Doesn’t Everyone Hate it When Service Companies Get Involved in Software?

Local SEO Guide is happy to announce Locadium, a Google My Business reporting system built from the ground up for multi-location brands and agencies. According to a recent poll of Local SEO Sherpa’s, 78% of them have problems with Google changing information on GMB profiles. Now I know you are saying:

“Dan, there is the ability to see changes suggested by Google in the GMB dashboard”.

Thanks, random Internet person! You can see Google suggested updates in the various GMB dashboards, and in addition to that, Locadium reports actual front end UI changes that users are seeing. 

In addition to the core reporting application, you can also push updates to GMB through the GMB API in real time, manage thousands of children locations from a parent agency or brand setup, check recent reviews and see how Google is updating your information over time. These are all things that we have been using internally to help us manage GMB profiles at scale.

In addition to these features, we are hard at work building out aggregate GMB Insights reporting and the ability to push attributes via the GMB API that we plan to include at no extra cost.

While I think that those are all pretty exciting features,  my favorite is probably our industrial strength GMB duplicate checker. Using our proprietary technology we gather and score all the relevant duplicates and potential duplicates out there so you can detect any rogue GMB listings. Then you can either claim and optimize them or terminate them with EXTREME PREJUDICE.

So that’s all the good stuff if you are so inclined head over to www.locadium.com now and check it out. But before that, screenshots!

The top level dashboard:

A “Location Page”:

The reviews at the bottom of a “Location Page”:

The ability to edit a location page:

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The SEO Monopoly Hangover

Source: Threadheads

Ben Thompson’s post this week on Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover touched a nerve. Thompson’s thesis is that companies that are monopolies tend to face considerable problems once the monopoly ends. He boils these problems down to:

• Nature
  “The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high one because it has become fat and lazy.”

• Business Model
  “The natural inclination for former monopolies, at least if Microsoft and IBM are any indication, is to stick with the monopoly-era business model.”

• Culture
  “When there’s little competitive threat, when high profit margins and a commanding market position are assumed, then the economic and market forces that other companies have to live or die by simply don’t apply. In that environment, what would you expect to happen? The company and its people lose touch with external realities, because what’s happening in the marketplace is essentially irrelevant to the success of the company…”

This feels relevant because I think the SEO industry is in the early phases of a monopoly hangover. And with the speed of change in the tech industry ever-increasing, the length of each phase gets shorter.

For the past decade or so, SEO consulting as an industry has been its own odd version of a monopoly. Customers had limited knowledge of what they were buying and many didn’t even know where to buy it. Demand felt infinite.

In the early days, SEO consultants had pricing power – you could almost charge whatever you want. If a prospect balked there was likely another one in your inbox wanting to buy your service. SEO tool providers probably had similar experiences. We all were hungry for data, shortcuts and ways to automate our work (we still are).

No one of us had monopoly power of course, but demand so outstripped supply that it certainly felt like we did.

I don’t think that’s the case today:

• It feels like most companies that even come close to touching marketing (web developers, system integrators, media buyers, domain providers, mobile site providers, business listings management services. hosting companies, etc.) offers some version of SEO consulting these days, driving pricing down across the industry. In many cases, firms that focus on paid search are throwing SEO in as “added value”.

• Tool providers are increasingly moving from point solutions to “kitchen sink” solutions. SEMRush is a great example. They have done a truly impressive job of iterating from a keyword/rankings research tool to what feels like a full SEO suite (backlink analysis, technical analysis, etc.).

While there are still plenty of ways to differentiate your services, the overall trend feels like a lot of the industry is being commodified.

As a competitor in SEO, these forces have had me thinking about whether or not Local SEO Guide has a post-monopoly hangover (although I hadn’t thought of it that way until I read Thompson’s post). Thinking about it via Thompson’s framework:

• Nature
  I’d like to think I never got lazy, but I certainly got fat. I took as much business as I could handle. It got to a point where I was afraid that the quality of my work, and my sanity, were going to suffer. That was about three years ago and one of the primary reasons I starting asking smart people if they would consider working with me. Over three years we have grown from two people to eight. This has dramatically changed the nature of the company, but in classic old-dog/new-tricks vein, it hasn’t quite changed my nature (I don’t think). That’s got me thinking as we try to grow in this post-SEO-monopoly world, what are the aspects of my own nature that need to change to keep this thing going in the right direction?

• Business Model
  While SEO consulting is our core business, over the past three years we have grown a variety of related services to improve ways we can help our clients and to attract new business. Our local citation services for multi-location brands and our white-label service for other agencies have been two of our strongest growth engines. And next week we’ll be jumping into the SEO tools SAAS space (stay tuned!).

• Culture
  This has been perhaps the most interesting challenge for us/me. I have always found this talk by Cabel Sasser of Panic Software inspiring:
  Sasser talks about how the goal of Panic is not to IPO or sell out, etc. but rather to hang a sign on the front door that they have “gone fishing” when they are ready to retire. When the LSG team talks about the mission of the company, we typically discuss helping our clients succeed at their jobs (and in some cases, save them) and creating a life for our employees that enables them to achieve their own “gone fishing” goal. We are definitely trying to be the best at what we do, but I often wonder if, given the state of the SEO world these days, that’s enough?

  Do we need to be more aggressive marketers? Do we need to try to be the smartest guys in the room, or at least make silly videos portraying us that way? Do we need to be constantly blogging about the Ultimate List of SEO Bullshit? Or can we just continue doing great work and continue to rely mostly on our reputation and hand-crafted Twitter feed for business? (#humblebrag) If I am being honest with myself, I think we do need to do the Ultimate List of SEO Bullshit and the silly videos; we just need to figure out how to do those “marketing” things in a way that reflects our culture and values. Culture can certainly be a curse – it’s the source of a both company’s strength and its weakness.

I am not sure there are any perfect solutions to how to survive the SEO monopoly hangover, but if you’re not ready to go fishing yet, it certainly couldn’t hurt to think about it. I certainly am.

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Yoast SEO 5.1: Internal linking suggestions in Italian

Our development team is steadily chugging along and today provides you with a new and improved edition of Yoast SEO. This release features mainly enhancements and fixes, plus a slew of updates to our language support. Let us walk you through the new version we know as Yoast SEO 5.1, starting with our main focus point in this release: languages.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

Buy now » Info Updated language support in Yoast SEO 5.1

We like to know a language inside and out to be able to offer the best possible content and readability analysis. That’s why we’re continually improving the support we provide for languages and add new languages in the process. This release, we’re doing a lot of work on our language support. The highlight? Thanks to Abramo Tesoro, we’re now offering complete Italian Insights and Linking Suggestions in Yoast SEO 5.1 Premium.

Our Italian friends can now write a couple of hundred words to see the related post tool automatically suggest internal links to add to their posts. It’s a helpful tool that helps you build a solid site structure, and we’re happy that our Italian speaking users can use it now. Additionally, we’ve improved the Internal Linking Suggestions and Insights for Spanish, Dutch, French, English, and German.

Even more language news

In this release, we have a lot of new language additions. For instance, we’ve added additional English and French transition words, that last one thanks to Vianney Andre who also helped us with the Yoast SEO 5.0 release.

