OK, Google: Should I Focus on Voice Search in 2017?

Answer: No. Not if you want to hit your 2017 goals.

Seer Round Table

Welcome to Seer Round Table – content driven by Seer employees talking through the latest trends in marketing.  This is the product of seasoned marketers challenging the trends and each other to simply get to the best solutions.…

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Ask Yoast: Block your site’s search results pages?

Every website should have a decent internal search functionality that shows the visitors search results that fit their search query. However, those search results pages on your site don’t need to be shown in Google’s search results. In fact, Google advises against this too; it’s not a great user experience to click on a Google search result, just to end up on a search result page of your site. Learn what’s best practice to prevent this from happening!

User experience is not the only reason to prevent Google from including these pages in their search results. Spam domains can also abuse your search results pages, which is what happened to Krunoslav from Croatia. He therefore emailed Ask Yoast:

“Some spam domains were linking to the search results pages on my WordPress site. So what could I do to block Google from accessing my site search results? Is there any code that I could put in robots.txt?”

Check out the video or read the answer below!

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In the video, we explain what you could do to prevent Google from showing your site’s search results:

“Well, to be honest, I don’t think I would block them. What you could do, is try two different things:

1. One is do nothing and run our Yoast SEO plugin. We’ll automatically noindex all the search result pages on your site. But if that leads to weird rankings or to other stuff that is not really working for you, then you could do another thing:

2. The second way is to block them and put a disallow:/?=s* in your robots.txt. This basically means that you’re blocking Google from crawling your entire search query. I don’t know whether that’s the best solution though.

I would try noindex first and see if that does anything. If it doesn’t, then use the method of blocking your search results in your robots.txt.

Good luck!”

Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Read more: ‘Block your site’s search results pages’ »

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How to start a blog

If you’re thinking about starting a blog, the most important thing I have to say to you is: go for it! Start your blog! Just do it! Blogging is a great SEO strategy, it’s a wonderful marketing tool and blogging is lots of fun! A new blog will allow you to make smart and strategic choices. Just take a little time to think about how to set up your blog before you begin, so you’ll have less work later on. Let me share some tips with you on how to start a blog.

Choose your niche

You should always write about what you know. But you should not write about everything you know. Pick a niche. Decide upon a main topic and write posts related to that topic. It’s more likely that your audience will come back and read your other posts if you’re writing about similar topics. People will know what to expect. Starting a mom blog implies that you write about all things concerning your children and family life. Starting a travel blog implies you write about traveling. You can write about something slightly off topic once in a while of course, but try to stick to your niche. An audience of a travel blog doesn’t expect a blog post about gardening. 

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$ 25€ 25 - Buy now » Info Do your keyword research

Once you’ve chosen your niche, you should do some solid keyword research. Try to find out what people are searching for. What words are they using when they want to read about your niche and your topic? You should really get inside the heads of your potential audience. If you do your keyword research properly, you should end up with a long lists of keywords you would like to be found for. Try to come up with competitive, head keywords as well as with less competitive long-tail keywords.

Read more: ‘How to start your keyword research’ »

Think about site structure

This is the best time to think about site structure. What categories are popular in your niche? What are the most important head keywords you’d like to rank for? You should write a long, kick-ass article about each of these keywords. Those will be your most essential articles, or in other words, your cornerstone content. You should give those articles a prominent place on your site.

After you’ve written those beautiful cornerstone articles, write lots of blog posts on sub topics of that main topic and always link to your cornerstones. That way, you’ll be telling Google exactly what the most important articles on your website are.

Keep reading: ‘What is cornerstone content?’ »

Write that first post

Take some time to do keyword research and to think about site structure. But don’t take too much time. Just write that first post! Put pen to paper and just do it. Your blog starts with the very first post. That post doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be published. Need some help to get started? Check out our 10 tips on how to make your post awesome.

Pictures and videos

Writing blog post is more than writing a nice story; a successful blog has pictures and videos as well. Every post should show at least one image. Taking nice photos yourself is a great way of creating images and making short videos is a really good blogging strategy as well. Especially if you’re blogging about (aspects) of your own life, photos of it are a necessity.

Read on: ‘Images for blogs’ »

Optimize for the search engines

Before publishing your post, optimize it using Yoast SEO (on WordPress of course, but on Magento and TYPO3 now too!). Don’t forget to create an awesome SEO title and a decent snippet. Finetune your text. Make sure your text is both readable as well as SEO-friendly.

