The meta description summarizes a page’s content and presents that to users in the search results. It’s one of the first things people will likely see when searching for something, so optimizing it is crucial for SEO. It’s your chance to persuade users to click on your result! This post will show you the characteristics of a good meta description and how Yoast SEO can help you get it right.
The meta description is an HTML tag you can set for a post or page of your website. In it, you can use roughly 155 characters to describe what your page is about. If you’re lucky, Google will show it beneath your page’s title in the search results. It allows you to convince search engine users that your page will offer what they are looking for.
In Google’s search results, this is where it can be displayed:
A meta description from yoast.com, as seen in the search results
And this is what it looks like in the HTML code of the page:
<meta name="description" content="Do you want people to click on your search result? Learn how to write the best meta description. Including 7 characteristics and examples!" />
Why set a meta description?
The purpose of a meta description is simple: it needs to get someone searching with a search term on Google to click your link. In other words, meta descriptions are there to generate click-throughs from search engines.
Search engines say there is no direct SEO benefit from the meta description – they don’t use it in their ranking algorithm. But there is an indirect benefit: Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) to determine whether you’re a good result. If more people click on your result, Google considers you to be a good result and will – based on your position – move you up the rankings. This is why optimizing your meta description is important, as is optimizing your titles.
In this Yoast SEO academy video, Fleur will explain how titles and meta description help increase your visibility on Google:
What does a good meta description contain?
Here’s a list of elements you need to write a good meta description:
Keep it up to 155 characters
Use an active voice and make it actionable
Include a call to action
Use your focus keyphrase
Show specifications when needed
Make sure it matches the content of the page
Make it unique
Let’s go over them in detail!
1. Keep it up to 155 characters
The right length doesn’t exist; it depends on the message you want to convey. You should take enough space to convey the message but keep it short and snappy. However, if you check the search results in Google, you’ll mostly see snippets of 120 to 156 characters, like in the example below. Google says you can make your meta descriptions as long as you want, but there is a limit to what we can see in the SERPs — and that’s around 155 characters; anything longer will get truncated.
This search result from a Yoast SEO user shows a succinct meta description in Google
Unfortunately, you can’t fully control what Google displays in the search results. Sometimes it shows the meta description, and sometimes it just grabs some sentences of your copy. Either way, your best bet is to keep it short. That way, if Google does decide to show the description you’ve written, it won’t be cut short.
2. Use active voice and make it actionable
If you see the meta description as an invitation to visit your page, you have to think about your user and their (possible) motivation to visit your page. Make sure that your description isn’t dull, difficult, or too cryptic. People need to know what they can expect to find on your page.
The example in the image below is the description you should strive to write. It’s active, it speaks to you and addresses you directly. You know what you’ll get if you click on the link!
Make people want to click your search result
3. Include a call-to-action
“Hello, we have such and such new product, and you want it. Find out more!†This overlaps with what we said about the active voice, but we wanted to emphasize it again. The meta description is your sales text. Except, in this case, the “product†you are trying to sell is the page that is linked. Invitations like Learn more, Get it now, Try for free come in handy, and we use them too.
Get people to click on your link
4. Use your focus keyword
If the search keyword matches a part of the text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use it and highlight it in the search results. This will make the link to your site even more inviting. Google sometimes even highlights synonyms. In the example below, both the Academy Awards and Oscars are highlighted. Getting your results emphasized like that makes them stand out even more.
A listing for the Academy Awards on Google
5. Show specifications, where possible
If you have a product in your Shopify or WooCommerce store aimed at the tech-savvy, it can be a good idea to focus on the technical specs. For example, you can include the manufacturer, SKU, price, etc. If the visitor is specifically looking for that product, you won’t have to convince them. Can the watch help us stay fit? Sign us up; that’s all we need to know. Note that to optimize your result in this manner, you should work on getting rich snippets.
Make it spark
6. Make sure it matches the content of the page
This is an important one. Google will find out if you use the meta descriptions to trick visitors into clicking on your result. They might even penalize you if you do it. But besides that, misleading descriptions will also increase your bounce rate. Which will also lower people’s trust in your company. It’s a bad idea for that reason alone. That is why you want the meta description to match the content on the page.
7. Make it unique
Adding the date to the snippet preview
People often ask questions about the date shown in the Google preview of our Yoast SEO plugin. We’ve added this because search engines may display a date with your snippet. So it’s important to factor it in when you decide on the right length of your meta description. Unfortunately, there’s no way to directly control whether this date is shown or not, but you can try to manage the dates they use in the search results.
If your meta description is the same as those for other pages, the user experience in Google will be hampered. Although your page titles might vary, all pages will appear to be the same because all the descriptions are the same. Instead of creating duplicate meta descriptions, you’d better leave them blank. Google will pick a snippet from the page containing the keyword used in the query. That being said, writing a unique meta description for every page you want to rank with is always the best practice.
How Yoast SEO helps you write meta descriptions
Adding a meta description is easy if you’re on WordPress or Shopify and using Yoast SEO. Firstly, you can write it in the Google preview section of Yoast SEO. But Yoast SEO also gives you feedback on it in the SEO analysis. The plugin checks the meta description length and whether you’ve used your focus keyphrase. So let’s see how the plugin helps you and what you can do with it.
You can edit your meta description in Yoast SEO
You can edit your meta description in Yoast SEO for Shopify
What does the keyphrase in meta description assessment in Yoast SEO do?
This check is all about using the keyphrase in the meta description. A focus keyphrase is the search term you want a page to rank with. When people use that term, you want them to find your page. You base your keyphrase on keyword research. After your research, you should end up with a combination of words that most of your audience is most likely to search for. We’ve already discussed that when you use your keyphrase in the meta description, Google will likely highlight it. That makes it easier for people to see that they’ve found what they are looking for.
Yoast SEO checks if and how often you use the words from your focus keyphrase in the meta description text. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, it also takes into account the synonyms you enter. If you overdo it, the plugin advises you to limit the use of your focus keyphrase.
What a green bullet looks like in Yoast SEO
What a green bullet looks like in Yoast SEO for Shopify
How to get a green traffic light for the keyphrase in meta description
If you don’t mention the keyphrase in the meta description at all, you’ll get a red traffic light. So, make sure to write one. But don’t stuff your meta description with your keyphrase, because that will also get you a red traffic light. And make sure to mention all the words from your keyphrase near to each other. Search engines are pretty smart nowadays, but you still need to make it clear what your page is about.
Yoast SEO Premium plugin takes the synonyms you’ve added into account when it performs its analysis. This allows you to write more naturally and will result in a text that’s a more pleasant read. Moreover, it’s easier to score a green traffic light this way. Use it to your advantage!
Unlock all features in Yoast SEO Premium
Save time on your SEO and get access to all of our SEO courses.
What does the meta description length assessment do?
This meta description length assessment measures whether your description is too short (less than 120 characters) or too long (more than 156 characters). When your meta description has the right length, you’ll get a green traffic light. If it’s too long, or too short, you’ll get an orange traffic light in the SEO analysis of Yoast SEO (or red, if you’ve marked your article as cornerstone content).
What the check looks like in the Yoast SEO meta box
A green bullet in the Yoast SEO for Shopify app
How to write a concise meta description
A good meta description convinces people that your page offers the best result to their query. But, to be the best result, you must know what people are looking for. What is their search intent? Are they looking for an answer to a question? If they are, try to give them the most complete answer. Are they looking for a product? Write down what makes your product stand out and why they would best buy it in your store. Be concise and convincing!
You get real-time feedback on the meta description length in the Google preview section in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. If you want to write a meta description, click on “Google preview” in the Yoast SEO sidebar. This will open the snippet editor and you’ll see input fields to edit the SEO title, the slug and the meta description. When you start typing in the meta description input field, the snippet preview at the top of the Google preview editor will immediately show your new text. Underneath the input field, there is a bar. It’s orange when you start typing and will become green when you’ve added enough information. When you add too much text, it will turn orange again.
The bar will change color when your go over the limit
Checking the Google preview in Yoast SEO for Shopify
Writing or editing your meta description in the Yoast SEO meta box underneath your post editor is also possible. Just go to the SEO tab in the meta box (if it’s not on this tab by default), and you can start typing in the field under Meta description right away.
What to do if you need meta descriptions for a lot of pages?
Does it feel like you need to change all your meta descriptions after reading this? But not sure how to fit that into your schedule? Google has the answer:
“If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.“
You can check which of your pages rank highest with Google Search Console. Take it from there. Additionally, it’s also possible to optimize your meta descriptions with variables in Yoast SEO. This allows you to speed up this process without having to worry about duplicate descriptions.
If you prefer to write a unique description for each page and have a lot to get through, you can use the Bulk editor tool in Yoast SEO for WordPress. Head to the Tools page, click on ‘Bulk editor’, and then select the ‘Description’ tab. You’ll be able to see any meta descriptions already set for your pages, and you can quickly add new ones without having to open each page individually. However, with this tool, you won’t get warnings if your description is too short/long, or if the focus keyword is missing.
Meta descriptions for social sharing
Do you have Yoast SEO? In that case: check the Facebook and Twitter preview in the Yoast SEO sidebar or social tab in the Yoast SEO meta box below your post or page. You can add a separate description for your social media channels there. In Yoast SEO Premium, you even have social previews that show you what your post or page will look like when shared on social media.
We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future!
Meet your new SEO best friend
With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.
It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!
The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0
A better interface for you and us
We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.
Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.â€
“I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,†says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. “Our team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows we’ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!â€
A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0
The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. We’ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.
We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:
General:
Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Content types:
Here, you’ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
Categories and tags:
Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
Advanced:
Here, you’ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.
Individual feature settings pages
One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it. The new interface also includes insightful links to give you more context on optimizing your website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO.
Like a breath of fresh air
Yoast SEO 20.0 is a game changer
Overall, Yoast SEO 20.0 is a major step forward in developing the plugin, and we are confident that it will help you achieve your SEO goals more easily. The new interface is cleaner, more intuitive, and user-friendly. It’s now easier than ever for you to optimize your website for search engines. We are excited for you to start using the new interface and see it for yourself.
Thank you for choosing Yoast SEO. We look forward to helping you improve your website’s rankings with our new, super-modern settings interface. And remember, this is only the beginning!
There are two types of search: the regular organic search results and the local ones. Whenever you search for something that might have a local intent, Google will tailor its results around that query. That part is called local search, and when you try to rank your business in the local search results, you are doing local SEO. In this ultimate guide, we’ll explain the ins and out of both and help you with your local search strategy.
Local search refers to all the activity in search engines that results in a local-oriented result. In the context of Google Search, local search engine optimization (local SEO) aims to improve the visibility of a website or business in Google’s Local Pack, Google Maps, and other local search results.
Local SEO uses various techniques, including creating and optimizing Google Business Profile listings, incorporating location-specific keywords into website content and meta tags, and obtaining positive customer reviews to improve visibility in local search. Local search optimization is an important aspect of improving a website’s visibility in search engines for users searching for businesses or services in a specific area.
An important distinction: organic vs. place
You might say it’s all Google, so how different could the local results be compared to the regular, organic ones? And it’s true, at its core, Google has always tried to provide searchers with the ‘best’ result for a given query. But the ‘best result’ depends on the context of the query. The type of search and the location of the person searching provide Google with two vital pieces of context.
Webpage-related results
Consider a search like get more followers on Instagram. No matter where you’re performing that search — mobile or desktop, home or on the go, in India or Iceland — you’re looking for an answer anywhere in the world. You’ll primarily find the answers on web pages in the ten blue links, with products, featured snippets, case studies, or articles about how to do so.
