There are a lot of interviews where you leave the conversation feeling energized but overwhelmed. Talking with Nat Miletic was the opposite: clear, grounded, insightful. The kind of conversation that immediately makes you want to open your own website and start fixing things.
I invited Nat on for a Kinsta Talk because he’s been doing SEO and WordPress development since 2007. His agency, Clio Websites, is trusted by dozens of businesses and agencies, and what stood out to me right away was how fluently Nat can translate the technical side of SEO into practical steps.
Here are my biggest takeaways from our conversation, plus a full replay if you want to dig in.
1. Your Website Needs a Refresh Every 3 Years
There’s no fixed rule, but three years is a good benchmark. You don’t always need a total rebuild, but Nat recommends refreshing the design, UX, and performance around that timeline. Especially now, where user expectations and tech stacks evolve quickly.
2. AI Has Impacted SEO More Than Web Dev
Nat made a great point I hadn’t heard before: while everyone is talking about AI replacing developers, the real disruption is happening in SEO. Content creation, auditing, and strategic planning are increasingly being supported (or rushed) by AI tools. That means the fundamentals matter more than ever.
3. EEAT is Old News, But Now It Helps with LLMs Too
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—EEAT—has been around for a while, especially in YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) niches like health and finance. But now it’s also becoming useful for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Getting listed in authoritative directories, showcasing credentials, and creating high-quality author profiles can help improve your chances of showing up in AI-generated answers.
4. Your Online Presence is Bigger Than SEO
Modern SEO isn’t just about your website. Nat emphasized that LLMs and Google’s AI Overviews are pulling from Reddit, Quora, directory listings, and social profiles. You don’t have to be everywhere—but you do need to be where your customers are. And if you hate social media, forcing it won’t help. Pick channels that fit your communication style.
5. The Most Common Mistake? Weak Foundations
Agencies often spend time on backlinks or content without first ensuring a strong foundation. Nat looks at:
- Website structure
- Page speed
- Internal linking
If the structure isn’t sound, everything else is harder. This reminded me of my early days in SEO, watching clients throw money at link building for sites that barely worked.
6. PageSpeed Scores Aren’t Everything
Google PageSpeed Insights is helpful, but Nat cautions against chasing 100%. Delaying JavaScript can make a site look fast to Google while still loading poorly for real users. Instead, use the tool as a guide and test real experiences.
Also: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the big metric to watch. And yes, plugins like WP Rocket help. So do built-in tools like Kinsta’s image optimization powered by Cloudflare Polish.
7. Internal Linking is an Art
Header and footer links don’t count for much. What matters is contextually relevant links high up in your content, pointing to the most important pages. Nat calls this a medium-difficulty SEO task that pays big dividends when done right.
8. Backlinks Still Matter, Even in 2025
Even in the era of AI overviews, backlinks from high-authority sites can boost your rankings. Nat warns against spammy link tactics and instead recommends building relationships. He’s seen underwhelming websites rank simply because they had a strong backlink profile.
9. The Stack Matters
When asked how he builds WordPress sites today, Nat didn’t hesitate: Elementor Pro and the Hello theme. But he made an even better point: there are lots of good tools. What matters is picking one, learning it deeply, and building lightweight, performance-first sites. Just don’t load up a junk theme with 40 plugins.
10. Kinsta Gets a Shoutout
Nat had kind words about Kinsta’s hosting, especially for agencies. He’s moved client sites to us and seen immediate performance improvements, even when the specs on paper looked the same. His reasoning? Kinsta is optimized for WordPress. That, plus our responsive support, has made us his go-to.
If you’re trying to make sense of SEO in 2025, this interview is worth your time. And if you’re running an agency or managing client sites, Nat’s advice will save you hours of trial and error.
Let me know what stood out to you, and how often you refresh your website. Comment below or find me on LinkedIn.
Thanks again to Nat Miletic from Clio Websites.
Full Transcript below
Nat Miletic (00:00)
the in terms of like the age of the website, I don’t think there’s like a set rule for sure, but usually around the three year timeframe is like where you should maybe be thinking about changing it to refresh it a bit. You don’t have to like rebuild the whole website, but looking at maybe just refreshing it a bit from a look and feel perspective and user experience perspective. Usually we’ve seen around like the three year timeframe be realistic.
Roger Williams (00:27)
So the next question that Andre’s got is hrefs versus semrush.
feel like I know where you’re gonna go with this, but I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts on those two tools.
Nat Miletic (00:37)
Yeah, I’ve used both and I don’t really have a preference, honestly. Like I haven’t used SEMrush in a while. I started with SEMrush, went over to Ahrefs and then I was thinking about going back to SEMrush. yeah, exactly. No, was something else. was like Ahrefs.
Roger Williams (00:49)
Because of the discount, they got a new discount going this month.
Nat Miletic (00:57)
I prefer the Ahrefs interface to be honest with you just because it’s a little bit faster, you know, to kind of like navigate through pages and different options and stuff. But they’re both great tools. Like, yeah, just, I think there was a limit on like number of projects you can have in SEMrush. So they got to be like way more expensive, you can only add like certain number of websites. On Ahrefs, you can add as many websites as you want, but then it’s like credit based.
Roger Williams (01:02)
Okay.
my name is Roger. I’m with Kinsta. I’m joined
with Nat from Clio websites. Hey Nat, how are ya?
