Google’s efforts to improve their local SEO has been met with positive results during the past year, with numerous businesses benefiting from the increased traffic and online presence. In turn, more and more websites have been optimized to keep up with the trend.
With this in mind, optimizing your local SEO effort is crucial for the growth of both your business and your online presence. With e-commerce and social media impacting the online marketplace greatly, businesses have become even more competitive than before. Here are some tips and techniques that can help your business’ local SEO.
Regularly update your website
A study conducted by Blue Fountain recently has shown that customers would think of a brandless when its website has not been updated. Personally, I’ve seen numerous cases of this in the past when looking for brands and products. Going to a website of a brand that you want to inquire or make a purchase and seeing that products and key information is outdated or missing will surely hurt your traffic.
It is best to keep your website content and design updated on a regular basis, as users would be able to see new products and announcements after visiting. Blogs are a great way to reach a wider audience, as you can provide them with beneficial information while promoting your brand at the same time.
Optimize loading speed and mobile-friendliness
Loading speed and mobile compatibility are two other factors that you have to keep in mind, as more and more users make online purchases through their smartphones. It is best to optimize text and image viewability for the best user experience. Slow loading speeds will make you lose customers, who might take a look at your competitors instead. Those crucial few seconds can affect a purchase and making sure everything works smoothly would give you an edge over the competition.
Social Media is key
Social media marketing has been the key to success for a lot of businesses in the past few years, with viral campaigns becoming the driving factor to more sales and revenue. Along with being present in Google Business listings, having a solid following on Facebook and Instagram also brings in more traffic.
Influencer marketing is also another strategy that can positively impact your business, as having someone with a significant social media following talk about your brand is another effective way of bringing in more customers. Social media has become one of the most powerful internet platforms and knowing how to utilize is another ingredient for success.
Take advantage of search queries
Search queries allow you to see how users search for your business, giving you a better idea of your searchability and online presence. This has been one of the best Google My Business features, as having this amount of search information helps you optimize your content, information, and products.
This also adds another layer to your keyword research strategy as well, as you now have search data from actual users who have looked at your business. This allows you to craft better keywords that have good volume and difficulty scores. Comparing GMB search queries with keyword research tools and Ahrefs and KWFinder is also an effective approach that would give you keywords that can rank well.
Enable Messaging
Instant messaging has been one of the most important innovations of the past decade, as it allows a faster and more efficient way of communication. One of the most recent Google My Business updates was the ability for users to directly send a message to you. Being able to quickly respond to customer inquiries and concerns has proven to provide a positive impact on businesses, as it improves customer trust and brand image.
While this feature is still only available on mobile, it is a handy feature to have, as you can respond to messages on the fly, allowing more potential to create sales for your business.
Provide answers to questions
Along with the ability to respond to messages instantly, providing answers to questions asked on Google is another way of boosting your traffic. More and more users are now using long-tail, question-based, and exact keyword searches, and its rise can be attributed to voice search through the use of AI assistants.
Regular keywords are still important and valuable for your SEO strategy, but providing answers using your content would help you tap into more users and bolster your search traffic and presence even more. Search is becoming more varied and versatile these past few years, and this strategy is something that would bode well for your future.
Key Takeaway
Local SEO is on a rise. As more local brands move their services online, it is important to get an edge over the competition. These tips and strategies will surely help boost your business, allowing you to grow your online presence steadily.
If you have questions and inquiries about local SEO and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
To get traffic, you need people willing to visit your site. To get them to visit your site, you need to know what they are looking for, which words they use and what type of content would fit their intent best. In short, you need a keyword strategy. In this SEO Basics article, we’ll take a brief look at what keyword strategy is and how it goes hand in hand with keyword research.
What is keyword strategy?
While many simply talk about doing keyword research to find out what terms you should use, what you do after that is just as important: this is your keyword strategy. A keyword strategy contains every decision you take based upon your findings in your keyword research project, whether it’s about the content you’re planning to write or how you are going to track the results in Analytics. Keyword strategy is about how you want to target those keywords, now and in the future.
A keyword strategy forms when looking at yourself and your environment
You need to have plenty of insights if you want to make informed decisions about your keyword strategy. Start by thoroughly investigating yourself, your product and your competitors.
Looking at yourself
A good keyword strategy starts with looking at yourself and your business. What are you doing and why? What are your goals? What’s your uniqueness in this world? What is the message you want to send? How’s your branding? Why would anyone want to visit your site? Better insights lead to a better understanding of what you want to achieve as to not waste resources. There’s no use focusing on the wrong things.
Looking at search intent
After you’ve fleshed out your uniqueness, it’s time to look at how. Search intent is the why behind the search that should lead to your site. Do you know your audience? Are people only looking for information or are they willing to buy stuff as well? Are there ways for you to target specific intents with focused content to influence this?
Looking at words
Words are at the center of everything. By doing keyword research, you should get great insights into the words people use to find what they are looking for. Now, you need to produce user-oriented content that fits their intent and goals perfectly.
Looking at competition
While writing up your keyword strategy you need to take a good look at your competitors. What are they doing? How well are they ranking for terms you’d like to attack? What kind of content do they have? Are there ways for you to improve on that? Have you thought about looking at the long tail?
Looking at the search engines itself
Of course, while looking at your competitors, you’ll often use search engines to see how they are doing. Doing these types of searches can give you great insights into the strategy of your competitors. It also gives you a very good feel of what happens when you type in your main focus keyphrase. What’s the on-screen real estate like? Are there featured snippets you could target? Are there other types of rich results? Is there a local pack?
In some markets, if you track developments over time, you might see that search engines are increasingly giving answers that lead to no-click searches. Always keep an eye on search engines, but don’t go obsessing about every little algorithm update.
Looking at data
Of course, analyzing data plays a big role in the success of your keyword strategy. Both before and after, Google Analytics provides invaluable insights into the performance of your site. Even Google Search Console can give a lot of stuff to think about and opportunities to pursue!
How are you targeting your keywords?
Checking your analytics regularly to keep track of your SEO performance is incredibly important, but can’t have performance without content tailored to the specific needs and goals of your strategy. If you’ve ran through all the steps and did a thorough keyword research, you should have an idea of what you should target and how you should do that. You can use these insights to create the content you need to make a success of your strategy. There’s a lot you can do:
Make landing pages
Create specific types of content for the different search intents
Maybe make specific content to get featured snippets
Or maybe voice search is something that might fit your strategy?
Or apps?
Video?
Something else entirely?