Read more: ‘How to use the content & SEO analysis of Yoast SEO’ »

Promote your blog

Using social media is the best way to reach and grow the audience of your blog. That’s why your blog should have a Facebook page. Sharing your posts on Facebook is a good marketing strategy. Don’t forget Instagram and Twitter either!

In addition to the use of social media to promote your blog, we advise you send out a digital newsletter. Let people sign up for it and send out emails with your latest blog posts and some other fun facts.

Keep reading: ‘Marketing your blog’ »

Stick with it!

The most important thing to start a blog – besides setting up your new blog – is to write that very first blog post. Once you’ve written that first post, your blog has started. You should keep on writing blog posts to make it successful, so try to determine a frequency to publish new posts. You don’t have to blog every day, once a week or maybe even once in every two weeks would be a nice frequency to start with. Find a frequency you can stick with! Your audience will know what to expect, if your blogging frequency is stable.

Read on: ‘Blog SEO: make people stay and read your post’ »

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Finding These Problems in Your Google Analytics Data and How to Fix Them

Ever since the creation and distribution of Google Analytics, several people have used it to track and report on their website’s traffic. Tracking through the use of Google analytics can help you learn some valuable information on who is visiting your website, the rate of visitors on your website, what the visitors do, and whether the website does its intended objective.

However, tracking through the Google Analytics requires constant attention and upkeep; without these, you’ll only be blindly depending on the data that you gather, or you will likely be not using it at all.

The data that you gather through Google Analytics is truly helpful, to say the least, especially for websites that are for businesses. This is due to the fact that the data you receive will help you formulate and make smart business decisions that can help you move forward. But, data will always remain as an object that is prone to errors if you are not careful.

But, you should not worry about the errors that can occur because they can be easily avoided. You just have to know what the common problems are with the Google Analytics data, and how you can fix them. Let’s get started.

#1. Self-Referrals

Google defines self-referrals as referral traffic that originates from pages within your own domain. This is a big problem that most people would not know how to detect and fix.

• The Effect
  • When a self-referral happens to a user, it means that their current session has been broken and has restarted without them leaving your website. Then, Google Analytics interprets your domain as the referrer, which will affect and overwrite the actual acquisition information.
• The Cause
  • This happens because of some errors in your tracking implementation; examples of which include: improper cross-domain tagging, missing tracking code, internal link tagging with UTM parameters, untagged landing pages, and much more.
• Finding Out
  
  • Within Google Analytics, go to the Referrals report. Then, scan the report to find out if your web properties are involved. Properties that are interpreted to be self-referrals include your domain (e.g. yourwebsitename.com) and other pages related to your website (e.g. contactus.yourwebsitename.com).
• Fixing It
  
  • The first thing that you should do is to report this to the person handling your tracking implementation. Self-referrals can be easily addressed by configuring tracking on an untracked company web property. Basically, if people can be redirected from your site to the untracked web property, it should be tracking. If this does not work, you can do adjustments to your cross-domain implementation, or you can even remove UTM parameters on internal website links, to see if it still does not work.

#2. Referral Spam

Referral spam is basically fake traffic sources that dirty your Google Analytics data. This will mess with the data that Google Analytics gives you, and will eventually affect the decisions you make based on the data.

• The Effect
  • Referral spam can affect metric calculated based sessions such as bounce rates, average session duration, pages per session, and much more. This is due to the ability of referral spam to send fake data to your Google Analytics page which results to non-genuine inflated sessions.
• The Cause
  • This could be a result of fake data or commonly known as “ghosts” being sent to the servers of Google Analytics through the Measurement Protocol. It can also be caused by people that use bots to crawl websites without bothering to block their actions from Analytics.
• Finding Out
  • The main way to track if you are experiencing “ghost” spam is that it will be sent from a made up hostname – or no hostname at all. Since it actually was not directed to your site, you’ll find out that the traffic has a 100% bounce rate, an average of 1 page per session, and 0.00 seconds for average session duration.
  • You can also try navigating to the Hostname report, then if you see a hostname that you do not recognize or is not listed, there is a high chance that this is “ghost” or referral spam.
  • You can also check out the Referrals report, then look for sources that you do not recognize. One thing to take note of is that Referral spam is seldom new. Use your knowledge of the results and known traffic sources to discern if that unrecognized traffic source is genuine or not.
• Fixing it
  • If you have encountered Referral spam sources, you can simply arrange for Google Analytics to exclude it through the “Filters” settings. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Directly head to the Filters setting
2. Select “Add Filter” to create a new one
3. Click on “Custom”
4. Select the “Include” option
5. From the drop down, choose “Hostname”
6. Specify all Hostnames that should send data to Google Analytics
7. Finally, apply it to relevant views of your data

