EDITS.WS

Author: Marieke van de Rakt

  • Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide

    Keyword research is an essential part of your SEO strategy. It’s the first step in the SEO copywriting process. Before you create your site’s content, you should find out what search terms your audience uses. Their search terms are your keywords. Based on these keywords, you can start writing useful, high-quality, and findable content. In this post, we’ll take you through the steps involved in keyword research.

    Table of contents

    Are you looking for a guide to keyword research for ecommerce? You can find more information tailored to your needs in this post about keyword research for online stores.

    What is keyword research?

    Keyword research is part of SEO (search engine optimization). It’s the work someone does to come up with an extensive list of keywords they would like a website to rank for. To obtain such a list, website owners need to dig into their desired audience and search engines. What search terms do people type into Google when looking for a particular product, service, business or type of organization? And what do they expect to find? With this list, website owners can create content that will attract more high-quality traffic to their site. Keyword research is never finished: repeating it regularly is essential to staying up-to-date!

    Read more: What is keyword research? »

    Why is keyword research important?

    Proper keyword research is important because it makes clear what search terms your audience uses. At Yoast, we frequently come across business owners who use one set of words to describe their products, while their target audience uses a completely different set of words! As a result, potential customers can’t find those websites. In other words: there’s a mismatch.

    To avoid this mismatch, you should do thorough keyword research. This research will make sure that you use the same words as your target audience. In addition, you should also consider your audience’s search intent. This will help you figure out what exactly your audience is looking for. All that’s left is for you to write high-quality content that answers your audience’s questions!

    Originality versus findability

    What about originality? Isn’t it better to stand out from the crowd and use different keywords than your competitors? Let’s say you (or your marketing department) decides to give a product an uncommon name. This can be a smart marketing decision, because people could remember your product more easily. If you rent out vacation cottages instead of vacation homes, for example, you might stand out more.

    But beware: very few people search for [vacation cottages]. So if you optimize your text for cottages, you’ll probably rank well on that specific term. However, because your audience uses a different word, you won’t generate a lot of traffic, and you won’t reach a large part of your potential customers.

    A video on keyword research

    In this video, Michiel tells us more about keyword research and how we think it should be done. It’s part of our SEO for beginner’s course, available through our Yoast SEO Academy subscription:

    Essential concepts of keyword research

    Before we jump to doing keyword research, we’ll briefly explain some of its essential concepts.

    Focus keyword

    A focus keyword or keyphrase is the word or phrase you want a certain page on your site to be found for in Google. You determine your set of focus keyphrases by doing keyword research.

    Long-tail keywords

    Long-tail keywords are more specific and less commonly searched for than head keywords. They focus on a niche. The longer and more specific search terms are, the easier it will be to rank for them. Why? Because there will be less competition.

    However, long-tail keywords are still worth ranking for! Because even though less people are searching for them, they might be more motivated to buy, subscribe, sign up, etc.

    Long tail graphic

    Keyword strategy

    Your keyword strategy is about the decisions you make based on your keyword research. For instance, what content are you going to create first? Will you focus on the head or tail? How and where will you publish it? Will you create a piece of writing, a post or a product page, a video tutorial or an infographic?

    Search intent

    Digging into search intent is key here: you have to discover what a searcher actually wants or needs. You’re not just looking at keywords. You’re also looking at the underlying goals of what a searcher wants to know, do or buy. Your content should provide a solution to the searcher’s “problem”. This is also known as content design.

    How to do keyword research in 10 steps

    There are 10 crucial steps to follow when carrying out keyword research. We’ll guide you through the process, and give you practical tips so you can conduct your own keyword research:

    1. Think about your mission and determine your SEO goals

      Before you start, think about your mission. Reflect on questions such as: What is the main goal of your business or organization? What makes it special? Who exactly are you trying to reach? And, what promises do you make on your website? Take your time and literally write down your mission. Once you’re able to answer these questions in detail, you’ll have taken the first and most important step in developing your keyword strategy.

      What if you’re in a competitive market?
      The market you’re in determines whether you’ll be able to rank high with your chosen keywords. Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. It’ll be hard to compete with these companies, because they have huge budgets for marketing in general and SEO in particular.

      If you’re launching into a competitive market, your best bet is to start out small. Once you ‘own’ a small part of that niche and become a bigger name in your business area, you could try to level up and sell your cruises to a larger (more general) audience. Your mission will then become more general as well. The scope of your business mission should align with your SEO goals, too. Be realistic about what kind of rankings you can achieve with the size of your business, and focus on what will help you achieve your mission.

      An example
      Let’s say you sell cruises to Hawaii. You offer great facilities for children, which makes your cruises especially suitable for parents with younger kids. If there are no other family-friendly cruises to Hawaii, you will stand out from the crowd. It will make your service unique. So it would be smart to make this your mission, your niche – because this is what you have to offer your audience.

