In Yoast SEO, you’ll find a focus keyphrase input field for every page on your site. Here, you can enter the keyword or keyphrase you’d like the page to rank for in Google. Next, Yoast SEO will check the page’s content to see if search engines will recognize what it is about. Here, we’ll explain the purpose of a focus keyphrase and how to choose it well.
The focus keyword or keyphrase is the search term you want a page or post to rank for. When people search for that phrase, they should find you. If you set a focus keyphrase for a page with Yoast SEO in WordPress or Shopify, the plugin or app evaluates the page’s content and provides feedback on improving the content to increase your chances of ranking higher for that search term.
You’ll find the input field for your focus keyphrase in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right side of your editor. If you’re working in WordPress and don’t see the Yoast SEO sidebar, click the Yoast icon on the top right of your screen first. If you’re working in Shopify, click the ‘More actions’ option at the top of the screen to optimize in Yoast SEO.
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO sidebar
If you’re using WordPress, you can also find the focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box below the post editor:
The focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box
You’ll find the feedback to improve your content in the SEO analysis tab. If you amend your page with this feedback, it will be easier for search engines to recognize what your post or page is about.
Check out this video to see how it works:
Why use a focus keyphrase?
Regularly adding quality content to your website or blog is a good SEO strategy. Google sees that your website is active because you add new information and increase the volume of your content.
But randomly adding content to your site isn’t very useful. You have to craft a keyword strategy, and based on that strategy, you should create high-quality content your audience is looking for. When you write those articles, optimizing them for the keyphrases you’re aiming at is important. And that’s what Yoast SEO helps you with.
How to choose a focus keyphrase
In our opinion, there are at least three things you should do to determine which keywords or keyphrases you should optimize your blog posts for:
If you want a post or page to rank, you can increase your chance of success by aiming for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords often exist of more words and are less searched for than very popular ‘head’ keywords. But less popular also means less competition, and the chances to convert are usually higher. We elaborate on this in our guide to content SEO.
Tools that help you find long-tail and related keyphrases
When you’ve done your keyword research and know what you want to write about, you can use various tools to find long-tail variants of that keyphrase or related keyphrases.
One of these tools is at your disposal in Yoast SEO in WordPress and Shopify: a Semrush integration to easily find related keyphrases. When you are a user of our WordPress plugin or Shopify app, and you know what to write about, you can click on ‘Get related keyphrases’ below your focus keyphrase to see what phrases people search for in Google:
You’ll find the ‘Get related keyphrase’ button in the Yoast SEO for WordPress sidebar
A screen will open with related keyphrase suggestions:
Find related keyphrases in Yoast SEO for WordPress/Shopify with the Semrush integration
2. Check the search volume for your keyphrase
Once you have found a long-tail search term you want to rank for, you should research whether there are many searches for that keyword or phrase. This used to require quite some effort: you’d need to dive into Google Adwords or Google Trends. However, as you can see in the image above, you can now easily get information aboutrelated or long-tail keyphrases in Yoast SEO if you’re on WordPress or Shopify!
For instance, you can check out the search volume (how often it is searched for in a specified period) and trends (how that changed over time). Now, you can easily compare the related keyphrases and decide which one(s) you want to focus on in your current or other posts.
Add more than one keyphrase
Optimizing your post for related keyphrases can improve the quality of your content: it will make it more complete and easier to understand for Google. If you want to set one of these related keyphrases for your posts, you can do so with one click in Yoast SEO Premium for WordPress and Shopify. Afterward, return to the post editor and optimize your post for the new related keyphrase.
Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!
Unlock the premium content analysis and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!
If you’re a Shopify user and want to maximize your SEO efforts, check out our Yoast SEO for Shopify app if you don’t have it already!
Check posts that already rank
If you already have some (blog) posts that rank well for good terms, you will know how many visitors these posts attract. Using Google Trends to compare the focus keyphrases of older posts (which you can view the statistics for) with the focus keyphrase you have in mind for your new post could give you some idea about the potential traffic. Make sure to choose older posts most similar to the post you plan to write. If you plan to choose a long-tail keyword, compare posts with long-tail keywords.
For instance, this post about the focus keyphrase could be compared with a post about snippet previews, a related feature of Yoast SEO we already wrote about. In WordPress and Shopify, you could do this by using the Semrush integration in the Yoast SEO plugin:
Compare posts to find out more about the potential traffic
As you can see, the amount of traffic is a bit lower but still comparable. We know the search traffic to our snippet preview post is reasonably good, so we know it’s worth optimizing for.
Another good way to use the Semrush integration in the Yoast SEO plugin is when considering several (long-tail) focus keywords. Because it will easily show you which search term will have the highest search volume compared to another, it will help you decide which long-tail keyword is most commonly used in search.
Apart from knowing which search terms people use, you need to know whether your post or page idea fits the needs and expectations of those who use these search terms. In other words, you need to determine your audience’s search intent. A quick way to find out is by Googling your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself.
Check the search engine result pages
Take the time to look at the search engine result pages (SERPs) Are the articles in the Google results of similar character to your article? Could your article fit the results shown on these search pages? If you write a blog post or page for this exact focus keyword, you aim to get your post amongst these results.
The type of content shown on the search results will help you decide what content to create: does Google show product pages or blog posts? Or perhaps video or images? If there’s one dominant type, Google probably “thinks” this is the type of content people are looking for, so it’s worth investing time in creating that type of content, too. Of course, the results change when the search intent changes. Remember: you’ll have to beat the other search results, so only do this when you can create something truly outstanding and useful for your audience!
Content of the results pages
Be sure to use the content of the result pages as an inspiration for your blog post. However, do NOT copy content. Use the result pages to check if you missed information or arguments for your post or page. And, most importantly, to see how you can make your post stand out. How could your post be better, funnier, and more original than the post displayed in the result pages? Try to create content that will make the audience click and share!
Check out social media and forums
Another great tip: Check what people say about this topic on social media and various online forums. This will probably give you loads of input for your post or page. You can directly address the questions people have and the difficulties they encounter regarding this topic. On top of this, it will help you use the right wording, which is crucial if you want to reach your audience.
Don’t forget to repeat your research now and then!
Remember that search suggestions change all the time. And they will often be tuned to what you’ve been searching for. When we searched for the term “focus keyword” some time ago, the suggested keyword differed from the ones we got a couple of weeks ago.
Suggest changes based on people’s problems, so monitoring it for important keywords makes sense. New results can give you input for your post or other related posts.
Yoast SEO checks the quality of your keyphrase
A good focus keyword for your post is essential if it wants to stand a chance in the search engines. Therefore, Yoast SEO checks some aspects of your keyphrase, both in our WordPress plugin and our Shopify app. First, we check the length of your keywords to ensure your keyphrase isn’t too long. In addition, Yoast SEO checks whether the keyphrase only consists of function words.
The function word check in Yoast SEO
Function words (words such as the, a, and, or, have) carry very little meaning. They don’t help Google figure out the topic of the copy. Even though it’s unlikely that you come up with such a keyphrase yourself, it can happen when you’re distracted while typing in your keyphrase. For instance, you could have typed [the] instead of [the best movies of 2020]. To prevent keeping your focus keyphrase like this, Yoast SEO will show a warning with a grey bullet in the SEO analysis of your post and help you stay focused!
In rare cases, you might mean to rank for a phrase consisting of only function words. For instance, if you are writing a post about a meme called “Why would you do that?â€. In exceptional cases like this, you can avoid getting a red bullet by adding a double quote before and after your keyphrase. By doing so, our tool will look for the exact match of this phrase, and the warning will disappear.
People often ask us whether their About page or contact page should have a focus keyword and, if so, what it should be.
The answer is easy: not every page needs a focus keyword. Your contact page should be easily reachable. It might, for instance, need to rank for “<company name> address.” That probably doesn’t make sense as a focus keyword, though, so it’s perfectly fine to leave it empty.
Also, ask yourself: Do I want this post to rank in the long term? Some posts, such as temporary announcements, are probably not worth optimizing.
Conclusion and further readings
Choosing a perfect focus keyword or keyphrase is not an exact science. You should aim for a combination of words used by a search audience. Aim for a keyphrase that is relatively high in volume and will suit your audience.
Are you aiming for that number 1 position in the search results? And do you madly chase traffic and clicks? It’s not easy to achieve all these things on your own. Luckily, Yoast is here to help. In this post, we’ll talk you through optimizing your post in the best possible way. We’ll explain the five steps on how to Yoast your post.
Writing comes first, Yoast comes second
Optimizing your post is important, but it should never come first. Writing has three phases:
Prepare your content
Write!
Edit your content (and Yoast it!)
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog post, an article, or novel. The steps are all the same.
Preparation is key
Before you start writing an article, you should be able to answer the following questions:
In other words, you should take some time to think about what you want to tell your audience and what the structure of your text will look like. You need to know who you’re writing for and what their goal or search intent is. And what keywords does your audience use, so your content can be found in the search engines?
If you do not think about these questions long and hard, you’ll make mistakes like addressing the wrong audience, focusing on the wrong keywords or writing an article that’s badly structured and unfocused.
Write!