Nat Miletic (01:27)
Hey, I’m doing great, how about you?
Roger Williams (01:30)
I’m doing really well. really excited in the in the pre show you and I were kind of talking about some of the new AI and SEO stuff and just how things are once again evolving in the SEO landscape. And I’m really excited about today’s webinar with you where we can talk about some of these in some more detail and hopefully give people some actionable insights. I’ve got an entire outline sitting over here.
next to me, which we’ve kind of used to prepare ourselves for the show, title of its SEO in 2025, Strategy, Speed and Staying Ahead. So this is really good stuff. Nat, I’ve got you on because you are an SEO expert. I’d love, before we start diving into things too far here,
for you to kind of give an introduction of yourself and why people should be tuning in and listening to you.
Nat Miletic (02:27)
Yeah, thanks Roger. So my name is Nat Miletic. I have a company called Clio websites. We’ve been around for a while since 2007. So our primary service offering is around, know, concentrate around WordPress, web development, and SEO. So I’ve been doing this for a while. There’s a team of eight behind Clio and we do all kinds of exciting.
web development and SEO projects.
Roger Williams (03:00)
Excellent. Excellent. All right. I feel like that is a great introduction here. For myself, if people aren’t familiar, my name is Roger Williams. I work for Kinsta in a partnership and community management role. I’ve been in hosting for over 20 years at this point, which is a crazy number to say out loud, but there it is. And I am just really excited because I can bring people, experts like Nat here to help share their expertise.
information that probably a lot of the time only their clients are getting to really hear about. mean, that you’re pretty prolific on social media, but still there’s almost only so much time in the day to share all of this. So I really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to kind of dive into your knowledge here and, and really explore this topic.
What would be really helpful is maybe start with talking about some of the strategic shifts in SEO that you’re seeing, that the industry is seeing and talking about. And like the last 12 months, like the changes that people should really be focusing on and being aware of.
Nat Miletic (04:03)
Yeah, mean, it’s very, you know, interesting, exciting and kind of like scary at the same time. And, you know, interestingly enough, there’s a lot of talk about like AI replacing, you know, developers and stuff. And, you know, lots of companies are saying that they can do kind of more with less these days. But I’m seeing actually the biggest shift
Roger Williams (04:10)
you
Nat Miletic (04:27)
happen in the SEO space with AI. Not so much the web development space. SEO has impacted quite a bit, especially in the content creation and SEO auditing and strategy arena where AI is really good at that. We’ll jump into that a little bit more. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in detail, but definitely a huge
impact on SEO as a service and just different like aspects of SEO in result of some of the work that these AI tools can do.
Roger Williams (04:58)
Excellent. Yeah, I’ve been having some really great conversations around AI and the developer side of things lately. And it sounds like with their the the change is going to be you know, the actual coding part of development is getting abstracted away a little bit. You can use these tools at least to help you with some syntax errors and some of like the bug troubleshooting that used to take ages. Now you can click a button on the SEO side.
you know, I can speak from a content creation perspective. I’ve been really struggling with these tools and and how to use them and how to use them effectively. I think that is really the essential word that we need to be using practical, pragmatic effectiveness because I can hit a button now and I can crank out endless reams of content. Right? I mean, I can I can create
30 blog posts in one click of a button, one prompt, but is it actually gonna be engaging? Is it going to convert? Is it gonna show up in the results for the search engines? I’m excited to kind of explore these topics with you. There’s one new acronym that has been popping up under the radar. It’s this EEAT.
And this is still new to me to the point where I still don’t remember exactly what it all stands for is can you walk us through why we need to be eating more and how it applies to our search results?
Nat Miletic (06:23)
Yeah, for
sure. mean, so the EEAT acronym has been around for a while, actually. have talked about that in the past, especially in fields that require authority, such as health and finance. What do they call those? Your money, your life is the kind of acronym that people use for or that Google uses even for like…
Roger Williams (06:29)
Okay.
hahahaha ⁓
Nat Miletic (06:49)
certain websites that deal with either financial or health information. And it’s very important to have the authority in those when you’re creating content for those types of sites. And so what people did for EEAT is basically create some mechanism to show that the website is authoritative by creating good quality author profiles, showing author credentials and stuff like that.
Roger Williams (06:54)
Okay.
Nat Miletic (07:14)
linking out to their credentials, sort of proofs. For a time, I think probably two or three years ago, it’s like everybody was talking about it. And there’s still a lot of contention whether or not that still kind of works as a strategy when it comes to those types of websites. Interestingly enough, the SEO
Roger Williams (07:25)
Okay.
Nat Miletic (07:40)
from like an AI perspective and getting listed on like chat bots and LLMs and stuff now we’re finding that this is actually useful from that perspective as well So, you know kind of like getting listed on different directories, know as an author as a website or whatever Well, will kind of increase your authority from kind of like the SEO the traditional sort of like search engine SEO perspective But also now we’re finding with LLMs that it’s actually helping with that as well so
Roger Williams (08:08)
Okay.
Nat Miletic (08:09)
So the concept itself is not new with AI. It’s been around for a while. It’s just, it was kind of like repurposed, I think, a little bit, you know, as a result of LLMs. Because now what we’re finding, what we’re hearing from clients is, I want to get listed on, you know, chat GPT instead of like, I want to be listed on Google or whatever. Right. So it’s just kind of a little bit different.