Yoast SEO can now filter out plural ordinal numbers for Spanish, Italian, and French. That means we can filter out things like octavo, ventunesimo or zéroième, when we encounter them in illogical places. This way, we can build a clean and useful prominent words list. Also, we’ve added filters for time words for English, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. Words like afternoon, middag, nachmittag, matin or tarde will no longer influence the link suggestions.

Enhancements & fixes

Since releasing Yoast SEO 5.0 a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been hard at work improving that version and getting things ready for future releases. Besides fixing bugs and enhancing the performance of the plugin, we’ve made some changes that will improve the way the plugin works. In addition to that, we’re also fine-tuning some workflows and thanks to a couple of UX changes you’ll have to guess less what some little things mean. Lastly, we’ve added an importer for Jetpack SEO data.

Conclusion

Yoast SEO 5.1 is a significant step forward in the language department. We now support multiple languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Italian, and our understanding of these languages is only increasing. With this knowledge, we can provide you with helpful information that not only helps you to write brilliant content but also to build a solid site structure by suggesting internal links based on what you write.

I hear you thinking:

“Maybe my language is next?”

Could be! Let us know in the comments which language we should look into, and we’ll see what we can do.

Read more: ‘Why every website needs Yoast SEO’ »

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How TO NOT Screw up Your Canonical Tags

The incorrect application of canonical tags might be ruining your past and current SEO efforts. This is because the use of canonical tags is a widely known advanced SEO technique/strategy for dealing with duplicate content or a page that is accessible through multiple URLs. So, if you do not know how to properly use a canonical tag, then you are definitely putting your SEO in danger.

Canonical Tags have been around for quite some time now, and you would expect that most – if not all – of the SEO practitioners around the world have grasped it in its totality. But reality is stranger than fiction in that some SEOs still need help with their canonical tags – and that’s amazing it itself.

Before you start with using the canonical tag, you should also know what a canonical URL is because the both of them aren’t what they seem – at least at first glance.

  Canonical URL

What I mean by canonical URL is that this exact URL is the one that you want the search engines to index and rank. The other URLs which have similar content, have a similar purpose, or are duplicates of your canonical URL should not be the ones indexed and ranked by the search engines.

Basically, if you happen to have this occurrence, then you should use the canonical tag for the one that you think is the best one among them.

For example, you have the canonical URL, hello.com/a. Then, you have another page, hello.com/b, which is the duplicate of your canonical URL that came from a problem in your site architecture or you use it for testing.

Then you have this version, http://ift.tt/2txVyvY, which has a URL parameter. Keep in mind that the parameter does not change the content.

So, your canonical URL is hello.com/a, and Google will know that the other URLs such as hello.com/b and http://ift.tt/2txVyvY are duplicates or serve the same purpose as hello.com/a – which would lead Google to know that the one that they should index is the canonicalized URL.

Another amazing use of the rel=canonical tag is for cross-domains. If you want to republish content on hello.com/a to another website, then you can put in a cross-domain rel=canonical which tells Google that hello.com/a is the original one. As a result, every time that Google crawls the other website, they will know that the original version is in hello.com/a.

Canonicalize Multiple URLs

There are actually numerous ways where you can canonicalize multiple URLs. Here are some of them:

1. Rel=canonical

As I have mentioned, you can use the rel=canonical tag for canonicalization, however, it is not the only one that you could use. I still recommend this, but sometimes you can also use the other ways. There are also some not recommended ways – which will be discussed in the later parts of this article.

2. 301 Direct

This code is the one that people use whenever they have duplicate content, changed URLs, or transferred the content of a page to a different one. It is basically you telling Google that you want your visitors to go to hello.com/a instead of hello.com/b.

3. Google Search Console’s Search Parameters

This way is the best option if you have numerous URLs and URL parameters. Sometimes, your web development team would just be wasting time if they individually clean each and every page. You can be effective in cleaning up your website by using Google Search Console’s search parameters option.

However, you have to make an account that is verified and connected to your website in order for this solution to work. After ensuring all of this, you can just proceed to the Search Console’s Search Parameters section to make certain parameters in your website passive.

So, for example, you have numerous URL parameters in your website, you can just set them to be passive, and Google will know that these URLs and URL parameters could be ignored. This could be a helpful way for you to canonicalize.

4. Location Hashes

This is for the webmasters and SEOs that basically have the same content on two different pages, but have slight differences. Let’s say hello.com/a has content about laptops at the top of the page, but hello.com/b has content about laptops at the bottom of the page. You have the same content in both URLs, same search intent, and you are essentially doing the same thing.

Well, if you want Google to treat it as one, then add the hash. In this case, it will be a#b and that will make someone go to the specific section of the page. If you have a “jobs” page on your website, but does not directly go to the “Job listings” part, then use the #listings in the URL to take people directly to the job listings page. After you have done this, Google will consider all of them as one URL. Therefore, they will be ranking it the same, they will not be indexed differently because they are basically canonicalized to the same URL.

How NOT to Canonicalize URLs

1. Block Google from Crawling one URL but not the other ones

Always remember that even if you use robots.txt to block Googlebot’s spiders from reaching hello.com/b, Google will still not allow that /b and hello.com/a possess the same content.

Since they cannot crawl /b, they will not be able to see anything inside that URL, it is invisible to them. This means that they will have no concept of its rankings signals, the links that point to that URL, any signals of engagement or content. So, any ranking signal that might have helped /a rank better will not be seen by Google.

2. Do not Block Indexation

Even if you might think of using the no-index tag so that Google could still determine that /a and /b’s content is the same, but they will not index /b, then you are still essentially facing the same problem as using the robots.txt. You will still be preventing them from merging the ranking signals of /a and /b – which is something that is important for your SEO.

3. Only use the 301

I still strongly recommend that you use the 301 redirect for canonicalization because it is a permanent redirect. It has the highest chance to be successful in canonicalization even if there is the 302 or the 307. For most SEOs – myself included – the 301 redirect is still the best for canonicalization, so if you are canonicalizing, the 301 redirect is the one to use.

4. Avoid using 404 for the Non-Canonical Version

I do not recommend that you use 404 for the URLs that have the duplicate content. Do not 404 it if you instead use the 301 redirect. If you use the 404, then you will lose the ranking signals for the other URLs – which will decrease the chances of /a having a better time in ranking.

The only time I would use the 404 is when you have a new page or the page was just the product of an error. Only use 404 if you know that the URL that you will be using it on does not have any ranking signals, and is full of problems. However, if it was an URL that had organic visitors and real people linked to it, then use the 301 instead.

When Should You Canonicalize?

1. If the Content Is Exceedingly Similar or Is an Exact Duplicate

If for instance, you have content on two or more URLs that are duplicates of each other or are exceedingly similar, then you should make it a habit to canonicalize these URLs into a single one.

2. If the URL’s Content Serves the Same Search Intent 

For your URL’s that are not necessarily duplicates, but have similar or same search intent, then I would recommend that you canonicalize it.

For example, /a is about laptops, but /b is about laptop parts, then even though their content is unique, and the phrasing and sentences are not similar at the least, they still serve the same search intent.

What you are trying to focus on is the URL’s search intent. Even if it has different purposes but has similar search intent or has a similarity in their targeted keywords, it would be better if you canonicalize these multiple URLs. Google will undeniably have a much better time indexing and ranking a single URL that has numerous positive ranking signals than them ranking multiple URLs that have an average performance. So, instead of dividing your URL’s link and ranking signal equity, it is much better if you focus on a single URL.