    2. Make a list of keywords you think people might search for

      The second step is creating a list of your keywords, preferably in a spreadsheet (like Google Sheets or Excel). With your mission in mind, try to get into the heads of your desired audience. What will these people be looking for? What kind of search terms could they be using, while looking for your amazing service or product? Which of their “problems” does your product solve? Write down as many answers as possible. If your mission is clear, you will have a pretty clear image of your niche and unique selling points (the things that set your business apart from others). These are the search terms you want to be found for.

      An example of how your keyword research sheet might look in Excel

    3. Research the keywords you’ve come up with

      After you’ve created your first list, it’s time to dive deeper into your keywords. Luckily, there are keyword research tools that make your keyword research easier.

      One of the easiest tool to use is Google itself. Google the keywords you came up with and check what Google suggests while you’re typing. Those are the questions people actually asked Google! You can also check out the “related searches” on Google’s results page. Also have a look at our related keyphrases tool in Yoast SEO or Answer the public.


      These tools will provide you with all kinds of variations of your keyphrases, synonyms and related keyphrases. Check them out and add the relevant keyphrases to your list.

    4. Use your research to find long-tail variants of your keywords

      When people start out with keyword research, they tend to focus on very popular “head” terms. Unfortunately, those head keywords are mostly taken by large businesses. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, get less search traffic, but there’s less competition too. Therefore it’s easier for you to rank on those keywords. Moreover, long-tail keywords even have a higher conversion value, as they focus more on a specific product or topic.

      An example
      A long-tail keyword often is longer and more focused than a head term. If your head term is [puppy training], a long-tail keyword could be [positive puppy training for Labradoodles in Amsterdam]. Using the tools mentioned in step 3 will also help you find more long-tail keywords. You might also find some less-searched variants of your keywords, you can benefit from using these too.

      Use both!
      Don’t forget to add the long-tail keywords and your keyword variants to your spreadsheet too. Put the head terms in the first column and add (multiple) columns for long-tail keywords and variants. This will also help you create a proper site structure later on. The more long-tail your search term is, the further down into your site structure its landing page belongs.

      An example of how your keyword research sheet might look with long-tail keywords added

    5. Analyze your competition for those keywords

      Whether you should go after long-tail keywords largely depends on your competition. If the competition in your niche is high, you’ll have a hard time ranking on competitive head terms. If you have little competition, you’ll be able to rank for more of your head terms. So you’ll need to do some benchmarking for SEO.

      Google the keywords that came out of your keyword research. Start with your most ‘head’ term. Check out the search engine result page (SERP). These are the websites you’ll be competing against once you optimize your content for such a keyword. Take a closer look: Do you see professional websites? Company websites? Are you ‘equal’ to these companies? Does your website fit among these sites? Is your company of similar size and does it have as much influence in your niche?


      It’s harder to rank when you’re competing against sites with strong brand names, like Royal Caribbean and Princess in the example above. If brands are known from TV or radio commercials, your chances to rank high will become even smaller. But it won’t hurt to take a look at their content. Is the content well written and well optimized? If your competition has poor content, you might have a chance to outrank them!

      Check Google Ads
      You can also take a look at ads in Google. Are there any? If you have a Google Ads account you can check the pay-per-click value of each search term using their Keyword Planner tool. Search terms that have a high pay-per-click are usually also harder to rank for in the organic results.

      Make notes!
      Make sure to make notes in your spreadsheet about your findings for the keywords you’ve investigated! You can use colors like red, yellow, and green to mark which keywords are more or less competitive if you find that easier than writing notes.

    6. Take a closer look at search intent for each keyword

      Today’s SEO strategies should, for the most part, revolve around answering the questions people have or providing the best solution for their “problem”. Whenever someone enters a search query into a search engine, they are on a quest for something. Every type of question needs a specific answer.

      Learn about search intent
      Try to find out which intent your audience has when they type a certain keyphrase into Google. Do they have an informational intent (try to find information on a specific topic), navigational intent (want to access a specific website), commercial intent (want to research something before buying), or transactional intent (looking to buy something right now)?

      You can learn more about the search intent of certain queries by looking closely at the type of pages that already rank for that query. Do you mostly see product pages? Or a lot of informational blog posts? Do you see videos? Or is it a mix? These are all hints to what Google assumes the search intent of a certain query is. This post explains how to use the search results to create great content that matches the right intent.

      Find out which kinds of intent apply to your keyphrases and, again, add your findings to your spreadsheet!

      How your keyword research sheet might look with search intent added

    7. Determine a keyword strategy – which keywords will you target?

      Based on the data you’ve collected now, you can determine a keyword strategy. If you’ve followed the steps above, you should have a spreadsheet with a substantial amount of keyphrases, plus information about the competition and the search intent of your audience for those keyphrases.

      Now think about this question: How does my website hold up compared to the websites in the SERPs? Are you of equal size and marketing budget? Then go ahead and focus on those head terms. If not: try more long-tail keywords first. Focusing on a whole bunch of long-tail keywords combined could very well attract a lot of traffic. Once you’ve managed to rank for those long-tail keywords, aiming for more head terms will become easier.

      When you’ve decided where to jump in, think about the type of content: What was the search intent for my keyphrases? What is my audience looking for? But also, which content can I create that isn’t there yet, and how can I stand out in terms of quality or providing solutions? This will help you decide on the type of content you’re going to create.