Roger Williams (08:30)
Absolutely. So it’s the new vanity search, right? Like I remember when I had clients, I would get a message at least once a day of, hey, when I search for X, I’m not coming up. And now I’m assuming you’re getting, when I’m prompting X, I’m not showing up. And so now you’ve got to figure out, you you got to balance, right? This vanity search, the new vanity AI search.
with things that are actually going to be effective. So that’s really fascinating to hear that something that’s been around for a while is being reprioritized because of these new technologies. ⁓
Nat Miletic (09:07)
It
stands for, I couldn’t remember exactly what all the acronyms stand for, but if somebody’s watching, it’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So it’s a mouthful, for sure.
Roger Williams (09:20)
Absolutely.
You know, I think this is really interesting because I was just having a discussion yesterday about Google’s AI overview and this person had done some research about how the overviews are working, specifically how users are interacting with these overviews. And then, know, whether they’re using the information directly from there or if they’re doing more.
research afterwards. And for him, a big component that’s now being thrown into the mix is this idea of trust, which you know, is the T in that acronym. And he was pointing out, you know, you’ve now you’re going even beyond like directories and credential sites, and you’re going to things like mentions on Reddit and Quora. And so as a business really thinking about
you know, your entire online activity is now being included as SEO, sounds. so you need to, know, backlinks are still important, but it’s not the only thing you need to be really working on. How are you guiding clients in these discussions?
Nat Miletic (10:27)
Yeah, it’s a great question. And unfortunately, it’s like, it’s one of those things where we’re going back to like, you need to be everywhere, right? So that’s the discussion we’re having with clients right now is like, you have to be on, you know, you have to be on the directory sites, you have to be on, you know, like social media, you have to have a social media profile, like the more the better, you know, that kind of stuff.
which is kind of unfortunate because you can imagine for like a small business, right? It’s very challenging. And even for bigger businesses, you know, having a presence on all these social platforms is, I’m sure you can appreciate, it’s a lot of work, right? So it’s kind of difficult, very time consuming. And so you have to sort of pick, you know, where your ideal client is coming from.
and prioritizing some of those sort of like areas of either search engines or LLM or maybe even direct like social media sort of profiles and actually promoting a little bit more on social media directly.
Roger Williams (11:29)
Excellent. And I think, you maybe that’s where it’s kind of meeting the client where they’re at, right? If they’re comfortable doing social media, then yeah, let’s pursue social media. But if they’re not comfortable with that and forcing them to be, I mean, it just, the transparency comes through so quickly when you’re not really enthusiastic on Twitter or on Reddit.
people can see right through you if you’re just doing sales pitches. So working with the client, sounds like, and figuring out where they want to spend their time and their effort is really important there.
Nat Miletic (12:04)
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Roger Williams (12:06)
All right, so let’s talk a little bit more about from an agency perspective. So for the agency people that are watching, you know, how, what are some takeaways they can be taking, you know, using from this conversation? And I think a great place to start is common mistakes. Where are you seeing agencies either making a mistake or maybe spending too much time focusing on the wrong things?
Nat Miletic (12:29)
Yeah, I think for agencies specifically, there are a few sort of like pieces of low hanging fruit that they could focus on. One of the things that we often find is just from like a web development perspective that the structure of the website isn’t optimized for SEO and for these LLMs as well.
That’s the most common one we would see and also like speed website speed it’s you know fairly easy these days to get you know decent web performance metrics as well and Internal linking as well as another big one. Those are kind of like the domain three I would say like looking at the overall structure of the website that that’s really the main area that we focus on where you know, we call it kind of like
the foundation, right? So if you build a website on a good foundation with a good structure, it’s clear for users which path to follow. It’s clear for these bots and crawlers, how the website is structured. That also kind of helps with resolving some of the technical issues that we might have on the website as well. And just kind of like setting up a good foundation, that’s
That’s what we see as the biggest usually issue when we’re working with new clients is, know, unfortunately sometimes it’s like, well, you you’re better off starting from scratch, you know, and just kind of rebuilding it properly and then investing more resources into SEO. You know, because if you do it the other way around, it’s kind of difficult to, you know, see those results as quickly as people might want to see them.
And so that’s kind of the most common. then, know, page speed and those kinds of things usually, you know, can be remedied easier when you’re creating a new website and doing it correctly than, you know, trying to fix performance issues on a site that maybe isn’t optimized ideally, right? So that’s kind of the, that’s the usually almost every project that we get involved in that for a website that we didn’t, you know, create for the client initially sadly is like,
similar approach, you know, so.
Roger Williams (14:39)
No, absolutely. And I feel like we’re in a time machine because I remember 2009, these were the same discussions I was having with clients. Or, I I worked at an agency at one point where we were procuring backlinks for their client websites. And I would just look at the client’s website and be like, hey, it doesn’t matter how many backlinks we get to this site.
It’s not, A, it’s not gonna convert because a person can’t use this site, but B, the crawlers can’t even look at anything that’s going on on here. you know, the basics and the fundamentals, it’s amazing how much we have to keep repeating this broken record. Even in 2025, you know, I see people wanting to use other options besides WordPress and…
they are there because it’s easy to use, right? They can sign up, they can click a few buttons and they have a website, but that they’re totally disregarding all of the SEO aspects of these tools, just lacking everything that WordPress gives you pretty much out of the box. So that’s really great. And I love, know, your your segue straight into performance and site speed. This, this kind of leads us into our next segment where we want to talk about
what is really important for people to be looking at when it comes to website performance? And you know, one of the issues with WordPress is it can be really easy to ruin the performance of your website. Plugins are super easy to install. You can get a page builder that you can build as many accordions as you can fit into your mouse click or whatever. I mean, you can really overbuild things and degrade the performance.