3. If You Are Republishing or Updating Old Content

In these instances, you should always use rel=canonical. However, if you still have the inclination to keep the old URL to get its ranking signals when you republish it, the simplest thing you can do is this: take the content of the older version and republish it as /a-old. Then, take /a and redirect it or publish newer content in it and make it the canonical one. As a result, you will still have the older version on your website but it is already treated as /old.

4. If There Are Expired Content, Events, and Promotions in Your Site

If you happen to have these kinds of content, and there are new related promos or events in your site, then it would be good for you if you use a 301 here. You should not use rel=canonical here because why would you want your visitors to go to a page where nothing is available? So, it is much better if you redirect them to a page where they will gains something, and possibly give you more customers.

Key Takeaway

Even if the rel=canonical, canonicalization or canonical URLs have been around for awhile now, it is always best for any SEO practitioner to go back to the basics and refresh their knowledge.

Your website’s content, links, and architecture are what your users always see, so if you do not take good care of the site, then you are potentially losing valuable visitors that you might have had the chance to convert into a paying customer. Remember everything that I have highlighted in this article and you will have an easy time in canonicalizing pages of your site.

Do you have any other tips on canonicalization? Share it in the comments section below.

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Data Storytelling: Using Color for Emphasis

One of the first, and I would argue most important, things you learn as an analyst is that not everyone loves (or understands) data as much as you do. Whether it’s your first executive report or 20th weekly analysis, at some point, you are going to have an incredibly important insight to share, and you definitely don’t want it to fall on deaf ears.…

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Link building with Dixon Jones (Majestic)

“If nobody writes about it, then the content is a tree falling in the forest without anyone there to listen.” That’s how Dixon Jones, Marketing Director of Majestic, illustrates the importance of getting the right links to your content. We proudly announce that Dixon will be speaking at YoastCon 2017 on November 2!

Learn link building from the best! Get your ticket now for YoastCon 2017!

Dixon Jones has worked at the forefront of search marketing since 1999. He became the Marketing Director of the world’s largest link analysis engine, Majestic, in 2009, transforming the SEO industry by providing link intelligence on a scale not previously open to the industry. Here, you can discover what he has to say about link building in 2017.

Majestic is all about links. If you compare links to other ranking factors, like content on a page or technical optimization, how would you rate the importance of links? Any examples to illustrate this?

In March 2016 Google’s Andry Lipattsev revealed that links remained one of Google top three ranking factors. In February 2017 Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the PageRank algorithm that made Google what it is today was still part of the algorithm. So yes – links are highly important, but these days there is a big difference between “a link” and “a link that counts”. Most links are hardly worth the screen they are written on.

Over the years link building changed a lot. Obviously, buying links is not the way to go. But what do you advise site owners if they want to get valuable links?

In a white hat world, you really should be considering the nature of the people that will be reading the page that the link is on. Are they real people? Is it a real story that relates to them? Does the link add to the story and is it a continuation of the user’s quest for knowledge? Is your content the END POINT for that quest?

Come see Dixon Jones speak at YoastCon 2017 on November 2 »

Some site owners might find it easier to get links from Facebook or Twitter than from other websites. How do social links compare to links from other websites? What would you invest in more?

Facebook and Twitter create short term noise, but unless that noise translates into others writing evergreen content that links to your site, the benefits are transitory on social. But I think of Social links as a stepping stone to long term success. They give you a tannoy to broadcast a new message… but if the wrong people listen, then nobody will write about what you have to say. If nobody writes about it, then the content is a tree falling in the forest without anyone there to listen… does it make a sound?

When a site owner analyzes their site with Majestic SEO they’ll get a trust and citation flow score. How can they put these metrics to use to help them optimize their site?

Understanding how we create those metrics really helps. The data is not simply scraping Google or looking for some sort of reverse engineering of Search Visibility. Trust Flow really is a score that relates at scale to the quality of a page. The simple workflow is:

• Find candidate sites for getting links to your content.
• Find the influencers on these sites.
• Convince them of the merits of your business and content.

You can start by just typing in a keyword into Majestic to find the candidate sites or you can look at up to 10 competitors and find the hubs of authority for your niche. Both strategies can work well.

Majestic is often used for competitor analysis. Is there a set workflow in Majestic that you can recommend to a new Majestic user who wants to analyze the competition?

Yes. Many people use the “Clique Hunter” to look at sites that link to three or four or more competitors but not to themselves. For some businesses, this creates quite a list, but re-sorting the list can put the best candidates near the top. To the right of each domain is a little cog. Use the cog to select candidate sites to approach and select the “add to bucket” button. You can do this all day, and when you are ready, click on the bucket icon at the top of the screen and you can export all the sites out as a .csv file to approach the influencers for these sites.

Alternatively (and indeed – in addition) I strongly urge users to set up a campaign dashboard as soon as they have an account on Majestic. This starts tracking their niche and from these dashboards, you can easily analyze the sites in any of Majestic’s tools by using the “Export Sites To…” button.

We assume this interview has convinced people to go see your presentation at YoastCon on November 2! In the unlikely case someone is still in doubt, what’s the main reason they shouldn’t miss it?

The chart below shows how our Gamification system has distributed 1 Million “badges” on Majestic. Only 3% of all badges were for areas of our site related to comparing websites. This tells us that most users are really only scratching the surface of what Majestic can do for them. Yoast’s conference is a chance to go deeper. You’ll find out things about links analysis you never knew was possible.

Read more: ‘YoastCon 2017: Practical SEO’ »

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Why SEO Radar Is Awesome

It’s a bit awkward to write about a company we have an investment in without sounding like a total salesman, but I am going to give it a try. Even if we had no interest in SEO Radar (full disclosure: we do), I’d like to think I’d still be writing this. Cause it saved my ass today.

A few years ago Mark Munroe showed me a prototype of a tool he was building that would crawl websites and report on changes to pages that would affect SEO. Whether you are an in-house SEO or an outside consultant, it often is the case that releases go live without you knowing about it, or without you getting a chance to test everything. We used to use various hacks to automate the tracking of a client site’s SEO elements and a variety of tools that could ping web pages and report but it was always a bit of a kluge. When I saw the SEO Radar demo, I wept like Alexander…and I asked Mark if I could invest in the company.

I am telling you about this today because this morning one of our clients pushed a big release live without alerting us. We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when. When I woke up this morning, I had the following alert in my inbox:

We had set up SEO Radar to track all of the main templates to this large ecommerce site. This alert reported on the biggest changes that went live. Clicking the “View crawl summary” link takes you to the full detail on all of the changes to the tracked URLs.

Rather than do a full review of all the bells and whistles, I’ll use one example to illustrate how this tool saves us both time and sanity:

One of the release tickets was to update the mobile alternate tag – it had previously specified media=”handheld” and we had recommended they update this to the more standard media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)“. So we clicked on the homepage URL in the SEO Radar dashboard and got the URL History report where one of the options is to view a full source diff between different days (there are a few other options like view headers, screenshots, etc.):

Checking the full source diff between today and yesterday quickly showed that the update had been done correctly. And it took about 30 seconds to confirm the other other templates were good to go.
Of course I could have manually checked the site, but this was just one of about 30 changes. SEO Radar allowed me to quickly review all of the changes on each template. And now I have these changes archived so at any moment I can go back and check what the robots.txt file was blocking on any date – that feature alone is worth the price of admission (yes, I’m looking at you client who can’t resist overwriting their robots.txt file almost every week).