    8. Create optimized landing pages for your keywords

      In theory, this step is out of the scope of keyword research itself. Nevertheless, creating awesome landing pages is essential if you want to get traffic to your website. So, you’ll need to build optimized landing pages for your search terms. You don’t have to create all these pages immediately – it can be a long-term effort. Your keyword strategy will help you prioritize.

      Cornerstone content
      For your most important keyphrases you’ll create cornerstone content articles; articles that provide the best possible content about that keyword – authoritative and all-encompassing. All your supporting long-tail articles should link to your cornerstone content pages. This is part of your internal linking strategy, which Yoast SEO Premium can help you implement. You can also use our SEO workout: the Cornerstone content approach to build a strong internal linking strategy in a few easy steps.

    9. Evaluate if your keyword strategy is working and keep improving

      Once you’ve done a thorough analysis of your chances to rank on each specific term, published some amazing articles (and optimized them accordingly), you should wait a little. Check out your rankings. Does your article pop up? Did it hit the first page of Google’s SERPs? Or is it hidden away on page 2 or 3? Make sure to evaluate your results in the SERPs.

      There are various ways to check how your content is performing in the search results. The simplest way is to Google the terms you’ve optimized your articles for. Another option is to use Google Search Console to find out which queries you’re ranking for. While the Google Search Console method is a bit more complicated, it can be a great way to find new opportunities! And finally, a third method is to use a keyword tracking tool to monitor your rankings; you can do this easily using the integrated Wincher features in the Yoast SEO plugin.

      However you do it, it’s always a good idea to check if your efforts are paying off. If you’re not able to rank on the first page, try to write another article, focused on an (even) more long-tail keyword. Make it a little bit more specific, more niche. And see how that goes. Evaluate again. Continue this process until you hit that first page of the SERPs!

    10. Refresh your keyword research and your content regularly

      As time goes on, things will change. Your audience may start using different words to search for what they want, so you might need to add new keywords to your sheet. And with the rise of generative AI, the competitive landscape is bound to change, either making it easier or harder to target particular keywords. Who knows? Blogging might not be relevant anymore.

      When you look at the situation from year to year, a lot can change. That’s why it’s important to reevaluate and refresh your keyword research once in a while. Take the time to update your sheet with the latest information. And don’t forget to keep your content fresh and up-to-date, too!

    Quick keyword research

    In an ideal world, you would do your keyword research, make a beautiful spreadsheet and create landing pages for each one. Your site structure would be flawless, and you’d blog and write every day, making your site rank higher and higher in Google. But we live in the real world.

    Of course, your keyword research will not always be as extensive. And some posts or articles aren’t written as part of an awesome strategy, but just because the topic was in the news or something inspired you to write it. That’s just how these things work. But this doesn’t have to be a problem.

    If you’re writing something that doesn’t exactly fit your strategy, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make that content rank. You could still use it to rank for something related to the terms in the list of your keyword strategy. Use the tools mentioned in step 3 and Google Trends to quickly check which keyword you’d like to rank for. At least, take some time to think about how to make your article or blog fit your strategy. After all, if you are writing valuable content, you might as well make it rank! You can find more tips on how to do keyword research on the fly in our focus keyword article.

    Tips for keyword research

    This all might sound pretty straight-forward, but we know it’s a lot of work and easier said than done. When put into practice, you might bump into some common issues or questions. Here we’ll give you some tips to make it work!

    Pro-tip: Want us to guide you through keyword research step-by-step? With videos, quizzes and other training material? Take a look at our keyword research training in Yoast SEO academy and let us help you!

    Prioritize your keyword list

    How many keywords should you target? Well, we can’t tell you the exact number of keywords you should have, but we can tell you that you need a lot of them – as many as you can think of. However, more than 1000 keywords is probably too many! Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords.

    But there’s no need to create pages for all of these straight away. You can add content bit by bit. Think about which keywords you want to rank for now (perhaps the more long-tail ones?) and which ones aren’t as important right away. Understand your priorities and plan the creation of your content.

    Keep reading: Managing a growing blog: content planning »

    A focus keyphrase and its synonyms only need one page

    In the past, each of the keywords you wanted to be found for got its own landing page. Today, however, search engines are so smart that they mostly use search intent to give searchers the best answer to their questions. The page that answers those questions best will rank on top. Search engines also understand subtle differences between keywords, so you don’t have to create landing pages for every subtle variation of a keyword, like synonyms.

    That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use synonyms! In fact, synonyms can really improve the readability of your copy, so make sure to use them. Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help you with this; it allows you to optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases. You can fill in synonyms of your keyphrase under the SEO analysis tab in your Yoast SEO sidebar. If you want to fill in more than one, you can separate them by commas. When it comes to adding related keyphrases to your text, we have an awesome feature you will want to know more about. So let’s discuss that next!

    Glossary of terms

    In the following paragraphs, we use a few words that you might not be familiar yet. Such as related keyphrases, word forms and exact focus keyphrase. Don’t worry! We wrote a glossary of terms that can help you out when you’re not quite sure what we mean when we use a specific term.