After thoroughly preparing your blog post or article, you can start writing. Make sure to start by filling out your focus keyphrases and their synonyms. What are the terms you want to be found for?
Since you’ve thought about what you’ll write in the preparation phase, you should go with the flow when you’re writing. Don’t overthink. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’ll have the third – and most important phase- to correct and Yoast your post.
Editing: let’s Yoast it!
In the final editing phase, you can Yoast your post. So, let’s look at the five steps you should take to optimize your post to the max.
Make sure your text is readable
The first step in optimizing your post is checking the readability analysis. If your overall readability score is green, you’re good to go. But that’s not always the case! Perhaps you used too many long sentences. Maybe you’ve used the passive voice too often. Correct those readability issues and make your text nice and easy to read. Check out our article about the readability analysis for more tips!
Check out your snippet preview
You want people to click on your site in the search result pages. You need to write a kickass meta description to make your result stand out. Because a good meta description lets people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site! That’s why you should choose a title and a meta description that stands out. Read our article on how to use Yoast SEO to write an awesome meta description if you want more practical tips.
If you need more help writing awesome meta descriptions, try the meta description generator. Our AI-powered generator crafts unique descriptions and titles for you! This feature is currently available if you have our premium Yoast SEO plugin.
Check your SEO score
The third step is to check out the SEO analysis. Which aspects of your SEO need improvement? Perhaps you should use your keyword or its synonym more often. Or maybe you’re overdoing it. And what about headings and images?
Check out which problems and improvements the Yoast SEO analysis indicates. Usually, you can easily make some tweaks that’ll make your copy better optimized for search engines. But don’t overdo it! You do not need all green traffic lights. You’re good to go if your overall SEO traffic light is green!
Add those internal links
Another thing you need before your content can rank is links. Google finds your posts and pages best when linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. So, using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO!
Are you linking to your most important articles? Are you linking to articles that are closely related to the article you’re currently writing? Make sure your site structure is tip-top. Read more about the power of internal linking and why you should use Yoast internal linking.
Read and reread!
Yoast SEO is a tool that aims to help you optimize your content. It gives practical tips on what you can do to improve your content. Think of it as your personal SEO assistant! But that being said, it’s also just a tool. Make sure to re-read your content once you’ve optimized it to make sure you’re happy with the end result!
Yoast your post
Writing is hard. Optimizing your post all by yourself is hard. That’s why Yoast SEO tries to make it easier for you! We’ll check your posts for readability, paragraph length, word complexity, your use of inclusive language, and make suggestions for improvements. We’ll help you to Yoast your post. But in the end, it will also remain some work from your side.
We are happy to announce the release of the latest version of Yoast SEO. This update focuses on enhancing performance, fixing bugs, and improving our features. Don’t forget to check out our recently launched generative AI feature! Here’s Yoast SEO 21.3.
Performance enhancements
By design, Yoast SEO stores image metadata for every post upon saving, which we use in several features, like schema output. This meant that for larger websites with loads of images, publishing or editing a post could take longer than expected, especially if a post contained a lot of those images.
With Yoast SEO 21.3, we released an improvement for this by taking advantage of each editor’s inherent handling of images. This enabled us to stop calls to the database that created these delays in the first place. For the combination of editors and blocks that worked, we noticed considerable decreases in the duration times of post-saving in our benchmark tests. Of course, the improvements heavily rely on the editor used for post creation and the image blocks added to the post content.
Word complexity improvements in Premium
Improving readability is a vital part of creating high-quality content. It’s one of the reasons we give you the tools needed to help you write that awesome content. Our in-house linguists always work hard to make these tools as good and helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 21.3, our team updated the word complexity feature available in Yoast SEO Premium.
The word complexity assessment marks complex words so that you can replace these with simpler alternatives. This will make your text easier to understand.
In Yoast SEO 21.3, we’ve improved the accuracy of this assessment in English by recognizing more plural forms of non-complex words. For example, the plural form universities is no longer marked as a complex word, just like the singular form university.
Generative AI in Yoast SEO Premium
As a reminder, in Yoast SEO 21.0, we added an innovative AI-powered feature that makes you quickly generate titles and meta descriptions. With this cutting-edge technology, you can optimize your content and metadata more effectively, saving you valuable time and resources.
Update now to Yoast SEO 21.3
Upgrade to the latest version of Yoast SEO now and benefit from better performance, advanced features, and easier SEO optimization. If you go Premium, you can use our AI-enhanced technology to achieve great results quickly. Download today’s update and enhance your visibility in the search engines.
You’ve got your Shopify store up and running, so now it’s time to welcome that traffic! Just roll out the red carpet and get those customers rummaging through the virtual shelves. Easy, right? Getting decent traffic is the hardest part of running an online store. Luckily, SEO can help you bring a steady stream of customers. Here are seven tips to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO.
It sounds easy, but it’s hard: getting a dependable stream of traffic
Thanks to platforms like Shopify, building and launching an online store has become easier. It’s now so accessible that everyone can run one! But launching a store is one thing; getting customers to your store and getting them to buy something is another!
Many stores are trying to get up and running with all kinds of marketing, with paid ads being very popular. But to get people to notice you, one essential tactic should have much of your attention: Shopify SEO. Doing SEO properly helps you build a stream of traffic that you can depend on.
You can do many things to improve the SEO of your online store, and in this article, we’ll highlight seven. For more tips and tricks, please read our Shopify SEO ultimate guide.
Improve structured data for products and store
A big part of SEO is making your store’s content easy to read and understand for search engines. You can focus on removing any technical hurdles a bot might have to crawl your pages. For the understanding part, structured data is essential.
Schema structured data gives search engines a sort of glossary of your site. You can precisely describe what the different parts mean to search engines with structured data. In addition, you can determine how everything connects by adding as much valuable information for search engines as possible.
There’s structured data for almost every part of your site, but a couple of significant ones for Shopify stores are review and product. These two give Google information about your products and show where it can find customer reviews. It can use this data to understand your products and what people think of them fully.
The result, of course, is a better listing in the search results. Your product might appear as a highlighted rich result with star ratings and more.
Structured data helps your products get highlighted in Google
It’s vital to get your structured data right. Luckily, several SEO apps in the Shopify app store can help you do this, like the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Below is an example of product structured data that Yoast SEO outputs automatically for all your products. This is tied into the rest of the structured data for your Shopify store.
Write great product descriptions, SEO titles, and meta descriptions
Another critical piece in getting traffic with the SEO puzzle is product descriptions. Both customers and search engines use product descriptions to learn about your product. It helps them understand the product and how they might experience it. But, simply listing a few features or relying on generic descriptions from manufacturers won’t do — you must stand out and write your own.
Good product descriptions give your store a voice and help build customer trust. It also provides search engines more clues on what to rank those products for — thus increasing the chance of showing up for relevant terms.
The same goes for your product titles and meta descriptions. All of these items offer insights for search engines to rank your products. Plus, they should appeal to potential customers by scanning the search results to pick the correct link. Be sure to put a lot of energy into your product content, which will pay dividends! Yoast SEO for Shopify has several features that can help you do this.
Build solid collection pages in Shopify
While you might want to rank individual product pages, most of the time, the collection pages rank for a higher-level product term. While you might jump at the chance of adding a thousand words of SEO content to your collection pages, that might backfire. Be careful, but test if changes to your collection pages have a positive or negative effect.
Check your collections in Shopify, and don’t make many of them with just one product. Those two might compete if you have a product and a product page collection. If you set them up correctly, fill them with the products needed, and add relevant content, collections can provide the groundwork for your Shopify SEO. Don’t forget to fit them into your navigation.
Don’t forget to add proper metadata on your collection pages, like an SEO title, meta description, images, etc. Please give it a title that adequately describes the product, and don’t forget to add the keyphrase.
Set up a blog on Shopify and write high-quality content
Content marketing is a great way to get your products noticed by a larger audience and search engines. Adding a blog to your Shopify store should be at the top of your list of things to do. A blog lets you talk more in-depth about your products and company, helping you build relationships with your potential customers.
On average, blogs are much wordier than product pages, so you have a bigger chance of those words appearing in search engines. In addition, you can use a blog to help customers with their buying journey. Not many people instantly buy a product in a store they’ve never been to before. Giving them several ways to read up on your product and store is good.
Of course, please do keyword research for your Shopify store. This will give you insights into which words your customers use and how much search volume they achieve. Don’t forget to look at long-tail keywords, as these have a better chance of converting. And, of course, set up a content strategy so that what you do makes sense.
Many Shopify stores like Beardbrand use blogs to attract traffic to their store using SEO
Set up an internal linking strategy
Internal linking is one of the main ingredients of good SEO. With a solid internal linking strategy, you identify your most important articles and link them so that they receive a boost from other related articles on your site. Internal linking not only helps search engines discover your content but also helps them get a sense of the most important pieces.
Internal linking can also work wonders on ecommerce sites. Of course, you don’t want to put too many — if any? — links in your product descriptions as you want your customers to convert and not head off to another page. Other spots on your store are great for linking to valuable content or places where people and machines can discover content that helps them understand your product. Adding related products helps as well. Just don’t overdo it on the links.
