Q&A: Is there a challenge of potentially losing search Rankings

Recently, Marv Dorner from the BeBizzy Break Podcast invited Florin Muresan, Squirrly’s CEO, for a conversation about Squirrly SEO and Search Engine Optimization in general.

Coming from a WordPress developer’s side, Marv had a distinctive approach to learning more about Squirrly SEO, which translated into some very interesting questions.

His questions are probably some of your questions as well, which is why we decided to share segments of that conversation here on the Squirrly blog as well. Check it out.

Marv: Is there a challenge of potentially losing search Rankings switching to Squirrly from other plugins, like Yoast?

Florin: It’s very easy (switching to Squirrly from other plugins) because when you install the Squirrly SEO plugin, it tells you to Import Settings. So basically everything that you’ve optimized in Yoast (for example) is going to be available by default in Squirrly SEO.

So, once you make the switch and deactivate Yoast, you’ll have everything that you used to have still in place. You’re not losing anything over the switch.

Marv: Yeah, I can see this being a concern for people that are doing this, either as a professional or if that’s their company website, they’d hate to blow up what they already have.

Does that work as well with other SEO plugins or do you have just a few of them where that import process works, or does it just grab everything that’s currently there?

Florin: I think we have everybody. And, I mean, Yoast is the most complex, and the others were very easy to do.

For Yoast users (in particular), because we do have a lot of people buying the PRO or the Business plans from Squirrly and who are using both plugins, we’ve made it easy to use both plugins.

For example, you can let Yoast deal with the technical side of the optimization and use Squirrly’s keyword research tool to find new opportunities for which to build content.

Marv: So, you can run both at the same time; they don’t conflict each other cause you’re importing data basically from the database.

Florin: You can tell Squirrly to NOT create the codes for METAs, for JSON-LD, for Open Graph, for Twitter Cards – and then Squirrly will not create any code for those. In this case, your WordPress site will get the Settings from Yoast, Squirrly will do nothing on this.

Then you can just use the other features from Squirrly, like the SERP Checker which shows you your true position on Google, the SEO Audit, the Keyword Research, the Live Assistant for when you optimize content.

Marv: Hmm, now you got me thinking. That’s a bit more frosting on the cake, I guess.

Florin: Yeah, we’ve spent about three months before the release of the new Squirrly version because we wanted to make even the Focus Pages feature work with Yoast, but in the end, we thought that since Yoast updates the plugin so much, we might have a lot of problems in the future.

So, we decided that if you want to use Focus Pages, you must switch everything to Squirrly, but it was one of our ideas to also make Focus Pages detect the settings made in Yoast.

Marv: Awesome! That’s amazing. Now you got me thinking that I definitely have to try this out and look at this a little closer, cause the fact that you can still run the technical side…

You know, I come from a WordPress developer’s side and do some SEO stuff, so I have a place in my heart for the technical side, because that’s something that people forget about; they write all kinds of great content but on the tech site, their site is a mess and is not managed correctly.

If you have a tool that is already doing that and then now you have a tool that it can actually help you on the content side and be way better at it, and you can run them in conjunction with each other – that’s a pretty good solution.

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This is a transcript of a section of an extended conversation between Marv and Florin. (answer featured in this article starts at 22:22).

For the full interview, check out Marv’s podcast here.

If you’re interested in Marv’s thoughts on Squirrly SEO after this interview, make sure to read this article here.

Squirrly SEO features mentioned in this segment of the conversation:

Click on the links to learn more about each one of the features.