    Add related keyphrases to help Google understand your text

    Related keyphrases are words and concepts that deepen and broaden the understanding of your focus keyphrase. They even help Google better understand the topic you’re talking about. By using related keyphrases in your text, you can paint a complete picture of your focus keyphrase in the article you’re writing.

    You might be able to think of a few related keyphrases, but we think using proper keyword data is the safest bet. That’s why we have a Semrush integration in Yoast SEO. It suggests related keyphrases and even shows you the search volume and trend for every keyphrase. As Semrush is one of the leading SEO and marketing software companies in the world, this will help you find the right related keyphrases for your content.

    You can find this feature in the Yoast SEO sidebar and meta box. Simply go to the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button underneath the ‘Focus keyphrase’ field and click it. The first time you click this, you will need to connect your Semrush account or create an account and authorize Yoast SEO to use it. After you’ve connected your account, you will be able to click the ‘Get related keyphrases’ button and find related keyphrases right away:

    Find related keyphrases without having to leave your post editor

    The related keyphrase feature is available for free, but if you use Premium you can also use those related keyphrases to optimize your content with the related keyphrase feature. This feature allows you to add related keyphrases or synonyms to a field in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box. That way you can easily optimize your content for multiple keyphrases and synonyms. If you want to know more about this integration, we have an article on how to use the Semrush related keyphrase feature.

    Check out results for singular and plural keywords

    Should you aim for the singular or the plural keyword? Well, this depends on the query. As Google learns more about the search intent of your query, it is able to better guess what you’re looking for. For instance, if you search for book, you get different results than if you search for books. Apparently Google thinks that in the first case you’re looking for a definition, in the second case it believes you’re intending to buy a book. So make sure you know what you offer on your page and that it fits with the query and results Google gives on that query.

    Yoast SEO Premium has word form support, so it automatically detects all the different forms of your focus keyphrase (known as keyword stemming). So, you no longer have to optimize your post for a specific word form. Optimizing your post has become a much more natural process. However, there are reasons why you’d still want to optimize for a very specific word form of a keyword. In this case, you can put your focus keyphrase in quotes: “best books ever”. Yoast SEO will now only take that exact focus keyphrase into account when checking your content.

    Use a keyphrase only once

    Beware, you shouldn’t use your exact focus keyword more than once. If you do, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization. Google has a hard time distinguishing between content that’s very alike. Therefore it might rank very similar posts or pages lower.

    Not sure if you used a focus keyphrase before? The post why and how to export your focus keyphrases with Yoast SEO Premium will help you get an overview of the focus keyphrases you’ve used before and on what page. Also, Yoast SEO gives you a warning in the SEO analysis if you use one twice.

    Did you find out you’ve already used the same or very similar keywords or keyphrases on various posts and pages? Then, it probably makes sense to audit your content and perhaps merge/delete/redirect some of it. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to solve keyword cannibalization issues.

    Ready? Start writing!

    Keyword research should be the start of any sustainable SEO strategy. The result will be a long list of keywords for which you’d like to be found. But the hardest part is still ahead: writing all that content. You should write articles and blog posts on every single keyword you would like to be found for. That’s quite a challenge. Check out our ultimate guide to SEO copywriting to get started!

    Read on: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

  • Site structure: the ultimate guide

    Your site needs to have a defined structure because, without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.

    Table of contents

    What is site structure, and why is it important?

    Site structure refers to organizing and arranging a website’s pages and content. It defines the information hierarchy within the site and serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers. A well-structured site facilitates easy navigation, enhances user experience, and helps search engines like Google understand and effectively index the site’s content. This, in turn, can improve the site’s performance by making it easier for users to find and engage with the content. Ultimately, an optimized site structure helps achieve higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates.

    Importance for usability

    The structure of your website significantly impacts the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, they’ll not likely become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.

    Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to grasp what you’re writing about or selling instantly.

    Importance of your site structure for SEO

    A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:

    a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site

    The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site is mainly about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

    b. It prevents you from competing with yourself

    On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your content for high rankings. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you instead of against you.

    c. It deals with changes on your website

    The products you sell in your shop will likely evolve. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.

    Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know the best strategy to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of the Yoast SEO academy. Access to Yoast SEO academy is included in the price of Yoast SEO Premium. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!

    How to set up the structure of your site

    So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure and then explain how to achieve this for your site.

    What’s an ideal site structure?

    Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: How should you organize your site if you’re starting from scratch? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with several levels:

    1. Homepage
    2. Categories (or sections)
    3. Subcategories (only for larger sites)
    4. Individual pages and posts

    The homepage should be at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file your content under one of these categories. You can divide these sections or categories into subcategories if your site is larger. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your pages and posts.

    ideal site structure
    An ideal site structure looks like a pyramid. On top, you’ll find the homepage and, right below, the main sections or categories, possibly followed by subcategories. On the ground, you’ll find all the individual posts and pages.