For instance, the blog we discussed earlier offers an excellent opportunity to describe your business and products while linking to the proper product pages. Ensure that the links are relevant and that you use an adequate anchor text to describe the link correctly. You can enrich your collection pages this way as well.
Another thing to focus on is your navigation. Are your most essential pages quickly reachable from your navigation?
Use a Shopify SEO app to fast-track the process
It wasn’t that long ago that doing SEO meant getting your hands dirty to get down in the nitty-gritty. A fair bit of coding was necessary to get online stores to do what you want them to do. Today, much of that work is “solved†by Shopify SEO apps. These apps ensure that your store is up for the task in a technical sense. In addition, adding structured data has become much easier thanks to the apps.
SEO apps come in all sorts and sizes, from small ones focused on solving a particular issue to suites that seem to do almost everything. One of the newest apps is Yoast SEO for Shopify. As we had years of experience helping WordPress users get good results with their sites — and even WooCommerce stores — we thought the time had come to bring our expertise to Shopify.
Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you set up your store in the best possible way for getting traffic with SEO. That’s not all, though, because the app also comes with SEO and readability analyses that help you make your content SEO-friendly and reader-friendly!
Keep your store clean and focused
Getting traffic to your Shopify store with SEO is also about keeping those people. Seeing all those potential customers bounce back to the search results is in nobody’s interest. Many competitors lurk in those search results pages and gladly take those customers!
Part of Shopify SEO is making your store lean and mean. This goes for the design of the store, but also for the loading times. Speed is of the essence. Fast-loading stores offer a better user experience and have a bigger chance of converting those visitors into paying — and returning! — customers. Check the Shopify Online Store Report to see how your store is doing.
While Shopify handles many of the technical parts for you, you can still do a lot to keep loading times down. For instance, don’t install so many apps in your Shopify store. And properly optimize and resize your product images. You could also optimize your store’s theme if you know how to code. Improve the code and dispel pieces that block the quick loading of your store.
How to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO
In this post, we’ve highlighted seven key areas in SEO you should focus on to get more traffic to your Shopify store. Make sure that your structured data is complete and valid. Write fantastic titles and meta descriptions, level up your content marketing with an excellent topical blog, and work on your internal links. And don’t forget to run an SEO app like Yoast SEO for Shopify!
Ever felt that some of your keywords don’t perform as well as before? And are you wondering why other companies outrank you in Google? Then it might be smart to do a quick competitive analysis. Because in most cases, it’s not necessarily your site that’s performing worse; it’s other sites doing better. Luckily, if you want to do a competitive analysis to optimize your SEO efforts, there’s actually a lot you can do yourself. Let us take you through the steps!
Step 1: Define your keywords
It’s very important to use the right keywords in a competitive analysis. If you insist on using your (possibly branded) company outing as one of the main keywords, you might not have any competition, but you also won’t get any decent, organic traffic to your website. An example: Let’s say you’re offering ‘holiday homes’. If you insist on using the keyword ‘vacation cottage’, you are selling yourself short. Match the words your customers use.
Use Google Trends to get insights into how your keywords are used
Doing proper keyword research will help. Not just for this competitive analysis, but for the entire SEO optimization of your website!
Step 2: Analyze these keywords
Once you have defined the keywords you’d like to check against your competitors, the next step is obvious: search for these keywords. See who your competitors are by writing down who ranks higher than you.
Be realistic
If you’re on page two in Google and want to do a competitive analysis with the number one, there is probably a lot to gain. But you should keep two things in mind. First, your rankings probably won’t immediately shoot to the first spot. They’ll most likely go up step by step. And second, the high-ranking web pages, depending on the keywords, might have a higher marketing budget than you to back their ranking strategies. In fact, this could be the reason why they rank so high in the first place!
But don’t give up. Our mission is ‘SEO for everyone‘ for a reason. If you put in the work, you’ll be able to climb to higher rankings step-by-step. Check the keywords, then make them long-tail or add local keywords (city name, region name) if needed. Do a thorough analysis. Google Trends will tell you what keywords have more traffic in the target markets for your business, and (free/paid) tools like Ahrefs.com and Searchmetrics.com will give you even more keyword insights. You can even use the Semrush integration in Yoast SEO to find relevant related keywords that might attract traffic.
Climbing up in rankings a (few) step(s) at a time
Sometimes, you can achieve a big improvement in your rankings. But if your website is ranking number six, it’s easier to climb to spot five or four before you target the top three. Again, that top three probably has the marketing budget to go all out, whereas your immediate ‘ranking neighbors’ are struggling like you. Beat them first; it’s easier. Having said that: if you have the opportunity to dethrone number one, two, or three, of course, go ahead and do so.
Step 3: Check technical differences
You’ll need to check a number of things to determine on which aspects your competition is ahead of you. That’s why the next step of your competitive analysis is to see if there are any technical differences.
Site speed
The faster the site, the happier the visitor, and the happier the search engine. That’s why it’s important to look at speed insights when doing a competitive analysis. Speed insights will tell you if there is a huge difference between you and your main competitors.
Again, there are multiple ways to check SLL/HTTPS in a competitive analysis. You can get a nice overview with Builtwith.com. This site gives you a ton of technical information, including an SSL certificate. You can obviously check your browser’s address bar for this as well, but Builtwith could give you more insights while going over all other details. Like what CMS your competitor uses (and if they upgraded their WordPress install and you didn’t?).
Mobile site
Mobile-first. Mobile parity. Mobile UX. It’s all about mobile these days. Which makes sense, as most of today’s website traffic is from mobile devices, a few exceptions aside.
A good mobile website is about getting your visitor to the right page as soon as possible. This has to do with speed, a clear and pleasant branded design, and deciding about top tasks on your website. Go check the websites of your competitors and see where they are clearly outperforming you. Be sure to check your Core Web Vitals as well, as Google is paying a lot of attention to these. To test this, you can use for instance:
Although technical optimizations are crucial, the quick wins will probably be in the field of content. Look at what you’ve written about your company and products, then see what your competitors published on their sites.
Click all menu items
What are your competitors’ main pages? What are they trying to sell, and how did they manage to rank above you? See how focused their menu is and what pages they link to from there. Check if your competitor tells a better story than you. Then improve your story. The main menu of your website should be targeted at your visitor; it doesn’t have to explain all the awesome things you came up with.
Category pages or product pages
If you have a shop, it might be interesting to do a competitive analysis of your competitor’s store structure. Are they trying to persuade customers on a product page or on category pages?
Our advice: optimize and try to rank for most of your category pages. After all, in a market where there are a gazillion products, ranking for each and every one of them is tough! So write appealing, high-quality content for your category pages, make them your cornerstone content, and try to rank a lot of ’em. Your competitive analysis will tell you which of these pages are optimized by your main competitors. Optimize yours accordingly and, obviously, better.
A sitemap can show you the site structure of your competitor, be it via an HTML sitemap or an XML sitemap. It can tell you, for instance, if they are targeting certain long-tail keywords via the slugs of their pages. Plus, a few clicks to their pages will tell you how their internal linking is done.
You can find that sitemap on most sites at example.com/sitemap.xml or example.com/sitemap_index.xml or at example.com/sitemap. Sometimes a website doesn’t have a sitemap, but tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb might help you out. Crawl the site and order by URL.
Blog
Do you have a blog? If not, you probably should. A blog makes for dynamic content, and keeps your site current. And, if you post regularly, Google will find all kinds of interesting and recent ‘Last Updated’ dates.
Check if your competitor has a blog, and if theirs ranks better than yours. If so, they’ve probably woven their blog into their content strategy.
Step 5: Compare UX
Great UX makes for a better time on your site, more page views, and a lower bounce rate. We’re not getting into UX too much here, because we think you should first focus on other things in your competitive analysis. However, we wanted to highlight two things: call to action and contact pages.
Call to action
A great call to action helps any page. Whether it’s to drive sales or engagement, every page needs a proper call to action. Simply go over some of your competitor’s pages and see how they went about this. See if you can grab some ideas, and improve your own call to action. Oh, and remove that slider and/or video background. That’s not a call to action. That’s a call to no action. (If you really must include one, make sure you at least optimize your video background in the right way).
Contact page & address details
Your contact page and address details could be the end goal of a visit to your page. If so, check how the competition created that page. Did they add structured data, for instance? Is there a contact form? Did they make it easier to find these details than you did? If comparing this sparks some great ideas, then adjust your site accordingly.
Step 6: Perform a backlink analysis
Last but not least: if all seems reasonably the same, and there is no logical way to explain why your competitor outranks you, it might just be that the other website has a great deal more relevant links than you do. Or simply better ones. You’d have to check Ahrefs.com, Moz’s OpenSiteExplorer or, for instance, Searchmetrics for this.
Follow-up on your competitive analysis!
At this point, you know the main differences between your competitor’s site and yours. This is the moment where you start prioritizing optimizations and get to work. First, take care of low-hanging fruit. Fix things that are easily fixed. Next, determine what issues might have the biggest impact on your rankings, then solve these as well. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll probably have no problem with this. Our tip? Go for any speed and content issues first, and try to get more backlinks in the process.