• For the “crawler” type of Referral spam

1. Follow steps 1-3
2. Select the “Exclude” option
3. From the drop down, choose “Campaign Source”
4. Enter the name of the source
5. Finally, apply it to relevant views of your data

#3. Personal Identifiable Information

As the name suggests, PII is anything related to the personal details of a user that can be used to identify them. The details may include name, address, personal phone number, credit card information, and social security number.

• The Effect
  • PII is something that can effectively shut down your account because Google has a policy that prohibits PII inside the data from Google Analytics.
• The Cause
  • PII is commonly incorporated in the Google Analytics data through URL strings. The use of search fields and form bars that users enter their personal details into are passed through the URL without any encryption, which leads to the existence of PII in the data.
• Finding Out
  • To check if there are PII in your data, you should go to the pages report, then begin an advanced search by pasting one of these expressions in the field provided:
    • For physical addresses: \?.*\b(St(reet)?|Ave(nue)?|B(ou)?le?v(ar)?d|(High)?Way|Ln|Lane|Road|Rd)\b
    • For credit card information: \?.*([=:,!]|%2[1C])(4[0-9]|5[1-5]|2[2-7]|6[05])(([\s+.,-]|%2[0B1C])*\d){12}($|[&#:,!%])
    • For social security number: \?.*([=:,!]|%2[1C])d{3}-?\d{2}-?\d{4}($|[&#:,!%])
    • For zip code: \?.*([=:,!]|%2[1C])\d{5}(\s|\+|%2[0B])*-(\s|\+|%2[0B])*\d{4}($|[&#:,!%])
    • For phone numbers: \?.*([=:,!]|%2[1C])(\(|%28)?\d{3}([\s+.,)-]|%2[0B1C9])*\d{3}([\s+.,-]|%2[0B1C])*\d{4}([\s+]|%2[0B])*($|[&#:,!%])
    • For email addresses: \?.*(@|%40)

• PII can also be sent to Google Analytics through custom and event dimension values. It is important to check your tracking data and implementation to avoid this.
• Fixing it
  • If you successfully found PII, contact your developer immediately. Share the parameters you’ve found sending the information into Google Analytics and request values that pass with PII are encrypted.
  • If it does not work, you can try using Google Tag Manager to remove parameters from the URL before it even makes it to Google Analytics. The steps are as follows:

1. Make a custom javascript variable in Google Tag Manager named “Pageview URL – Custom”
2. Make a test Google Analytics property. This will allow you to verify your solution before using it at your active Google Analytics property
3. Make a test pageview tag directing to a test UA property. Within it, set the “page” field with the variable that you created.
4. Test and publish the tag in #3
5. Review the URLs in Google Analytics to determine whether or not your solution is working as intended.
6. If working successfully, finish the configuration for your active pageview tag, then publish.

Key Takeaway

Today, Google Analytics is an integral part of monitoring your website’s performance, which is why you should do what you can to attend, maintain, and oversee the status of your Google Analytics page. Experiencing a problem on your page may have detrimental results, which is why you should avoid the problems highlighted here; and if you ever experience it, the solutions included here will help you.

Can you now take care of your Google Analytics account? Do you know of other problems that were not included here? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.

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The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O

The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google leads the world in technological advances that affect the way we live and do business. At the Google I/O developer conference this week, we glimpse a preview of how people will interact with computing in the near future.

Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, scene of the 2017 Google I/O conference

Kicking off the conference, CEO Sundar Pichai opened a two-hour keynote to a packed audience of developers, tech reporters and others who were joined by viewers in 85 countries watching online to hear what was new from the tech giant, including one overarching announcement:

We have shifted from a mobile first to an AI first world.

This shift into an “artificial intelligence first” world will impact the way customers find your business AND the way you interact with those customers.

Many articles no doubt list the many Google feature announcements coming out of the I/O conference. But here, we zero in on something that all business owners should be aware of as we move forward into this AI-powered, machine learning-based new world…

Focus on solving user problems

One thing becomes clear as you watch the tech giant unveil feature after feature: Each new product is designed to solve a problem. You could say this is the key to Google’s success.