    Your homepage

    On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:

    1. Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
    2. You show Google that these pages are important.

    Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which pages are essential to your business.

    Beware not to link too many pages from your homepage, which will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, you can do many other things. Read our article on homepage SEO to find out what.

    In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.

    The menu

    First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website, and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.

    Furthermore, putting everything in just one menu is not always necessary. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, creating a second menu is perfectly fine.

    For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and, in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that relate to the visitor’s account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.

    ebay's top menu with a colorful logo, links to various sections on the site and a big search bar
    eBay has multiple ways to start navigating from the homepage

    Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. They will become less valuable for your users and search engines if you do.

    Read about optimizing your website’s menu here, or enroll in our site structure training that includes many examples!

    Adding breadcrumbs to your pages can make your site’s structure even clearer. Breadcrumbs are clickable links, usually at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve your site’s user experience and SEO, as you can read in our guide on breadcrumbs.

    You can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins for your WordPress site. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.

    Taxonomies

    WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content; other CMSs have similar systems. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things — website pages, in this case — that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic can find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.

    Categories

    You should divide your site’s blog posts or products into several categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and sell shoes, you can divide this category into subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. These subcategories contain products, in this case, shoes, of that specific type.

    Adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every page you write. Add your main categories to your site’s menu when implementing your category structure.

    Read more: Using category and tag pages for SEO »

    Tags

    Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly concerns structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might interest a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.

    Keep reading: What is the difference between tags and categories? »

    Try not to create too many tags. You’re not structuring anything if you add a new unique tag to every post or article. Ensure each tag is used at least twice, and your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.

    Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Ensure your tags are available to visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for visitors wanting to read more about the same topic.

    Read on: Tagging post properly for users and SEO »

    Contextual internal linking

    Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, navigation, and taxonomies. On the other hand, contextual links are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.

    Your most important pages are often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.

    Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always uses the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to value and rank your pages properly. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.

    Contextual linking for blogs

    For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — your cornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.

    The following metaphor might help you understand this principle:

    Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. Some roads (links) lead to these smaller towns, but not as much as the big cities.

    internal links metaphor roads

    Keep on reading: Internal linking why and how »

    Contextual linking opportunities for online shops

    Contextual internal linking works differently on an online store with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.

    There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to the product pages for your ecommerce SEO:

    1. link from a product bundle page to the individual products
    2. a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
    3. a ‘customers also bought’ section
    4. a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.

    Learn all about setting up a great (internal linking) structure for your online store with our Site structure training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription. We’ve included lots of examples from real websites!

    Landing pages

    Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your regular pages.

    Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.

    Search intent

    When setting up your site structure, you must consider search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?

    Consider different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.

    When you have an idea of the search intent, ensuring your landing page fits your audience’s search intent is essential. Pages can answer multiple search intents, but you need a clear view of at least your most important pages.

    Read all about search intent and why it’s important for SEO.

    Cornerstone content pages

    Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic; their main goal is not to sell products.

    Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when discussing cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.

    This article explains what cornerstone content is and how to create it. Want to set up your cornerstone content strategy? Our Internal linking SEO workout makes the cornerstone content approach easy to implement!

    Product landing pages

    Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, whereas product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.

    You want to rank with these pages, meaning they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up of thousands of words, a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.

    Michiel listed all the essentials of your product landing page here.

    Maintaining your site structure

    Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority in everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you must do it, or your website might become messy. To prevent that from happening, you need to fix your site structure and keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should be part of your long-term SEO strategy.

    When your business goal or website changes, your menu must also change. Planning things visually will pay off when you start thinking about restructuring your site. Make a flowchart.

    Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid but don’t seem relevant to your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.

    Read more: Optimizing your website menu »

    Rethink your taxonomy

    Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories, and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode.

    Do your product categories and subcategories provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or you wrote many blog posts on one subject and very few on others.

    If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.

    If you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.

    Keep reading: The structure of a growing blog »

    Clean up outdated content

    You might be able to update and republish some outdated articles to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated, but no one reads it anyway, you might delete it. This could clean up your site nicely.

    What you should know, in that case, is that you should never delete a page or article without thinking. If Google cannot find the page, it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and, thus, bad for your SEO.

    Be smart about this! You need to redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting properly so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!

    Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.

    Avoid keyword cannibalization

    Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you optimize your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, making both pages rank lower.

    You’ll have some work to do if you suffer from keyword cannibalization. In short, you should research the performance of your content and probably merge and redirect some of it. When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This allows you to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.

    Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.

    Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. This tool can enhance your site structure by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links! You can identify your cornerstones by finding them in the column with the pyramid icon.

    Quickly see which posts have internal links pointing to them with the text link counter in Yoast SEO

    Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!

    internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO sidebar
    The internal linking suggestions even include other content types

    Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider cornerstone content on your site. Those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.

    Read on: How to use Yoast SEO for your cornerstone content strategy »

    The importance of site structure

    As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. A good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top and keep your website from growing out of control!

    Want to improve your site structure but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy, our Site structure training, and our SEO workouts!

    Keep on reading: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

    The post Site structure: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

  • SEO basics: What is crawlability?