Many roads lead to Rome, but some roads are more difficult than others. You could say that you get to Rome fastest via the highway, but there you might run into a traffic jam because everyone wants to take that route. Sometimes, it’s better to take that rarely traveled mountain pass — the results might wow you!
Update your keyword strategy
On the way, there’s a lot that can happen and your keyword strategy should take that into account. Regularly re-evaluate your keyword strategy. Have there been significant changes in the world around you that need to be assessed? It might be that your users’ language changed or that a new competitor is gobbling up market share. Keep an eye on things and adjust where necessary!
If you can optimize it, you should. And images are no exception.
The images on your website represent another way to drive organic search traffic. Often overlooked, Google Image SEO can be just as important as optimizing your webpage text.
In fact, you might be surprised at just how much traffic your images are already sending to your site.
TL;DR: Google Images represents another path outside of regular web search for your audience to find your site and discover your content. Google is making significant changes to Google Images that put more emphasis on quality and relevance. To help you drive traffic from image search, we provide a list of ways to optimize images for a website.
How to SEO Images: Table of Contents
First, we’ll take a quick look at the latest news about Google Images:
Google’s goal over the past year was to make image search more useful to users. We’ve likely all had the experience of finding an image connected to a not-so-great webpage.
Now, images attached to great content can do better in Google Images. So websites have more opportunity to rank images and drive traffic with well-optimized content.
Updates to Google Image Search
Major improvements to Google Images were announced in September 2018. The image-ranking algorithm now weighs these factors more heavily:
Authority: The authority of the webpage itself is now a more important signal for ranking an image.
Context: The ranking algorithm takes into account the context of the search. Google used the example of an image search for “DIY shelving.” Results should return images within sites related to DIY projects … so the searcher can find other helpful information beyond just a picture.
Freshness: Google prioritizes fresher content. So ranking images will likely come from a site (a site in general, but we believe the actual webpage in question) that’s been updated recently. This is probably a minor signal.
Position on page: Top-ranked images will likely be central to the webpage they’re part of. (And higher up in placement on the page.) For example, a product page for a particular shoe should rank above a category page for shoes.
Google Images results pages also got a facelift:
Captions: Image results now show more context. For example, searchers can read captions including the website and title of the page where the picture is published.
Related searches: Google started providing related search terms at the top of the results page. Notice the buttons, which help users narrow their search.
NOTE: We cannot reproduce this in Google SERPs today, so this may have been a temporary feature.
Related search terms across the top let searchers narrow image results.
Google Hints at More Changes to Come
Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller indicated this week that images are a “bigger topic” now.
People are running transactional and informational types of searches more frequently through Google Image search. We don’t have details yet, but Mueller’s statements (see below) make it a good bet that more UI changes are coming.
There’s nothing specific to announce from my side — it’s just a general observation that images are (once again) gaining importance overall on the web, and a reminder to think of them as a way of enabling users to find your content through Google Images / image search.
One futuristic feature that Google has already rolled out is its AI-powered Google Lens technology.
Users can now identify objects of interest within images as they look through image search results:
Lens’ AI technology analyzes images and detects objects of interest within them. If you select one of these objects, Lens will show you relevant images, many of which link to product pages so you can continue your search or buy the item you’re interested in. Using your finger on a mobile device screen, Lens will also let you “draw” on any part of an image, even if it’s not preselected by Lens, to trigger related results and dive even deeper on what’s in your image.
To show this in action, I searched for [diy outdoor grilling stations] and picked out a beverage center sitting in one of the resulting pictures. This revealed a new set of image results:
Google Lens at work: searching within a picture.
For now, the Lens feature works only in U.S. English, and only from image search in mobile browsers, not in the Google app.
But we expect Google Lens to be activated across more search platforms soon. It makes image search extremely flexible, letting users pinpoint what they want using visuals instead of words.
This new AI technology increases the population of search results. It also encourages more image-based searches.
Google increasingly understands the contents of even non-optimized images. So your images potentially have much more competition.
Image SEO becomes even more important. It’s time to optimize your images so that they can stand out.
How to Optimize Images for SEO
With all these changes to Google Images, how do you ensure you can get your share of visibility?
In this sense, Google Images search works much like regular web search. Googlebot needs to be able to crawl, index and understand what your images are about. Only then can they rank.
The latest updates to Google Images tell us that relevance and quality are more important than ever. That means providing the search engine with as much context as possible.
Here are 16 important steps to SEO images …
1. Track Your Image-based Traffic
Want to know how many visitors you get through Google Images search?
Change the search type at the top to Image. This filters the data so you can keep an eye on your traffic from image search.
Alternatively, in Google Analytics you can use the Referral report. Google Images search traffic is broken out from other search traffic. The line with the Source/Medium “google organic / images” is where you’ll find that data.
Take a baseline and watch your search traffic grow as you apply SEO to your images.
2. Create High-Quality, Original Content
Search engines want to reward high-quality pages. This applies to the information on the webpage that your image is hosted on, and to the image itself.
In its image best practices help file, Google discourages “pages where neither the images or the text are original content.”
So whenever possible, take your own photos and make your own graphics.
What if you have to use stock photos? There are a lot of ways to modify stock images to make them unique. You can add filters, crop them, overlay text, and much more.
Also remember that when you do use images from elsewhere, you must honor copyrights, license fees and/or trademark laws.
Google now includes metadata support for crediting images to the proper author and rights holder. This is visible by clicking “Image credits” where available.
3. Use Relevant Images
Choose or create images that are helpful to the overall theme of the page. That might be an infographic, a diagram, an appropriate photograph or something else.
Remember that search engines would rather rank a picture if it’s on a webpage that will satisfy the searcher’s intent with more relevant content.
4. Have a Proper File Format
Use an image file format that search engines can index. The three most common are:
PNG, good for screenshots and images with graphics or text. Depending on image complexity, PNGs may create larger files than the other formats. The PNG format uses lossless compression, which means the quality is preserved.
JPEG, good for most photographs. JPEGs create smaller files by using lossy compression, which means there will be a loss of image quality every time you save this file format.
GIF to create animations. GIFs use lossless compression, which means the quality remains the same.
Another type that’s becoming popular is:
SVG. This is a scalable vector format. As opposed to the raster types mentioned above, vector graphics can be extremely small files that don’t lose quality no matter how much they’re enlarged.
Notice how the vector does not pixelate as it’s enlarged. (Image credit: Google)
SVG isn’t right for photos or complex images, but it works well for simple graphics with geometric shapes, such as a logo.