There are plenty of other great features including Google Search Console data archiving, ability to test staging sites for changes, competitive monitoring (we have one client who is obsessed about knowing when one of their competitors changes their site) and more. It’s one of the more useful tools in our SEO toolbelt and it has already saved us and our clients a lot of time and money by catching SEO problems before they become big SEO problems.

Like I said, we like SEO Radar so much we invested in the company so feel free to take this post as a very biased pitch. But if you do SEO for a complicated website that gets updated a lot, I encourage you to check SEO Radar out. It’s like the Prozac of SEO tools.

SEORadar.com

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SEO Industry Update: Mobile First

3 Steps Every Digital Marketer with a Dynamic Serving or Mobile Site Needs to Take Remind me: What is this Mobile First Index all about, again?

In October 2016, Gary Illyes announced that Google will be creating a new mobile index that will become their primary index.…

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Mobile SEO: the ultimate guide

We are addicted to our smartphones. For many people, the smartphone is the first thing they check when they get out of bed in the morning. It is also the last thing they check before they go to sleep. People use it for everything. It’s huge. Mobile has changed our lives. It has also changed SEO. Mobile SEO helps you to reach customers and satisfy their needs in an enjoyable way. This guide to mobile SEO will show you everything you need to deliver a perfect mobile experience.

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Buy now » Info

• Mobile SEO vs. desktop SEO
• Google’s mobile-first index
• Know what to do
  • Mobile SEO tools
• Design for performance
  • Responsive design vs. dynamic serving vs. separate domain
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Think about implementing AMP
  • New kid on the block: Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
• Focus on user experience
• Optimize for local
• Finetune your mobile content
  • Write for the small screen
  • Write better meta descriptions and titles
  • Prepare for voice search
• Add structured data to a mobile site

Why is mobile SEO important?

Mobile SEO is so important because it helps you get in the right place at the right time and makes sure the experience you offer consumers is stellar. Mobile traffic has eclipsed desktop traffic. Every day, more and more people are discovering the enormous advantages of the smartphone. Our whole lives are in those machines – it’s almost scary to see how attached we’ve become to our smartphone. Many people call it an extension of themselves and something they couldn’t live without. To reach these people you need mobile SEO.

Mobile does not necessarily mean on the go. Studies find that people often grab the nearest device to look something up and in most cases that’s their smartphone. They use it to inform themselves about products before making the decision to buy something. Anywhere any place. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products.

Mobile SEO vs. desktop SEO

There’s a difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO, but the goals are often comparable. You want to reach your audience and turn them into customers. In some ways, desktop SEO tactics also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form. Three big themes still apply: focus on performance, user experience, and content. In desktop SEO you’ll often focus more on the general public, while mobile SEO is somewhat more local oriented.

Google’s mobile-first index

The importance of mobile SEO is made even clearer by Google’s recent announcement. Sometime in 2018, Google will switch to a mobile-first index. What does this mean? For the first time, Google will determine rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of the site instead of the desktop version. A new Googlebot will crawl your mobile site and determine if its performance, content and user experience are up to scratch. If so, you can get a good ranking. If it fails somehow, other sites will be higher rated and will pass you by. Even if you’re not focusing on mobile you will still be judged by your mobile site, so now is the time to take action.

Things will change

Right now, nobody knows exactly how this process will differ from the current one. We do know, however, that you must keep your mobile site crawlable by taking down all possible barriers like poorly loading scripts. Don’t block stuff in your robots.txt. It also has to offer the highest possible performance if you want to be indexed well.

You can no longer present less information on your mobile site than on your desktop site. Your content has to be the same on both, because, in the future, you can only rank on the information that is on your mobile page. Or, like Google’s Maile Ohye told us in an interview:

“To “optimize” for a mobile-first index, make sure that what you serve to mobile users is the version of the content you’d want Google to index, not a paired down version, or a version that gets updated later than desktop, or version that redirects to the mobile homepage.”

Don’t forget to tell Google your site is mobile-proof. You can add a viewport declaration – if you’re using responsive design – or a Vary header when using dynamic serving. More on later on in this article or in Google’s developer documentation.

Know what to do

Mobile SEO is – just like regular SEO – all about making sure your site is crawlable and findable. Also, you need stellar performance, great content and a flawless UX. To get it right, you need to know how your site is currently performing and what your visitors are doing right now. For instance, do people use the same keywords on mobile to find you? People often change how they search while using a mobile device. And what do you want people to do? Offering to navigate to the nearest Whole Foods is less than ideal when you’re on a desktop machine. It makes total sense on your smartphone, though.

Mobile SEO tools

You need to become best friends with Google Search Console. Its search tools are legendary and a big help if you want to find out how your site is doing in the search results. For instance, by using the Search Analytics feature, you can see how mobile and desktop users use words to find what they need. Are you targeting the right words? Should you focus on something else?

One of the other Google Search Console tools that make your life a bit easier is the Mobile Usability tool. This tool checks your site and presents an overview of posts and pages that don’t follow Google’s mobile-friendly rules. This is an excellent way to start improving your mobile SEO.

Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training »

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Another Google tool is PageSpeed Insights. This tool shows you exactly how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop. It also suggests performance improving enhancements. Use this alongside the Developer Tools in browsers to see how your site is rendering its contents. Some other great tools to up your mobile SEO game are Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, Analytics, SEMrush, OnPage.org, ScreamingFrog, and SimilarWeb.

Read more: Google Search Console: Search appearance
Read more: DIY: Test your mobile site

Design for performance

It’s the number one thing you’ll be working on when you’re trying to improve mobile SEO: performance. In this case, performance almost entirely boils down to site speed. It’s a given: the faster your site is, the happier your users will be. We all know that a site has to load within a couple of seconds or else your visitors will be gone. If you combine this with the knowledge that sites are only increasing in size, you know you have your work cut out for you.

Optimizing performance, however, is a continuous process. Your site will never be fast enough because there’s always more to improve. And that’s ok. By keeping a close watch on how your mobile site is performing, you can immediately jump onto every opportunity to improve it. Google loves fast sites, and so do your customers.

Read more: How to improve your mobile site
Read more: Page speed as a ranking factor, what you need to know

Responsive design vs. dynamic serving vs. separate domain

While developing your mobile site, you’ll have three options: responsive design, dynamic serving and a separate site on a subdomain. Google prefers responsive design. This way, you have one site that adapts to the device it’s used on. There’s only one code base, so maintenance is easy. According to Google, using responsive design will make your site eligible for addition in the new mobile-first index. Always let Google know that your site is mobile-proof by adding the meta name=“viewport” declaration in the head of your documents.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Dynamic serving takes a different approach. It uses server-side technology to serve a different version of your site to mobile users, depending on the way they access your site. The URL stays the same, but the files sent differ completely. You need to add the Vary header to get Google to crawl your site. This way, Google immediately knows that it will receive mobile-optimized files from somewhere else. A Vary header appears like this when a browser makes a request:

Vary: User-Agent

The third option is a separate mobile site on a different URL – usually an m. domain – and with different content. Google supports this method, but only if you make correct connections between your regular desktop domain and the mobile domain. Use rel=”alternate” and rel=”canonical” to tell Google how these pages are connected. More on these different types and how Google uses them on this Developers page.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a powerful tool to analyze the performance of your mobile site. It’s easy to use and gives you loads of insights into the loading speed of your site. Put in your URL and Insights will give you two scores: one for mobile and one for the desktop. These will differ. If your score is red, you have work to do. Orange means an average performance and green is good. You’ll receive suggestions to enhance the performance of your site. Follow these suggestions, and you’ll be on your way.