    Do you want to outrank your competition? Then basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must. Of course, you also need to create great and relevant content for your site. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care of (almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, it’s good to understand one of the most important concepts of technical SEO: crawlability.

    What is the crawler again?

    A search engine like Google consists of three things: a crawler, an index, and an algorithm. A crawler follows the links on the web. It does this 24/7! Once a crawler comes to a website, it saves the HTML version in a gigantic database called the index. This index is updated every time the crawler comes around your website, and finds a new or revised version of it. Depending on how important Google deems your site and the number of changes you make on your website, the crawler comes around more or less often.

    Fun fact: A crawler is also called a robot, a bot, or a spider! And Google’s crawler is sometimes referred to as Googlebot.

    Read more: SEO basics: what does Google do »

    And what is crawlability?

    Crawlability has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your website. Luckily, you can block crawlers on your site. If your website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re saying to Google’s crawler: “Do not come here.” As a result, your site or the respective page won’t turn up in the search results. At least, in most cases.

    So how do you block crawlers? There are a few things that could prevent Google from crawling (or indexing) your website:

    • If your robots.txt file blocks the crawler, Google will not come to your website or specific web page.
    • Before crawling your website, the crawler will take a look at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains a status code. If this status code says that a page doesn’t exist, Google won’t crawl your website. Want to know more? We’ll explain all about this HTTP header tip in the module of our Technical SEO training!
    • If the robots meta tag on a specific page blocks the search engine from indexing that page, Google will crawl that page, but won’t add it to its index.

    How crawlers impact the environment

    Yes, you read that right. Crawlers have a substantial impact on the environment. Here’s how: Crawlers can come to your site multiple times a day. Why? They want to discover new content, or check if there are any new updates. And every time they visit our site, they will crawl everything that looks like a URL to them. This means a URL is often crawled multiple times per day.

    This is unnecessary, because you’re unlikely to make multiple changes on a URL on any given day. Not to mention, almost every CMS output URLs that don’t make sense that crawlers can safely skip. But instead of skipping these URLs, crawlers will crawl them, again and again, every time they come across one. All this unnecessary crawling takes up tons of energy resources which is harmful for our planet.

    Improve your site’s crawlability with Yoast SEO Premium

    To ensure you’re not wasting energy, it’s important to stay on top of your site’s crawlability settings. Luckily, you don’t have to do all the work yourself. Using tools such as Yoast SEO Premium will make it easier for you!

    So how does it work? We have a crawl settings feature that removes unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets from your website. This will make crawlers crawl your website more efficiently. Don’t worry, you’re still in control! Because the feature also allows you to decide per type of asset whether you want to actually remove the URL or not. If you want to know more, we’ll explain all about the crawl settings here.

    Want to learn more about crawlability?

    Although crawlability is a basic part of technical SEO (it has to do with all the things that enable Google to index your site), it’s already pretty advanced stuff for most people. Still, it’s important that you understand what crawlability is. You might be blocking – perhaps even without knowing! – crawlers from your site, which means you’ll never rank high in Google. So, if you’re serious about SEO, crawlability should matter to you.

    An easy way to learn is by doing our technical SEO trainings. These SEO courses will teach you how to detect technical SEO issues and solve them (with our Yoast SEO plugin). We also have a training dedicated to crawlability and indexability! Good to know for Premium users: Yoast SEO Academy is already included at no extra cost in your Premium subscription!

    Keep reading: Bot traffic: What it is and why you should care about it »

    The post SEO basics: What is crawlability? appeared first on Yoast.

  • The ultimate guide to content SEO

    Content SEO is a key part of any SEO strategy. Without content, it’s impossible for your site to rank in search engines. It’s, therefore, crucial to write and structure quality content! This ultimate guide covers the most important areas of content SEO. Read on if you want to learn how to create content that ranks.

    Table of contents


    Quality content matters now more than ever!

    Have you heard about Google’s helpful content update? From now on, the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings.

     

    We know that creating high-quality content isn’t easy. But our Premium SEO analysis can help! It’s just as smart as Google, helping you create rich and helpful content in a natural way and improving your rankings!

     

    Improve your content with Yoast SEO Premium

    What is content SEO?

    Content SEO refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines. It includes everything, from writing to structuring the content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.

    Why is content SEO important in the first place? Because search engines like Google read your website, so the words you use determine whether or not your site will rank in their results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed, with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes your site rank in Google should also be covered. But without quality content your site doesn’t stand a chance in the search engines.

    1. Keyword research

    What is keyword research?

    Keyword research is basically the steps you take to create an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Every content SEO strategy should begin with keyword research, because you have to know what your audience is searching for if you want to generate traffic. Keyword research helps you to discover the terms you should be aiming to rank for.

    Keyword research has four steps:

    • Write down the mission of your business;
    • Make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for;
    • Look at search intent;
    • Create landing pages for these keywords.

    If you do your keyword research right, you should have a clear overview of the terms people use and the terms for which you want the pages on your site to be found. This overview will serve as a guide for writing content on your website.

    Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

    Why is keyword research so important for SEO content?

    Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. At Yoast, we regularly encounter clients who use particular words when talking about their products, while their customers use entirely different words. Writing and optimizing SEO content for words that people don’t use doesn’t make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you are using the same words as your target audience, therefore making the effort of optimizing your website worthwhile.

    Terms we use in keyword research

    Keywords and keyphrases

    We tend to use the word ‘keyword‘ all the time. However, it doesn’t have to be just one word. After all, ‘WordPress SEO’ is a keyword, as is ‘Google Analytics plugin.’ So you can have keywords containing multiple words!

    Long-tail keywords

    The longer (and more specific) a search term is, the easier it will be to rank for that term. Keywords that are more specific (and usually longer) are usually referred to as long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and focus more on a niche.

    How many keywords?

    It is very hard to give an exact number of keywords you should focus on. You just need to have a lot – as many as you can come up with. More than 1,000 keywords is probably too many though!

    Even if you’re a reasonably small business, you’ll probably end up with a couple of hundred keywords. But you don’t have to create pages for all of these immediately. The great thing about having a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is that you can gradually add content. Think about what keywords you would like to rank for right away, and which ones aren’t immediately important. Determine what your priorities are and plan the creation of your content.

    Head or tail?

    Classifying your keywords is essential. Some keywords are very common and competitive (head), while others are long-tail. Decide which are your most critical, high-level keywords – the ones that generate sufficient traffic for your website and best fit your business. You’ll probably only have a few of these general keywords for your business, the rest will be more down the tail. In the next section, we’ll give more in-depth information on long-tail keywords (and the importance of these keywords).

    Tip: Make sure your homepage and the pages one level beneath that are optimized for the most common keywords! Content that’s focused on long-tail keywords (and therefore more niche) should be on the tail end of your site.

    Keyword intent and search intent

    As you’re doing keyword research, it really pays off to think about the search intent of users. Are they looking for information, or do they want to buy something? What is their goal when they enter your keyword as a search term? This goal is otherwise known as keyword intent. For some keywords, it’s pretty clear, like [buy leather sofa], or [how to train your puppy]. But it’s not always that simple.

    Four types of intent

    There are four types of intent:

    • Navigational intent: People want to visit a specific website, but rather than entering the URL, they’re entering a term into a search engine.
    • Informational intent: People are trying to find an answer to a particular question or information on a specific topic.
    • Commercial intent: People want to buy something in the near future and are doing research before making a purchase.
    • Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.

    Search engines are always trying to answer the exact needs people have, and they’re getting better at it too. So, put simply, if 95% of the people searching for [change car tire] have informational intent, and you’re optimizing for transactional intent to sell tires, you’re probably not going to rank.

    Check the SERPs

    You can get a wealth of information from the results pages when you’re doing keyword research. If you want to find out what the intent is of people using your keywords, simply google those keywords and take a good look at the search results. Then, try to create content that answers the specific need that you distill from the results for each keyword. Tip: Read more about how to use the search results to create content for the right intent here.

    Keep reading: What is search intent? »

    Keyword research tools you can use

    There are multiple free and premium tools available to help you with your keyword research. Yoast SEO comes with a Semrush integration that gives suggestions for related keyphrases, including search volume trends. Of course, this is not a full keyword research tool. But it can help you gain valuable insights, and find high-performing keywords! For other tools, please check out our article about keyword research tools.

    Adapting your keyword strategy

    Your keyword strategy shouldn’t be static. It should change and evolve alongside your company and website. It should evolve and grow with you. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong.

    Stay on top of the changes in your company, and adapt your strategy simultaneously. If your online shop starts selling new products, extend your list with more keywords. If you’re aiming for new markets, it’s vital that your keywords are aimed at these new markets as well.

    There are several keyword strategies to adopt. One of them is to try and rank for long-tail keywords first, then aim at more general keywords. But you could also start by focusing on general keywords before aiming for more long-tail ones. You can zoom in and pursue more niche activities, broaden your approach, adding more content on different things, or you can do both simultaneously.

    2. Site structure

    The second important aspect of content SEO is the structure of your site. First, I’ll explain why site structure is critical, then I’ll show you what an ideal site structure looks like. I will also give you tips on how to (quickly) improve your site structure without completely disrupting the core of your website.

    Why is site structure important for content SEO?

    There are two main reasons why site structure is an important ranking factor and therefore imperative for building SEO content:

    a. A good structure helps Google ‘understand’ your site

    The way your site is structured gives Google significant clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good site structure will, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

    By creating such a structure, you can use existing content that has attracted links from others to help your other pages rank too. Your site’s structure will help spread some of that link juice to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, this means you can use high-quality content you’ve written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too.

    b. A good structure makes sure you aren’t competing with your own SEO content

    You will probably have multiple articles about similar topics on your site. At Yoast, for example, we write about SEO. If we wrote eight articles about SEO, Google wouldn’t know which one is the most important. That’s why we used our site structure to clarify this. If we hadn’t, we’d be competing with our own articles for Google’s top spot. So if you solve problems like this by using a sound internal linking structure, the result will be higher rankings overall.