Now, next-generation image formats exist. These formats have better compression, are higher quality, load faster, and take less cellular data:
JPEG 2000
JPEG-XR
WebP
WebP has been gaining attention lately. It’s possible to convert existing JPEG and PNG files to WebP.
WebP is a method of lossy and lossless compression that can be used on a large variety of photographic, translucent and graphical images found on the web. The degree of lossy compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality. WebP typically achieves an average of 30% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000, without loss of image quality …
5. Optimize Your Images
There’s no single best way to optimize images. For each one, you need to find the optimal balance between minimum file size and maximum quality. Here are must-dos:
Resize and crop images to be no larger (in dimensions) than they’ll be displayed. With raster-style images (the most common type on the web), you might need to save several versions at various resolutions to work for different users.
Choose the most efficient file format per image (see my last point). It’s OK to mix different types of images on the same webpage.
Use compression to reduce file size. When saving a JPEG, for example, slide the quality bar down as far as you can without losing visual quality. With an SVG file, Google suggests you minify it by running it through a tool like svgo.
Consider replacing a picture with a different technology altogether. CSS effects can produce shadows, gradients, and more. Web fonts let you show text in beautiful typefaces, which actually improves your page’s usability and crawlability compared to an image.
Accessibility for all users is important. That’s why adding alt attributes to images is part of our always up-to-date SEO checklist.
Alt text describes what the image is about to the visually impaired who use screen readers. It also can give search engines valuable information about the image’s contents.
Only when appropriate, use a relevant keyword you’re targeting to describe the image.
Remember that with linked images, search engines treat the alt attribute as the link anchor text. For example, if you have a question mark icon linking users to your help system, include alt=”Help” in your image tag.
7. Make Use of the Image Title
There’s an optional title attribute that you can give to each image. Some tests have shown that Google does index image titles.
8. Create an Image Caption
Add a little extra context by describing the image in a caption. You can also give the image source here, if appropriate.
In the WordPress editor, adding a caption is simple to do.
9. Use a Descriptive File Name
This is an often-overlooked step. But I have a quick remedy.
When you save your image file, accurately describe the photo in a few words or less. For example, ugly-christmas-sweater is a better file name than IMG01534.
In a webinar with Google’s Gary Illyes at Search Engine Journal, he pointed out that it’s just not feasible for large sites to have accurate file names for all their images (Pinterest, for example).
Illyes says this is more of a nice to have than a requirement for ranking. But, Illyes did explain when the file name can matter:
“I would imagine that it would be something that, all signals considered equal in case of your and your competitor’s images, if you have a better file name, then perhaps you might get ranked better with your image …”
10. Implement Structured Data If Possible
Google Images supports structured data markup for a product, video and recipe.
When you add structured data to your webpage’s HTML, your image results can be richer. Extra bits of information can show along with the image. And that can encourage more clicks and visitors to your site.
Structured data can help Google display things like the price and availability of a product.
11. Consider Image Placement on the Page
Google says in its image best practices page (linked to earlier) that “when it makes sense, consider placing the most important image near the top of the page.”
But in the SEJ webinar, Illyes said that you can put an image “pretty much anywhere on the page” and it can be picked up and shown in Google Images if it’s relevant to the query.
12. Analyze the Content around the Image
Consider the body text around the image. Does it give context to what the reader is looking at?
In the SEJ webinar, Illyes called the content around the image (on the page or in a caption) “critical” to understanding the image.
A$: The big one for me is to get the accessibility right with the alt text, then build around that with good captions and other related text near the image, Then add in a good file name and the image title. #SEOChat
Google shows relevant information about the webpage (where the image appears) in Google Images results.
So don’t skip your metadata, including title and meta description. They give the user and search engine more context — just like in the regular search results.
Inspiration is at the heart of design. When we – as designers – try to solve a problem we tend to look at what others do. We are often tempted to copy what other companies or websites are doing. This because of their authority: “I’m following Material Design to the letter because Google made it.”. Or because stakeholders point us in that direction: “I want that thing that Airbnb uses on its website.”.
This has led to a point where the entire web starts to look the same (well, kind of). In my opinion, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this so-called ‘design sameness’. It’s ok to be inspired and I personally don’t really care that so many websites look alike.
The danger – in my opinion – lies in the often heard reasoning that designers make decisions because they follow design conventions. And in doing so, they think they’re putting their users first. But, do they really? What exactly are these conventions? Where do they come from? And why do we so eagerly hide behind them?
To help answer these questions, I dove into some of my research from when I was studying spatial planning. I found out that concepts from the domain of public decision-making apply fairly well to the design domain as well.
In this article, I want to walk you through these concepts and the tension field that is present in decision-making. The tension between the complexity and diversity of the context in which we make decisions, on the one hand. And concepts of universally accepted norms (like the public interest and conventions), on the other hand. I also want to try and propose how we can reshape the concept of convention. To claim ownership over it for the use in our design practices.
The public interest as an analogy for design convention
‘The public interest’ is a concept stemming from the domain of governance and public decision-making. And I think that it works very well as an analogy in the domain of design. In the sense that it is very similar to the way us designers tend to use conventions in our work.
In public decision-making, we have two ways of dealing with the public interest:
A substantive way (meaning we treat it as ‘the greater good’, as an abstract norm that decision-makers strive for)
A procedural way (meaning it’s a product of different insights and claims shaped through dialogue)
The distinction lies in a top-down versus a bottom-up approach to decision-making. It’s this substantive, top-down approach that I want to highlight at this point. It reminds us of our attitude towards conventions in design. Accepting the existence of a concept in our practice that is so abstract and elusive holds a danger. It can be used (or abused) by decision-makers to legitimize their decisions: “Our policy is in the public interest, so it benefits everybody.”. Design convention works somewhat the same way. It basically says: “Everybody’s using this, so it must work.”
“In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express approval, approbation or commendation of public policy.”
R.E. Flathman (1966)
Pluriformity
Utilitarian philosophy and liberalism (which center around the individual) argue that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the above reasoning. Namely, the total lack of care about individual needs. And this is odd (to say the least), considering we live in a world that is both complex and diverse. This diversity is called pluriformity. It means that there is recognition for different ideologies, cultures and political preferences. And the norms, values and interests associated with it. The concept is therefore often associated with the rejection of the existence of universal norms.
If we translate this to our design domain, we can argue that it is unlikely that universal solutions exist. At least in practice. Considering the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which problems occur. It seems that the public interest is used as a legitimization for decision-making. Just as convention is used to hide behind the fact that the design lacks research and critical thinking.