Place-related results
With a search like coffee shop, Google has high confidence that you’re looking for a place to grab a coffee now. You probably want a place close to you, no matter where you’re searching. Sure, we could browse a magazine article about the best coffee shops in this city or look at a complete list of coffee shops on a directory page. But it’s much more helpful for Google to return a list of places than other websites about places.
Very different results for very different searches
Differences
Google’s webpage-related results for Instagram followers and its place-related results for coffee shops are generated by different algorithms. Searches with specific questions like How do I make chimichurri? are likely to trigger a different kind of result in the form of rich results. But that’s a topic for another day.
As a local business, you will face fierce competition in webpage-related results. If you offer services to help get more Instagram followers, you’ll have to compete with every other provider of this service to get your website ranked.
But in the second instance, when Google detects a search with local intent, you’re only competing with other coffee shops near you. Note above; we didn’t specify our city; Google inferred it. And even though Starbucks has coffee shops in just about every town and city in the world, it’s harder for them to stand out against local brands in these place-based results. And these results are also featured in Google Maps, in-car navigation devices, Google Home/Assistant searches, and many other media.
More place-based results
Over the last few years, Google has shown more place-based results for local queries and fewer webpage results. Even the webpage results that appear beneath these place results on a local intent search have been infused with local business websites.
Regardless of the medium (desktop, mobile, or voice) and irrespective of the type of result (webpage or place-related), Google remains a significant source of customers for many local businesses. So it’s critical to put your best foot forward to attract those customers in both algorithms. You can use (local) SEO and a solid local search strategy to do so.
Your first stop: Google Business Profile
Having a strong online presence is essential for any local business. With more people than ever searching online for products and services, the first step on the way to success for your local business is to create a Google Business Profile.
Google Business Profile — previously known as Google My Business — is a free tool that allows local businesses to promote their products and services and provide customers with critical information. Having a Google Business Profile has numerous benefits and is a must for any business that wants to stay competitive in the digital world.
Google Business Profile is a must-have for local businesses
Increase visibility on Google Maps
One of the most important reasons to have a Google Business Profile is to increase your visibility on Google Maps. Being listed on Google Maps allows your local business to be found more easily by customers searching for your products and services. It helps customers find your business quickly and easily, including a map of your business location, contact information, opening hours, and more. This is a great way to boost local visibility and get more customers in the door.
Grow local customer base
Growing a local customer base is one of the key reasons why every local business should use Google Business Profile. By creating a profile, your business will appear in search results and Google Maps, allowing potential customers to find and contact your business. Furthermore, using the various features, you can promote your local business to potential customers by adding photos and other important business information. Doing so will help potential customers find you while making a positive impression on them.
Gain insights into customer activity
Google Business Profile helps you leverage insights into customers’ activities. Businesses can use analytics to identify customer trends, preferences, and behaviors. You can use this data to create targeted marketing campaigns and outreach initiatives. Businesses can also use the metrics to track the performance of their campaigns and make improvements based on customer feedback. With this data, companies can arm themselves with the knowledge to effectively serve their customers and increase sales.
Manage your business information
Having up-to-date and complete information about your business on your Google listing can significantly affect how customers find and interact with your business online. Keeping information such as your business hours, contact information, and services offered current and accurate ensures that your customers have the best possible first experience. Additionally, customers can leave reviews on your listing, which allows you to manage your online reputation better and allows potential customers to learn more about your business before they visit.
Connect with customers and manage reviews
Google Business Profile allows local businesses to connect with their customers as they can leave reviews about their experiences. By managing reviews, companies can demonstrate to potential customers the quality of their products and services. This is a great way to build customer trust and loyalty, and it can help generate leads.
A Google Business Profile is essential for any local business looking to do well in local search. By optimizing and maintaining an up-to-date profile, companies can ensure they are visible to potential customers and have the most up-to-date information about their business easily accessible to customers.
We have an extensive guide on making the most of Google Business Profile for your local SEO efforts.
Apple Business Connect
In January 2023, Apple launched a similar platform under the Apple Business Connect moniker. Business owners will now have the ability to self-manage their information on the platform, including crucial details such as business hours, location, photos, logos, and special deals. To facilitate this, the company launched a website named Apple Business Connect, which enables businesses to oversee their presence across Apple’s 1.5 billion devices from one central location.
Be sure to check it out!
Manage your business listings on Apple Business Connect
Website optimization for local SEO
Your website is one of your most important pieces of digital real estate and one of the fundamental components of a successful local marketing stack. It’s a crucial communication vehicle from you to your customers. Regardless of changing consumer search and social media behavior, it will remain a place consumers visit. It’s where people get more information about you and connect with your business.
Your website is the ranking factor over which you have complete control. This makes it an ideal asset to begin your local marketing campaigns powered by your local search strategy. We’ll review some important website optimization criteria, also known as on-site or on-page SEO. Thanks to local SEO, improving your performance across these criteria will help you rank better for local searches and attract more customers.
Crawlability
Google has built a giant database of hundreds of trillions of web pages which its algorithm analyzes and ranks. It sends scores of robots or spiders visiting page after page. They follow the links on each page to see where they lead. This is called crawling.
Technical issues
You want to ensure that Google’s spiders crawl your website and store its contents in its database. The quickest way to assess your website’s crawlability for major hurdles is to enter this search at Google: [site:yourdomain.com]. For example:
Quickly find the number of URLs found Google indexed for your site
Before you browse the results list, look at the number that Google returns and see whether it’s more or less accurate. For example, if you have a 5-page site and Google returns 1000 pages or a 1000-page site and Google only returns five pages, you have a major technical issue with your site. You may want to dive into that with the Yoast SEO plugin or even bring in outside assistance.
Site structure concerns the arrangement of your website’s functional and visual aspects. Essentially it’s the hierarchy of pages within your site and the content within each page. Regarding local search and SEO, there are a couple of essential best practices for your site architecture.
First, place your basic contact information in the header and footer of your website. You want to make it easy for customers who land on your website to contact you or complete a transaction — no matter what page they enter first.
A dedicated “Contact us,†or an “About us” page with more detailed information about your business is also a good idea. Ensure you link to this page from your homepage and, ideally, from your primary navigation menu.
Make it instantly clear how people can contact your business
Contact page content
Your contact page should contain the same information you submitted to Google Business Profile (address, phone number, and hours). It should also contain an email address or contact form for customers who prefer email to voice calls. If you collect customer reviews and testimonials, this is a good page to include at least a handful. Be sure to give it the proper contactPage structured data in the advanced schema options of Yoast SEO.
If you’re a traditional brick-and-mortar business, you should include written driving directions from population centers near you. These driving directions help prospective customers and Google identify the markets you serve. Include an embedded Google Map, too, as Google may track clicks for driving directions as a ranking factor.
If you’re a Service Area Business, your contact page should mention the significant surrounding towns and cities your business serves. You might consider building a unique page for these substantial towns and cities. Link to them from your contact page and fill them with case studies and testimonials from customers in those markets.
Advice for businesses with multiple locations
If your business operates in more than one physical location, creating a unique page for each is essential. Including a unique page for each location helps your customers (and Google) avoid conflating contact information between them. It’s also best to expand your local ranking potential to multiple cities. These pages also allow you to go more in-depth with localized content for each location, making it a good option for local SEO.
If you operate a handful of locations, link to the contact page for each one from the footer of each page of your website. Connect to a store locator page from your primary navigation or another utility menu if you use more than a handful.
Don’t forget to add Schema.org structured data
Schema.org is a code protocol developed jointly by the world’s top search engines. It was created to make it easier for companies to structure the data they present on their websites. One of the most widely-used schemas is for business contact information.
Marking up your most important information in structured data is like handing Google a business card. Google’s pretty smart, but rather than leaving to chance that it will be able to crawl your contact info, why not do everything you can to guarantee it? Adding structured data will not improve your rankings, but it can give your organic results some extra visual impact, increasing the chances that customers will click on your result.
LocalBusiness schema comes with a ton of properties to describe your business
Crawlability made easy: Yoast SEO plugins
The Yoast Local SEO plugin takes care of what we mention in this article on local search. You’ll have to add the proper pages to your WordPress website and link them appropriately from your menus. But the plugin handles most of the technical details required for your contact page, and we highly recommend it. In addition, it also comes with a load of LocalBusiness structured data options so you can easily pick your business from a list.
Yoast SEO Premium gives you more control over what search engines crawl on your site. You can use the crawl settings to guide them away from URLs, assets, and scripts that are unhelpful or add unnecessary overhead.
Mobile SEO
For the last couple of years, it has been all about mobile. Mobile will remain a significant factor in the coming years. Therefore, you should make your website faster and easier for mobile visitors to use. This process is called mobile SEO.
Test your site’s mobile friendliness
Google provides this easy-to-use free tool to test how friendly your website is for mobile visitors. It warns you about any significant suboptimal features and renders a screenshot of how your site appears for most mobile visitors.
Improve the mobile user experience
Google also provides a detailed guide on improving your website’s user experience for mobile visitors. Critical aspects of user experience to keep in mind:
Does the width of your website automatically adjust to the screen size (“viewportâ€) of the visitor’s device?
Does text automatically resize for mobile visitors, so they don’t have to pinch and scroll to read it?
Are your calls to action and other buttons large enough for people to click with their fingers and thumbs?
These adjustments for the mobile visitor comprise what’s known as responsive behavior. If your WordPress website is not yet responsive, it’s time to upgrade your theme to one that is.
Make your site faster
One of the most significant website improvements you can make is to get your site to load faster. We’ve all been frustrated by sites that load slowly or won’t load on slower data connections. Sites that load quickly help build positive engagement with your business, and some evidence suggests that loading time and engagement with your content improve your rankings.
Conveniently, Google also provides a free tool to assess how quickly your site loads relative to others. This one is an extremely tough grader, though! Nonetheless, if you want to supercharge your website speed, Google provides advice on how to do it in the Opportunities section of this tool. But one of the easiest and most effective ways of speeding up your site is by upgrading your hosting plan.
The importance of relevance
Thus far, we’ve focused mainly on the technical aspects of your website. But if your technically-optimized website doesn’t feature relevant, high-quality content, you will rank poorly — and attract very few customers. From a content standpoint, the goal of your website is to communicate to both Google and users precisely what products or services you offer and where you offer them.
What keywords or keyphrases to target
At the risk of stating the obvious: you want to be relevant for topics, keywords, and phrases your customers are searching for. This typically means using generic layperson’s terms to describe your products and services instead of industry jargon (unless you’re in a very niche business-to-business industry). An example from the medical field would be to use an “ear, nose, and throat doctor†instead of an “otolaryngologist.â€
Keyword research is an important part of SEO, and that also goes for local SEO. Here are a couple of easy sources for good keywords to target:
Pay attention to the language customers use in their phone calls with you (or your staff) and emails and contact forms.
Pay attention to the category terms that Google Business Profile returns when you type related keywords.
Perform a search for each of the terms above and scroll to the bottom of the results page. Google will list terms related to the one you searched for, front and center.