A redirect happens when someone asks for a specific page but gets sent to a different page. Often, the site owner deleted the page and set up a redirect to send visitors and search engine crawlers to a relevant page — a much better approach than serving them annoying, user-experience-breaking 404 messages. Redirects play a big part in the lives of site owners, developers, and SEOs. So, let’s answer a couple of recurring questions about redirects for SEO.
1. Are redirects bad for SEO?
Are redirects bad for SEO? The answer is no; redirects are not inherently bad for SEO. However, it is crucial to implement them correctly to avoid potential issues. An improper implementation can lead to problems such as losing PageRank and traffic. Redirecting pages is necessary when making URL changes, as you want to preserve the hard work invested in building an audience and acquiring backlinks.
To ensure that redirects are implemented correctly and effectively, consider the following best practices:
Use the appropriate redirect type: The most commonly used redirect for permanent URL changes is the 301 redirect. This informs search engines that the original URL has permanently moved to a new location. By using a 301 redirect, you can maintain the ranking and relevance of the old URL and seamlessly redirect users and search engine crawlers to the new URL.
Update internal links: When you implement redirects, updating any internal links on your website that refer to the old URLs is important. This ensures visitors can navigate to the correct pages and search engines can properly index the new URLs.
Preserve user experience: Redirects should aim to provide a smooth user experience. Avoid excessive redirect chains, which can slow page load times and frustrate users. It’s also important to redirect users to relevant content that aligns with their intent. For example, if a page has been permanently removed, redirect users to a relevant alternative rather than a generic homepage.
Monitor and test redirects: Regularly monitor your redirects. Check for errors or issues, such as broken redirects or redirect loops. It’s also helpful to periodically test the redirects to ensure they function as expected.
2. Why should I redirect a URL?
By redirecting a changed URL, you send users and crawlers to a new URL, minimizing annoyance. Whenever you perform any maintenance on your site, you are taking stuff out. You could delete a post, change your URL structure, or move your site to a new domain. You must replace it, or visitors will land on those 404 pages.
If you make small changes, like deleting an outdated article, you can redirect that old URL with a 301 to a relevant new article or give it a 410 to say that you deleted it. Don’t delete stuff without a plan. And don’t redirect your URLs to random articles that don’t have anything to do with the article you’re deleting. Lastly, don’t 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage!
Bigger projects need a URL migration strategy. For instance, moving to a new domain or changing the URL paths. In these cases, you should look at all your site’s URLs and map them to their future locations on the new domain. After determining what goes where you can start redirecting the URLs. Use the change of address tool in Google Search Console to notify Google of the changes.
3. What is a 301 redirect? And a 302 redirect?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect informing visitors and search engine crawlers that the requested URL has moved to a new destination permanently. It is the most commonly used redirect for permanent URL changes. When implementing a 301 redirect, you signal that the old URL is no longer in use and that the new URL should be accessed instead. It is important to note that with a 301 redirect, the old URL should not be used again in the future, as it signifies a permanent change.
On the other hand, a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. This type of redirect is used to indicate that the requested content is temporarily unavailable at a specific address but will return at a later time. Unlike a 301 redirect, a 302 redirect suggests that the change is temporary and that the original URL may be used again.
You must consider the URL change’s nature when deciding which redirect to use. If the change is permanent and you have no intention of using the original URL again, a 301 redirect is appropriate. However, if the change is temporary and you plan on returning to the original URL, a 302 redirect should be used.
It is recommended to carefully consider the purpose and longevity of the URL change when selecting the appropriate redirect. If you are uncertain about which redirect you need, please read our article on which redirect to pick?
4. What’s an easy way to manage redirects in WordPress?
We might be biased, but we think the redirect manager in our Yoast SEO Premium WordPress plugin is incredibly helpful. We know that many people struggle to understand the concept of redirects and the work that goes into adding and managing them. That’s why one of the first things we wanted our WordPress SEO plugin to have was an easy-to-use redirect tool. I think we succeeded, but don’t take my word for it.
The redirect manager can help set up and manage redirects on your WordPress site. It’s an indispensable tool to keep your site fresh and healthy. We made it as easy as possible. Here’s what happens when you delete a post:
Move a post to the trash
A message pops up saying that you moved a post to the trash
Choose one of two options given by the redirects manager:
Redirect to another URL
Serve a 410 Content deleted header
If you pick redirect, a modal opens where you can enter the new URL for this particular post
A redirect checker is a tool to determine if a certain URL is redirected and to analyze the path it follows. You can use this information to find bottlenecks, like a redirect chain in which a URL is redirected many times, making it much harder for Google to crawl that URL — and giving users a less-than-stellar user experience. These chains often happen without you knowing it: if you delete a redirected page, you add another piece. So, you need to keep an eye on your redirects; a redirect checker is one of the tools to do that.
You can use one of the SEO suites, such as Sitebulb, Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to test your redirects and links. If you only need a quick check, you can also use a simpler tool like httpstatus.io to give you an insight into the life of a URL on your site. Another must-have tool is the Redirect Path extension for Chrome, made by Ayima.
6. Do I need to redirect HTTP to HTTPS?
Every site should use the HTTPS protocol, but be sure to redirect your HTTP traffic to HTTPS. You could get into trouble with Google if you make your site available on HTTP and HTTPS, so watch out for that. Google prefers HTTPS sites because these tend to be faster and more secure. Your visitors expect the extra security as well.
So, you need to set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. There are a couple of ways of doing this, and you must plan this to ensure everything goes as it should. First, the preferred way of doing this is at the server level. Find out what kind of server your site is running (NGINX, Apache, or something else) and the code needed to add to your server config file or .htaccess file. Your host will often have a guide to help you set up a redirect for HTTP to HTTPS on the server level. Some hosts have a simple setting to manage this in one go.
There are also WordPress plugins that can handle the HTTPS/SSL stuff for your site, but for this specific issue, we wouldn’t rely on a plugin, but manage your redirect at a server level. Don’t forget to let Google know of the changes in Search Console.
Redirects for SEO
There are loads of questions about redirects to answer. The redirect concept isn’t too hard to grasp if you think about it. Getting started with redirects isn’t that hard, either. The hard part of working with redirects is managing them. Where are all these redirects leading? What if something breaks? Can you find redirect chains or redirect loops? Can you shorten the paths? You can gain a lot from optimizing your redirects, so dive in and fix them. Do you have burning questions about redirects? Let us know in the comments!
The summer has just ended. Should you already prepare for Black Friday and the holiday season? Yes! They’re the biggest sales of the year, and ranking in Google isn’t something you do overnight. It’s never too early to start. So, if you have an online shop, let’s start working on your holiday season SEO immediately!
Don’t forget, Black Friday (24 November) and Cyber Monday (27 November) are kicking off this year’s holiday shopping season. You can set up a lot of content for all occasions. In this post, we’ll review some things you can do to prepare!
Holiday shopping in 2023
Nowadays, people are used to shopping online. It’s easier and more convenient, because you don’t have to travel only to find something is out of stock. Plus, online stores often offer payment plans. Shopping online is so popular that online sales hit a record of 9.12 billion dollars last year! And the numbers will only continue to rise. That’s why it’s safe to assume that people will buy many (if not most) of their holiday gifts online this year.
Discount deals and alternative payment options (Buy now, pay later) should be part of your strategy
Brands should provide a consistent purchasing experience across digital and physical stores
To minimize returns, brands should make their product pages as comprehensive as possible
Holiday season marketing campaigns should be tailored to each platform to ensure maximum effectiveness
Holiday retail sales will grow 4.5% to reach $1.317 trillion this year, according to our forecast. Retailers who want to carve out a share of that spend will need strong promotional strategies and a seamless digital-physical experience. It’s also not a bad idea to have a plan ready for when the returns start rolling in.
Arielle Feger – Newsletter Analyst at eMarketer Insider Intelligence
Online is where it’s at
Of course, in-store or curbside pick-up will still prove popular. Nowadays, however, most people do their research and purchases online – sometimes even weeks in advance! So don’t be surprised when the holiday shopping season starts well before Black Friday and continues for weeks.
That’s why it can be a good idea to extend your online deals for a few days or weeks. Especially if you want to prevent huge crowds from gathering at your store on a specific day. That won’t be a good shopping experience for anyone involved, so spreading these deals over an extended time is probably better.
Start preparing in time
Dive into the data you amassed during previous Black Friday events, and see if you can come up with improvements. Bear in mind that it takes a while for content to rank. So if you want to keep up with the competition, try to get your content in gear at least 45 days ahead. That’s often recommended. Of course, you can always start preparing earlier if that works better for you. Your schedule could look something like this:
45 Days in advance: Post your promotion to your website calendar and post a save-the-date post on social media and in your email newsletter).
7 Days in advance: Post upcoming events/promotions post on social media and via email. Try to encourage other (small) businesses to share it with their followers.
1 Day in advance: Post an event reminder post on social media.
Keeping these steps and time frames in mind is a good rule. However, we think you can do much more in setting up new pages and renewing old ones. Let’s look at a few practical tips.