Tried and true conventions
Yes, it is a much heard argument that trends and conventions actually do exist in design. We might even need them for our users to understand how our websites work (the most famous example probably being the hamburger menu icon). But how did these conventions originate? That is a fundamental question, that I believe doesn’t get asked enough. The problem with ‘getting inspired’ or ‘following convention’, is that you lack context about problem definition and – solution. We risk losing ourselves in studying the solution and lose track of what the initial problem was.
This leads to information gaps, as Stephen Hay, Head of UX at Catawiki, so strikingly described it in his presentation about design sameness at this years’ Refresh Conference (which served as an immense inspiration for this article). It means that, with each blind application of a convention, problem and solution drift further apart. The problem gets, sort of, lost in translation.
This doesn’t mean that we have to fully reject the concept of convention. Problems re-occur and are not always unique in nature. And not every solution needs to be different or unique. I dare even say that every problem that you face as a designer, has probably already been faced by someone else. Even if you consider the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which we work.
But what’s critical, is that you first isolate and define the specific problem that you’re facing. And only then move on to the solution. Blindly using a convention as a solution without exactly knowing what it is you’re trying to solve, is simply wrong. Stephen Hay argues that relying on conventions is cutting corners. Especially, considering critical thinking is one of the biggest assets you possess as a designer. Therefore it’s essential that you use just that.
“We rely on conventions because they will often give us an acceptable solution with a minimum of effort.”
Stephen Hay (2018)
The fear of isolation leading to waste
We’ve arrived at a moral crossroad…
Although I very much encourage Hay’s plea for critical thinking. And although I understand the value of isolating the problem you are trying to solve. I also think in doing so, there’s a lurking danger of isolating yourself. Of forcing yourself to come up with something original, different and unique. And in doing so you risk your process becoming a costly effort. Wasteful even. Because, what if every designer tries to fix every problem over, and over again? It would feel like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s why I opt for actively claiming ownership over conventions.
We think that the open source model is able to prevent wasteful processes. How? Read more about it here.
Scale down and claim ownership over convention
Let me take you back to the domain of public decision-making and the aforementioned public interest. While we’ve established the trouble with treating the public interest as a given. The concept actually is – in a procedural sense – existent and is something that we can control and claim ownership over.
“The public interest is the compromise that comes about with regard to the policy, with the help of the actors involved, within the boundaries of the project.”
Ernest R. Alexander (1992)
It is something that can originate as a solution to a problem that is defined through dialogue. This, within an enclosed context. But, for this to happen we need designers to come together and:
share the problems they face, and;
share the solutions they come up with
What this means is that we need an arena (just like politicians and decision-makers do). An arena where designers come together and debate the problems they face. And for this to really work it’s critical that the context in which problems (and solutions) occur is also shared. This, to the end that designers can learn from each other. Learn to identify situations more easily. And find fitting solutions more quickly. This, to avoid the risk of getting stuck in a wasteful process.
This way we can turn the concept of convention from something that magically applies to all similar problems, into a commonality. A commonality that’s actually shaped by designers and applicable within a well defined context.
The open source design arena
But how do we create this arena and bring these designers together? Actually, these arenas exist all over the web. They’re called communities. Whether they’re platforms like Behance, Dribbble, GitHub (or even Twitter and Facebook). Get-togethers like Meetup. Or movements like the Open Design Foundation. They all have the potential to bring designers together and discuss design.
This is what I love about @Dribbble and why I think the comment section should be more prominent. Designers coming together on @lobanovskiy's latest shot to find solutions: https://t.co/aAnDZGxPFx
I’m a firm believer in the concept of open source design as presented in a manifesto by Garth Braithwaite. It lies at the heart of everything this article discusses. And it’s something that we, at Yoast, firmly believe in. It’s about us designers actively participating in discussion. About helping each other by sharing our work. About sharing the context in which we work and the problems we’re facing. And about sharing the solutions we find within this context.
This, to the end that we, designers, look further than just ‘getting inspired’ and seeking individual advancement. But are really able to claim ownership over our work and start creating meaningful conventions and conversations. And, through this, help push design forward.
One of the most common issues that you can find on any website is error pages. This can occur for various reasons, such as servers getting bogged down due to high traffic, also known as a 500 Error, or page requests that cannot be found in your website, which is a 404 Error.
For the latter, 404 Errors make up a significant percentage of all web page errors. Whether it be a small or a well-established website, there will always be a chance that users would encounter this on a regular basis. These kinds of error pages not only hamper the user experience but is also bad for your SEO. The best way to solve these error pages is through 301 redirects, which helps lead users into the right place.
While doing 301 redirects is a handy solution that ensures you wouldn’t lose PageRank, there are times when it could actually cause a negative impact. Here’s what you need to know about the possible negative effects of redirection.
Effect on Loading Speed
The main goal of redirection is to help lead users into content they intended to see, or to pages with related or updated content. This is a common practice on websites that have gone through a revamp or are looking to streamline their content to optimize their performance. Redirection not only affects the user experience and traffic to your content but having a large number of redirected links can cause your loading speed to slow down to a certain extent.
With loading speed as an important ranking factor in both desktop and mobile, those few seconds truly matter, as taking just a few moments longer might cause you to lose precious traffic. While redirection aims to help users access your content, having a lot of them can cause your website to have slower loading speeds. While having to redirect pages is challenging to avoid, is it best to ensure that you are still able to optimize your loading speed using methods like AMP integration and caching tools which would surely help your rankings.
Redirect links on landing pages is another issue that must be avoided as much as possible, this can have a negative effect on your traffic, along with the process of completing a conversion. Along with landing pages, redirecting most of your web pages to your home page is also a practice that is not encouraged, as it will only confuse Google, and lose some of your hard-earned traffic from the content that will be redirected. Instead, the better approach is to redirect them to related content, which allows the new page to have a better chance of growing their traffic.
Redirection Chain
While having multiple pages getting redirected can be a regular occurrence to certain websites, there are instances in which redirect chains would be created. A redirect chain happens when the primary URL and the target URL have more than one redirect link. Redirect chains can happen for various reasons, with content and website updates being the most common ones.
While 301 redirects would still be able to retain their PageRank, having a redirect chain will affect GoogleBot’s ability to crawl into your website. If the redirect chain reaches to around 4-5 links, GoogleBot would less likely crawl the latter pages, and in some cases, not crawl the page at all. Link value can also be devalued due to long redirect chains, with each subsequent redirect losing a significant percentage.
