is you'd wanna copy all these keywords and then figure out how you're going to attack them. So that's pretty much it for using Ahrefs to kind of figure out, you know, where are the quick wins
for this particular website.
So the next thing I would do, is I would go into Siteliner
and see if there are any duplicate content issues,
any type of content issues that could be negatively
affecting the site and then obviously, you know, without having access to their backend, it's really hard to kind of see what's going on from the crawl rates, and indexing, and things like that. You can get a lot of intel just
by using some of these tools so this is a good tool and
then also using Pingdom. So we got Pingdom, so what we wanna do basically is just see, you know, how fast the website's loading and it looks like it's gonna
be awhile before I can do that and then we'll also go to
Google's mobile friendly test. This is a good thing to check as well because you wanna make sure the website's performing well mobile, especially a website like Rotten Tomatoes, where probably most of its users are gonna be coming from mobile. I'm gonna go ahead and go
to the actual tool here and then we'll go ahead and run the test.
Okay, so this quickly finished and their website is
definitely mobile friendly. So while we wait for some of these analysis tools to finish (chuckles), we can look at the website in general. So it's unfair for a lot of reasons, websites like Rotten Tomatoes, that have a ton of authority, they can get away with things that smaller websites probably wouldn't be able to get away with. So, for example, having this ad block above the fold and like really the first thing that you see on the page, is something that Google has said countless times that is frowned upon and actually it's something that Google's Panda algorithm can target, with having ads above the fold, but, of course, Google
is not going to penalize a website like Rotten
Tomatoes that probably brings a lot of ad revenue, so. There are some unfair advantages when it comes to SEO, this is one of them. You're not gonna be treated
the same but that is okay.
But outside of that, Rotten Tomatoes, it's really
fascinating to see their design because the new trend for design is to have these full width designs and Rotten Tomatoes actually sticks with the old school blocked out design and it's very effective for them and it keeps you really
focused on the content itself, which is what really matters. So the other big thing
that I probably want to dive deeper into, which I'm not gonna be able to go too deep into it in this video (chuckles) but it would be their site architecture and, you know, they
have a lot going on here and so it would take me at least a week to try to figure out what's going on here and try to map out this site architecture. But I'm sure there is a
thought process behind a lot of these menu items that they have and so obviously without having, you know, their in-house information and having access to their strategy, it's very hard for me to know what they're trying to achieve but if I was looking at this from a totally outside perspective, I would try to first draw out how I think the architecture should be and then I would look at
their existing architecture and see where we can make
some slight adjustments to hopefully increase
organic search traffic and, like I said before,
when you're making these types of changes
on a website like this, you need to be really, really careful so, for example, I had a client that sold house plans and
they really are dominating organic search for anything
related to house plans but they were using some
really old school methods.
So they had, you know, footer links at the bottom of their website with keyword rich internal anchors and those were site
wide and so, obviously, I felt very uncomfortable about that because that's kind of
an old school practice but the problem is that it was working and so (chuckles) I had to be very careful with maneuvering that issue. So what I did is I would
change one internal link and make it so it only
showed up on the homepage as opposed to site wide and then I'd see the impact of doing that and, you know, sometimes there would be an increase on organic search traffic, other times there would be a decrease but the good news is when
you make small changes, you can always go back and re-implement whatever you made a change to.
So it's just really, really important to track what you're
doing because otherwise you'll be making all
these different changes and then you're gonna have no idea what actually made the traffic fluctuate in a positive or negative direction and so keep track of
every change that you make so that you can see the
impact of what you did. Okay, so I'm back here on Siteliner and what I would do is, obviously, you know, this is, you need to do the premium version for a website like Rotten Tomatoes but just for this example, so you go into duplicate content and you wanna see if there are any issues here regarding that and, you know, there probably aren't gonna be too many severe issues because they've really (chuckles) been in this game for a long time, so I doubt they have
much duplicate content that's gonna cause any issues.
But if we go ahead and look, let's see, we have browse/cf-dvd-streaming-all, so Siteliner claims
that it's matching this but I think all that's
really happening here is it's just matching
some of the menu items and stuff like that, so, there's not gonna be any issues here. Rotten Tomatoes is not copying pages, every single page on their website pretty much has unique content. So that's an important lesson as well, is you've heard me say this many times but every single page on your website should have completely unique content. You should never, you know, use a boiler template and
just take certain pieces of content and put it on
each page of your website.
You should always try to
make every page unique, especially pages that you're
trying to rank in Google for a particular keyword phrase. Because if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, every single page that they create is gonna be completely unique for whatever that topic is. So definitely follow what they do because they do it very, very well and go on your own and you can
analyze some of their pages because, like I said, they do some things that are so incredibly smart that I feel like more
people should be doing and the biggest thing
that I really find amazing about their strategy is the video content and the different forms of media. Their pages are really, really effective and this is a great template for building out keyword targeted pages. So definitely take notes on what they do and even try to emulate some
of the things that they do because they really, they get it, when it comes down to it and, like I said, you know, there are gonna be some situations where maybe they should beef up the content a little bit for those pages that aren't ranking well but for the most part, obviously, based on the traffic that they get, they know what they're doing.
So now Pingdom is officially done and it looks like their
website loading speed is actually a little slow and, you know, this can happen with a website that is as big as Rotten Tomatoes, but still, you know, this is
not an ideal loading speed and so this would be something you'd definitely want to tackle because it can have a huge impact if you take this, you know, from a 4.75 to maybe like a 2.75, that's gonna have a monumental impact on the user experience on the website. You know, this is a high priority issue that they would wanna tackle. And one thing I recommend you do when you're doing these
site loading speeds audits, is run this test five to 10 times and then average out the
average loading speed.
That way you can get kind of an idea of what the average loading speed is compared to, you know, just doing it once and it's gonna be the
loading speed in New York but the loading speed
for a San Jose location or Australia's gonna be totally different. So that's why it's
important to get the average just so you know where you really stand with your website loading speed. Okay, guys, thank you so much for watching this SEO analysis. If you liked this video, please give it a big thumb's up and leave a comment below if you have any questions whatsoever and, like I said at the
beginning of the video we are running a giveaway so make sure you subscribe,
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access to Gotch SEO Academy.
Thanks again for watching and I will see you in the next video and hopefully my voice will sound a lot better in the next video. Thanks again for watching..