Build a master list of these terms and match them up with local landing pages on your website, one keyword to one page. It’s entirely likely each page will rank for far more terms than the keyword you target. But it’s good to keep your pages focused on a small handful of terms. Below is a small example of how you could do this:
Page
Parent
Target keyphrase
Title tag
Testimonials
Home
Best furniture stores in Newark
Moe’s furniture: Rated one of the best furniture stores in Newark
Vintage
Sofa styles
Vintage sofas in Newark
Vintage sofas Newark | Pick the vintage sofa of your dreams
Modern
Sofa styles
Modern sofas Newark
Newark! Come find the perfect modern sofa at Moe’s furniture
Scandinavian
Sofa styles
Scandinavian design sofa Newark
Scandinavian sofa designs in Newark | Moe’s furniture
In addition to discussing your products or services, you should include your city, state, or metropolitan area as part of these keyphrases. Google has gotten better at detecting the area a local business website serves — particularly for websites that use structured data. But it’s still a good practice to sprinkle these geographic keywords liberally within your website.
Where to place your keywords
Your title tags are the most important places to put your keywords. Remember, though, that Google might rewrite your titles when it thinks it can do a better job. Note that title tags and the page or post titles you enter in WordPress are different. Title tags are the SEO titles in Yoast SEO.
Perform the site:yourdomain.com search we mentioned earlier to see your existing title tags. The blue link text associated with each page in these results is the page’s title tag.
An example of a title on Google
Yoast SEO helps you edit your SEO title tags. Pull up your target keywords and add them to the corresponding pages.
Take some time in crafting each title, though. Don’t just stuff your keywords in and then tack on your city, state, region, or county at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases your prospective customers will see when searching. So make these titles enticing for visitors as well as keyword-focused. If you don’t do a good job, Google will rewrite them.
For example, which title tag would you be more likely to click?
Option 1:
Car Insurance Agent - Luxury Car Insurance Agent - Car Insurance Agency - Newark, New Jersey
Option 2:
Newark’s Top Locally-Owned Car Insurance Agency since 1954: Smith Insurance
We’d undoubtedly choose option two, and most of your customers would do the same.
It’s also a best practice to include your target keywords in your WordPress page/post titles and other headlines. Nevertheless, it’s far more important to write these for your visitors than it is to write them for Google.
The final place to use your keywords is within the links you use on your website, also known as anchor text. For example, instead of saying click here — which you should never use anyway –, you might say contact our insurance agency to help Google gain a little more context about what services your contact page is relevant for.
The changing place of your website
We’re moving into a world with more place-based (mobile and voice) results and fewer website-based (desktop) results. Increasingly, Google is trying to extract as much structured information as possible from your website and place it in the Knowledge Graph Panel it constructs with the data from Google Business Profile.
This shift is why crawlability is such an important part of local SEO. Your website must give Google a strong sense of what you do and where you do it, but it’s even more important that Google can crawl that information, assimilate it, and present it in a structured format.
As a result, tactics like LocalBusiness Schema.org markup and tools like the Yoast Local SEO plugin that help structure information about your business are becoming that much more important. Your content is still critical, but start thinking of your website primarily as a data source for the Knowledge Graph and as a customer destination secondarily.
Inbound links are important
Since the ascent of Google as the world’s top search engine, links have been the primary concern of most SEO practitioners. The seminal idea behind Google’s ranking technology makes it clear that inbound links are the primary vehicle by which Google discovers new online pages and websites. They’re one of the ways Google assesses the credibility of a given website — although the importance of links is waning.
Google’s emphasis on links is the most significant overlap between its organic and local ranking algorithms. According to the experts of the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, links make up an essential piece of the pie in localized organic results. They’re a competitive difference-maker across all types of local results.
Local businesses can’t be thoroughly evaluated based on links for reasons you’ll see further on. But there’s no question that a solid inbound link profile — links pointing from other websites to yours — positively impacts how well your business ranks. Link building should be part of your local SEO efforts.
Why links in the first place?
You’re probably thinking, “hey, I want to rank #1, just tell me what to do!†But understanding why Google values links so highly can help you assess the strength or weakness of your link profile. This can help you determine your link acquisition strategy.
Googlebot crawls the Internet by following one link after another. They discover new pages and websites as part of that crawl and store the content of each of those pages in a giant database.
In addition to storing the content of each page, Google also stores how its crawlers arrived on the page. In other words, it remembers the pages and websites linking to it. A link from one site to another is like a vote or endorsement for the credibility of the second website.
Sites with the most endorsements rank better than those with few or no endorsements. Especially links from websites that are heavily endorsed themselves improve your ranking. You need endorsements to get elected and links to rank well.
Link attributes
Topical context
While Google’s algorithm over the years has been incredibly vulnerable to abuse by spammers, increasingly, it’s taking into account the context in which a link appears. Google essentially devalues links that appear on completely unrelated websites. For example, a personal injury lawyer receives a link from a Russian real estate forum. Increasingly these kinds of links put you in jeopardy of a Google penalty.
Conversely, links you acquire or earn that are likely to refer you to actual customers are increasingly the ones that Google values. For example, a personal injury lawyer receives a link from a neighboring chiropractor’s website.
Page/domain authority
The source of a link matters a great deal to how much weight it carries in Google’s algorithm. Links from pages and websites that are heavily linked to — such as BBC.com or WashingtonPost.com — will benefit the linked site much more than a link from a hobbyist blog or tiny startup.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the words that make up the link itself. The link’s text helps provide Google additional context about the topic of the linked page, i.e., what keywords that page should rank for. So links that contain keywords related to what you sell or where you’re located — and even links for your brand name — will help you rank. They’ll help you more than links using generic terms like “click here†or “read more.â€
But you don’t have control over what text people use on other websites. In general, it’s not the best use of time to influence what anchor text others are using. It’s just a ranking factor to be aware of.
Assessing your existing link profile
Many SEO tools — like Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs — help you analyze your existing link profile, which provides all the information an average local business needs.
See if you can find one which lists the authority of the domains linking to you, often described as page or domain authority. The number of referring domains is the best heuristic for most local businesses regarding their strong link profile. Explore the list of the sites sending links to you. Are there apparent sites not on that list that should relate to you? Consider reaching out to them to tell them how much a link would help your business.
Links that help your local search strategy
Google pretends that great content and websites will naturally acquire links. But for 99.999% of businesses, that’s terrible advice. The old question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?†applies to content and links. Does it acquire links if you produce great content, but no one’s there to see it? The answer is no. Businesses need to be proactive about reaching links, which makes building links an important part of your local search strategy.
Over the years, many local businesses have fallen victim to scam artists selling hundreds of links. Or have otherwise been too aggressive about acquiring links. The reality is that, for many businesses, 10-20 high-quality links will lead to top rankings in short order – sustainable rankings that will last for years. Take the time to earn these high-quality links, and don’t pursue those over-aggressive tactics.
Industry-relevant links
Industry-relevant links are often the most accessible links for small business owners to acquire. Many involve asking your existing contacts at companies or organizations with whom you do business.
Local business and neighborhood associations
Are you a member of your local chamber of commerce, business association, or neighborhood association? Most groups like these operate a member directory, and you want to ensure that the directory is online, visible to the public, and Google’s spiders. If the websites of these groups are not showing up in your backlink profile, bring up the issue with the director or marketing manager of these associations and ask them to create a webpage that links to each member.
Regional/national certification boards and industry organizations
Depending on your industry, you may also be licensed by, or participate in, a regional or national organization. Don’t just display your certification on your website. Link to your business’s online profile on the websites of these certifying boards and industry organizations. This increases your business’s credibility with potential customers and helps Google’s spiders discover and crawl your profile on these highly-trusted sites.
Distributors (directories or announcements)
For retailers, think about the products that you sell in-store. Are you unique or one of the few stores in your local market that carries a particular product? If so, consider asking the manufacturer or distributor of that product for a link from their website, preferably from a “where to buy†directory. At the very least, these companies should partner with you on a press release – containing a link to your website. For example, to announce to their customers — and Google — where people can buy their product in your area.
Vendors (testimonials)
Are there particular vendors from whom you purchase many goods or services? Ask them if you can contribute a testimonial to their website, and if they really appreciate your business, that testimonial will contain a link back to your site.
Interviews and guest columns
Getting featured in a trade publication is a great driver of business – especially referral business – and can provide a vital link to your website. These links are a little more challenging to acquire as they require building a relationship with authors or influencers in your industry.
Locally-relevant links
Charities or schools to which you’ve donated money, goods, or volunteered.
Many of you are likely involved in local charities on non-profit organizations. These links are highly valued by Google, as charities tend to be trusted institutions offline and online. You want to make sure your involvement is acknowledged online. They’ll give you a link from their website if they want to thank you for your involvement.
Groups for whom you host events at your physical location
Hosting events for outside groups is one of the lowest-cost, lowest-work link-building initiatives you can undertake. Chances are good that the business or group hosting the event at your company will link to your website’s contact/directions page when they post their invitation online. Someone else is building your link for you – and who knows – some of the attendees may even turn into customers!
Complementary businesses
You probably have colleagues in related industries to whom you refer business and from whom you’re referred regularly. Make sure these referral relationships are represented online in the form of links. That way, Google knows that your companies vouch for each other just as you do offline.
Interviews and guest columns
Local publications like newspapers and alternative weeklies or monthlies are terrific places to get your business featured. And the chances may be better, especially in smaller towns or tightly-knit neighborhoods, that a friend of a friend works at one of these companies.
The future of links and rankings
SEO professionals have been predicting the demise of links for many years. But there’s little evidence to support this trend, even though Google’s John Mueller recently hinted at a future where they might rely less on links. Google has gotten better at penalizing low-quality links through various algorithm updates. Still, if anything, high-quality links have been that much harder to come by and even more valuable to their recipients.
Citations and online mentions
In 2005, the internet was a very different place. MySpace, not Facebook, was all the rage, and Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram weren’t even close to launching. There was no iPhone, and there was no Android. In a nutshell, the world was far less digital. When you searched at Google, it returned ten blue links of webpage results. Inbound links largely determined the authority of those web pages.
But the launch of Google Maps in early 2005 and the subsequent release of the 10-pack in May 2007 introduced something entirely different. Google Maps and the 10-pack ranked business listings, not websites, required a completely different algorithm – an algorithm that remains distinct today.
Google has changed a lot over the years, but the underlying foundation of that Maps/10-pack algorithm still seems to be in place today in the Maps/3-pack interface that has succeeded it.
The local search results look a lot different in 2004, before the launch of Google Maps
What’s a citation?
A citation references your name, address, or phone number online. While inbound links were the dominant ranking factor for the ten blue links results, Google’s listing-based results couldn’t rely primarily on inbound links alone to determine rankings. At the time, many businesses in Google’s business index didn’t even have websites; some still don’t. Without a website, there’s nothing for other sites around the web to link to. So Google had to develop an alternative ranking algorithm that wasn’t dependent on links.
These Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) mentions online are what we know as citations. Your NAP is your digital thumbprint — it’s how Google knows that a website mentions your business as opposed to someone else’s. The more times Google sees your thumbprint on reputable websites, the more confident it is displaying a reputable company in its search results. Remember to be consistent anywhere you expect Google to pick up your thumbprint.
Mixing and matching your NAP makes it much harder for Google to match mentions of your business. Subsequently, giving your business credit through rankings is more challenging. If those mismatches appear in prominent enough sources, they can lead to duplicate listings. This is a headache that no business wants to develop.
NAP consistency is critical between your website and Google My Business. Yoast Local SEO makes this two-way consistency easy.
Where to get citations
Unless you’re blatantly spamming, there isn’t a bad website on which to acquire a citation. But as with inbound links, specific citations are more valuable than others. Let’s take a look at the most valuable citation types below.
Data aggregators
Google has licensed existing databases in most countries to build its local business index rather than starting from scratch. In many cases, the licensors are the most prominent traditional yellow pages companies in each market. See how this local search ecosystem is connected.