If you have long redirect chains in your website, the best practice is to begin cleaning them up as soon as possible, even more so for older web pages that have been redirected in the past, which can hamper the traffic of older content. Optimizing this process would bring in positive changes to your traffic and search rankings, and ensure that GoogleBot would be able to crawl each page evenly while making sure there’s enough link value.
Key Takeaway
While redirection is a process that helps users and retains much of your PageRank, having an excessive or disorganized set of redirects can negatively affect page performance, and affect how GoogleBot crawls into your website. Knowing when or when not to use the right form of redirection is crucial for your SEO success.
If you have questions or inquiries about redirection or SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
If you’re like me (or the 70% of people who have student loans) you can understand the burdens that they place. Having to say no to nights out, vacations, a new pair of sneakers, etc. can be draining and sometimes embarrassing.…
Today’s edition of my roundup consists of lots of little interesting bits and updates. It’s been a relatively quiet week, as far as news from the WordPress Community is concerned. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to share! Let’s talk some more about Gutenberg integrations and eCommerce solutions!
More Gutenberg integrations
In my previous Roundup, I listed a couple of interesting Gutenberg related solutions, and quite a few people reached out to me privately that they’d like to see this more often.
MathML Block
So, with that in mind, I’d like to share Adam Silverstein’s MathML block for Gutenberg. This Gutenberg block uses MathJax to render MathML formulas in the editor and on the front end of a website. It’s a niche plugin, for sure, but a very cool one for those of us that need to display fancy math formulas on our sites.
CoBlocks
You may think that Gutenberg isn’t quite ready yet for building full web pages, but Rich Tabor suggests otherwise. With more than a dozen custom blocks already available in his CoBlocks plugin, the addition of Row and Columns blocks takes things to the next level. You can now add one, two, three, or four column block areas and, with that, start crafting beautiful web pages within the block editor.
WordPress Roadmap
As you may have read in my previous Roundup, Joost took on a new role for the WordPress Project as Marketing & Communications Lead of WordPress. One of the first things he managed to get done in his new role is a much-needed update to the WordPress Roadmap. If you have never read it, now would be a good time, as it now clearly lists the 9 priorities for 2019.
WordPress and eCommerce
Extending your WordPress site with an eCommerce plugin nowadays is quite easy to do. Especially with one of the two largest eCommerce solutions out there for WordPress: EDD and WooCommerce. And even though there’s very little you cannot do with either of those two plugins, there’s always room for more options. One of the companies seeing room for improvement is BigCommerce. They’ve been around for a while, but recent updates to their plugin make their solution more interesting. Check out their recent announcement post to see what makes them stand out.
Bonus read
There’s one more thing I’d like to share. I came across an interview with Ernst Pfauth that I’d like to share with you. Even though this only slightly touches WordPress, I do think you’ll find it interesting. Ernst is co-founder and CEO of The Correspondent. And no, that’s not built on WordPress, but Ernst did start using WordPress back in 2006. The interview, over at our friends from Post Status, has lots of great insights that I think are also relevant for our WordPress world.
When unlocking this relationship, not only are math and design perfect partners, but actually a natural intersection that can generate a beautiful design with equally alluring results.
This picture is my 13 year old son’s recent project. He printed out the Sunday funnies (we don’t get a newspaper so he went online and found some to print). Then, he chopped up each panel and sliced out each bit of dialog. Finally, he mixed them all up at random to make his own comics to see if anything unexpectedly funny would come of it. It was funny enough. The idea comes (roughly) from “Garfield without Garfield” and other remixes of old comics tropes.
Your Company Probably Doesn’t Pay A Lot of Attention to Memes
Shortly after Barack Obama became US President, a lot of politicians and corporations decided to take social media a lot more seriously. Before then, it was “that thing kids do.” Afterwards, I was hired by some of the biggest companies in the world (Coke, Disney, Pepsi, GM, Microsoft, and so on) to talk about how these tools could drive better human interactions.
The past two Google Algorithm updates have shown what Google wants SEO companies and professionals to focus on: quality content. Content marketing has remained a very important element in driving more traffic into websites, with blogs allowing users to discover new content and services through search.
With this in mind, it is imperative that websites should follow Google’s E-A-T requirements when it comes to content. With numerous websites experiencing traffic drops, making sure that your articles follow the right guidelines would help keep your rankings steady and growing. This makes having a quality content strategy essential in improving your search rankings. Here are some content strategy tips you can use that would surely help your website’s SEO this 2019.
Understand Voice Search
The emergence of voice search saw more long-tail and exact-match keywords appearing in SERPs, with queries from AI assistants making up a huge portion of it. This adds another dimension to how we search, as AI assistants recognize questions and commands rather than conventional keywords when conducting their search process.
This makes question-based inquiries more effective, as voice search users commonly ask what, where, how, who, when, and why questions when using their assistants. Crafting articles to cater to these questions would prove to be very beneficial for your traffic, and provide quality content that Google is looking for. As AI assistants become more widespread, creating content that they can find will bring a positive impact on your long-term SEO strategy.
Focus on what your audience needs
Quality content is also purpose-driven content, as users would benefit from the new knowledge that they will acquire and apply. The best way to formulate these kinds of content is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and analyze how they search for what they need on the internet.
Keyword research tools like Ahrefs give a good glimpse of how people search for your content by looking at related search terms and content that users use on a regular basis. The most successful blogs address the needs of their audience and having the ability to understand how they search will provide the best results that would constantly drive traffic.
Create readable and accessible content
One of the biggest challenges about writing SEO articles that cater to both newcomers and professionals is finding the right balance of making it accessible for the former, while still providing enough depth for the latter. Having too much jargon can alienate a large portion of the audience, making your content confusing and challenging to understand.
One of the best ways to strike this balance is to provide clear explanations while maintaining the flow of your content consistent. Quality content has to be clear, properly-structured, readable, and informative at the same time. Accessibility helps to provide a wider audience reach, and having the right balance would prove to provide the best kinds of content.
Quality links
Contrary to various sources, link building is still one of the most effective SEO strategies that can drive high amounts of traffic to any website. Links help build online presence and authority while providing the same to the site being linked to. Adding quality links to content is the same as citing sources in a research article, providing additional information from reputable sources.
Building links through guest posting have been one of the most popular strategies in a long time and continue to provide good results. While voice search, featured snippets, and zero-click search results are continuing to become more prevalent in SERPs, having a good link building strategy still provides highly impactful results that are surely worth the effort.