And of course, I would be remiss without bringing up hosting. Since Kinsta is a managed host for WordPress. Well, you know, one of the things that we try and focus on, of course, is speed and performance. And so that’s, you know, the servers themselves were using Google Cloud. We’re using really performant operations and setups with Linux containers. Everything’s behind Cloudflare. And so, you know, I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts about what
What are the measuring sticks that either site owners or agencies should be using these days to really see, hey, is this site performing? And then what specific areas of the site should I be working on to make it more performant?
Nat Miletic (16:56)
Yeah, so some of the tools that people use usually for measuring this type of stuff is the Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s a free tool that anybody can use to test the speed of their website. The PageSpeed Insights is a good tool because it integrates with some of the Google tool sets and how they evaluate the speed and health of a website.
If people have heard this term of core web vitals, that’s kind of like the measurement that Google uses whether or not your website is speedy and efficient. Core web vitals are really important because they show up in your Google Search Console and that’s how Google evaluates whether or not people are experiencing good user experience.
Roger Williams (17:30)
See ⁓
Nat Miletic (17:40)
performance or user experience, right, on the website. So that’s kind of like the starting point, I would say, in terms of performance. however, I would just caution people. have seen sort of, you know, people that are a little bit more SEO savvy, even agencies, you know, that do this type of work. You know, they’re always trying to aim for like 100 % on mobile or, you know, 99%, like the, you know, the faster, the better kind of thing.
I would say don’t trust those scores or chase those blindly either, just because sometimes you have to take some trade-offs when you’re dealing with performance in order to improve the user experience, for example. without getting into a lot of detail, but one of the prime examples of that is delaying all the JavaScript on your website, right? Where on Google,
you know, PageSpeed Insights looks great. You’re getting 100%. But when somebody goes to the website and they don’t click on anything, they might get a blank screen or they may get a website that’s not fully loaded. So when they click on something or they move their mouse, then all of a sudden these interactions start to happen on the website. From a core Web Vitals perspective, you’re doing great. But from a user perspective, you’re not doing so great because they might have some issues.
navigating your website or taking an action that you want to take. So sometimes you have to, you know, to balance those things. So I would only caution people don’t follow it blindly to be like, need 99 % or 100 % on mobile. You know, that’s not sometimes not as important as user experience of like interacting with the site and using it. But obviously, you know, the faster the better, especially if you’re, you know, if you have an e commerce business where people are making purchases and
You know using you know using the website for that, you know a purpose. It’s very important to be fast and to avoid those cart abandonment issues and even just you know, even if it’s a service business for people to be able to contact you quickly and fill out a form and kind of be in and out right and that’s where I think Kinsta is really good. We you know for a lot of our clients where like performance and reliability
is an important factor. We’re just like, yeah, just sign up for Kinsta and you don’t have to worry about that.
Roger Williams (19:55)
I love it. love it. Thank you so much for the plug there. We’ve got a quick question in and I love it. Endry is in the comments asking how can we optimize LCP, especially images and I’m missing out on the acronym here. LCP. Are you picking up what that is? Okay.
Nat Miletic (20:13)
Yeah,
so there’s a few different sort of areas on PageSpeed Insights where it kind of like, there’s a few areas where you, how Google PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of the website. LCP is one of those metrics. And so I forget what it stands for actually. ⁓ Largest Contentful Paint, yeah.
Roger Williams (20:33)
contentful pain okay
Nat Miletic (20:36)
And they measure it. think it’s if you’re doing like 2.5 seconds or less you’re considered good if you’re doing higher than that you’re doing kind of medium or poor or whatever and And then if you’re over four seconds, they’ll give you like a red symbol meaning you need to address that LCP can be a problem for a number of different reasons. It could be like large images. It could be sometimes something like a large font file
it’s very hard to say it’s one thing because it could be a number of things. For example, what we found recently, and I don’t know if this question is referring to that, is there was some, there was actually an issue with PageSpeed Insights where it was identifying an LCP as an issue for a large majority of sites due to an algorithm change or something that they did where we were finding that it was just like very difficult to get around that error.
What can help with that is, for example, if you’re using WordPress, WP Rocket and some of those plugins can delay things. They can lazy load images, for example. They can do certain things to alleviate the LCP issue, but LCP can be exasperated by, you know, scripts. It could be exasperated by large images. So it’s kind of hard to say it’s one thing. It’s usually a combination of things and
PageSpeed Insights will give you recommendations based on that particular score to be like, this is actually what’s causing it. And then you can work to address that. The bug that I was talking about is referring to something that for LCP specifically, it was like, you know, this particular section is causing an issue. So it doesn’t really give you an answer. Like, is it an image? Is it a font? So you kind of have to do some guesswork and troubleshoot it. so, you know, without going into a lot of details,
PageSpeed Insight is great at giving you those recommendations that you can, you you have to work through sometimes one by one to address them, you know, without doing like a quick fix like WP Remote, or sorry, WP Rocket, just like enabling all the settings and then hoping for the best. Sometimes you have to go one by one and it’s quite the process.