The local search ecosystem in a graph
Consumer directories
In addition to licensing data, Google searches the internet for local business citations. Citations from authoritative consumer directories (such as Foursquare, Yelp, or YP.com) carry more weight in helping your rankings than those from weak directories you’ve never heard of, like USCity.Net or ABLocal.
Whitespark has put together great resources that uncover the top consumer directories on which you should list your business.
The critical point is that the citation source’s quality matters far more than the number of sources you’re listed. Despite the marketing of certain business listing services touting “dozens†or “hundreds†of directories, the reality is that there are only a handful of cross-industry consumer directories on which you need to be listed.
Industry directories
As with inbound links, citations from industry-relevant websites help build the authority of your business. They also give Google a sense of the keywords for which your business is relevant.
Chances are that U.S.-based businesses can rattle off the important vertical directories in their industry. Sites like Avvo and Findlaw for Lawyers, Houzz and HomeAdvisor for contractors, WeddingWire and TheKnot for photographers, etc. These are the directories that regularly rank for the keywords that you want to rank for.
Businesses with an optimized thumbprint on these directories stand a better chance of ranking in Google for industry terms than businesses with a messy or missing thumbprint. Whitespark has put together a list of the top industry directories.
Local directories
Citations from local directories also increase the authority and credibility of listed businesses. As we mentioned, the member directories of your local chamber of commerce and neighborhood business association are great places to start. There may also be business listing websites that are popular with residents. Seek listings on similar sites in your business’s towns and cities.
On building citations online
It’s essential to be represented as cleanly and entirely as possible in as many online places as possible. However, it’s necessary to weigh the benefit of citations against their cost – whether in time or money.
Be where your customers expect you to be. If you run a deli, and every other deli in your city is on Yelp, you probably need to be on Yelp, too. If you’re a home decorator, and every other home decorator in your region is on Thumbtack, you probably need to be on Thumbtack, too.
Being where your customers expect you also means you’ll be where Google expects you to be. Citations beyond these prominent websites provide diminishing returns, so be wary of that fact as you evaluate signing up for new products or services.
Citations in the future
The importance of citations has gradually decreased over the years. Citations are a rudimentary ranking factor in an increasingly sophisticated local algorithm. Because they’re relatively easy to build, most successful small businesses will already have a strong citation profile.
In other words, citations have table stakes in the Local SEO poker game. You need a strong citation profile to compete. But if your business already has a strong profile, it’s unlikely that building a few more citations will move the needle much on your rankings.
Reviews: more important by the day
Although they weren’t part of the initial release of Google Maps, reviews have been a fixture on Google’s local properties for over fifteen years. The reason is obvious: consumers love reviews.
A considerable amount of consumers use reviews to evaluate local businesses. Many of them trust reviews just as much as a personal recommendation! So it’s no wonder that Google features them so prominently.
It stands to reason that if consumers love reviews so much, Google’s ranking algorithm does too. Businesses with robust review profiles on Google – and beyond – tend to be rewarded with higher rankings.
Reviews create a virtuous cycle. More reviews lead to better visibility, which leads to more customers, which results in more reviews. Simply gathering and encouraging customer reviews is one of the most sustainable marketing techniques your business can engage in.
How Google evaluates reviews
Only the engineers know, but local search experts have theorized that Google primarily evaluates reviews across the attributes below for years. But what are they looking for?
Volume
Google designed its entire local algorithm to represent the offline world online in the most accurate way possible. In Google’s ideal world, popular businesses rank near the top of search results. Less popular businesses rank further down. Reviews are one of the easiest ways for Google to assess popularity.
All other factors being equal, popular businesses tend to serve more customers than less popular ones. But remember, Google can only “see†what’s represented online. So if your customers leave reviews of your business at a higher rate than your competitors’ customers, your business will appear more popular and stand a good chance at outranking the competition.
Content
The area in which Google’s algorithm has arguably improved the most over the past years is semantic analysis and neural language processing. One of the earliest datasets on which Google trained its semantic algorithm was local business reviews.
So not only is Google looking at the number of reviews when assessing the popularity of local businesses, it’s looking at what people are saying about local businesses in those reviews. For example, doctors whose patients frequently mention a particular treatment in their reviews will likely rank better in searches for that treatment. Contractors whose customers say the kind of projects they execute, such as “kitchen remodel,†are likely to rank better for searches for those kinds of projects.
The content of your customers’ reviews isn’t necessarily something you can control. But prompting your customers to think about particular questions as they write their reviews (“What service did we perform for you?†e.g.) can help improve the effectiveness of those reviews concerning your rankings.
Diversity
A common misconception is that Google does not use third-party reviews to rank local results. This could not be further from the truth. In some cases, reviews on third-party sites can improve your rankings even more than comparable reviews left directly at Google. It’s not only a best practice but also essential to earn reviews from your customers on some sites beyond Google.
Star / numerical rating
Generally speaking, Google’s algorithm seems to value volume and sentiment much more strongly than the star rating that customers leave for a business. With nearly 75% of reviews being three stars or above (even on Yelp!), it’s not particularly useful for Google to split hairs between a 4.2 and a 4.4-star business, for example.
Where rating may play a larger role is in consumer choice. According to BrightLocal, a majority of consumers see the rating as the most important review factor in choosing a business.
The reviewer
Google’s review spam filter leaves much to be desired. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that the reviewer’s account may positively influence how much weight his or her review carries. In much the same way Yelp Elite reviews carry extra weight in Yelp’s algorithm, reviews from members of the Local Guides Program likely carry extra weight in Google’s.
Velocity
The velocity or frequency customers leave reviews may also impact a business’s rankings. Older reviews might be seen as no longer relevant. While Google’s “review expiration date†is longer than three months, especially in less-frequently-reviewed industries like DUI law or addiction treatment, businesses with a steady stream of new reviews will likely outrank those with a stale review profile.
Where to get reviews
Don’t focus your review acquisition efforts solely on Google. Reviews on prominent sites like Yelp have been proven to single-handedly increase rankings for businesses in smaller markets with limited competition.
As with citations, you want to have reviews on the sites where Google expects popular businesses to have reviews. The only difference between the sites where you should acquire citations vs. the sites where you should acquire reviews is that data aggregators don’t offer reviews as a feature.
Reviews are front and center in Google’s local pack
Consumer directories
You should do your best to acquire customer reviews on Facebook and Yelp. These two platforms are used to research local businesses by millions of consumers monthly. Yelp syndicates its reviews to Apple Maps. This way, even more consumers will read them. And, of course, Facebook is Facebook — although slowly losing favor, it’s still an important platform for many.
Industry-specific and local reviews
Beyond these two giants, you should look at the sites that show up in Knowledge Panels for your competitors. Also, look at other high-ranking businesses similar to yours in different geographic markets.
Sites like the ones listed in the ‘Reviews from the web’ sections of Knowledge Panels likely have direct relationships with Google to feed them reviews. Also, take a look at the review sites that show up for searches matching the pattern:
[your keyword] [your city] [reviews]
Note the review sites that appear in the top 20 (or so) organic results. Pay close attention to the ones with gold stars in the organic results.
Google shows an additional search feature to help searchers find suitable results on other sites
How to get reviews
Have an intentional review acquisition process in place because it’s an essential element of success for your local search strategy.
Knowing the importance of customer reviews, you might be tempted to blast all your customers at once, asking them to leave reviews. Or worse, you might consider buying your way to the top with fake reviews from Fiverr or similar sites. These techniques might lead to success in the short term but dramatic pain in the long term. Google and other review platforms are getting better at cracking down on this behavior. This is pretty trivial to spot algorithmically.
Instead, a steady drip of reviews will lead to sustained long-term success. Depending on your industry, this could be a handful per month or a handful per week.
Getting Yelp reviews
Getting Yelp reviews can be challenging, thanks to Yelp’s overaggressive review filter and historically asinine policy on review solicitation. You’re not supposed to ask people to leave reviews on Yelp, so your best bet is to try and get these organically.
Under no circumstances should you offer an incentive to leave a review on Yelp — or any other platform, for that matter. This is a violation that will get you blocklisted. If the incentive is not disclosed, it may violate United States FTC guidelines or similar laws in other countries.
Responding to reviews
No matter how great your business is, you’ll get a negative review at some point. Many sites, including Google and Yelp, allow you to respond to that bad review as a business owner. The critical thing to remember is that the real audience for that response is not this particular customer but the dozens or hundreds of prospective customers who read your response, evaluate your empathy for the reviewer and attempt to resolve the complaint.
What’s next for reviews
The reality is that reviews are a far more democratic ranking signal than inbound links or even citations. They more accurately reflect the popularity of a business than either of these prominent local ranking factors.
Half of the consumers asked by a local business for a review have left one. This is an exponentially higher fraction than the number of consumers who operate websites, let alone have given a local business a link from those websites!
While Google has a long road ahead in fighting spam, it will shut down the most egregious spammers within the next few years. And as long as consumers continue to make decisions at least partially based on reviews, they’ll be a fixture in local search results (and rankings) for years to come.
Behavioral signals
As one of the most pervasive companies, Google has as much data about our behavior as any company in human history. Only Google has a full picture of user behavior, so it’s the blackest of Google’s many algorithmic black boxes. But experts in the Local Search Ranking Factors survey have pegged these signals in the top eight most crucial factors and competitive difference-makers.
But Google’s longstanding mission in local search has been to reflect the real world as accurately as possible online. A reflection based on real-world human beings will be far more accurate than one based on data from digital-world webpages and robots. It stands to reason that as Google can gather more real-world behavioral data, it will grow in algorithmic importance for rankings.
Let’s look at some of the behavioral data that Google is likely using to inform local rankings and search, from most basic to most advanced.
Location of searcher
Google has always been very good at detecting location on mobile phones. Now, they are scarily good even for desktop searches. And while it’s hard to describe something as sophisticated as detecting a user’s location as “basic,†the algorithmic outcome of that location is relatively straightforward.
The distance of a business from the location where a search is performed influences how well it ranks for those searches. All other factors being equal, the closer the company is to the point of search, the higher it will rank.
Beyond numeric rankings, the radius of businesses Google considers proximally relevant varies by category. High-frequency brick-and-mortar businesses like coffee shops have a tighter radius of relevance. Low-frequency or service-area businesses like golf courses or roofing companies have a wider radius.
Suppose your business lies outside this relevancy radius from the search locations of large groups of your customers. In that case, you will have a tough time attracting those customers via Google.
Branded search volume
In a way, branded searches are a kind of citation. If corroborated by information in Google’s business database, they’re an expression of interest in that business — if not an out-and-out endorsement. While branded searches are a fundamental indicator of the awareness or popularity of a company, most internet users perform these regularly, making them one of the most democratic ranking signals.
Beyond just the number of times a brand name is searched (and searched by people in a given geographic area), the context of those brand names is also important. Adjacent keywords used in those searches that rank for future unbranded searches for those keywords.
Generally, branded searches favor established businesses over new ones and companies that take a holistic marketing approach, so including offline. They’re one of Google’s best heuristics for word-of-mouth as it tries to build its reflection of the offline world.
Click Through Rate
There’s an endless discussion around Click Through Rate (CTR) as a ranking factor in organic search. The theory is that the more people click on your listing or website in a given search result, the more times it will show up for similar searches in the future. CTR is one step up from a branded search. CTR indicates, if not endorsement, that the searcher thinks the destination listing or website will be relevant to her query.