Explore and experiment
One of the most constant things in SEO is experimentation, and it has led to numerous innovations and new discoveries that have helped drive our industry forward. This is even more so when creating content, as there are many ways to capture your audience and a wide variety of information that you can utilize. While experimentation can also bring about negative results, these can be used as learning blocks and create positive results that innovate your approach.
Investing time to experiment is valuable, as it pushes you to try harder and test the limits of how you can create and market your content, and achieve more success.
Key Takeaway
Quality content not only drives traffic but provides something very useful in return. These tips allow you to adapt and adjust to the ever-changing SEO landscape, and drive more traffic that would help you get to the top of search rankings.
If you have questions about content marketing and SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
As of today, Marieke van de Rakt will be the new CEO of Yoast. Marieke, founder of Yoast Academy and former Chief Strategy Officer at Yoast, is thrilled to take on her new role and officially lead the company. Joost de Valk, former CEO and founder of Yoast, will start focusing mostly on software development, as the new Chief Product Officer of Yoast. Alongside that, he’ll be leading marketing and communications for WordPress, as his second job.
Yoast’s new CEO: Marieke
Marieke is the founder of Yoast Academy, the SEO training portal of Yoast. She joined the company in 2013 after obtaining her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and working at various universities. In 2015, she started developing Yoast’s first SEO training: Basic SEO. Soon other courses followed. Today, Yoast offers an impressive portfolio of SEO courses, tailored to the specific needs of people wanting to learn about SEO.
In 2014, Marieke joined the board. She took on the role of CSO and was heavily involved in the company’s strategy for growth, being responsible for content, marketing, research and project management. In fact, as Marieke wrote on her blog, she has already been acting as the CEO for a while now:
“In many ways, I was already the CEO. Among the four of us, I am the one most thinking ahead. I am the one most concerned with company culture. I am the one who’s often leading the way. That does not mean I decided upon the route though. That’s something we do among the four of us. Still, I was the one proposing to my partners that we needed to make decisions.”
So will big changes take place? This is what Marieke says about it:
“I don’t think there will be big changes inside our organization. Things will pretty much keep running the way they were always running…. [However,] I am very curious to what extent people will treat me any different now that I am the CEO of Yoast. For a lot of people outside of Yoast, it was not very clear what my role at Yoast was. The job title of CEO will perhaps be a door opener for me.”
The mission of Yoast is SEO for everyone. That mission will not change as Marieke takes the lead.
‘We want to help people to create websites that rank in the search engines, with software and by learning people about SEO. We have big plans for 2019, making SEO more actionable and understandable for everyone.’
One thing’s for sure: She’ll do “this CEO-thing” her way, as she says in her blog post.
Yoast’s new CPO: Joost
Joost is the founder of the company Yoast and brain behind the very successful Yoast SEO plugin. Since he founded Yoast in 2010, he has been the CEO. Today, he’s stepping down and handing over this position to Marieke. He’s very confident she’ll do an outstanding job as CEO, as he says in his post:
“In many ways, Marieke is way more suited to be CEO than I am. She has so much more structure and isn’t as likely as I am to go “oh squirrel!” and forget about the important stuff. I’m sure she’ll continue to be excellent in her new role.”
Starting today, Joost will focus again on what he loves most: software development. As Chief Product Officer of Yoast, he’ll dedicate his time to further development of great tools which allow people to rank higher in the search engines.
“Having to worry less about stuff that needs my signature and other painful sides of being CEO will free me up to work on the core product more. I’m still super proud of Yoast SEO and look forward to working on it for years to come.”
In addition to that, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, appointed Joost as the Marketing and Communications lead at WordPress. An opportunity Joost took with both hands:
“I think WordPress is one of the most essential platforms on the web and I’m really proud to be able to do my part for it. I have been in the WordPress community for well over a decade now. In that time I’ve done a lot of different things but I think this will be my biggest challenge yet.”
The Yoast board: Michiel, Marieke, Joost and Omar. Photo by Eveline van Elk.
The Yoast board exists of 4 people: as of today Marieke van de Rakt will take on the role of CEO and Joost de Valk will be CPO. Michiel Heijmans continues to be COO and Omar Reiss remains CTO.
Tickets to YoastCon are selling very quickly! And people from all over the world will be joining us. We’ve sold tickets to a lot of people from the Netherlands and from the US. But we will also be welcoming people from Belgium, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Israel, South-Africa and even people from Brazil and Senegal. And for at least 7 good reasons.
1. Google and Bing will be there!
Google’s WordPress team will be at YoasCon. They’ll fly in both from Silicon Valley and from Switzerland. Bing is also sending search experts. Both companies will present on stage. At Yoast, we communicate and often work together with the largest search engines, making sure our plugin does exactly what it should do to get your site ranking. Want to hear what Google and Bing have to say about SEO? YoastCon is the place to be!
2. Intimate event
Lots of SEO conference are really large (with over 1000 attendees). We’re planning for an intimate event (with about 400 attendees). Most of our speakers will be at the conference for both days. You’ll have every chance to ask questions or to even talk to them in person.
3. Hang out with the Yoasters
We would really like to meet our audience. We love to meet people who read our blog and use our plugin. Do you have any questions about our plugin? We have a support booth open the entire conference. You can ask us anything! Please come by and tell us what you like and dislike about our plugin. Or just hang out with us, play some foosball or have a few drinks.
4. Food and drinks will be great
Lunch and drinks are included. As well as coffee and some treats. On both days, we’ll end our conference with drinks. Great food, great drinks, and great opportunities to meet new and inspiring people.
5. That awesome line up of speakers
I’ve written about it before; you do not want to miss our amazing speakers. The line up of YoastCon 2019 is so very awesome. Alberto Medina from Google, Rand Fishkin, Aleyda Solis and Jono Alderson at one conference. And that’s only four of them. Unbelievable.
6. Practical workshops
Inspiring keynote talks are great, but if you want some practical help with your SEO, YoastCon is also the place to go. We have some amazing workshops prepared. I just finished preparing 3 workshops on SEO copywriting, site structure and keyword research. In these workshops, we’ll really help you get started with a practical aspect of SEO. We’ll make sure it is completely applied to your very own unique situation, so you’ll go home with actual results!
7. The venue and Nijmegen
Not convinced yet? YoastCon will be in Nijmegen in de Vereeniging, which is one of the most beautiful concert halls of the Netherlands. And Nijmegen, that’s where I was born. Very laid back, very welcoming, very awesome. The venue is located in the city center, and there are countless bars and restaurants to get some dinner or to hang out after our conference.