Roger Williams (22:46)
Okay, excellent. I hope, I hope, Andrew, we kind of addressed your concern there. But, you know, one thing I’ll jump in and mention is at Kinsta in the MyKinsta dashboard, when you’re in a specific individual site, if you go to the caching tab on the left, there’s an option for image compression. And so we’re using Cloudflare’s polish tool to do image compression for you on the fly. And if you’re not hosted at Kinsta, there’s
many plugins you can use for this. You can also do this locally on your computer. But I think, again, one of the nice advantages at Kinsta is we’ve got this tool built in. There’s the option for lossless or lossy compression. You can choose how you want that to be done. And we just handle that for you on the fly. So, you know, I think another thing that a lot of people maybe miss the boat on here is resizing their images properly.
I know this is something I used to make the mistake of was, you know, maybe I had a photo from my iPhone, which is a massive image to put onto a web page when I only need something that’s like 480 pixels wide or even smaller sometimes. And so making sure you’re resizing those images properly so that it’s just loading it only what you need and nothing more really can make a huge difference.
When as we’re kind of moving forward here, we’re kind of approaching our time, when you’re talking about actionable SEO wins, where let’s maybe get like a kind of like beginner, intermediate and advanced kind of suggestions here if you don’t mind. So I’m kind of brand new to SEO.
Where should I get started? Like what are the first real things I should be focused on? It sounds like On-Page SEO is probably the best place to start. Other than like completely rebuilding my website, you know, what are some things I could do this week to really kind of help things out?
Nat Miletic (24:40)
Yeah, that’s a great question. what I like to recommend to people is sign up for like a free SEO tool. Just do like an SEO audit. Ahrefs is a great tool. You can like sign up for a free account where, you know, you can do a free audit basically on a website. And it’ll give you a bunch of like actionable tips that you can apply to your website in order to improve the performance.
We also have a tool that we developed called seotest.me and it’s good for testing individual pages. if you need a, like let’s say you put in your URL homepage and you want to get some quick tips on like what to improve or any issues, you can use that tool for free and like crawl a specific page of a website. Ahrefs is great if you want to do a crawl of the entire site. So it’s a little bit more comprehensive.
and it’ll do an entire crawl of the website. It’ll give you kind of like a score and it’ll give you recommendations on what you can fix. So that’s a great like beginner strategy because not only will you get an audit of your website, you’ll also get some tips specific to like, here’s an issue, here’s how to fix it, right? So they’ll kind of even teach you. SEO is vast, right? So it’s like such a huge area where some people
you know, specialize in just like technical SEO, other people specialize in, you know, like backlink acquisition, there’s like so many areas, right? So there’s, it’s a little bit overwhelming. So that’s where I would start, because that’ll teach you a lot when it comes to like technical SEO. Yeah, in term, do you want me to go to like medium and advanced too?
Roger Williams (26:11)
Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah, yeah,
where would you go? So I’ve got the audit, I’ve kind of fixed some of the low hanging fruit. Where should I start going to next in terms of building out my SEO strategy?
Nat Miletic (26:26)
So the next thing you can do without rebuilding a website as well is looking at some of that internal linking within your website. So optimizing sort of the user experience and how, what pages you’re linking to within your website. So for example, know, important pages that you want to drive traffic to, you want to link as many internal hyperlinks to that page from your website. that means like,
On the homepage, let’s say you have a service page for web design. You want to link from the homepage to that web design page. And also all the other pages should be linked to that specific page. That’s like an example of internal linking. Again, internal linking is a little bit more of a medium sort of strategy, medium difficulty. You have to learn a lot more about how to apply that. There’s that, and then there’s also the structure.
content creation. So you need to learn a little bit more about if I’m, you know, for example, trying to promote this particular service, I need a lot of supporting content for that particular service on how to, you know, boost that page from from an SEO perspective. So that’s kind of like a more of a medium strategy, setting up a good structure on your existing site, creating some content that supports the services or pages that you want to promote.
Roger Williams (27:41)
Excellent, excellent. Before
we before we go into the advanced as a like kind of a bookmark here. How do like navigation links work into this both in the header in the footer? Do those count as internal linking? Or is that kind of degraded because it’s header and footer stuff?
Nat Miletic (27:57)
Yeah, great question. Again, they are deemed as not as important as actual internal links on a page. So a lot of people make that mistake where they’re like, I’m interlinking a lot because this page is in my menu, right? So it’s linked everywhere. And while technically that’s true, those are usually wrapped around like a header, footer, tag. So Google devaluates them a little bit. So the value of a link is usually like,
you know, for your most authoritative page, usually your homepage, if you’re linking to a specific page, the higher up on the page as possible, that’s like a high value link, you know, pointing to the page you want to rank. So there’s a lot of different, like, nuances when it comes to interlinking. That’s why I said it’s kind of like a intermediate type difficulty problem, right, that people need to research a little bit more. And that’s one of the things like common misconception where people say, well, you know, I have it in my footer.
Roger Williams (28:45)
Yeah, yeah.
Nat Miletic (28:52)
or header so it’s like a valuable one because I’m linking to it everywhere but actually it’s not as important as like having it on an actual page.