I hear you thinking:

“Nobody has a score of 0/100, right?”

Well, think again. It’s a combination of things that can do your mobile site a lot of harm. Find a bad hosting provider, install WordPress on a crappy shared hosting program, activate thirty plugins and upload a hundred non-optimized images to your blog and you are well on your way to a bad score. But these things can easily be undone. Run PageSpeed Insights and other speed analyses tools and follow their advice.

What can you do to improve your site speed?

• Optimize images and use fewer images
• Invest in quality hosting
• Update PHP to PHP7
• Keep your redirects in check
• Fix render blocking content above the fold
• Optimize and minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript
• Cache your assets
• Use a CDN
• Make the transition to HTTP/2
• Load fewer assets like JavaScript libraries
• Load fewer ad servers

When improving your page speed, you should always ask yourself if you need all these assets, libraries, images, plugins, theme features and so on. The famous saying “less is more” is still as valuable as ever.

Read more: Site speed tools and suggestions »

Think about implementing AMP

The Google-led open source project AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, has one goal: loading your pages as fast as possible. It’s been in development for some time now. It has reached new heights with the release of amp-bind, a JavaScript library that adds interactivity to AMP pages. Now, one of the biggest drawbacks of using AMP is fixed.

In the beginning, AMP was used on static posts, like blogs or news articles, that didn’t need interaction from the user. For e-commerce purposes, AMP fell short. Until now, that is. Look into what AMP could do for your site and how you might implement it. Not every site needs it, but the ones that do could gain a lot from it.

Read more about implementing AMP with WordPress »

New kid on the block: Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

PWAs offers another way of targeting that mobile user. A progressive web app is an all-in-one solution that works on all devices, for all users. It’s the perfect crossover between the app world and the web world. The web app works like an app, without the need to publishing it in an app store. PWAs combine the loading speeds of mobile sites with the best functionality of a native app. If done correctly, a good PWA might fool users into thinking they are using a native app.

Thanks to technologies like service workers, the browser can do a lot more in the background, while keeping the front end updated in real-time. This makes it a viable option if you need an app, but can’t justify the cost. There will be a lot happening with progressive web apps in the next couple of years. Google has a must-read blog post if you want to know how to create indexable PWAs.

Focus on user experience

Besides being findable and lightning fast, your mobile site should offer an enjoyable user experience. Try to take away any obstacles and make sure users can reach their goals quickly. There’s a lot you need to consider when optimizing your user experience. I’ve listed a couple of things you can think of below:

• Fix your font size: your typography needs to be top notch.
• Keep enough room between the clickable elements.
• Make your sub-menu clickable, so users don’t automatically go back to home instead of the submenu.
• Put your phone number on the homepage and make it clickable. This way, people can call you if they want to do business.
• Don’t make users pinch and zoom to see – and use – your interface.
• Make your buttons large enough for fingers.
• Fix your forms: bad forms are unusable on mobile.
• Cut the clutter.
• Test, adjust and test again!

Read more: 10 ways to improve mobile UX »

Optimize for local

While we use our smartphones a lot in our house, these devices become extra useful when we’re out and about. Google found out that 76% of the people who search for something nearby visit a related business within a day. 28% of those visits lead to a sale. To cope with that local demand, you need to work on your local SEO. Local search results can look very different from regular desktop searches, so you have to know what to target and how to target that. Here are some things you can to do to improve your local SEO for mobile:

• Write locally oriented content: It’s one of the best things you can do to improve local rankings.
• Build local links: Ask, and ye shall receive.
• Google My Business: Sign up and fill in your details. Here, you can keep your NAP data up to date, respond to reviews and upload photos, among other things.
• Reviews: Ask your customers for reviews, mark them up with structured data and present them on a particular page on your site. This might do wonders.
• Photos: Make beautiful pictures of your business and add them to My Business.
• Schema.org: Add structured data for NAP details, products, reviews, etc. and you might get mobile rich search results like rich cards or carousels.
• Contact details: Make sure your contact information is always correct. If not, fix it.
• Yoast Local SEO for WordPress plugin: This plugin can do a lot of the hard local SEO work for you.

Read more: Ultimate guide to small business SEO
Read more: Local ranking factors that help your business’ SEO

Finetune your mobile content

The screen of a smartphone is small, that’s a given. On that screen, text gets truncated or wrapped in a seemingly never-ending stream of paragraphs. A user has to scroll endlessly. Text on a mobile screen has the potential to give every web designer a headache. But the design – and use – of text is of crucial importance to the success of your site. If your site is unreadable or plain ugly, people will not read your 1,000-word article. Hell, not even your 100-word summary. Fix your typography.

People read a lot on their smartphones, but you have to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Also, you have to make sure that your content is up to scratch as well.

Read more: Optimize your mobile content

Write for the small screen

Always keep the restrictions of the small screen in mind when creating or editing content. Don’t use too many long sentences, keep your paragraphs around four sentences and use many stops like lists and headings to break up your text. Nothing is more daunting to your visitor than a massive block of unformatted text. Check your content on a smartphone to see how it works and if it’s possible to improve it.

Read more: Copywriting for mobile (coming soon!)

Write better meta descriptions and titles

Google will show less information in the search results on mobile than on a desktop. Your meta descriptions and your titles will be truncated if you made them too long. Thinks about that when you optimize your posts and pages. You lose several characters when optimizing your meta descriptions and titles for mobile. In Yoast SEO’s snippet editor, you can switch between a mobile and desktop preview. This way, you can see how the differences between the two and pick a perfect middle ground.

Read more: The snippet preview in Yoast SEO

Prepare for voice search

When working on your content, you should take the next biggest thing into account: voice search. Yes, it’s been around for a while. But with the advent of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s nameless Home assistant, things are moving fast right now. More and more people are using their voice to perform actions on the web, and your content has to provide answers. If done correctly, you might kill two birds with one stone: you’ll not only respond to questions mobile users have, but it might also lead to so-called featured snippets or answer boxes on desktop searches.

To prepare for voice search, you need to take a good look at your current content. Ask yourself, does it answer any question a user might have? If not, change it. Find out which questions people use to find your content and optimize for that. Use Google’s autofill or tools like Answer the Public to find alternative questions to answer.

Read more: How to prepare for voice search

Add structured data to a mobile site

Structured data is hot. By adding structured data in the form of Schema.org to your site, you can open a line of communication with search engines. Structured data makes it clear for search engines what all the different elements on your site mean. If done correctly, search engines can use this data to give you highlighted search results, known as rich results or rich snippets. This way, your site immediately stands out from the crowd, and that might lead to a higher click-through rate.