Google has never shared information about the inner workings of this ranking factor — and explicitly obfuscated its usage. But SEO practitioners suspect there’s a mechanism involving CTR relative to the position on the page. After all, the top results will always get the lion’s share of clicks.
You can improve your organic CTR with more compelling titles and meta descriptions on your web pages. Your Google Business Profile listings have fewer options, but a superior review profile — both star rating and volume — will help you stand out from the competition and earn more than your share of clicks.
Personalization
Much of the account infrastructure underlying Google’s products (Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, etc.) has been unified. As a result, we’re all perpetually logged in to the same account on every device. Some devices, like Android phones and Google Home, require users to log into their Google accounts before using them.
As a tracking and data-gathering platform, Google has been a smashing success. It’s now trivial for Google to track us from desktop to mobile to tablet, from Gmail to Maps to YouTube to Search, and back again. Our behavior in each product and on each device informs what we see in different effects on different devices.
At a strategic level, you should do everything you can to engage your customers with reasons to return to your website, engage with your email newsletter, and share your business with their friends and family via email and messaging. Google is probably monitoring all of those visits and shares. It may use them to inform future search results for those customers, friends, and family, even if they don’t convert on their initial visit.
Knowledge Panel interactions
The panels have many options
As Google displays more and more Knowledge Panel results, the percentage of clickthroughs to webpages has dropped. But that doesn’t mean searchers are no longer clicking at all. Increasingly, clicks are happening within Knowledge Panels.
These Knowledge Panel click-throughs are far more substantial endorsements of a business’s relevance for a given query than a website visit. They’re a direct indication of a desire to transact with the company.
Where a phone call indicates a desire to learn more about a business, a request for driving directions is an even stronger indicator that a searcher intends to visit that business. The strongest of all purely digital signals that a business is relevant for a particular query.
Bookings (where available)
Google has long offered users the ability to make bookings with hotels and restaurants directly from the Knowledge Panel through partnerships with Expedia, OpenTable, and others. There are many other options, and businesses can now add their own booking buttons with the Maps Booking API feature.
By offering this in-SERP interactivity with a business directly through Knowledge Panels, Google reduces the number of clicks to business websites and can collect more data about how searchers view a business. However, this data influences rankings, as with most behavioral signals, only Google knows how much.
Book an appointment straight from the Google panel
In-store visits
It’s reasonable to expect Google to track our on-SERP and click behavior online. It has a near-complete picture of our offline behavior through its perpetual location-tracking of Android and iOS users with the Google Maps app installed. We see the outcome of this tracking in the Popular Times section of many businesses’ Knowledge Panels.
Popular times and opening hours
Google aggregates location data from any person it can — whether they’ve searched for a business or not — and puts that data front-and-center on that business’s Knowledge Panel. It even tracks how long people stay at a given company and whether the business is busier or less busy than usual.
This complete offline tracking helps Google offer its advertisers a “closed loop†of data on whether online ads lead to offline visits. To think that Google isn’t using this same closed loop of data for its local algorithm defies belief.
Regardless of whether knowing a business’s popularity before you visit is an acceptable tradeoff for your privacy, offline visits are the ranking signals that help Google identify local popularity and relevance most accurately — and they can’t be optimized.
Offline transactions
It took a while, but Google succeeded in the mobile payment space. Google Pay is now only second to Apple Pay and is closely followed by Samsung Pay. It’s hard to ignore data from tens of millions of consumers. Particularly in industries with frequent purchases like supermarkets, coffee shops, and gas stations, the volume of Google Pay transactions could be a reasonable indicator of the offline popularity of a business.
But Google is not only looking at mobile payments — it’s now looking at all costs. In 2017, Google partnered with credit card companies to track 70% of all consumer purchases. And in 2019, it was found that Google also keeps track of your other purchases by checking your receipts in Gmail. Google is increasingly looking to bridge the gap between the real world and the online world — especially in the commerce space –, so we can expect more on this front.
Social media is nice to have
Generally speaking, social media is not an essential part of local SEO. You should do the basics well. Primarily, “the basics†involve optimizing your social media profiles instead of your social media activity.
Social media basics for your local search strategy
At a minimum, every local business should claim a business profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram, even if you don’t plan to use some or all of those profiles.
Customers may look for you on those sites, and you don’t want them to come up empty, or worse: discover another business with a similar name and think it’s you. And you never know when you might decide to engage with customers on those social platforms – in which case, it’ll be nice to have an existing profile as a jumping-off point.
Social profiles offer some of the easiest inbound links and citations you can acquire, and it makes sense to utilize all relevant fields that major social media platforms offer you.
Setting up the social media profiles
At a minimum, use a high-quality logo or, if more appropriate, a personal photo. Pick a high-resolution photo or graphic representation of your business that you can use as a cover image. Hubspot produced this handy guide of the sizes you’ll need for each social platform.
Because each social profile can (and should) act as a citation, you’ll want to maintain a consistent business name across all platforms. This helps Google (and customers) associate these profiles with you.
Where possible, add your location information to your profile, even if it’s a city and state. This helps Google make that connection even more strongly.
If you don’t plan to use one or more of these profiles actively, pin a post to the top of that profile. That way, you can let customers know where they can find you. It doesn’t matter if that’s your website, email newsletter, or a different social channel you manage actively.
Use logos and photo’s to help people recognize your brand
Social media and local search in the long tail
Except for Twitter, with whom it has a direct contractual relationship, Google has difficulty getting visibility into what’s happening on social platforms. So “being active†on social media doesn’t help your local search visibility. And even if you’re wildly popular on social media, it’s unlikely that popularity will translate directly into higher local search rankings.
One way it might translate is if your social profile is frequently linked to other websites due to your popularity. The link you’ve added from your profile to your website then passes additional authority to your website. But that’s a fraction of a fractional increase in authority. Not one that’s worth getting hung up on.
You should focus your social media efforts on engaging your customers with exciting content, promotions (if relevant), and polls and conversations that will increase their affinity for your brand. You can promote your website to a degree, but generally speaking, improvements in your local rankings will come from other factors.
Social media is for conversations
It’s far more productive to treat social media as an engagement channel rather than a means to rank better. Making yourself available to your customers and responsive to their questions on the platforms above — as well as the locally-focused NextDoor — helps create the positive association for your brand that social media is best designed for. Utilize your social media channels for brand awareness, customer engagement, and loyalty, not rankings.
Local SEO conclusion
Local search has become a multi-faceted paradox in the last couple of years. While the algorithm has evolved to reward real-world behavior, the SERP interface rewards more technical tactics like Schema markup and rich snippets.
And while the sophistication of Google’s algorithm and the number of local businesses paying attention to local SEO makes it more challenging than ever to rank, the payoff may be lower as fewer businesses win organic real estate above the fold.
But Google isn’t going away anytime soon. Organic search results will continue to be an effective customer acquisition channel far into the future. Regardless of how Google changes over time, the techniques we’ve laid out in this local search strategy guide should help position your business effectively for the next innovations!
Last year, we launched the inclusive language analysis to help you open up your content to a broader audience. It’s been well-received, with thousands of people already using it to help improve their content. The analysis is free for everyone, so try it if you haven’t. In Yoast SEO 19.14, we’re improving the analysis.
Why the inclusive language analysis?
Your SEO efforts often go hand in hand with expanding your audience. One way to achieve this is by crafting your content inclusive, which can make it more accessible to a broader range of people. The more individuals read and interact with your content, the higher the likelihood it will be shared, liked, or linked to by others.
Google also increasingly looks for language that’s helpful, not harmful. The latest updates to the Quality Raters Guidelines, released in December 2022, adds new examples of content that may be harmful to groups. With E-E-A-T, Google will focus more and more on finding and ranking content that’s truly helpful to a large audience.
The inclusive language analysis helps highlight non-inclusive terms and suggests inclusive replacements. It’s easy to use and doesn’t block your work while writing. It’s also opt-in, so you have to turn it on to start using it.
Improvements to the inclusive language analysis
We’ve launched the inclusive language analysis in beta form, so we can collect feedback and improve based on that. Our team of expert linguists also has a long list of enhancements they want to add, making the analysis as valuable and helpful as possible.
In Yoast SEO 19.14, we launch the first wave of improvements. These mainly concern changes in which context we flag specific terms. Sometimes, terms are only harmful when used in a particular situation. We’ve fine-tuned the list of non-inclusive phrases and expanded it with more words. We’ve also added more alternatives for some terms to suggest the writer replace the non-inclusive terms, and we’ve improved some of the feedback writers get.
And we’re now also taking into account whether phrases are preceded and/or followed by function words, participles, and/or punctuation marks. This means we can determine for even more cases whether a term is used in a non-inclusive way and give feedback to change it.
Update now to Yoast SEO 19.14
Yoast SEO 19.14 comes with the first wave of improvements to the inclusive language analysis. With this, we’re making it easier to find non-inclusive terms and giving better feedback on improving your content.
For most sites, SEO in 2023 will probably be similar to the past couple of years: you still need to improve your work but set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you should keep an eye out for technological advancements like ChatGPT, as they might make for an exciting year. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2023.
2022 was a weird year. It might have been a somewhat positive year for most of us — although we’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with a recession looming. The pandemic is still around but has taken a back seat in most places. If we look at our industry, SEO, we see that the online world has made a big jump. A lot of businesses moved online. Many people have shopped online for the first time, and many of them will keep doing that. There’s never been a better time to build an online business.
With a recession looming, SEO will likely become even more important. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching an audience — plus, it’s relatively easy to do. You can rely less on external platforms and more on the one that you fully control: your website.
So, with all these people waiting for your content — how would you use SEO in 2023?
It’s all about quality and E-A-T
2023 is all about quality and authority. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what you do. Please look at your products and services and the way you describe these. Have you had any trouble telling what you do? You may need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.
Increasingly, Google looks at other signals to determine the value of your offer and yourself. These signals, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or E-A-T) help it to discern the real from the fake, so to speak. The web is already rife with sub-par content, and the advent of new artificial intelligence content writers might flood it with even more. Quality, originality, authority, trustworthiness, and expertise will be where you will be judged on. And the recent addition of Experience to the E-A-T acronym shows Google is not done with its focus on this ranking factor.
Google will build out the Helpful Content system that it launched earlier in 2022 to help uncover truly good and original stuff.
SEO in 2023
For years, we heard talk about AI taking over the world, and 2023 might be the year that could happen. The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 was a bombshell for many, and it was followed by a ton of new tools and developments. Plus, all the news surrounding the chat AI helped it reach a vast audience, which will surely help it get into the mainstream. ChatGPT could dramatically reshape how we search for answers, write our content, and much more. Now, it’s still early days, but keep a close eye on it and related technologies.
There’s a ton of other stuff happening as well. 2023 will also see much more visual and intelligent ways of searching and finding, like the multisearch stuff that Google introduced. Images will play a big part in how people will find you, so be sure to make these as good as possible.
There will also be a renewed interest in SEO as marketers will get trouble tracking their success on other platforms due to various legal changes, like a possible ban on Google Analytics in Europe. Cookies are also about to die. Even though tracking will continue in different forms, it’s time to invest in SEO before others flock to SEO.
Take note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is critical. Content quality is vital. So, these SEO trends for 2023 are not hyped-up stuff but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?
Improve site quality
If you’ve been playing this SEO game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know many factors that search engines consider to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s not possible. While nobody knows precisely what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a more significant period to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?
Quality.