During yesterday’s keynote alone, Google announced many coming AI-enabled features that exemplify this problem-solution strategy. Here are just a few.

• Google Assistant will be much more connected, even allowing people to type their interactions through a phone instead of speaking them — because there are times you don’t want people to overhear what you’re saying.
• Google Photos is getting Photo Sharing, a new feature that can recognize people in your photo and proactively suggest sending them the file — because people have a problem following through and sharing their photos.
• Google Visual Positioning Service will be able to guide your indoor movements through a store such as Lowes to help you find what you want — which solves a big problem for visually impaired people, not to mention the rest of us who need help navigating aisles.
• Google Lens is a fascinating new AI feature that takes visual identification to new heights. In one application, Lens can remove obstructions in front of a subject, such as a chain link fence (see demo tweeted below), and fill in the missing elements — because people want to be able to take better pictures.

Yes, this is a real thing real people at Google are working on. #Googleio2017 http://pic.twitter.com/vZJqkHBtH3

— Golden Krishna (@goldenkrishna) May 17, 2017

Let’s apply Google strategy to your business. In a nutshell:

Your greatest opportunities as a business are probably hiding under the cloak of user problems.
Click To Tweet

To find the opportunities awaiting discovery for your own business, ask yourself two questions:

1. What do people complain about in my industry? Complaints expose problems just waiting for a new product, service or technology to solve. This kind of negative feedback also provides clues for how to best engage your prospective customers.
2. What is difficult or time-consuming for prospective customers to accomplish today? In addition to listening for pain points, also just observe. Look for processes that everyone just accepts, but which require a lot of time and effort to do.

If your business innovates a solution to a problem, you can make people’s lives or jobs easier, potentially jump ahead of your competition, and grow your business.

But even if you’re not going to invent the next great product, by understanding people’s needs better you can offer solutions more effectively. Your marketing campaigns will ring truer (and have better click-through rates!) if they come from a point of empathy.

Solving people’s problems underlies the majority of Google’s advancements. Make it your business’s mantra, too.

Note: You can watch Google I/O to see various presentations live May 17–19 (check out the schedule here).

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What Google’s Suggested Clip Feature Means for You

A few weeks ago, Google rolled out a new SERP feature that highlights a “suggested clip” within an embedded video. As visible below, the video itself dominates the SERP, automatically highlighting the section of the video that Google has determined best answers your search query.…

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Meta keywords: why we don’t use them

You would think this post would be redundant by now: people know that the meta keyword tag is useless nowadays, right? The truth is that we still see site owners using meta keywords on their website. In addition to that, people are still searching for meta keywords according to Google Trends, although there seem to be less queries than 5 years ago. That’s why we republish this post about the uselessness of meta keywords for SEO once again.

Let me give you the full history of the meta keywords tag’s demise. Already in September 2009, Google announced officially what was true for years back then: “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking”. Matt Cutts explained it in a video:

Do Yahoo! and Bing use meta keywords?

In October of that same year, 2009, at SMX East, Yahoo! announced they no longer use the meta keywords tag anymore either. This turned out to be not entirely true, as they do index them, but they won’t help you one bit.

Bing also stated in 2014:

“Today, it’s pretty clear the meta keyword tag is dead in terms of SEO value. Sure, it might have value for contextual ad systems or serve as a signal to bots plying the web looking for topics to target, but as far as search goes, that tag flat lined years ago as a booster.”

Earlier, they even implied that using them – the wrong way – could work against you, because it’s rather seen as a spam signal than a ranking signal.

So don’t waste your time on the meta keywords tag. Instead of thinking about which keywords to put in that silly tag for 5 minutes, think about your content for 5 minutes longer. Really. It’s worth it.

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$ 199€ 199 - Buy now » Info But I want meta keywords!!!

By default, there is no meta keywords input field in our Yoast SEO plugin. If you use Yoast SEO and you really can’t live without them, you can turn it on though. You’ll first need to enable the advanced settings before you can change this. For a detailed explanation on how to do this, check out ‘how to enable meta keywords in Yoast SEO‘.

Don’t expect me to think you’re cool though. The reality is, that if you’re trying to rank for any term that’s even only a little competitive, meta keywords won’t help. You should write engaging, meaningful content on a technically well optimized platform and get good links and social engagement. That’s what builds great rankings, meta keywords have nothing to do with it.

Read more: ‘Metadata and SEO part 1: the head section’ »

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