1. Set up holiday season gift pages
First, we must consider what category or particular landing pages make sense for the upcoming holidays. You can always set up pages like ‘Best gifts for parents/millennials/teens’, ‘Newest deals for your 6/10/12-year-old’, and ‘Best friend/grandparents/coworker discounts’. You could also think along the lines of ‘Top 10 gifts for outdoor/skiing/parasailing enthusiasts’ and ‘Top 3 deals for stay-at-home parents’, etcetera.
To increase the chances of your gift pages ranking, boost their internal linking structure. You can also link the previous all-year holiday season pages, such as specific Christmas landing pages (‘Top 7/10/25 gifts for under the Christmas tree’) to boost these when the time has come. That could be around the 45-day mark, but we wouldn’t mind stretching that to 60 days. You have to give Google and other search engines enough time to follow your links and find your specific holiday season landing pages in time.
2. Promote on social media and in your newsletter
Social media like Twitter and Pinterest — though this is technically a visual search engine — can play a massive role in the success of your (online) holiday sale. Take Pinterest, for instance. Raise your hand if you or your spouse has a Pinterest wish list. Many people do. If you manage to get your products on people’s wish lists, that can positively impact your sales.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to share your holiday season gifts pages on Facebook and Instagram as well. In the previous section, we’ve mentioned the top 10 lists. We all know these still work pretty well on social media. Yoast SEO can actually help you optimize your social media posts before you share them.
Email marketing
And last but not least, don’t forget your email marketing! For many companies, newsletters provide a steady stream of income. Be sure to plan a good campaign for your newsletters.
For example, we recommend setting up holiday gift guides and sharing these. You can create an excellent overview of all kinds of gifts that lots of people will enjoy. ELLE and Target have pages like that, and so do more companies.
3. Introduce new products
The holiday season is an excellent time to pitch new products. If you know of potential bestsellers for the upcoming holiday season, start writing content about these products now. You can compare it to tech sites writing about concept iPhones, features that Apple might add, and things like that.
The more you write about new products upfront, the more likely the sales pages for these products will rank when it matters. You should link all pages you made in advance to that one main page you’ll set up when the product is released and available to buy. Treat that page like cornerstone content.
4. Add structured data to your product pages
When adding or changing your product pages to fit the season, don’t forget to optimize them. Check, for instance, whether you’ve added structured data to your product pages. Because rich results that show ratings and prices can give you an edge over your competitor. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin, Local SEO plugin, or Yoast SEO for Shopify app can help you do this!
Example of how a product can appear in the search results if you use structured data.
There’s no shame in serving old wine in a new bottle. If you have a Black Friday guide for 2022, feel free to reuse it in 2023. Update the year, and update details like popular brands and popular products for that year. If the slug of your URL is /black-friday-guide-2022/, change it to /black-friday-guide-2023/ around August next year, and redirect the old URL to the new one. No need to create a new page. It would be a waste of nice inbound links not to reuse that old URL. Of course, this is even easier if you don’t include the year in the URL, so /black-friday-guide/ is an excellent slug as well.
In the months before the holiday season, you could even simply repost popular posts from last year (a bit adjusted or updated if needed) on social media. Valentine’s Day might even become Secret Santa. Cyber Monday might match your child’s favorite gifts for Ramadan. These are probably small adjustments; perhaps just adding ‘this Ramadan’ to a meta description or title will do.
It’s a good idea to check and optimize your website for speed and mobile. Trust us, you’ll get these recommendations from an SEO blog or consultant every day, all day. And with good reason! Mobile, site speed, and user experience in general are becoming more important every year (or day, for that matter). When preparing your website for the holiday season, this is as good a time as any to check your mobile website and site speed, and update or improve them if possible.
All set? Don’t forget to make a measurement plan so you can analyze your success. Write down all your plans, then think about how to track all your actions. This is key if you want to know what to focus on next year. For detailed instructions on how to analyze your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Cinco de Mayo shopping, read our post with 5 tips to measure your holiday sales success.
What should you do when the holiday season is over?
How do you handle the product pages of holiday gift sets after the holidays are over? Even if the gift set or product was a great success, and you want to offer it again next year, it’ll take a while for the page to be relevant again. So, what’s the best way to deal with these pages in the meantime?
Our advice: Keep the pages up. However, you don’t necessarily want the pages visible to people browsing your site. So have the page up without linking to it, then link to it again when the holiday season starts. This is better than deleting it and starting again.
Conclusion on holiday season SEO
In short, now’s the time to buckle down and start writing holiday gift pages and content on new products. And don’t forget to plan your social media promotion and analytics. After all, you can never start too early when your online business depends on the holiday season. Be prepared, begin now!
Hot on the heels of our AI release comes Yoast SEO 21.2. Always committed to helping businesses grow and attract more traffic, this new release is packed with enhancements and fixes to improve your experience and site’s SEO. Find out more!
What’s new?
The update to our sidebar is particularly interesting in the 21.2 release of Yoast SEO. We’re always looking for ways to make our SEO plugins more intuitive and easy to use. This led us to rethink how we organize our sidebar.
Firstly, we’ve renamed the ‘Google preview’ section to ‘Search appearance.’ This new title better reflects the function of this section. Namely, giving you an accurate depiction of how your post or page will appear in the search engine results.
Similarly, what you previously knew as ‘Social previews’ — i.e., X, the app formerly known as Twitter and Facebook previews — is now appropriately titled ‘Social media appearance. This gives you a clearer idea of how your content will display across various social media platforms. Checking your social media appearance is a Yoast SEO Premium feature.
Additionally, not only have we renamed these sections, but they also now come with new, distinctive icons. These changes make spotting these sections more straightforward, making your SEO process more efficient and effective.
How your content appears to users, whether on search engines or social media, can significantly affect click-through rates. These updates provide a superior ability to manage and optimize how your content will look, thereby enhancing your potential visibility and traffic.
New and improved Yoast SEO sidebar in the block editor
Dropping support for WordPress 6.1
We’ll drop support for WordPress 6.1 in Yoast SEO 21.2 to stay ahead with technology and provide optimal performance. This change will allow us to utilize advanced features and improvements to the newer WordPress versions. Thus, we highly recommend users of WordPress 6.1 upgrade to enjoy enhanced performance, security, and features offered in newer versions alongside the best Yoast SEO.
Update and optimize!
We want to keep Yoast SEO as the best tool for all your SEO needs. We’re confident you’ll find this updated version helpful. As always, we remain committed to helping you optimize your site, attract more organic traffic, and earn higher visibility!
Update now to the latest version of Yoast SEO and enjoy an optimized, user-friendly, and results-driven SEO experience! Effective SEO is a continuous process, so stay tuned for future updates and enhancements as we refine Yoast SEO to serve you better.
Nowadays, it seems everyone and their mother have an online store. Platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify make it easy to start one, so why not? But creating a shop doesn’t equal success. There are many moving parts before you can celebrate sale after sale. One of those is writing great product descriptions.
Two of the most important tools you have at your disposal to sell your products are product photography and writing product descriptions. An online store has to work extra hard to make products on its product pages tangible for its customers. Customers can’t handle your products in the flesh, so they have to make do with a description and imagery — so these better be great!
Unfortunately, many ecommerce sites don’t take this to heart. There are a lot of opportunities for online stores to improve their offerings. That also means there’s a lot of room for forward-thinking online stores to conquer the market. Whatever you do, there’s always a chance to improve your product descriptions. Don’t rely on tedious and standard stuff!
Do you need more reasons to improve your product descriptions? Good product descriptions help you:
Communicate benefits more clearly,
establish a voice,
improve customer experience,
increase the chance of ranking your product in the search results,
get higher conversion rates,
get more return customers/build relationships,
create trust.
See what we mean?
Use Yoast WooCommerce SEO or Yoast SEO for Shopify
Before we get into how to improve your product descriptions, we want to mention that we offer some awesome ecommerce tools: our WooCommerce SEO plugin and the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. These add-ons help you maximize the performance of your online store. Plus, as a bonus, you’ll also get access to Yoast SEO academy, including our ecommerce training course, and if you’re using Shopify, our Yoast SEO for Shopify course, too!
In both the WooCommerce plugin and the Shopify app, you’ll find an analysis that gives you feedback you can use to optimize your product pages. This analysis specifically aims to improve your product content and the SEO of your product pages. It enables you to build unbeatable product pages that are ready to get ranking.
Step number one in almost everything SEO is doing keyword research. The same goes for improving product descriptions. You need to know the product, the customer, and how they write or talk about this particular product. You need to know how the customer comes from realizing a need to buy a product from you: the user journey.
It might be that the manufacturer came up with a snazzy name and description that in no way aligns with the consumer’s thoughts about this product. A particle destroyer doesn’t scream vacuum cleaner, right? Don’t amplify that; keep it sensible and understandable.
Doing keyword research for products also gives you an idea about how to discuss products — not just which words to use. Find out the real value of the product and use consumers’ way of talking to communicate that.
2. Don’t rely on generic text from manufacturers
It’s easy to use the descriptions provided by manufacturers. The content is in the data set, so why not use it? Well, you shouldn’t use that default description for a couple of reasons. One, many other online stores selling the same products use these descriptions. Two, many other online stores selling the same products use these descriptions. See duplicate content!