Roger Williams (29:01)
Excellent, excellent. All right, so let’s go big boy time, big gal time, advanced SEO techniques. What are you looking at?
Nat Miletic (29:10)
Yeah, like I think still if you’re trying to rank on Google specifically and other search engines, backlink acquisition is still like, you know, the one that will set you kind of like above your competitors. The higher the authority of your site, the better. That’s still the most difficult I would say in order to, you know, acquire those links. What you want to do is
have authoritative sites linking back to your site. So not just any site creating like a bunch of you know, spammy links on thousands of different sites, but you know, getting good authoritative links pointing back to your site. And that’s the most difficult part, I would say. You either have to pay somebody to do that, or you need to spend a lot of time like promoting yourself, you know, doing, you know, being on social media, you know, creating relationships with different.
companies in order to get a link created back to your site and those kinds of things. So it’s very time consuming and it’s very difficult for somebody who’s just starting out to do and to know what type of link is valuable and where it should point to, right? It’s another sort of aspect. So it’s still the most difficult. I’ve seen some, you know, very slow and crappy looking sites that rank very well because they have a very good link profile, you know, that
you know, might get devalued a little bit with the AI overviews on Google. What I’m finding now and what I’m reading is that a lot of people are not going past that AI overview, right? So even if you are, you know, getting that snippet in the AI overview, your people are not clicking at the links. They’re not scrolling down. They just get their answer. They’re done, right? So they just kind of, just kind of crawl away, right? So.
Roger Williams (30:49)
Absolutely. Are there any tools that you’re using? I know that back in the day, was like Moz was really good for looking at domain authority. Is that still, like what are the tools now that you’re using to kind of help give you an idea of what might be a good page versus not?
Nat Miletic (31:05)
Yeah, so we use Ahrefs. There’s a few others out there. All the SEO tools kind of have their own sort of ranking or authority score. Keep in mind that Google probably has their own. So all of these tools can give you a really good indication on where you’re at.
It doesn’t mean that if you have 99 on Ahrefs that all of a sudden you’re the most authoritative site on the internet because Google probably looks at it slightly differently. But they’re good metric. They’re a good metric to determine if you’re moving in the right direction, if you are authoritative based on other websites in your niche or your industry. So it’s still good kind of measuring stick. But again, take it with a grain of salt because it can also be easily manipulated as well.
Roger Williams (31:52)
Okay, all right. And I think all of this kind of hearkens back, I remember way back in the day, 15, maybe 20 years ago now.
there was an SEO specialist and a blogger and they kind of did a competition of who could outrank each other or something for a certain keyword. And the SEO person was, you know, put this huge back linking and, and, know, some of the dark arts of SEO into action. And the blogger just reached out to his network and said, Hey everybody, put a back link to me with this keyword is the anchor text. And, he, and he blew the doors off the SEO person. And so,
I think, you know, and especially with SEO now being more AI driven with these AI overviews and chat GPT results is having your network and having content that actually speaks to people and and gets them to respond to it is still the winning combination. You can you know, you can manufacture as much as you want. But if you can actually connect with people and get them to be
A, your customers, right? Like that’s the goal, but also your fans and your champions. That’s going to help a ton here. Nat, I’ve really appreciated this. We’re kind of at time a little bit here. I wanted to spend a little bit of time kind of going over some questions here. Endry is just blowing up the question area. Thank you so much for your questions, Endry.
One thing that he asked specifically is, do you recommend Rank Math AI content for blogs?
Nat Miletic (33:21)
Rank math AI content for blogs. I haven’t used rank maths AI much ⁓ To comment I’m not sure what you know engine they’re using in the in the background I I would you know caution against using like just AI content blindly for any type of content creation it’s great for like, you know creating content overviews and
Roger Williams (33:28)
Okay.
Nat Miletic (33:47)
you know, getting ideas and stuff, but I wouldn’t use any of those AI generated sort of blog posts blindly where I’m just copying and pasting and posting it on my website. We use AI for some content creation, but we also, you know, have that like human touch where we go through it, modify it, make sure it makes sense and so forth. So I haven’t used the RankMath one specifically, but all of them are basically using the same engine. So you can use like, you know, chat GPT or
any of the other LLMs in order to create content these days. just be cautious of making sure it still makes sense and you’re still touching it up and making it not as obvious to humans that you’ve generated it with AI.
Roger Williams (34:27)
Sure, no, absolutely. And I’m not familiar with that tool either, but I can tell you from my use of ChatGPT is I will run into kind of a similar issue where, you know, if I just say, create me some content about SEO, it’s really going to crank out some really generic stuff that, you know, A, it’s not going to look any different from anything else. It’s not going to give people anything new or insightful to kind of go with.
And so they’re going to kind of tell that but on the flip side
you know, when I use things like if I take a transcript like such as the transcript from this interview and I load that into there and then I use it to kind of help me build an outline and maybe even build some of the content, I find a lot more success in terms of engaging content with that. you know, it’s as much as you’re putting in, you’re going to get out of these tools, I think. Great. So the next question that Andre’s got is hrefs versus semrush.
feel like I know where you’re gonna go with this, but I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts on those two tools.
Nat Miletic (35:30)
Yeah, I’ve used both and I don’t really have a preference, honestly. Like I haven’t used SEMrush in a while. I started with SEMrush, went over to Ahrefs and then I was thinking about going back to SEMrush. yeah, exactly. No, was something else. was like Ahrefs.