Want rich snippets for your site? Try our Structured data training »

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Structured data forms the basis for many new ways of presenting search results. The rich results we used to know as rich cards, for instance, use data you can add to your mobile site. The result is a snippet that is mobile-optimized and very enticing to click. Structured data is one of the most important topics you have to read up on. Follow our structured data course if you need an easy way to add structured data to your mobile..

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INFOGRAPH: 5 Steps to Create the Perfect Meta Description

Meta descriptions are essentially your way of showcasing what you want people to see – the high level of your page in search results. They matter because click-through rate matters, and if you write them well and follow a few simple principles you can increase your site traffic.

Step One: Start with an action verb

You can create a sense of movement and inspire people to read with just this one copywriting trick. When you start with an action verb like “Discover,’ “learn,’ or “become” you get the person moving along the sentence and reducing friction.

Step Two: Give a clear picture of what the content will be

If you describe with clarity what a searcher will get if they click through to your content – if you really outline in a succinct way what the benefit to them will be for clicking, your click through rate will go up significantly. This is why the meta description is just about being persuasive, not stuffing as many keywords in as possible. Though it may make sense to use some as I suggest in another point below.

Step Three: Make sure your meta description is less than 155 Characters

You can go on and on in your content and it’s a value add, but because meta descriptions have a cut off around 155 characters, if you do this in a meta description you’re liable to have your snippet to cut off with a … (ellipsis). Not the worst thing in the world, except that we want to be intentional about our start, middle, and end of the meta description – so a longer meta description is out.

Step Four: Include the main keyword again in the meta description

Wait – you said that it’s not about keyword stuffing – and doing so would have a little benefit? Yes, but because Google will bold the keyword that was searched in the meta if you can do it tastefully and naturally – the bolding will draw more attention to your meta description than others. It’s an advantage that I wouldn’t shoot for if including the keyword makes the meta description less readable or coherent, but I would shoot for if you can do it without hampering your other elements of a perfect meta description.

Step Five: Lastly, end your meta description with a call to action.

“Get Started,” “Learn More,” or “Read more now” can all create more of a nudge to move a searcher to read your content. If you tailor this to the specific situation you’re writing your meta description for, it will be most effective. Don’t sit on one generic ’get started’ call to action for every meta description if the situation calls for something a bit more specific to the page or article you’re writing it for.

Wrapping Up:

Writing meta descriptions is an art – but not one without clear and effective principals that most people should be able to carry out. If you’re working with a team – don’t forget to share this article with them and give them some easy to follow guidelines about how to do this right. It’s simple – but really important. Much like creating an actionable title tag or your link building campaign, effective meta descriptions that improve click through rate can have a massive impact on your site’s overall traffic over time. It pays to start working in this process to every post and page you publish.

Author Bio

Tim Brown does marketing for general contractors and is obsessed with getting results for them in the form of new business and increased revenue. Drive traffic and conversion. You can tweet him at @timbdesignmpls

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Please Google Do NOT Rank Us For This Keyword or This Keyword or This Keyword…

We are working with a mattress retailer who would like to show up higher for mattress brand queries like “Tempurpedic mattress”.  So I thought it might be helpful to see what types of pages currently rank for that query. Here are the top ranking URLs. Check out result #4:

Here’s a link to the query so you can see yourself. If you look at the Mattress Firm URL, check out the not very visible copy block below the hero image:

For those of you whose eyes are not what they used to be, here’s what the copy says (emphasis mine):

“Mattress Firm, Inc. is not an authorized reseller of Tempur-Pedic products and is not affiliated with either Tempur-Pedic North America, LLC or Tempur Sealy, International, Inc.”

“IS TEMPUR-PEDIC® MATERIAL THE SAME AS MEMORY FOAM?

Tempur-Pedic® is known for using a TEMPUR® material similar to memory foam, which has millions of movable cells designed to cushion the body during sleep…

Perhaps there is a legit reason to display this stuff – like they used to carry Tempur-pedic and now don’t but there’s still a lot of users coming to their site looking for it, but I can’t see any reason why Google should rank them for these queries. This also kind of flies in the face of engagement as a critical ranking factor. I can’t imagine this page is “engaging” for Tempur-pedic queries.

But hey it’s good for users and all that right?

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Hey #MozCon – Local SEO Guide Welcomes Ashley Berman Hale & Jessica Baker To The Team!

Couldn’t resist a little hashtag-jacking…

This is one of those posts where I #humblebrag about having been too busy to post much this year. The demand for our services and the complexity of some of our engagements ha…er…must…stop…the…marketingspeak…

What I’m really trying to say is two awesome people have joined the Local SEO Guide team and I’d like to formally announce it to the world via the miracle of WordPress.

We are super pleased to welcome Ashley Berman Hale, our new Director of SEO (think audits, audits + more audits) and Jessica Baker, our new Director of Client Services (think running herd on everything we’re doing for our clients) to Local SEO Guide!

Ashley is a Google Top Contributor with lots of experience with SEO for funky websites (all of our clients are by definition funky) and Jessica joins us from Advice Media where she ran SEO programs for SMBs in healthcare. You can find out more about them and the rest of our team, oddly enough, on our Team page.

And of course feel free to congratulate them with your fave GIF at @jbaker435 &  @BermanHale. A GIF overload would certainly set the right tone for their journey with LSG.

We are excited to have them!

via GIPHY

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Adapting Your SEO Strategy When Your Business Changes

SEO Specialists should be able to adapt to Google’s changes on the fly. I’m not exaggerating when I say that for SEO, you either adapt or you die. I can’t stress how crucial it is for any SEO to be ready to accept any changes in the industry and to always be informed on the regular updates that any search engine releases.

Whenever you notice an update, you should immediately evaluate and integrate the changes through your on-site and off-site testing, create some link building campaigns that are in-line with the changes, and all the other SEO tasks you know and love.

However, we all know that this is easier said than done. Ensuring that all your efforts are focusing on valuable traffic, and ensuring that the traffic you have could help your brand grow to new heights are only some of the things that you should take note of. Today, I’ll be showing you how you could edit your SEO strategy in accordance with the sudden changes your business undertakes.

Situate Your SEO Strategy Alongside the Business Strategy

One change that might happen to a business is to change their marketing strategy – either for budgeting purposes, change of executives, or failure of the old strategy. One such example of a change in marketing strategy is to change their target audience. Instead of targeting a broad audience, your business might want to target a specific audience.  

If this is the case, then you will be competing with more competition and less volume. It’s basically the classic Quality v.s. Quantity talk. Therefore, all your SEO efforts will now be focusing on the specific audience you want to target. You will need to adjust your SEO strategy correspondingly to obtain your desired conversion rate.

Coordinate with the Marketing Manager

Make it a point to always coordinated with your marketing manager because it will help you create a list of items that you need to evaluate in order to better grasp what your company’s long-term objectives are. The ideal factors you should be focusing on are the vision of the company, the competition in the industry, your target audience, and much more.

Specifically, your marketing strategy should be researching and analyzing the following:

• Location: Research which countries and places are the most helpful to your product or business. This could be determined by examining a number of your sales, leads, and potential revenue by region/country.
• Industry: The next step should be the enumeration of industries that you should invest time in – from insurance to e-commerce, etc.
• Audience: Enter the marketplace to get a feel of who your target audience really is, and what exactly are they looking for.
• Research a list of keywords that you would like to target.
• Analyze the strategies of your competitors, and update your current knowledge of them. Then, generate a new intelligence report about your competitors and industry leaders.