Standard manufacturer descriptions are abundant in the search results
It’s hard to stand out if you are like everyone else. Of course, it’s hard for some products to come up with a description that accurately describes the product in your unique way. Plus, you might have many slight product variations, causing frustration in writing those individual descriptions. Still, if there’s only the possibility of writing something that stands out — go for it.
In researching, search for your product in Google and see which competitor comes up. Analyze their writing and see how you can top that.
3. Don’t write for search engines (but do)
One of the most important things to remember is that you are writing for humans, not machines. Of course, writing a good product description makes it easier for search engines to understand it, but that shouldn’t be your goal. You aim to communicate the product’s value to customers and sell it as a solution.
Doing keyword research will give you an idea of which terms a product ranks for — and you know what people use to describe it. Combining these helps you write great product descriptions that can work well for search engines and consumers!
Don’t forget to use Yoast SEO to prepare your product pages for the search engines; if your site runs on WooCommerce, you’ll enjoy our WooCommerce SEO add-on. If you want to broaden your horizon and increase the chance of your site turning up in Google, you could start blogging on your ecommerce store.
4. Focus on solving the user’s pain
It’s easy to list a selection of plusses you think fit the product well. Maybe add some specifications while you are at it. But, then you might end up with a product description written from your perspective and not the consumer’s. What are they gaining from using your product? What’s the solution? How do you plan to solve the user’s pain?
An example
Remember, you are not selling dental picks, but you are selling a solution for bleeding gums. Sometimes, consumers don’t even know the product name they are looking for — they want to fix their problem. Selling your dental picks as simply that might mean missing out on the people looking for a quick and easy way can help them reduce their woes.
Look at the difference between these two product descriptions. The first one is generic:
Introducing our high-quality Dental Picks! These dental tools are perfect for maintaining oral hygiene and keeping your teeth clean. With their durable construction and ergonomic design, our Dental Picks are a must-have for anyone looking to improve their dental care routine.
Featuring a sleek and compact design, our Dental Picks are easy to use and provide effective cleaning between teeth. Made from premium materials, they ensure durability and longevity for long-lasting use. Whether you’re at home or on the go, our Dental Picks are the ideal companion for maintaining a healthy smile.
Upgrade your dental care routine with our Dental Picks today and experience the difference for yourself!
The second example focuses on the benefits that dental picks have for the user:
Are your bleeding gums causing you discomfort and frustration? Say goodbye to oral woes with our innovative Dental Health Solution Kit. Designed to provide a quick and easy way to reduce bleeding gums, our kit is your ultimate solution for achieving optimal oral health.
Unlike traditional dental picks, our Dental Health Solution Kit goes beyond simply cleaning teeth. It is specially crafted to target the underlying causes of bleeding gums, effectively soothing irritation and promoting gum health. With our kit, you can finally experience the relief you’ve been searching for.
Don’t let the pain of bleeding gums hold you back from enjoying a confident smile. Our Dental Health Solution Kit is here to rescue you from your oral troubles. Take the first step towards healthier gums and a happier you.
Focussing on the user intent makes it possible to uncover those problems and helps you offer solutions with your product.
The new Renewal toothpaste by Colgate does set out to solve those bleeding gums
5. Stay away from cliches and avoid using superlatives
Calling every product the best will achieve the opposite — nobody will believe anything anymore. Words have power, but you must learn how to wield that power. Think carefully about which words you use because, most often, less is more. Omit needless words. By using stripped-back language, that single power word can do the job. Of course, if your products have won awards or other accolades, you can brag about it — please do so tastefully!
The same goes for cliches in your writing. Don’t use cliched language if a regular text can do the job. Keep in mind that not everyone knows the same idioms as you do. Keep your content easy to understand, easy to scan, and easy to remember.
Sticking with the dental picks example, please don’t do this:
Looking for a game-changing solution to keep your pearly whites in tip-top shape? Look no further than our revolutionary Dental Picks! These bad boys are the ultimate weapon in the fight against plaque and gum disease.
With their cutting-edge design and precision-engineered tips, our Dental Picks are like a knight in shining armor for your oral health. They effortlessly glide between your teeth, removing stubborn food particles and banishing plaque with the power of a thousand suns.
But wait, there’s more! Our Dental Picks are as versatile as they come. They can tackle the toughest tartar, defy the most challenging cavities, and make your teeth shine brighter than a Hollywood smile. Say goodbye to boring dental care routines and hello to a dazzling, award-winning smile.
Experience the dental pick revolution today and join the ranks of satisfied customers who have witnessed the magic firsthand. Don’t be fooled by imitations, choose our Dental Picks for a smile that will leave everyone speechless!
Helly Hansen’s jacket might bring in awards, but this description is nearly indecipherable Dickies gets straight to the point with a list of the most important features, supported by icons that you can quickly scan
6. Make it personal
Not every piece of text has to be boring and distant. You can use your voice and make it more personal. Develop your tone of voice and stick to it! It makes you recognizable and helps your branding, making you stand out from the crowd.
Keep in mind that you are not simply selling a product to a person, but you are selling an experience. And, since you want that customer to return sometime soon, it better be a good experience!
J. Peterman’s unique voice comes through loud and clear
7. Use user stories and examples
It shouldn’t always be you who tells the story of a product — the best seller of your product is someone who bought it already. Ask your customers for input and use their insights to enhance your content. You might even incorporate their stories in your product descriptions.
Use visual and textual examples of your product in use by actual customers. This gives potential customers a better feel for the product, its benefits, and usage.
Improve the product descriptions for an online store
In this article, we’ve highlighted seven ways to write better product descriptions for your ecommerce site — be that a Shopify or a WooCommerce site. Of course, there are many more ways of doing that, but with these simple tips, anyone can improve the marketing copy of their products. Looking for more ecommerce SEO tips? We have an ultimate guide on ecommerce SEO that touches on many subjects. Or, if you’re using Shopify, you might want to read our ultimate guide to Shopify SEO.
Master the art of using Schema.org to elevate your online visibility with our ultimate guide to structured data. Dive into the heart of Schema.org and how it can revolutionize how your site interacts with search engines like Google. Explore its power in improving the presentation of your pages when describing products, reviews, events, and recipes. Discover how to get rich results such as snippets, interactive mobile results, voice-activated actions, or securing a spot in Google’s coveted Knowledge Graph. Embrace structured data — your ticket to better online exposure and interaction.
Structured data is a way of describing your website to make it easier for search engines to understand. You need a so-called vocabulary to make it work, and the one used by the big search engines is Schema.org. Schema.org provides a series of tags and properties to describe your products, reviews, local business listings, job postings, et cetera in detail.
The major search engines, Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo, developed this vocabulary to reach a shared language to understand websites better. Search engines use it today for many things, from fact-checking content to listing job postings!
If added well, search engines can use the applied structured data to better understand your page’s contents. As a result, your site might be presented better in search results, for example, in the form of rich results like rich snippets. However, there are no guarantees you’ll get rich results — that’s up to the search engines.
Below is an example of a simple structured data using Schema.org in JSON-LD format. This is a basic schema for a product with review properties. This code tells search engines that the page is a product (Product); it provides the name and description of the product, pricing information, the URL, plus product ratings and reviews. This allows search engines to understand your products and present your content in search results.
Structured data, particularly when using the Schema.org vocabulary, breathes life into your site for search engines. It describes your products, reviews, events, job postings, and more in a language that search engines instantly understand. The beauty of structured data lies in its precision and detailed presentation of your site’s content. Gone are the days when search engines had to make guesses about your content: with structured data, every site element is deciphered clearly.
Structured data is crucial because it can outline clear connections among diverse website components. It fosters a new understanding for search engines, helping them see your site’s content and how everything relates. It’s a roadmap of your site’s content, with each piece connected and important to the bigger picture.
In a world where clarity equals visibility, structured data is no longer nice but necessary. By applying structured data, you speak the language of search engines, augmenting your website’s comprehensibility and attracting more organic traffic.
Is structured data important for SEO?
Implementing structured data using Schema.org is a strategic move in bolstering your website’s SEO. While it may not directly improve your site’s rankings, it enriches search result listings, making your site a more appealing click to prospective visitors.
Envision your search result as a movie trailer: The preview captivates the audience and compels them to watch it. An enhanced search result crafted with structured data offers a similar advantage. It gives searchers a more detailed, enriched preview of your website, significantly increasing the likelihood of being chosen from a sea of links. If your website delivers on what the enhanced listing promises, congratulations – you’ve just become a reputable source for your visitor. This user satisfaction translates into a lower bounce rate, signaling to search engines like Google that your site is a credible and reliable resource.
Moreover, with structured data gradually gaining traction, now is the perfect opportunity to leapfrog your competitors. It’s not just about keeping pace in the SEO race; it’s about being a frontrunner. Our structured data guide is designed to equip you with pragmatic tips and recommendations to maximize your website’s potential using structured data
Structured data can lead to rich results
By describing your site for search engines, you allow them to do exciting things with your content. Schema.org and its support are constantly developing, improving, and expanding. As structured data forms the basis for many new developments in the SEO world — like voice search –, there are bound to be more shortly. Below is an overview of the available rich search results; examples are in Google’s Search Gallery. At the moment, these are a couple of the available rich results:
Article
FAQ
Q&A
Book
Home activities
Recipe
Breadcrumbs
How-to
Review snippet
Carousel
Image metadata
Sitelinks searchbox
Course
Job posting
Software app
Critic review
Learning video
Speakable
Dataset
Local business
Subscription and paywalled content
Education Q&A
Logo
Video
Employer aggregate rating
Math solver
Estimated salary
Movie
Event
Practice problem
Fact check
Product
The rich results formerly known as rich snippets
Rich results are your golden ticket to creating dynamic, engaging, and information-packed search result listings. They are much more than the standard, black-line meta description text on a search engine results page. Harnessing the power of rich results enriches search listings with additional information and interactive functionalities.