To win in SEO in 2023, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and high-quality content, and target the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed and user experience need to improve. It also means incorporating and improving Schema.org structured data, as structured data remains one of the critical developments for some time.
Let’s review some of the things you need to focus on in 2023.
A better Page Experience with good Core Web Vitals
As part of an effort to get sites to speed up and to provide a great user experience, Google announced the Page Experience algorithm update that rolled out in 2021. This update gives you another reason to put site speed front and center. While the Page Experience update didn’t shake up the SERPs, we expect it to continue to become a stronger signal.
Site speed has always been critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a more challenging time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s an excellent tradeoff.
Start by finding a better hosting plan — one of the quickest ways to speed up your site! — and optimizing your images with image SEO.
Enhance the user experience
Page experience ties in with user experience. Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in an instant? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a surefire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!
Untangle your site structure
Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts, and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors and search engines. Everything should have its proper place, and if something is old, outdated, or deprecated, maybe you should delete it and point it to something relevant.
This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or if improvements need to be made. How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing up the flow of your site? The SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium can help you get started on this.
Implement Schema.org structured data
Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to connect parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data makes your site eligible for rich results. There are many rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many developments, like voice search and Google’s ecommerce push.
Implementing structured data has never been easy, but we’re solving that problem. Yoast SEO automatically outputs a complete graph of structured data, describing your site and content in detail for search engines — and connecting everything. For specific pages, you can describe the content in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor let you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online training course on structured data to help you improve your SEO in 2023.
The FAQ block in Yoast SEO makes it easy to get rich results for your FAQs
Mobile still needs your focus
We’ve talked about mobile for years, but we must remind people to take it seriously. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when most of your traffic is from the desktop. Give your mobile site special care and work on its mobile SEO. You should test whether your site works as well on mobile and desktop. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Could you make it lightning-fast, easy to use, and valuable?
In 2022, many people experienced mobile shopping for the first time, and they will come back for more in 2023. If you sell stuff online, be sure to optimize the checkout process of your ecommerce site — make it as short and focused as possible!
Content quality
There is a ton of content out there — and a lot of new content is published daily. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrases? Is it perfect enough to beat the competition? Are you publishing original, all-encompassing content that answers the questions your audience has?
Keep search intent front and center
Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior. Thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing with BERT and MUM, Google is starting to know the language inside out. In 2023, we’ll see Google use these new skills to bring better and more accurate search results — and present them in innovative ways.
Of course, we can still help search engines pick the correct version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to a searcher’s specific goals. Map these intents to your content, and you’re good to go.
Re-do your keyword research
The last two years were impactful for many of us, and a lot has changed. Keeping this in mind, it’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of change in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research means missing out on significant opportunities. Read up on the research about consumer trends for 2023 and beyond. After that, ask yourself these questions:
What changed in my company?
What changed in and around my audience?
Has something changed in people’s language?
What has changed in where people search?
Content is context
Context is one of the essential words in the SEO field. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become more innovative and intelligent, providing them with as much related information as possible is becoming more critical. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema structured data provides another way to show search engines how entities are connected.
By mapping the context of your subject, you might find a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or perhaps the recent developments threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.
Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages
If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content. That’s not a bad thing, of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization can become a big issue, so content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Is that what you want to happen?
You need to re-assess your content to find out how you are doing. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles into one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be to hold the writing for a while and improve what you have!
Work on your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
Now search engines can understand the content; they are increasingly looking at its value. Is it trustworthy? Who is the person claiming these things? Why should we trust the author? Is the author an authority on the subject? Google looks not just at the quality of the content but also at whether that content can be assessed professionally. Trust and expertise will be essential, especially for YMLY (Your Money or Your Life) pages, like medical or financial content. E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) looks at this and is becoming a more significant part of SEO in 2023. What’s more, at the end of 2022 even added an extra letter to the acronym: Experience!
Hone those writing skills!
Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth, and easy to understand. Search engines are improving at determining an article’s text quality and making decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across as more professional, and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content.
While it is increasingly challenging to write all that high-quality content yourself, artificial intelligence might help make your job easier. AI content generators are getting better by the day and have reached a level that produces pretty good content. So why not make use of these tools, I hear you say?
Having an AI tool write your content doesn’t lead to high-quality, unique, authentic stuff. An AI has been trained on stuff that we already know, so there is no way for it to write something unique. Please take care in using tools like this. Of course, there’s no harm in having an AI speed up your work, getting you inspired, and helping you set stuff up. Be sure to edit the outcome into something you are proud of.
It will be interesting to see Google’s reaction to the flood of AI-generated content that is bound to arrive in 2023. They will probably focus even more on identifying E-A-T signals in content to try and discern AI content from content written by expert humans.
As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere, not specifically in Google. Search is moving beyond the website or social media platform for investigations and actions. Loads of devices can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Machines that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are powerful e-commerce platforms that seem to get most of the product searches, not to mention all those app-based services. Visual search is also on the rise. TikTok is huge in certain demographics. Maybe these have value for you?
(Progressive web) apps
Links to apps continue to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Many sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere; even Google is testing structured data for software apps. Moreover, Google has expanded its mobile homepage with the Discover app that suggests new content based on your interests.
Where there’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi-hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes a better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, looking into apps might be a good idea. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there are always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot of this year!
Video
Video content is incredibly popular! And there’s no end in sight for the video boom. YouTube might be the most crucial search engine for many people besides Google. We’ve seen the arrival of short-form content providers like TikTok and several enhancements in how video gets presented on the search results pages. You can count on it that video content will only become more critical. If you have the means, invest in video. Remember, it doesn’t always have to be flashy and professional — make it heartfelt. In addition to our Video SEO WordPress plugin, we also have a ton of content on how to do video SEO well.
Other platforms
Traditionally, many searches happen not on search engines but social media and other platforms. These past years, we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion from social media. Different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. Plus, there are all those short-form videos going around. Maybe that’s something to attract a new audience? Also, did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Neeva? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and their goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Indeed, something to think about!
Don’t just think: “I need to publish a blog post on my website” — there are so many great destinations out there that might fit the goal of your message better.
A system for getting traffic with SEO in 2023
What does it all boil down to if we recap all this? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:
A lot has changed in the last two years, so restart your research and read up on consumer trends for 2023.
You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that genuinely helps visitors.
This website must be supported by a brand offering high-quality products and services.
SEO in 2023: What’s next?
It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2023 because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic searches. Social media traffic is down, and conversational search is rising, but not enough to put a dent in organic. And then there’s video. Ultimately, you must keep improving your site in all the right places.
Of course, much other stuff is happening simultaneously, and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we might see Google less like a search engine and more as a virtual assistant — a person who lives on your phone and solves your problems. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.
Page speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. Page speed is aranking factor, and its importance keeps growing. In this post, we’ll discuss how to check your page speed and which tools can help you do just that. Read on!
Why is page speed important for SEO?
For starters, a fast website provides a much better user experience than a slow one. Research has shown time and again that people don’t buy as much from slower sites. They also don’t read or engage as much on slow sites. That in itself should be enough reason to make sure the speed of your web pages is as good as it can be.
Beyond just being better for users, faster websites can be easier for search engines to crawl, process and index. That means your posts will take less time to show up in the search results. And they’ll be more likely to perform and rank better.
Page speed is not a single metric
We’ve written an extensive post about the concept of page speed and its importance. Long story short, page speed is not a single metric. You should not think of page speed as in “this page loads in 5 seconds”.
This is due to the complexity of various factors that affect the loading speed of a web page. Some of these factors include the infrastructure of your web server, the quality of the internet connection of your users, and the technical setup of your website (i.e: themes, plugins). And it’s not possible to determine the definitive loading speed of a page either.
Even if you try to simplify all of this to something like “the time it takes until it’s completely loaded“, it’s still tricky to give that a useful number. For instance, you can run an analysis that shows you that your page loads in 5 seconds. But this number may only apply to a percentage of your users. Someone who lives further from your web server, with a slower internet connection, and uses a slower device will experience a longer load time.
Instead, we advise you to think of page speed as a part of the user experience that your website provides. Page speed and user experience go hand-in-hand.
Make a page “feels†like it loads faster
In an ideal world, we’d click on a link in the search result page and the web page would appear instantly before our eyes. But we all know that our technologies haven’t reached that point yet. At the same time, websites nowadays are incredibly complex, with web pages getting heavier and harder to load.
Now, the challenge for website owners is not only to make pages load faster, but also to give visitors the “perception†that the page is indeed fast. In fact, being able to deliver the “perception†that a page is fast is crucial, as it ties into the “experience†that visitors get on your website. In order to create this “perception” of a fast-loading page, it’s good to get a grasp of the loading process of web pages.
Web page loading process 101
From the moment when you click on a link or hit ‘enter’ in your URL bar, a process begins to load the page you requested. That process contains many parts, but they can be grouped into several stages which look something like this:
Please note that the above model refers to the delivery and rendering of content above the fold. The model is also mobile-centric.
While Google’s documentation might be a bit ambitious about the timings of these stages, the model is helpful. Essentially, the process can be described in three stages of loading. Let’s discuss these three stages and what they mean to your pages.
Network stage
DNS lookup and TCP connection: Without going too much into detail, you can understand that these are protocols to establish communication between your web server and the user’s device. Essentially, they are what make transferring data via the internet possible.
Generally speaking, you don’t have a whole lot of control over what happens here. It’s also hard to measure or impact this part of the process. But it’s good to note that there are technologies that exist to speed up this process, including CDN, intelligent routing, etc. However, these technologies are more useful for sites that serve large international audiences. If you have a site that serves mostly local audiences, there are other things that you can do to speed up your pages.
Server response stage
HTTP request and response: After a connection is established, your user’s device sends a request to your web server asking for the page and its accompanying files and content. Your web server must process this request and prepare the requested content. Your hosting infrastructure, your web server, and the availability of a CDN have an impact on this stage.
Server response time: Server response time refers to the time it takes for a server to return the initial HTML, excluding the network transport time. This stage is about how fast your web server can return information. Your hosting infrastructure, web server, themes, and plugins can affect this stage.
Browser-rendering stage
Client-side rendering: This stage is where the page needs to be constructed, laid out, colored in, and displayed. The way in which images load, in which JavaScript and CSS are processed, and every individual HTML tag on your page affects how quickly things load. Themes and plugins also add additional elements to be rendered.
It’s good to realize that assets, content, and elements (i.e: buttons) on any given page are loaded in sequences. You can imagine that elements near the top of the page will be prioritized first, then elements closer to the bottom of the page will be loaded later on. This is also why Google emphasizes the importance of above-the-fold content in various documentation – it allows users to start interacting with a page as soon as possible. Additionally, being able to quickly load content on the top of a page also gives the perception that the page loads fast.
Metrics to pay attention to when checking page speed
Since 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals – a set of metrics to measure websites’ speed and user experience, which made their way into Google’s core algorithm update. Essentially, Core Web Vitals look at three aspects of a web page: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
Loading – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the most significant piece of content to appear on the screen.
Interactivity – First Input Delay (FID): Measures how fast the page can respond to the first user interaction.
Visual Stability – Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the stability of visual elements on your page. In other words, does stuff move around on the screen while loading?
Metrics in Core Web Vitals
When optimizing your page performance for SEO, these three metrics are the most important to look out for. To pass Core Web Vitals, you need your page to get a green “score†for all these three metrics. And it’s good to know that at least 75% of your real-world users need to experience the green “score†in order for your page to have a pass.