Google Search Console (or ‘GSC’ for short) lets webmasters monitor and manage their websites through an official portal, and is crammed full with useful statistics. Having access to tools and data provided directly by the search engines can make optimizing your website much easier!
It’s a communication channel
Search Console accounts are the main, and official way in which Google communicates with individual site owners. By having a registered account, Google can send webmasters information about site issues, errors, or even penalties. It also provides some limited tools to allow you to contact them about site issues and feature requests.
It’s a control center
If you’re actively optimizing your website, you’ll understand that SEO is never ‘finished’. You need to be continually improving your content, refining your site settings, and minimizing your errors.
Search Console provides tools which help with this day-to-day management. It lets you do things like submit and monitor your XML sitemaps, ask Google to (re)evaluate your errors, or see how Google sees particular pages and URLs on your site.
It’s a performance dashboard
Your GSC account is full of useful information about how your website is shown and performing in search results. From mobile usability reports to visibility and clickthrough tracking, and much more.
If you’re serious about managing and optimizing your website, your GSC account is your nerve center for understanding when, where and how your site is appearing in Google.
It’s a data source
Most of the data in Google Search Console can be extracted and integrated into other systems, like Google Analytics, and Yoast SEO!
That means that, if you’re running a Yoast SEO plugin, you can integrate some of your GSC data directly into your website. This can make it much easier to manage your errors, analysis, and redirects!
Check out our great guide on how to get that hooked up, and how to take advantage of the integration.
Ready to get started?
Anybody who runs or manages a website should be able to access a Google Search Console account, for free.
There are a few different ways to create and authorize your account, but the easiest is to integrate through Yoast SEO – just follow this quick guide to get things running!
For a term that’s been around since 2001, there are still a great many people asking “what is SEM?”
It would seem that this should be an easy question to answer. After all, SEM has had nearly two decades to settle its definition. And yet, the question is still asked.
The term search engine marketing was popularized in 2001 by Danny Sullivan, then editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. Danny wanted SEM to describe all search engine marketing initiatives, both organic and paid. Even today, you’ll occasionally see SEM used as a one-size-fits-all term for any marketing involving search engines.
Industry professionals and publications also throw around the term search marketing with ease. This might sound like the same thing, but it isn’t.
And of course, there is also the venerable search engine optimization (SEO) to consider. SEM, Search Marketing, SEO …
With all these terms, no wonder there is still confusion.
What Is SEM?
SEM stands for search engine marketing. As it is commonly used today, SEM describes only the money-backed portion of marketing through a search engine.
SEM involves buying PPC (pay-per-click) ads that display on a search engine results page (SERP for short). Ads may be placed through Google Ads, Bing Ads, or other search engines.
You know you’re doing SEM if …
When you give a search engine money to appear on their SERP, you’re doing SEM.
Common SEM concerns are cost per click and cost per acquisition (CPC and CPA). These indicate how much money is being spent on search advertising, and whether the return is worth it.
Some other important terms used in the world of SEM include:
Retargeting
Geotargeting
Dayparting
Demographic targeting
Mobile targeting
and many more
SEM is the area where search engines make most of their money. As a result, paid search advertising takes precision so that ad dollars aren’t wasted. That makes SEM a marketing specialty of rapid change, one of the more exciting frontiers in search.
Does “Search Engine Marketing” Include SEO?
The short answer is no. SEM and SEO are now two different roles.
The longer answer is: “Not anymore, but it’s complicated.”
When Danny Sullivan created SEM back in 2001, he used it as a catch-all to describe all efforts that encouraged website traffic from search engine results pages — including paid and organic search initiatives. According to Danny then, both SEO and PPC folks worked in search engine marketing. Simple. Clear. This definition was accepted by the industry at the time.
Yet in the 18 years since, the common understanding of the term SEM has shifted.
What caused this change? A few possible causes include Wikipedia’s page on SEM being entirely skewed toward paid efforts; Yahoo’s push of their PPC solution; and the general alphabet soup of confusing marketing acronyms. (For a detailed history of the term SEM, see Danny’s recap from 2010.)
Whatever the reason, the answer to the question “what is SEM” has definitively changed. SEM now means paid.
Today when you head to Search Engine Land, you’ll find SEM defined this way:
“SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the process of gaining website traffic by purchasing ads on search engines.”
That clearly includes pay per click, local search ads, product listing ads, and all advertising efforts with regard to search engines.
What about “Search Marketing”?
In place of SEM as an umbrella term, the industry coined the phrase “search marketing.”
Again looking at SEL, the definition of search marketing is:
“Search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.”
You may recognize that definition as Danny’s original meaning for SEM.
Defining SEM for the Future
Raise your hand if you think “SEM” is done evolving. Anyone?
I see signs that SEM will expand in meaning in the future.
In 2019, search marketing conferences are including more than just search engine advertising within the track called “SEM.”
Exhibit A: SMX West
The upcoming SMX West conference divides their tracks into SEO (organic) and SEM (paid). So that division is clear. You can expect to learn about organic ranking in the SEO track. In the SEM track, sessions focus on PPC topics like improving a Google Ads campaign.
What’s striking is the addition of advertising platforms besides Google and Bing. Sessions in the SEM track also talk about:
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Amazon
Exhibit B: Pubcon Las Vegas
I wondered if SMX was just an exception here. So I looked at another big marketing event, Pubcon.
It turns out that Pubcon’s “SEM” theme also covers more than just traditional search engines. Facebook advertising makes the cut. And there could be others that just aren’t mentioned in the summary description.
At least in the context of conferences, SEM can mean any variety of online ad placement. (This is somewhat counterintuitive.)
No longer are sessions merely focused on Google and Bing. They cover non-search outlets that accept ads, too.
Will this lead to another shift in the definition of SEM? Or will another term entirely take over to encapsulate the always evolving and always exciting world of digital marketing?
The scope of what we do as search marketers has grown. So should our definitions.
Search marketing, in my view, now has to include more than just organic SEO and paid SEM in the major search engines. It also involves video, server issues, site performance, voice, YouTube, Amazon, and the list goes on.
One thing is certain — the search industry continues to develop. So too will the language we use to describe it.
If you find yourself asking what is SEM 10 years from now and discover the answer has changed once again, at least you won’t be surprised.
It’s great to help people write better content in their own language. Of course, Yoast SEO works with any language, but languages that have full readability support get access to an even better content analysis. In Yoast SEO 9.5, we’re adding a new language to our roster: Swedish! In addition, we also improved the transition word support for German. Find out what else is new in Yoast SEO 9.5.