Keyword Research

After you have collected all the necessary information that is in accordance with your company’s new strategy, you will now proceed with generating a new keyword research strategy.

One of the best ways to start your keyword research is to check your updated list of competitors. Check up on the rate of their received traffic, and which keywords will be relevant to your own company.

Here are some tools that I recommend:

• SEMrush
• Ferzy Keyword Tool
• Moz Keyword Explorer

You can use these tools to obtain your competitor’s list of keywords. I also recommend that you would not limit yourself to using just 1 keyword tool, it is actually crucial for you to use multiple keyword tools to help you generate more ideas.

By using multiple keywords, you can discover new perspectives for your keyword strategy. Additionally, through multiple keywords, you can group the keywords into relevant groupings to effectively heighten their accessibility.

Afterward, group the keywords in the list based on their topic, relevance, and volume. Then, separate the keywords based on their possible performance. One of the best tools for this is Ferzy because this tool gives you an accurate picture of how your keyword would perform.

Now that you have finished researching, listing, and organizing your keywords, you should immediately start mapping the keywords into your site pages. Always remember that it is important to integrate the keywords into your titles, H1s, H2s, and descriptions.

Concentrate on RELEVANT Traffic

Historically, numerous SEO practitioners assumed that when you get more traffic, you will be improving your rankings. I am here to tell you that this is wrong. The correct way that SEO practitioners should look at SEO rankings is that when you improve the quality of your traffic, your rankings will correspondingly improve.

The best example I could give you about focusing on RELEVANT traffic is to show you what SimilarWeb did to their site’s irrelevant traffic. Some reasons that pushed them to remove their low-quality traffic from the index is because:

• It provided 0% value to the business in regards to leads or sales.
• They had a high bounce rate
• Low page views per user
• Contains content that is not relevant to their business.

One of the most important aspects of Google is that they provide only the best result for every query. Consequently, if you have irrelevant content in your site, and it is not performing that successfully, then you should either rewrite it or remove it from the index.

Key Takeaway

Experiencing changes in your company’s strategy is not always bad news. These changes can also introduce you to an amazing opportunity to improve your SEO. It will help you analyze the current state of all your SEO endeavors.

By identifying what is effective and what is not, then you will be gaining the sufficient knowledge that not a lot of SEO practitioners have. This kind of knowledge helps you be ready for any problem that might occur in the future, and it can help you build an effective strategy that will not only attract traffic but also users that have a high chance of converting.

Have you ever experienced something like this? Tell me in the comments below what you did to adapt to your company’s sudden change in strategy.

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Your Customers Don’t Want You To Act Like a Robot

There’s a dark side and a beautiful future built around every new tool and technology that comes along. For all the brilliance of marketing automation, artificial intelligence, and chatbots, there are all kinds of ways to use these tools to alienate and upset your customers, as well. As with all pursuits, we have to look at the intent of your execution and make sure you’re not annoying the people you most want to serve.

Every time you “set it and forget it,” you’re missing the actual business value.

I use marketing automation of some form every day. I sent out automated newsletters to my subscribers. I schedule anywhere from 20-30 tweets to go out every day from my Twitter account. There are all kinds of parts of my business that are automated. But in each of these cases, I’ve built a system that also allows me to connect and interact directly with people who engage with that information.

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Favicons and your online brand

Those used to tabbed browsing know why favicons are important. Your site will stand out from the rest if your favicon is recognizable. After all, a picture says more than a thousand words. Personally, I often find myself pinning websites in Google Chrome, still my browser of choice. As a to-do list, or simply because I want Gmail at hand anytime. Or that specific spreadsheet in Sheets. Or Facebook. That little favicon is the only reference to what site is hidden in that tab. You simply need a good favicon for your website.

For good SEO, you need a good user experience. Learn about UX & Conversion! »

$ 19€ 19 - Buy now » Info Make your favicon stand out

You should make sure your favicon stands out from that long list of tabs. Check if it matches your logo and website well. Especially when you are not one of the big brands, you want people to recognize your favicon. Two tips directly related to that are:

• avoid too many details in your favicon,
• and please use the right colors, so the favicon doesn’t blend in with the gray of your browser tab.

Both are closely related to branding. Your brand should be recognizable in your favicon. Although we’re able to use more colors and more depth in our favicons nowadays, the fact is that the space available on that browser still hasn’t improved from the small 16×16 pixels it used to be in the early days. It doesn’t look like 16×16 pixels anymore, but that’s because we have better screens, not because that space increased. The main improvement is that lines are sharper and you can use all the colors you want.

Proper branding is making sure people will relate your favicon to your website immediately. I listed a number of favicons for you to test. Drop me a line in the comments about what favicon belongs to what brand:

Too easy? In that case, these brands did a good job on translating their brand to their favicon.

SEO benefits of favicons

Are there real SEO benefits to favicons? Tough one. Besides branding, probably not, though opinions may differ on this a bit. One might argue that you can now add an image of 1MB as a favicon and that this will slow down loading times. You could say that a proper favicon highlights a bookmark and might increase return visitors. I have even found a story where someone stated that some browsers automatically look for a favicon and return a 404 if it’s not there.

My 2 cents? If there is an SEO benefit, it’s so small that all other optimization, like proper site structure or great copy, should always have priority. Does that mean you don’t need that favicon? Hey, didn’t you read that part about browser tabs? You do need it, even if it’s just to stand out.

WordPress just made your day: favicons in the Customizer

If you use WordPress, you might already know that there’s been a favicon functionality in WordPress core since version 4.3. So you can use this default functionality, without hassle. It’s located in the Customizer and is called Site Icon. In fact, WordPress recommends using this option to add a favicon. You don’t even need to create a favicon.ico file, like you used to, years ago. Just use a square image, preferably at least 512 pixels wide and tall. That seems to contradict with the recommendation to keep it as small as possible. But if you optimize your image, it won’t slow down your site :)

More information on how to go about this in WordPress is in the WordPress Codex. Go read and add a nice favicon to your own site!

Read more: ‘5 tips on branding’ »

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Pouring One Out For Rand Fishkin

So Rand is “stepping away” from Moz…

When I started trying to figure out SEO around 2003, I had no idea what I was doing. As I recall I stumbled onto a few voices that helped me start to make sense of things – some of the more memorable were Andy Beard, Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin.

Each of these guys in their own way provided me with a veritable lifeline as I started to understand that SEO was a key factor in whether or not my startup, InsiderPages, was going to survive, and my job along with it.

While I loved Andy Beard’s mind-bending PageRank theories and Aaron’s brutal honesty about the business, it was Rand’s unique voice that most helped me overcome whatever intimidation I may have felt about being a complete SEO idiot. Rand exuded empathy. And as a newbie, I needed that as much as I needed to know how to figure out how to fix a duplicate content problem.

Rand’s voice has perhaps done more than anything other than Google itself to drive SEO into the mainstream. And we all have benefitted from his work in one way or another. And it has been a lot of fun to watch…

via GIPHY

Epilogue:
Now that I think about it, the way we typically communicate to clients is a great combination of Aaron and Rand – brutal honesty tempered with empathy.