Google’s John Mueller said that all three metrics must appear green if you want your site to benefit from the page experience ranking signals. Note that you shouldn’t optimize your site to get green scores – but having green scores will be beneficial for your visitors. It’s all about happy visitors – and great content, of course!
Other interesting metrics
In addition to these three metrics, it might be interesting to also look at:
Time to first byte (TTFB): Measures how long it takes until the server responds with some information. Even if your front-end is blazing fast, this will hold you up.
First contentful paint(FCP): Measures how long it takes for key visual content (e.g., a hero image or a page heading) to appear on the screen.
Time until interactive: Measures how long it takes for the experience to be visible, and react to user’s input.
All of the mentioned metrics are much more sophisticated metrics than “how long did it take to loadâ€. And perhaps more importantly, they have a user-centric focus. Improving these metrics should correlate directly with user satisfaction, which is super important for SEO.
Now that you’ve got the basics about the concept of page speed and the web-loading process, it’s time to get practical and dive into the tools to check your page speed.
Your best friends are Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
Google Search Console
Essentially, data regarding Core Web Vitals and other page performance metrics are taken from PageSpeed Insights. But we want to point you to Google Search Console (GSC) first before going into PageSpeed Insights.Â
Assuming that you’re working on improving your page speed to gain competitive advantages in search ranking, then you’re probably using Search Console a lot already. Not only does the tool give an overview of your search performance, but it also provides a great overview of how your pages perform according to the page experience standards.
To see this report, go to Google Search Console and look for “Page experience†in the left navigation bar. You should see an overview of how your mobile and desktop pages perform.
The Page experience overview in Google Search Console
Take a look at the “Core Web Vitals†tab. There, you’ll find a list of URLs that are failing Core Web Vitals, which are conveniently grouped into categories that they are failing.Â
This is great because the tool presents you with an overview of the links you should work on. In addition, you already know beforehand what your objectives for these URLs are. For instance, you know whether you should work on improving the LCP or CLS score of a page.
Lists of groups of URLs failing Core Web Vitals
Clicking on one of these groups will prompt GSC to show you a few groups of URLs, based on their performance. For example, in the screenshot below, Search Console is showing URLs with low LCP scores, grouped based on the different LCP scores.
Clicking on one of these groups will show you the full list of URLs on your right bar. And if you click on an URL, a box will appear with a link that takes you to an audit of the page on PageSpeed Insights.
PageSpeed Insights
As we mentioned above, PageSpeed Insights provides you with data regarding your page performance. You’ll find metrics in Core Web Vitals and other metrics of a specific page.
This is an incredibly useful tool if you want to work on improving your page performance. It provides real user metrics of your website, straight from Google.
Results from PageSpeed Insights for yoast.com
If you scroll down a bit, you’ll find a diagnostic that provides you with the causes of why your page is failing Core Web Vitals. The reasons listed here are unique to a page and can range from a redundancy of third-party code, JavaScript error, lack of caching, etc,…
The tool also provides suggestions to optimize your page, which you can find under the “Opportunities†section. They are good starting points and can be helpful when you’ve just started out with speed optimization. But it’s good to know that following these suggestions may help your page to load faster, but they might not directly affect the performance score. There are also a bunch of other things you could do other than what’s listed here.
More advanced tools
If you’re new to page speed optimization, then Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights probably give you enough information to start working. This section is more useful for those who would like to have more data and want to dive deeper into their website’s performance.
Tools to check server performance
These tools focus on the performance of server hardware, databases, and scripts. You may need to ask for help from your hosting provider or tech team.
We can check the performance of the server with tools like NewRelic or DataDog, which monitor how your site behaves and responds from the ‘inside’.
They’ll provide charts and metrics around things like slow database queries and slow scripts. Armed with this information, you can get a better understanding of whether your hosting is up to scratch, and if you need to make code changes to your theme/plugins/scripts.
WordPress has some great plugins for doing this kind of analysis, too. We recommend checking Query Monitor out. It provides some great insights into which bits of WordPress might be slowing you down – whether it’s your themes, plugins, or environments.
Another tool to check page performance
Another tool that may be interesting to look at is WebPageTest.org. This tool lets you test how your page performs on various types of networks and devices.
An interesting feature of this tool is the “waterfall†view. Essentially, it presents you with an overview of how much time it takes for all the assets on a page to load. This can be especially useful if you want detailed diagnostics to identify optimization opportunities.
For instance, the image below is the waterfall view of the homepage of Yoast.com. It looks quite daunting at first, but it does become easier to understand once you run the test yourself. Remember the model of the stages of the loading process we mentioned earlier? This waterfall view tells us that the first stage (DNS lookup and TCP connection) takes about 0.55 seconds to complete. Then the HTML file is sent from the web server to the browser (but not rendered) and then onto other assets.
WebPageTest.org results for yoast.com
Field data vs Lab data
Now that you’re equipped with the right tools to check your page speed, let’s talk about how these tools get their data.
Metrics in Core Web Vitals are measurable in the field and reflect the experience that your real-world visitors get. That’s why Google requires at least 75% of your real visitors to experience good page performance before giving you a pass. You can count on PageSpeed Insights to give you field data from real users.
In contrast, a tool like WebPageTest.org runs tests and collects data within a controlled environment, with predefined devices and network settings.
We know and understand the importance of field data since it captures true real-world user experience. It helps you to understand what your users struggle with. However, with field data, you run into the issue that you have limited debugging capabilities. Since every user is different, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly whether the changes you deploy are effective or not.
On the other hand, with lab tests, you can control for as many factors as you can, so the results are consistent and reproducible. And since field data is captured from real-world experience, it can only do so if users are able to enter and load your page. Lab data can help with identifying optimization opportunities and help make your site more accessible to a wider range of audience. Let’s say your goal is to optimize your site so users with a really slow connection can still access it. Running lab tests may give insights into what you can do to improve.
Which to prioritize?
Generally speaking, if you have both field and lab data on a page, you should prioritize using field data and base your optimization efforts on that. That means looking at the data in Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Google also recommends prioritizing field data. Since field data reflects the experience real-world users get, you can better understand what issues they are facing and what you need to do to fix those.
Wrap up
Learning how to check your page speed doesn’t need to be difficult. If you’re just starting out with page speed optimization, look to Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. These tools will give you insights into which pages are falling Core Web Vitals and how real users experience your page.
From there, identify what your pages are lacking and focus your effort on optimizing your pages to pass Core Web Vitals. The suggestions that Google gives on PageSpeed Insights may provide you with a good starting point. However, don’t rely on them all the time. There is so much more you can do!
Did we miss anything in this post? Or do you have great tips on page speed optimization? Let us know in the comment!
Content freshness is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and has been that way for years. Google tends to favor unique, recent, and timely content on the search results page. However, there’s a repercussion stemming from this – many websites would relabel their old content as new to try to game the algorithm. This is not a good SEO practice, and we’ll discuss why that won’t help you rank better in this post!
Google likes fresh content, and so do we
Why does Google favor fresh content? It’s because we, as users, like new content.
We always want the most recent and up-to-date information. Whether it’s about the latest fashion trend, the latest face massager, or the latest SEO tips. Freshness is even more important for some topics, like medical information or breaking news. Of course, Google wants to meet its user’s demands. That’s why the search engine has introduced algorithm updates to help rank fresh and timely content.
What does Google mean by “fresh†content?
Google introduced the “Freshness update†way back in 2011. Since then, there have been multiple updates to the algorithm. But some things stay the same – fresh content is more favorable to rank high.
“Breaking news†queries, like a natural disaster.
Recurring event queries, like a sporting event or fashion show.
Current information queries, like the population of a country or inflation rate.
Product queries, like the new iPhone or new TV.
It’s good to know that not all queries and topics need the most recent update. For instance, queries that aim to learn about the history of World War 2 don’t require the most recent articles. An extensive report from years ago can contain just as good information.
Can you change the date of your content to make it fresh?
Many websites try to trick the algorithm into thinking they have fresh content. One way they do this is by changing the date on a page’s title or publishing date.
Some websites even go so far as to change the date/year on their page title or in their content in advance so they’re ahead of other competitors when that date hits.
For instance, if you search for ‘Best TV to buy’, you might get a search result like this:
At the time of writing this post, it’s not 2023 yet. And you can even see the publish date of one link is December 2022. Most likely, it’s an evergreen article that lists good TVs in 2022 and was frequently updated throughout the year. But since new TVs in 2023 don’t come out until later in the year, and people will search for ‘the best TVs in 2023’, these sites use this approach to stay ahead of the competition.
For the most part, this hack doesn’t work, and we advise you not to do the same! You won’t get a ranking boost by doing so. Even if you do, you’ll eventually fall off when other websites start to write better content on the same topic.
And we’re not saying this out of the blue, either. Take the word of Google’s Search Advocate John Muller, who pointed out in one of his tweets:
Is there significantly new content? Then update the dates. Is there no significantly new content? Then don't update the dates. We see a lot of spam & low-quality content that just arbitrarily updates dates ("Best fax machine for 2023"), it's pretty obvious & embarassing.
And that wasn’t the first time he answered that question:
When you write something new, or siginificantly change something existing, then change the date. Changing the date without doing anything else is just noise & useless.
Now, you shouldn’t always flat-out believe everything Google says, but in this case, they are right. Don’t “fake†your fresh content. A ranking boost doesn’t happen that easily. You’ll have to work hard and create fresh and valuable content to improve your ranking.
Fun fact (or just a fact) – We used to support current month and current year variables in the ‘SEO title’ field in the preview tool of Yoast SEO. But we decided to remove those altogether, partly because we don’t want our users to use them to “fake” refresh old content without putting in the work!
Does updating existing content make it fresh again?
Yes, it does! But it depends on how much you’ve added to that content.
If you only fix a few typos and add a few sentences here and there, that doesn’t count as making it fresh. On the other hand, if you make a significant update to a page, or frequent updates with new information, that does matter.
For instance, we’ve recently updated an article on page speed, adding much more information. The ranking for that post improved significantly after the update. That’s due to Google’s algorithm having to re-evaluate the post and compare it to other articles on the same topic.
The search performance chart of one of our recently updated post
In conclusion
Don’t try to trick the algorithm into thinking that you have fresh content while you don’t. You won’t gain any SEO benefit from relabeling your old evergreen content as new. Instead, put in the hard work and update your content with new and useful information. If your content is great, Google will give you the ranking boost you deserve! Want to learn how? Check out Marieke’s article on keeping your content fresh and up to date.
Last week, we uncovered a problem in Gutenberg’s upcoming release that breaks the block editor’s link functionality when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO. The result is that users cannot create links using the editor. This release of the block editor will happen this week, so we’re proactively updating Yoast SEO to be sure to fix this for our users.
The issue is in WordPress’s block editor
The next release of the Gutenberg block editor will introduce functionality to let users remove unknown formatting in rich-text snippets. It does so by adding a new default formatting style, which breaks the link functionality in the visual editor. The result is that users can’t insert links through the interface.
The block editor update breaks the link feature
Moreover, even though blocks such as the Yoast SEO Related Linking blocks work fine — as they correctly create the links — the block editor then detects the links as having unknown formatting. The result is the same: linking doesn’t work.
This is an issue in the WordPress block editor — not in Yoast SEO — that we have identified, but we want to work around this by updating the code in Yoast SEO in advance to ensure that our users don’t run into this problem.
Today’s Yoast SEO release fixes the error WordPress introduced
Yoast SEO 19.13 fixes the issue
Yoast SEO 19.13 is out today, and this fixes a single issue with the link functionality in the next update of the block editor in WordPress. We do this to ensure that your editor keeps functioning as it should and that you can keep adding or updating links to your content.