An improved understanding of Swedish
There’s an ever-increasing quest for quality. We know customers value a flawless piece of content aimed at wherever they are in their journey to find out what they need. But, we’re also increasingly aware of how much search engines value a great piece of content — and they can judge quality more easily every day. Luckily, our content tools can help you improve your content. What’s more, the Yoast SEO content analysis even has checks that are tailored to specific languages. Today, we’re adding a new one: Swedish.
Swedish joins a growing list of language that fully supports the specific Yoast SEO readability checks. The list as of today consists of English, Russian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and French, with more on the way. For these languages, we understand and recognize, among other things transition words and passive voice, so we can calculate an accurate Flesch Reading Ease score, give relevant suggestions for related links and generally give better feedback on how to improve your writing. English language users can also enjoy the awesome word form support, which we’re developing for other languages as well.
Besides providing readability support, we’re also improving the keyword functionality. This means that we can make a distinction between content words and function words, so we can provide better feedback based on words that have true meaning.
Reminder: Help us test a new SEO analysis!
Almost 80.000 people are helping us beta test the new SEO analysis that will arrive in Yoast SEO 10.0. Can we add you to the list? The more the merrier!
Our new analysis is the result of months of hard work by a dedicated team of experts looking to align the plugin with research. This gave us a lot of insights into what works and what doesn’t, what’s old and outdated and what’s missing. We used these insights to improve the analysis in Yoast SEO. At the moment, we’re testing this before we roll it out.
You can start testing by switching on the toggle in SEO > General > Features. You’ll be added to a special mailing list which we only use to send you a couple of questionnaires. Read all about the upcoming changes in Yoast SEO and more about why you should help us test.
Update to Yoast SEO 9.5
While Yoast SEO 9.5 mostly consists of bug fixes and enhancements — which you can find in the changelog —, we’ve added a new language to our roster and updated support for German. Flawless content is incredibly important in this day and age and we hope our tools can help you to improve yours!
If you haven’t signed up for testing the new analysis of Yoast SEO, please do. Together we’ll make Yoast SEO 10 an incredible release. Thanks!
Search continues to evolve, and this 2019, new updates, services, and tools aim to continue its optimization. With mobile and voice search having more impact than before, optimization on these platforms continues to be one of the main concerns in the world of SEO.
Along with mobile and voice, conversion rate optimization remains a constant metric to watch, as it is key to generating sales and revenue to any business website. Tracking this data helps you get an idea of how successful your efforts and strategies are, and also showing how to improve them as well. 2019 is another year that brings in big changes to SEO, and here are the key metrics that you should keep track this year, and maybe even beyond.
Subscriber Size and User Retention
One of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website content is by having a steady and growing subscriber base. Subscription keeps users regularly informed that new content has been released by a website, thus bringing in traffic. Subscription helps user retention grow, which plays a huge part in traffic growth. Some of the biggest websites utilize their subscription base very well, which has helped them establish their online presence, thanks in large part to their loyal user base.
and social media marketing are two great ways to grow your subscription base, as you can create sizeable campaigns that will help you gain more users. We have covered this in previous articles, and it is worth taking a look at them again to see how to create them successfully. While establishing a user base takes a lot of time and quality content to accomplish, it is a long-term investment worth making that will surely pay dividends in the end.
Mobile Search Ranking
Mobile search is constantly growing over the past year, with more people using mobile internet, and with the increasing popularity of voice search. In fact, there are cases in which mobile traffic constitutes half of the overall traffic of certain websites, which is something that would not be as common a few years ago.
This makes mobile optimization a must if you haven’t done it yet, as it makes your website accessible for different kinds of mobile devices, without sacrificing content and other features, which were some of the more persistent issues in the past. With search engines like Google incorporating voice search, mobile search rankings are crucial to track how users find your website and find the best search terms that would generate more traffic.
Page Loading Speed
The Google Speed update during July 2018 made mobile loading speed a ranking factor, which led to numerous websites optimizing accordingly. With this in mind, each second truly counts, as it makes a huge difference in the user experience. A few extra seconds can hamper the experience, and lead to users moving on to other websites, which no website owner would want.
Google Lighthouse and the PageSpeed Insights tool allows you to check loading speed and find any issue that is affecting loading speed. AMP is also another time-saver, as it creates fast loading pages. With increasing internet speed, having a website that performs well makes a huge difference in creating the best user experience.
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is one of the most important SEO metrics to track, as this is one of your main goals when generating revenue to your website. A good conversion rate shows that you have a website that is optimized well, making sure that users would be guided to the right pages. The key to a good conversion rate is quality content that enables users to take actionable steps and starting the buyer’s journey. The user experience is crucial, as a conversion might be hampered by factors such as broken links and misleading images.
Landing page optimization would make sure that these elements would function properly and help guide users into the buyer’s journey. Conversion rate has always been a crucial SEO metric, and it remains in 2019.
Device Used
With search becoming bigger on mobile, it is important to keep track what kind of device is being used to view your website. This would help if pages within your website need to be optimized to make it flexible for multiple platforms. You can also use this metric to see how many of your email. subscribers view your content through different platforms as well.
Tracking this metric also helps push the need for AMP and Responsive Design on your website, which has become a primary need for every website aiming to achieve good search rankings. Since we’re handling different websites, we get to see a wide variety of data that show how different types of users prefer to view content. Upon viewing the data we have at hand, we can say that mobile is growing much larger month after month.
The main tool to track this metric is Google Analytics, which provides data to view desktop, mobile, and tablet user numbers. You can also view the device that was being used as well, which is additional data that might come in handy when targeting certain audiences. Mobile looks to play a huge part in the future of SEO and tracking this metric would bode well for your website.
Error Pages
One of the most hampering experiences that can happen on a website is when you encounter an error page, which means that you can’t navigate further and access content. Whenever you encounter these pages on your website, it is best to act fast and have it fixed as soon as possible.
Tools like Screaming Frog allow you to crawl over all pages in your website, which helps you find any error page that requires redirection. A good practice would be to have your website crawled on a weekly basis to ensure that any error page would be resolved immediately.
Key Takeaway
There are many metrics and factors that can affect the success of an SEO and conversion strategy, and keeping track of these metrics makes sure that you achieve the most success this 2019, and prepare your website for new and upcoming updates.
If you have questions and inquiries about SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
John 
(@MathijsLemmers) 