Roger Williams (35:43)
Because of the discount, they got a new discount going this month.
Nat Miletic (35:51)
I prefer the Ahrefs interface to be honest with you just because it’s a little bit faster, you know, to kind of like navigate through pages and different options and stuff. But they’re both great tools. Like, yeah, just, I think there was a limit on like number of projects you can have in SEMrush. So they got to be like way more expensive, you can only add like certain number of websites. On Ahrefs, you can add as many websites as you want, but then it’s like credit based. you know, if you’re not like,
Roger Williams (35:56)
Okay.
Nat Miletic (36:17)
doing crawls all the time or whatever, you can add like 100 websites, right? But in SEMrush, you can only add like, you know, five or 10 or 15 or whatever, right? So it’s, that was the only reason why I preferred Ahrefs, you know, in the past, I don’t know if that’s changed. But now I’m kind of on Ahrefs and I’ve been using it for a while, but totally indifferent. They’re both great tools.
Roger Williams (36:26)
Okay.
Excellent, excellent. Back in the day I used to use Screaming Frog. Is that still a tool that’s pretty useful? Where do you use that in your stack?
Nat Miletic (36:40)
Yeah, totally.
Definitely. like Screaming Frog is great for technical audits. So you can put in a URL of a website and it’ll crawl the whole website and give you a indication of the technical health. Ahrefs and SEMrush do the same thing as well. Screaming Frog is just a little bit more efficient and faster at it. So if you have a huge site, Screaming Frog is gonna go through it.
very quickly and give you some good indications on what needs to be fixed.
Roger Williams (37:10)
Excellent, excellent. All right, and then finally, Andrew is asking about Kinsta versus some cloud hosting. I’m not familiar with that brand, Wink Wink. ⁓ Where’s the difference? And so, you I can kind of speak to this a little bit. You know, I think, you know, when you’re looking at cloud hosting, there’s different levels.
Nat Miletic (37:19)
Okay.
Roger Williams (37:30)
of it and in terms of how integrated they are with the cloud host. So what I can tell you is that at Kinsta, we have a DevOps team who are all Google Cloud platform experts. And so they spend their day, you know, looking at what we’ve got currently tweaking it, making sure that it’s the most efficient.
But we’re also looking at the horizon and what Google’s got coming next. And so one of the big things we did a few years ago, Google came out with new machines. It’s called, they call them C3D machines. The prior were C2. And we made the decision to just upgrade all of our clients’ websites to those faster machines as they came out. Not all the Google data centers have these faster machines yet. But as they’re released,
we’re upgrading all of our clients’ websites and that’s at no additional charge. So that, you know, that to me speaks a lot about our focus on performance and speed. We want our clients to have the best possible experience with their websites for their clients. And so that, think that really speaks volumes to our philosophy. You know, there’s a lot of little things in there. So we use Linux containers for all of the sites
So you’ve got your own Nginx server, your own MySQL database, your own PHP, that also means you have your own instance of WP CLI. So all of those are working really efficiently. And then there’s knock on effects from that. So when we do a backup,
we’re taking a snapshot of the container. And so when we restore it, we’re just restoring the entire container. And so we’re not messing with files and databases. just the whole thing gets restored. And so our backups work really quickly. And that’s something I would encourage that you test at any hosting provider you’ve got that’s providing you with backups or God forbid you’re having to use a plugin for doing backups.
Make sure you’re testing those every once in a while. Make sure that the backup actually works and see how long it takes for it to restore so that when there is an emergency or somebody does make a mistake, you know how long it’s going to take to resolve that mistake and get the restore back in working. There’s a whole lot of things I could spend another hour talking about, all the features at Kinsta, but the last one I’ll really hit on is support.
WordPress websites are complicated. There’s a lot of different ways that you can configure them. You’re using third party software in a lot of cases. mean WordPress itself is third party, but it’s pretty stable. But you’re using plugins and a lot of times you have no idea who’s maintaining these plugins and things can go wrong. And that’s where support really becomes an absolutely essential part of your
plan, your operations, being able to reach out to Kinsta. We have an under two minute response time. Our support engineers are all WordPress experts. We only have one tier of support, so you’re getting the person you’re talking with is gonna handle you through till resolution.
And even if it’s something that’s out of our scope of support, we’re not here to develop. We’re not going to touch your code. But we will do our best to point at what we think is affecting it. So if it is something in your site, we’re going to try and help pinpoint that for you. So I can’t downplay support enough. But Nat, I’d love to hear maybe your thoughts in a couple of minutes here of what you think about Kinsta hosting.
Nat Miletic (40:49)
Yeah, for sure. mean, you know, not all cloud providers are created equal for sure, like when it comes to hosting, just because even if you’re comparing, if you think you’re comparing apples to apples, for example, like, I’m just like renting a server on Google workspace through this one provider and another provider, there’s a lot more configuration that goes into it behind the scenes. And so to give you a, like a practical example, we’ve moved sites from one cloud provider
to Kinsta, for example, and saw like a crazy improvement in performance. Even though, like if you look at it from a spec perspective, I’m getting like a server with this many CPUs or whatever in memory here and there, it really like, it’s still a significant difference in terms of performance just because how the hosting is sort of tuned and configured for WordPress. So it’s something that’s kind of seems like a little bit not as intuitive.
because you would think, well, it just comes down to specs or whatever. But there’s actually a lot of different things when it comes to configuring these servers for WordPress specifically that make them run efficiently. Because like you said, Roger, it’s very complicated. There’s databases, there’s files, there’s all kinds of configuration things that need to be tuned correctly for all of this to work for busy and complex sites. So that’s one thing where I think like…
Kinsta is really good at tuning those environments for WordPress websites to make them quick and efficient. And then the other thing is support. Like, you know, some other providers have stumped them before, but with like Kinsta support, you know, even for complex issues, I’ve never been, I’ve never like stumped them where they’re like, not sure. And then I have to deal with it myself, you know, kind of thing. yeah, I’ve always had, so that’s like a huge.