At Yoast HQ, we’re doing our part to make your websites run like clockwork. One of the things we’re working on is optimizing our Yoast SEO plugin to use fewer resources. This helps make your site faster and more efficient. In Yoast SEO 19.11, we’re doing this by streamlining your database.
Improved SEO data optimization
We ask you to let Yoast SEO index your website data so we can get to work immediately. The data we index ends up in a special table in your database, which stores all the information we might need from an SEO perspective. We use this to understand your site and make our behind-the-scenes processes run faster.
In this release, we are improving the database and the underlying process determining how we fill the special table. In some cases, the table could contain things that shouldn’t end up in the database. This could cause the database to be more extensive than it should be, leading to slower server responses. We’ve now sped this up.
In Yoast SEO 19.11, we put a lot of effort into ensuring that only things that need to end up in the database will end up in the database. We’re also cleaning up the database and deleting stray additions.
To help you manage your database, we’ve added a WP-CLI command to clean up unused data from our custom database tables: wp yoast cleanup. Plus, we’ve added the wpseo_indexable_excluded_taxonomies filter to allow manually excluding taxonomies from being indexed.
Update now to Yoast SEO 19.11!
Yoast SEO 19.11 is ready for download. In this release, we’ve mainly worked on improving our database usage and finetuning how we handle the SEO data we index. Your database should now be leaner — making it faster and more efficient. Happy updating!
Web sustainability is a huge topic and covers a lot of aspects, from technical details to design and the way you organize your content. Why is it such an important topic? Because climate change is a serious threat and can no longer be ignored. All of us need to work together to do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. And although it might not be the first thing that pops into your head, this also includes websites. Online traffic actually has an extensive impact on our environment and this impact is growing every year. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can get insight into the impact of your website. After that, we’ll give you a few suggestions to reduce your site’s carbon footprint. Let’s dive in and go green!
Is my website’s carbon footprint that big a deal?
Many of us don’t think about the environmental impact of our online activities. Why should we? When there are loads of other things happening that have a way bigger impact on our climate. And honestly, online is also the place we go to unwind while watching funny videos or browsing for new clothes. Which is understandable, especially with so much of our lives moving online nowadays. But we could do with a bit more awareness.
You see, every action we take online produces a carbon footprint, no matter how insignificant it might feel. In fact, digital technologies and internet usages are two massive players in polluting the environment as they use a considerable amount of electricity. Take a look at some statistics from the Shift Project that might surprise you:
Digital technologies are responsible for roughly 4% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The energy consumption of digital technologies is increasing by 9% a year.
As you can see, the internet and digital technologies have drawbacks, however easy they make our lives. And if you own a website – large or small – there’s no way around it: you’re leaving a carbon footprint. We realize that this isn’t fun to hear, but here at Yoast, we’re guilty of this too. So, what can we do to reduce this footprint? To start we’ll discuss what elements contribute to the carbon footprint of your website.
Every interaction on your website
As we mentioned above, every online action, including every interaction with your website results in electricity being used. For instance, whenever someone visits your website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to your server asking for information. Your server needs to respond to this request and return the necessary information. Whenever this happens, your server spends a small amount of energy to complete the request. On the other side, the browser also needs the power to process data and present the page to the visitor.
Even though the energy needed to complete a request like this is minimal, this adds up when you consider all the interactions on a website and the number of websites we have worldwide. It’s also good to know that the complexity of your website plays a part in this. The heavier and more complex your website is, the more energy is required to send and process data.
On the host side
If you own a website, you’ll know that your website needs a hosting provider to host your server and store your site’s files and data. And hosts do this by keeping all this information on computers in large data centers. In these data centers, you can find thousands of computers processing data and large, complex cooling solutions running all day and night to keep the computers cool. All of these things consume electricity to function. As a result, data centers have massive carbon footprints. Of course, not all data centers are equal. There are a lot of factors to consider, from the size of the centers, the technology they use, and the infrastructure in place. Some use far more energy than others, producing significantly more pollution.
Don’t forget about bot traffic
Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or app. It actually accounts for more than 40% of the total internet traffic in 2022 and you can safely assume that bots have visited your website. Similar to when a visitor enters your site, bots also make requests to your server that need to be processed. And when it comes to environmental impact, it makes no difference whether it’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bot that’s visiting your website. It’s difficult to estimate the total power consumption of bots’ activities, but considering that it’s such a big part of the total internet traffic we can say that this amount will not be small.
Check your website’s carbon footprint
When you do a quick search online, you’ll find several carbon footprint calculators. According to the Website Carbon Calculator, the average web page they test produces approximately 0.5 grams of CO2 per pageview. That translates to 60 kg of CO2 per year for a website with 10,000 monthly pageviews.
Naturally, we were curious to see how yoast.com would fare. So we used the tool to find out what the impact of our homepage is. Here’s the result:
The carbon footprint of our homepage, calculated by the Website Carbon Calculator
So if our homepage gets around 10,000 monthly pageviews, it produces 20kg of CO2 per year. This is equivalent to the amount of carbon one tree absorbs in a year. Of course, we’re happy that our homepage does quite well when it comes to the carbon it emits. However, this is only an estimation and it’s only for one page. Our website isn’t just a homepage, we have loads of other pages driving lots of pageviews daily. Still, it can give you an idea of how much improvement your pages need.
How to reduce your website’s carbon footprint
There are several things we can do to minimize the carbon impact of our websites. And some of these suggestions may have a minimal effect. But do remember that every little thing we do and every bit of effort we make will bring us closer to the goal of net zero carbon emissions.
Choose a green host
A great way to lower the environmental impact of your website is to use a “green” hosting provider. Green hosting providers are companies using data centers with high energy efficiency and who are committed to using sustainable energy sources.
You can look for one or check your current host on The Green Web Foundation’s directory. The website lists over 500 hosting providers worldwide that have a tangible commitment to the use of green energy. We’re hosting our site on Cloudflare, which is certified as a green host.
Reduce the size of your images and videos
For most websites, images are the most significant contributor to a page’s weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files are, the more data is transferred, and the more energy is used in the process. Let’s be real, you don’t need razor-sharp images that are a few MBs in size. You need your images to be sharp enough. Besides, heavy images are the culprit of a slow-loading page, which is a terrible experience for your visitors. Slow-loading pages are also bad for SEO. So, export images with the correct size and format and compress them using a tool or plugin to reduce their weight. We recommend using a tool like ImageOptim or websites like Squoosh, JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io.
It’s the same situation with on-page and self-hosted videos, although it’s better to compress videos before uploading them to your site. Or better, avoid hosting videos on your site altogether and use embedded links from video hosting platforms like Wistia or YouTube. Next, you can further reduce data usage from video streaming by removing auto-play and keeping video content short. Auto-playing video is hard to optimize anyway.
Regularly check for redundant content
Whenever we have something new to tell or a new product to sell, it’s easy to create a new dedicated page. Creating new pages isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to keep track of the number of pages on your site. Is this new page essential or are you cluttering your website? And if it is necessary, what other content may become redundant or could easily be integrated into this page? Regularly cleaning up pages that you’re not using anymore is not only saving energy, but it also helps site visitors find the right content and not get lost on your website.
In line with this, it’s also good to take a look at your writing style. Writing in a clear and understandable way benefits your SEO and helps users find what they’re looking for more easily. This also means that you’re reducing the time they need to look around on your website and get to where they need to be. A more focused website for you, less frustration for them, and less energy spent on unnecessary scrolling and clicking around. Yoast SEO comes with a readability analysis that can help you improve your content and make it easier to read.
One last thing: Although the goal of SEO and other marketing efforts might be to get more people on your website, you shouldn’t write content with the sole purpose of getting more visits. Write content that adds value and answers actual questions your audience might have. We strongly advise against using misleading keyphrases and stuffing your content with keywords. Not only will you hurt your reputation, but it also causes online traffic that might lose you customers and costs loads of energy on requests that aren’t necessary. Plus, search engines are getting better at picking this up so it might hurt your rankings as well. Always focus your content on getting the right people on your website, not just as many people as you can.
Reduce other data transfer by:
Making your website technically lean
A technically lean and clean website benefits both users and the environment. Keep your code clean and simple while avoiding duplications. In addition, avoid installing unnecessary plugins that add bloat to your site and keep away from unnecessary plugins that add excessive weight.
If you’re running a WordPress site, you can use plugins to compress and clean up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These plugins don’t alter your code; they remove things like redundant spacing or bring lines of code onto the same row instead of spreading them out on multiple rows. Doing this only reduces the size of these files by a tiny bit. But you know the deal, every bit of effort matters!
Using a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers in different geographic locations. They work together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near your visitors. Much of your website content is static – like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files – that stays the same for every user. CDNs work by having a copy of these files on each of their servers in the network. When a user enters your website, these files are served from a local server instead of the origin server. That means data doesn’t have to travel as far, which also helps your site load faster. A fast-loading site is more attractive to users and prevents a scenario where someone requests to load a webpage only to click the back button. Which wastes energy that’s already used in the data-transferring process.
Not to mention, serving images through CDNs is an excellent choice for reducing image file size. Many CDNs offer a wide range of image-reducing methods like serving images in the WebP format, offering the same compression quality as JPEG but a significantly smaller file size.
Block bots to lower unnecessary traffic to your site
As we mentioned above, bot traffic accounts for a lot of online traffic. It helps to identify bots that are not valuable to you and block them from entering your site. If they request your server but you’re telling your server not to answer them, you’re saving energy. You can block bad bots by looking at your server log for unusual behavior and blocking the individual or the entire range of IPs where unusual traffic comes from. An alternative is to use a bot management solution from providers like Cloudflare. For the ‘good’ bots, you can determine whether they bring value to your site or not. If the answer is no, don’t hesitate to block them as well.
Reduce unnecessary crawling on your site
In our post about bot traffic, we give an example of the crawling activities of Google on our site on a given day. But Google bots are not the only bots visiting our website. There are also bots from other search engines, commercial bots, SEO bots, etc. If they support the craw-delay directives in robots.txt, set a craw delay for them to limit unnecessary crawling.
Use the crawl settings feature in Yoast SEO Premium
Search engines have a vast amount of resources at their disposal, so they have the power to crawl everything they find on your website. However, this is not necessarily the most efficient way to operate. Adding to that is the fact that almost every CMS outputs assets that are nonessential for your website and users. These assets get URLs, but since they don’t bring any added value for most websites, we think crawlers could safely skip them most of the time.
In Yoast SEO Premium, we introduced a crawl settings feature to remove unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets from your WordPress site. By removing these, you help crawlers crawl your site more efficiently and reduce their crawling activities. By doing this, you’re saving energy for your server and the search engines themselves. This is our way to contribute to the net-zero goal and it can also be yours. Use our plugin to reduce the carbon footprint of your WordPress website!
The crawl settings feature allows you to decide per type of asset whether you want to remove the URLs it creates. So you’re always in control. This screenshot of our plugin shows you where to find it and here you can read how it works exactly:
Remove links that are not needed and automatically output by WordPress
Final thoughts: every bit of effort helps
Reducing the carbon footprint of your website will probably not be a priority in your day-to-day life. We understand that completely. But it’s time to start investing in our future. The longer takes us to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, the more damage we’re doing to our environment. Let’s make sure we’re doing what we can to do our part. The planet and your site visitors will thank you for it. So, let’s join forces and conserve this planet we call home!
(@JohnMu) 