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Ask Yoast Case study: SEO for architects

In our Ask Yoast case studies we give SEO advice for websites in a specific market or industry. This time: the website of Slemish Design Studio Architects, the business site of an architect duo. The architects told us that they get great responses from their clients, but is their website optimized for search engines as well? We’ll dive into this architectural website to see what improvements can be made to enhance their site’s SEO.

First impression

The first page we land on is the homepage. We see lots of full screen images of the great work these architects deliver on top of the homepage. Though impressive, the images are shown in a slider. Loyal readers of our blog know that we’re not a big fan of sliders. Many experiments show why you shouldn’t use a slider on your website. Only 1% of your visitors will actually click on a slider, they slow down your website and lots of visitors ignore sliders because of banner blindness. Just to name a few.

Looking at this specific website, the slider images are very big as well. The textual content of the homepage is pushed down. We recommend showing some smaller images on top of the site, instead of the slider, and adding some clear introductory content just below these images. Try adding your USPs to the introductory content: Why should visitors choose you as their architect?

Lastly, by adding a clear call-to-action just below the introductory content you’ll make sure visitors can easily navigate to your most important pages. For example, you could think of a button which says ‘Get inspired by our projects’ or ‘Our services’: decide what the main goal of your homepage is. Just to show you the difference, we’ve created a mock-up of how the homepage could look like after following our advice:

Beautiful images, too little text

On the ‘The Studio’ page, we notice a tab ‘What we do’. This tabbed content tells visitors what kind of work you do and what type of services you offer. Because of the relevancy of this content, we think these services deserve their own menu item. Visitors who want to know more about your team and your company may click on ‘The Studio’. However, they might not expect to find the services you offer there.

In addition to that, your services are great subjects to write about. Writing nice informational copy about your services will increase your chance of ranking for keywords related to these services. When you add sufficient relevant content, Google will understand that your website has content for people looking for services like yours. This means those people will easily find you. The more your content seems to fit to the needs of people who search for these keywords, the higher you’ll rank in the future.

Make sure you optimize one specific page or post for one subject/keyword. When you optimize one page for more keywords that are too different, it’s unclear for Google what the main subject of the page is. Pages that contain a lot of information about the keywords you really want to rank for, should become your cornerstone content pages. This blog post about cornerstone content explains in detail what cornerstone content means and this blogpost shows you how to incorporate cornerstone content into your website.

Lastly, we think you can improve your content as well by adding more copy to your project pages. Consider writing a nice text about the planning stage of the project, the building stage and the delivery stage of the project, for instance. In this copy you can add relevant keywords for your business. In addition to that, this allows you to internally link to your cornerstone content pages from your project pages. 

Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training »

$ 199€ 199 - Buy now » Info Structure your text

When you decide to write more copy for your website in the future, make sure the pages and posts have a great heading structure. On your current pages and posts, we noticed that your logo is an H1 heading. However, the H1 heading should describe the main subject of a particular page on your site to help Google understand what the subject of that specific page or post is.

For example, checking ‘The studio’ page, we see the following headings on top of the page:

Your company name/logo has an H1 tag now, which means that your company name would be the main subject of this page. While in fact, ‘The studio’ is the main subject of the page. So you should change the H2 heading of ‘The studio’ into an H1 heading. Just remove the H1 heading from the logo on every page of the website. We’d advise to check all of your pages and posts and only add one H1 heading, that describes what can be found on there, on each page.

Read more: ‘SEO basics: how to use headings on your site’ »

The right metadata

You’ll need to add relevant keywords to your page titles to help Google understand what your pages are about. Since page titles are still one of the most important ranking factors it’s important to optimize those to the fullest.

Looking at the page title of your homepage, we think you’ve added too many different keywords to show what your website is about:

Adding all different locations to your page title makes it unclear what your website is about. Moreover, the snippet doesn’t look very enticing to click on in the search results. This might cause a low CTR, or click-through rate. If you want to rank for all the different locations, adding separate pages with unique page titles and content for every location would be a better idea.

We’d advise to create appealing page titles and make sure they describe what can be found on that specific URL. For the homepage, use your USP and add a call-to-action such as ‘See our projects here’ to make people click on your page in the search results. Don’t you think a snippet like this will be more appealing to potential visitors?

On top of that, it’s important to be consistent in your branding. Add your company name to every page title. If you do that, people will recognize your page in the search results more easily, because of the brand name in every page title.

Add more relevant content to your blog

Having a blog can be very beneficial for SEO. Adding posts regularly makes it easy to add content about relevant keywords to your website. It helps you to start ranking for new keywords and to keep ranking for the keywords you already rank for.

Slemish Design Studio Architects have a blog and they add new posts regularly, which is great. However, it seems that lots of posts have little textual content. For example, this post only has two sentences:

Google could consider this post as a thin content page, which could hurt your website’s rankings. Since pages like these don’t add much value to your website, you’d better add more content or remove them from your website.

Keep reading: ‘Blogging: the ultimate guide’ »

Create strong cornerstone content

Besides the benefits of adding more content about relevant keywords to a blog, a blog also gives you an opportunity to add more internal links to your most important pages and posts. For example, when you’ve created a separate page for the service ‘Sun Rooms’ you could write a blog post about new innovations for sun rooms. From that post you can add an internal link to the page about the ‘Sun Rooms’ service. Doing this consistently, that service page – which could be a great cornerstone content page if you add sufficient content – will become a better search result, according to Google.

In addition to internal links within a text, you can add a popular, recent or related posts section to the blog. The sidebar is often used to add sections like these. These links in the sidebar will give the posts they link to some extra link value.

Lastly, adding your blog’s categories to the sidebar will give your category pages some more link value too. Consider doing this if you want to rank with your category pages.

A fast loading website

The longer visitors have to wait for your website to load completely, the more likely it gets that some of them will ‘bounce’ back to the search results. A long loading time frustrates visitors, so they might leave your website before seeing any relevant content. Google uses bounce rate, among other things, to determine if a website provides visitors with a good result. When lots of visitors bounce back to Google’s search results quickly, that isn’t a good sign. You might understand that this can harm your rankings.

On top of that, page speed is an actual ranking factor. Google understands that a website with bad loading times probably isn’t the best result. Similar websites that load faster are likely to end up higher in the search results.

We’ve tested the website of Slemish Design Studio Architects and we found a score of 24/100. The score is in red and this means that there’s work to do! Just follow the advice Google gives in the page speed tool as this leads to both a better user experience, as well as better rankings. 

Become a technical SEO expert with our Technical SEO 1 training! »

$ 199€ 199 - Buy now » Info To sum it up

It was a pleasure analyzing the website of this architect duo. You show some amazing work in the images on the website! Adding a cleaner homepage with a clear call-to-action could result in more conversions, so more actual clients. Also, specific pages for all your services could be valuable for both Google and visitors.

Basically, our most important SEO advice is: make sure Google understands what your website is about. This means you’ll need to write relevant content about keywords you’d like to rank for. Furthermore, optimizing your site’s metadata – like titles and meta descriptions – and headings would be beneficial. With internal links you can connect your content and give your most important pages extra value.

And last, but definitely not least, making your website load faster will really improve your site’s SEO and user experience!

Read on: ‘How to optimize your real estate site’ »

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