Roger Williams (42:30)
you
Nat Miletic (42:38)
Especially for agencies, because you don’t need basic support. You usually need something a little bit beyond basic, because you’ve already tried the basic things and it didn’t work. So it’s something configuration-wise where you might need to tweak things. And that’s where the hosting provider kind of provides that extra layer of support, which is great and which is something that I really appreciate with Kinsta hosting.
Roger Williams (43:00)
Beautiful. I couldn’t put it any better and the support team is going to really be happy to hear all of that. You know, with that said, it looks like we’ve gotten all of the questions answered. Thank you so much, Indri, for playing along here. Nat, I really appreciate your time and your insights. I’ve got a lot to unpack here. You know, it sounds like…
The basics are still critical. You need to have a good website. You need to make sure that it’s performant. You need to make sure your internal linking. You know, it is amazing to me how often I’ll be on the homepage of a website and I’ll be totally lost of what should I do from here. And so, you know, if you want somebody to buy something,
put that buy now button in there. And then finally backlinks backlinks will never go away. mean, it’s going to be just part of the part of the system here. All right, we do have one last question. Andries getting just inside of the line here. In your thought in your opinion that what’s the best way to build a WordPress site? Are you building from WordPress core plus Elementor Pro?
or pick a theme or a builder. Like, where’s your stack at right now? Where are you building for clients and suggesting people go?
Nat Miletic (44:13)
Yeah, I mean, there’s so many different ways. That’s the great thing about WordPress. There’s so many different ways to build an awesome website. So I’m not going to say my way is the right way or the only way for sure. But we use Elementor Pro for like 99 % of our projects. We use their Hello theme. So we build everything from scratch. And we’ve had some great results with that.
Roger Williams (44:23)
you
Nat Miletic (44:34)
you know, there’s again, there’s different we’ve used the bricks builder as well, which is also great. And I know a lot of people are using the new full site editing as well for like, you know, from a performance perspective, and kind of keeping up with some of the latest sort of WordPress trends and stuff as well. you know, there’s, there’s a lot of different ways, there’s no right or wrong way. Actually, there is a wrong way. It’s like buying a cheap theme somewhere and just like installing like 1000 plugins.
That’s the wrong way. what I would recommend is like pick a tool that’s fast and efficient that you can learn and grow with and become an expert in a tool and use that tool for all of the different projects that you do.
Roger Williams (45:05)
Ha ha.
Excellent. All right. And so a quick follow up to that then is I know that there’s always this concern when you rebuild a website of losing your SEO authority, right? Because you’ve changed how the linking structure works, whatever. How much should people be concerned about that? And then B, what’s a good cadence for refreshing the design of your website? How many years?
should somebody wait before they’re like, you know what, think I just need to rebuild the whole website.
Nat Miletic (45:52)
Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen some horror stories, unfortunately, where clients have rebuilt their websites, where we were like doing SEO for them and they totally missed the boat on certain key things and kind of saw their rankings decrease, unfortunately. And unfortunately, sometimes they don’t let us know that they’re rebuilding the website. And then we find out later, like, why did your rankings drop?
because they sometimes didn’t take the right steps. So we specialize in that. We do a lot of projects where SEO is top of mind and we’re rebuilding the website for the client. And so we have a process of following certain steps to ensure that that doesn’t happen. What you want to see is that your rankings increase with the redevelopment of a site, not decrease, right? And so, you know…
Roger Williams (46:15)
Yeah.
Nat Miletic (46:38)
the in terms of like the age of the website, I don’t think there’s like a set rule for sure, but usually around the three year timeframe is like where you should maybe be thinking about changing it to refresh it a bit. You don’t have to like rebuild the whole website, but looking at maybe just refreshing it a bit from a look and feel perspective and user experience perspective. Usually we’ve seen around like the three year timeframe be realistic.
Roger Williams (47:06)
Okay, all right, excellent. All right, well, with that said, questions are closed. Now, I really do appreciate your time, man. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. If people want to hire you, or just say hi to you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Nat Miletic (47:22)
Yeah, add me on LinkedIn for sure and check out our website, cliowebsites.com.
Roger Williams (47:29)
Beautiful. All right. And my name is Roger. I’m with Kinsta. If you’re interested in learning more about Kinsta, head over to our website, Kinsta.com. You can read a whole bunch there. You can click to talk to a salesperson. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me there. Feel free to reach out and ask questions, say hello, and I’d love to talk to you. So with that said, Nat, great talking to you,
Nat Miletic (47:51)
Thanks Roger. Thanks for the opportunity great chatting with you as well
Roger Williams (47:55)
Absolutely. Ciao.