Some listings offer extra information, like star ratings or product details
Consider rich results as added-value details that elevate a user’s search experience. From showing critical product data such as pricing and reviews to practical navigational tools like breadcrumbs or in-site search functions, rich results make your listing stand out in a competitive digital landscape.
Where a conventional search result offers a glimpse into your site, a rich result is akin to rolling out a red carpet, enticing users with a premium overview of what they can expect when they click through. These enriched listings can effectively boost click-through rates (CTR) and enhance user interaction, providing an SEO advantage that improves your site’s visibility and drives more traffic.
In today’s mobile-driven world, rich results are pivotal in shaping a distinctive and interactive search experience. Rich results find a particular resonance in mobile searches, becoming more prevalent and impactful. Specific searches for local restaurants, recipes, movies, how-tos, and courses benefit from a specialized treatment in mobile search results.
Tasty, right?
They are often presented in a touch-friendly and user-engaging, swipeable manner, making rich results intuitive and streamlined on mobile devices. This format, frequently called the carousel, significantly enhances the user experience and the ease of information access.
Google significantly emphasizes fostering rich, interactive elements within these results. With Google’s touch of innovation, you can conveniently reserve a table at your favorite restaurant, order movie tickets, find delectable cheesecake recipes, or even book flight tickets— all directly from the search results. Google’s advancements have turned the humble search engine results page into a powerhouse encompassing almost every aspect of daily life, with structured data propelling parts of it.
With structured data and rich results, your website gains the potential to offer more than just links and text — it becomes more visible to the user. It elevates the user experience by leaps and bounds, improving your site’s visibility and creating potential for greater user engagement. Remember, the precision and dynamism offered by structured data and rich results are still in the early adoption phases across the web. Therefore, harnessing them presents a lucrative opportunity to gain a competitive edge. And from the looks of it, we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of potential here.
Knowledge Graph Panel
When you search Google, you’ll commonly see a large box of detailed information on the right side. This dynamic feature, Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel, provides an enriched snapshot of information tied to your specific search.
A knowledge panel
So, how does Google amass this information? It systematically evaluates related content about the subject in question, with structured data from a website being a significant resource. This exhaustive examination of interconnected data helps to unveil a more holistic picture of the search subject.
Imagine you’re a verified business or an authority on a particular subject. The Knowledge Graph Panel can showcase your name, logo, and social media profiles. This visibility warrants a sense of prestige and credibility conferred by Google.
But the implications of the Knowledge Graph Panel go beyond just surface-level information. Linking to a multitude of related content creates a comprehensive web of knowledge that helps users delve deeper into their areas of interest. This enhances user experience and increases the time spent on Google services, making it a win-win feature for both ends.
Moreover, the Knowledge Graph’s influence extends to SEO strategy. A billboard showcasing your site’s relevance and authority is featured in search results. It underscores the importance of structured data in shaping a website’s digital visibility and underlines how optimized, high-quality content can pave the way for enriched search results.
Featured snippets
This might be a sneaky addition because featured snippets are rich results, but they do not get their content from structured data. A featured snippet answers a search question directly in the search results but uses regular content from a web page to do so.
A featured snippet for the search term [site structure]
Does structured data work on mobile?
Yes, the results of implementing structured data work everywhere. Mobile is one of the places where the results of a Schema implementation are most visible.
If a page meets the criteria Google sets, you can now book movie tickets or reserve a table at a restaurant directly from the search results. If you implement structured data correctly, you could also be eligible for several interactive extras on the mobile search results pages.
Different kinds of structured data
Sitelinks Searchbox
A Searchbox is where the internal search engine of a site is presented within the search results of Google. Google uses Schema.org code for this as well. Yoast SEO has support for this built in, and there’s more info in our Knowledge Base.
If you look at the Schema.org website, you’ll notice a lot of information you could add to your site as structured data. Not everything is relevant, though. Before implementing structured data, you need to know what you should markup. Do you have a product in an online store? Do you own a restaurant? Or do you have a local business providing services to the community? Or a site with your favorite cheesecake recipes? Whichever it is, you need to know what you want to do and explore the possibilities. Don’t forget to check the documentation by search engines to understand what they need from you.
Yoast SEO does a lot of these
Yoast SEO has Schema controls, which help translate your content into a language search engines understand and appreciate. It automatically generates structured data for your site with sensible default settings, which you can also manually adjust based on over twenty supported content types. This granular control over your Schema settings can increase your chance of obtaining coveted rich results.
For instance, our Schema tab lets you specify your contact page as a ContactPage, removing potential ambiguities for search engines. Beyond this, Yoast SEO makes automatic connections that guide search engines in deciphering the meaning of your site. We also provide additional features that enhance Schema elements and center around content specificity, all contributing to a cohesive structured data strategy.
Yoast SEO helps you fine-tune your schema structured data settings per page
Creative works
The Creative Work group encompasses all creative things produced by someone or something. You’ll find the most common ones below, but the list is much longer. You’ll also find properties for sculptures, games, conversations, software applications, visual artworks, and much more. However, most of these properties don’t have a rich presentation in search engine results, so they are less valuable. But, as mentioned earlier, if your site has items in the categories below, mark them up with Schema.org.
Articles
An article could be a news item or part of an investigative report. You can distinguish between a news article, a tech article, or even a blog post.
Books
A book is a book, whether in paper form or digital form, as an eBook. You can mark up every property type, from the author who wrote it to any awards it has won.
Google understands structured data for datasets and can use this to help surface and understand these datasets better. Find out more on Google’s developer pages.
FAQ pages
Make a great FAQ page to answer your customers’ frequently asked questions. Yoast SEO helps you turn those FAQs into something Google can understand properly, with the Schema structured data FAQ content block.
How-tos
You can markup your how-to articles with HowTo structured data. Our structured data content block for how-tos is in the WordPress block editor. By following a step-by-step process, users can get a specific task done.
Image metadata
By incorporating detailed image metadata, Google Images can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the image, including details about the creator, usage permissions, and acknowledgment specifics.
Music
Music also gets the structured data treatment. There are a couple of Schema.orgs of interest for music, like MusicRecording, MusicAlbum, MusicEvent, and MusicGroup.
Q&A pages
Question and answer pages are eligible for rich results as well. According to Google, Q&A pages differ from FAQ pages, where you can find multiple questions and answers on a page — more in Google’s Q&A page documentation. Use the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks to provide structured data for your FAQ pages.
Recipes
Adding Recipe structured data to the recipes on your cooking website lets you get your recipes featured directly in search results. Moreover, with mobile rich results, recipes look great on mobile featuring great images — if you add them. And that’s not all, because you can now send your recipes to Google Home and get Assistant to speak it out loud. How cool is that?
Speakable
Google is currently testing the implementation of speakable Schema.org. With this code, you can tell a search engine that a piece of content is specially written to be spoken aloud by digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant.
TV & Movies
Movies and TV shows get their piece of structured data as well. Searching for a movie in search engines will yield a rich result with reviews, poster art, cast information, and even the ability to order tickets for a showing directly. You can even mark up lists of the best movies ever made or your favorite TV shows.
Videos
It’s possible to do all kinds of interesting things with video. Google, in particular, is working on new ways to display videos in the search results.
Commerce
There is also structured data for commercial goals. Here, you’ll find a couple of important ones:
Events
Marking up your event listings with the correct Event Schema.org, might lead to search engines showing your events directly in the search results. This is a must-have if you own a nightclub, a venue, or any business regularly organizing events.
Businesses and organizations
If you make money with your website, you might own a business. If you’re a site owner or work on a company site, you’ll find the business and organization Schema.orgs interesting. Almost every site can benefit from the correct business Schema.org. If you do it well, you could get a nice Knowledge Graph or another type of rich listing in the search engines. You can even add special structured data for your contact details so customers can contact you directly from the search results. For local businesses, our Local SEO plugin helps you take care of all your local structured data needs.
Have job postings on your site? Mark them up with the job postings structured data to have them show up nicely in Google. We use this on all our Yoast job postings as well.
Products
Schema.org for products is almost as important as the one for businesses and organizations. Using Product Schema.org; you can give your products the extra data search engines need to give you rich snippets, for example. Consider all the search results with added information, like pricing, reviews, availability, etc. This should be a significant part of your structured data strategy if you have products. Remember to mark up your product images. Our WooCommerce SEO and Shopify SEO products output proper product structured data.
Reviews and ratings play an important role in today’s search process. Businesses, service providers, and online stores all use reviews to attract more customers and show how trustworthy their offer is. Getting those five stars in search engines might be the missing link to creating a successful business.
Voice assistants are interesting, but they have yet to reach the adoption levels they were predicted to have. Still, there’s stuff happening on this front if you see it as part of the conversational search movement. Take recipes, for instance; you can send a recipe from the search results to your Google Home to read aloud while cooking. These are called Actions, and there are a whole bunch of them. If you want your recipes to appear in the Google Assistant library, add a specific structured data set and adhere to additional rules. You can find more on that on the Creating a recipe action page. Visit Google’s Assistant site to get a feel for what’s possible (a lot!).
Google Assistant uses a lot of structured data to understand your content
The technical details
To start marking up your pages, you must understand how Schema.org works. If you look closely at the full specs on Schema.org, you’ll see a strict hierarchy in the vocabulary. Everything is connected, just like everything is connected on your pages. Scroll through the list to see all the options, and note the ones you need.
Let’s look at the structure. A Schema.org implementation starts with a Thing, the most generic type of item. A Thing could be a more specific type of item, for instance, a Creative Work, an Event, Organization, Person, Place, or Product.
For example, a movie is a “Thing†and a “Creative Workâ€, which falls under the category “Movieâ€. You can add a lot of properties to this, like a “Descriptionâ€, a “Directorâ€, an “Actorâ€, a poster “Imageâ€, “Duration†or “Genreâ€. There are loads to add, so you can get as specific as you want. However, don’t overdo it since not all search engines use every property – at least not yet. For instance, you should look at the specifications in Google’s documentation to see which properties are required and which are recommended.
A sample Schema.org structure
If we put what we know now in a hierarchy, this is what you will end up with:
Thing
Creative Work
Movie
Description (type: text)
Director (type: person)
Actor (type: person)
Image (type: ImageObject or URL)
etc.
If it would be a local business, you could use something like this:
Thing
Organization (or Place)
LocalBusiness
Dentist
Name
Address
Email
Logo
Review
etc.
For local businesses, you could pick a more specific type of business. This makes it easier for search engines to determine what kind of business you own. There are hundreds of types of local businesses, but your business might not fit one of the descriptions. Using the Product Types Ontology you can get more specific information if your listing is too broad.
In the local business example, you’ll see that Google lists several required properties, like your business’s NAP (Name and Phone) details. There are also recommended properties, like URLs, geo-coordinates, opening hours, etc. Try to fill out as many of these as possible because search engines will only give you the whole presentation you want. You’ll find our Local SEO plugin very helpful if you need help with your local business markup.
What do you need to describe for search engines?
Looking at Schema.org for the first time is daunting. The list is enormous, and the possibilities are endless, so it’s easy to become overwhelmed. To get over this, you need to go back to basics. Think about your site, business, or product and write down the specifications and properties you feel are necessary, then work up. Also, Yoast SEO covers the most essential properties automatically — so there is no need to worry about those if your plugin is configured correctly!
Having said that, there are a couple of sections you should prioritize in your plan to add structured data to your site. If you start with these three, you’ll have the basics covered, and then you can build on that. You should start with structured data for your business details, products, and reviews. These will have the biggest effect in the short term.
How to implement structured data
Don’t be frightened, but here comes the technical part of the story. Before we do that, we’d like to remind you that Yoast SEO comes with an excellent structured data implementation. It’ll automatically handle most sites’ most pressing structured data needs. Of course, as mentioned below, you can extend our structured data framework as your needs become bigger.
Do the Yoast SEO configuration and get your site’s structured data set up in a few clicks! The configuration is available for all Yoast SEO users to help you get your plugin configured correctly. It’s quick, it’s easy, and doing it will pay off. Plus, if you’re using the new block editor in WordPress you can also add structured data to your FAQ pages and how-to articles using our structured data content blocks.
Thanks to JSON-LD, there’s nothing scary about adding the data to your pages anymore. This JavaScript-based data format makes it much easier to add structured data since it forms a block of code and is no longer embedded in the HTML of your page. This makes it easier to write and maintain, plus both humans and machines better understand it. If you need help implementing JSON-LD structured data, you can enroll in our free Structured data for beginners course, our Understanding structured data course or follow a high-level course on Google’s Codelabs.
Structured data with JSON-LD
JSON-LD is the preferred method of adding structured data to your site. However, not all search engines have been quick to adopt it — Bing being the last hold-out. Thankfully, Microsoft came around in August 2018 and now supports this, as the most efficient method.
Since Yoast SEO 11.0, the plugin comes with a fully-featured Schema.org implementation. Yoast SEO now creates a structured data graph for every page on your site, interconnecting everything. While working on this, we’ve also created complete, detailed documentation on Schema, including a specification for integrating structured data. You’ll find some example graphs for various standard pages on your site.
The old ways: RFDa and Microdata
The classic way of writing structured data for inclusion on your pages involves directly embedding it into your HTML. This made a really inefficient and error-prone process and is much of the reason why the uptake of Schema.org hasn’t been swift. Writing and maintaining it via RDFa or Microdata is a pain. Believe us, try to do as much as you can in JSON-LD.
Microdata needs itemprops to function, so everything has to be inline coded. You can instantly see how that makes it hard to read, write and edit.
Tools for working with structured data
Yoast SEO automatically handles much of the structured data in the background. You could extend our Schema framework, of course — see the next chapter –, but if adding code by hand seems scary, you could try some of the tools listed below. If you need help with how to proceed, ask your web developer for help. They will fix this for you in a couple of minutes.
Yoast SEO uses JSON-LD to add Schema.org information about your site search, your site name, your logo, images, articles, social profiles and a lot more to your web pages. We ask if your site represents a person or an organization and adapt our structured data based on that. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor make it easy to add structured data to your FAQs and How-to’s. Check our the structured data features in Yoast SEO.
The Yoast SEO Schema structured data framework
Implementing structured data has always been challenging. Also, the results of most of those implementations often needed improvement. At Yoast, we set out to enhance the Schema output by millions of sites. For this, we built a Schema framework — ready to be adapted and extended by anyone. We combined all those loose bits and pieces of structured data that appear on many sites, improved these, and put them in a graph. By interconnecting all these bits, we offer search engines all your connections on a silver platter.
See this video for more background on the schema graph.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it. We can also extend Yoast SEO output by adding specific Schema pieces, like how-tos or FAQs. We built structured data content blocks for use in the WordPress block editor. We’ve also enabled other WordPress plugins to integrate with our structured data framework, like Easy Digital Downloads, The Events Calendar, Seriously Simple Podcasting, and WP Recipe Maker, with more to come. Together, these help you remove barriers for search engines and users, as it has always been challenging to work with structured data.
Expand and improve your structured data implementation
You’ll need to follow a structured and focused approach to effectively implement and enhance Schema.org markup on your website. This includes understanding the key concepts, identifying your goals, leveraging the right tools, and regularly reviewing your strategy. Here’s a guide on how you can do this:
Understanding Schema.org Markup: First, you need to understand what Schema.org markup is and why it’s crucial for your SEO strategy. Yoast’s developer portal provides a detailed insight into the functional approach of constructing Schema.org markup. This will help you to comprehend its importance in generating rich results on search engines.
Selecting the right format: Choosing the right format for your structured data is critically important. Yoast’s approach recommends JSON-LD as the preferred format for structured markup. According to their Technology and Approach page, JSON-LD provides usability and efficiency in conveying structured information, making it a recommended format by major search engines, including Google.
Integrating with Yoast’s structured data framework: To seamlessly add Schema.org markup to your web pages, you can use our structured data framework. Yoast’s Schema Integration Guidelines provide an easy and beneficial way to integrate Schema.org markup, optimize communication with search engines, and potentially improve its SEO performance.
Reviewing and enhancing your implementation: To keep your structured data markup implementation effective, reviewing and enhancing it regularly is advisable. Not only does this help in identifying any potential issues, but it also presents opportunities to improve your existing markup for better SEO performance.
Read up
By following the guidelines and adopting a comprehensive approach, you can successfully get structured data on your pages and enhance the effectiveness of your schema.org markup implementation for a robust SEO performance. Read the Yoast SEO Schema documentation to learn how Yoast SEO works with structured data, how you can extend it via an API, and how you can integrate it into your work.
Several WordPress plugins already integrate their structured data into the Yoast SEO graph
Most search engines have their developer center where you can find more information on the inner workings of their structured data implementations. You can read these to see what works and what doesn’t. It would be best to stick to their rules because a bad Schema.org implementation could lead to a penalty. Always check your code in the structured data test tool to see if it’s correct. Fix errors and regularly maintain the code on your site to see if it is still up to scratch.
You can’t run away from structured data anymore. If your site means anything to you, you should look into it and figure out the best way to use Schema.org. Still need some help? Read more on how Yoast SEO makes it easy for you. Or check out our digital story on rich results, structured data and Schema, or take our free structured data for beginner’s online training course. If implemented correctly, it can do great things for your site, now and in the future. Search engines are constantly developing new ways to present search results, and more often than not, they use Schema.org data.
Adding structured data to your site is an essential part of technical SEO. If you’re wondering how fit your site’s overall technical SEO is, take our technical SEO fitness quiz to find out. This quiz helps you figure out what you can still work on!