    The ideal site structure

    Ideally, you should structure your site like a pyramid. At the top is your homepage. On your homepage, you link to some other pages (such as category pages). These pages, in turn, link to even more pages.

    In an effective content SEO strategy, your keyword strategy and the way you structure your site work together. In a proper keyword strategy, you’ll have thought about common, competitive keywords as well as long-tail (and niche) search terms. You should make a similar dichotomy in your site structure. Pages that focus on common search terms should appear high in your pyramid, while pages that are optimized for long-tail keywords should appear in a lower part of your structure. And don’t forget to let the long-tail pages at the bottom link to the pages higher in the pyramid!

    Read on: The ultimate guide to site structure »

    Practical tips on improving your site structure

    If you’re serious about content SEO, you’ll most likely already have a live website. So it may be a bit late to set up your site’s structure in an ideal pyramid-like way. Don’t despair – there are still plenty of things you can do to improve your site’s structure and your SEO content.

    Decide upon cornerstone content

    You should focus your efforts on cornerstone articles. These are the articles that you’re most proud of, and that fit the mission of your website best. You want to rank for these articles the most. Fun fact: This ultimate guide is one of our cornerstones!

    If you haven’t decided which of your articles are the most important yet, start thinking about that now. Make these articles the best ones on your site. Give them extra TLC and update them regularly.

    Keep on reading: What is cornerstone content »

    Once you’ve decided upon your precious cornerstones, make sure you link from all your ‘tail’ articles to those cornerstones. That way, Google will know which articles to rank highest. You can read all about this in our article about incorporating cornerstones into your site structure. Good to know: Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced internal linking tool that automatically suggests relevant articles to link from.

    Pro tip: You can use our cornerstone content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to check on all your cornerstone content pages, see how many internal links they’re getting, and quickly add more if necessary.

    Use tags (but not too many)

    Your site will also benefit from adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure – at least, Google will understand it better. They group your articles about similar topics. Don’t overdo it, though. Some people have more tags than articles. Using too many tags will lead to a confusing and poorly-structured site.

    Avoid duplicate content

    The same SEO content can turn up at multiple places on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you still get the content you came for. But a search engine has to choose something to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice. And what about other sites that want to link to your product? Chances are that some of them will link to the first URL, while others will link to the second.

    However, if you make sure that all these duplicate posts link to the same URL, your chances of ranking top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. In other words: Canonicalization is the solution to duplicate content. You can configure the canonical URL in the advanced tab of Yoast SEO.

    Remove old SEO content

    Should you keep old content? That depends. You have three options: update, redirect, or merge. If the content on a page is outdated, remove it! But what about the valuable links to that page? After all, you want to make sure that you still benefit from these links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore. That’s where the second option comes in: redirect.

    Redirecting pages is easy if you have our Yoast SEO Premium plugin, which can help you take care of redirects. Preferably, you redirect the old URL (301) to the new and updated page or product. You can also redirect to a related page if there is no replacement. For example, the category page of the specific product, or, as a very last resort, your homepage. This way, the (outdated) page won’t interfere with your site structure anymore.

    Deal with orphaned content

    The term ‘orphaned content’ refers to articles that don’t have any links from your other articles or posts. Because of that, these articles are hard to find, both by Google and by your users. What’s more, Google will consider this type of content to be less important! So if an article is important to you, you should make it clear to Google (and your visitors) by linking to that particular article from other (related) content. Read more about solving the problem of orphaned articles in our article about orphaned content.

    Pro tip: Use our orphaned content SEO workout in Yoast SEO Premium to quickly find and fix pages with no incoming internal links.

    Deal with content cannibalization

    Once you’ve been writing content for a while, you might have dozens of articles on any given topic. If these articles are kind of saying the same thing, search engines and users might get confused. Not to mention the fact that your content might compete against itself in the search engines. This is called keyword cannibalization. It’s not inherently bad, but it’s something you need to take a look at. Are your articles performing as well as they should, or is the competition hurting the chances at a higher ranking? Luckily, it’s not hard to find and fix keyword cannibalization.

    3. Copywriting for content SEO

    The third and final aspect of a successful content SEO strategy is copywriting. Two very important things to remember: Write articles that are attractive to read, and that will make your audience want to stay on your site. However, you shouldn’t forget to make your SEO content attractive for Google. Just don’t go too far by optimizing your content so overtly that it becomes terrible to read. At Yoast, we suggest optimizing your text for search without adversely affecting the originality of your idea or the readability of your text.

    Read more: The ultimate guide to SEO copywriting »

    Start with an original idea

    The first requirement for high-quality copywriting is to write original content. Your post or article should be ‘fresh,’ new, and original. It has to be different from all the other posts and articles that are already on the internet. Plus, it should be content that people want to read.

    If you did your keyword research well, you now have a long list of terms that you want to be found for. This list can be a guide for you to choose from. A keyword isn’t necessarily a topic, though. You should make sure to come up with an original idea for your blog post – an idea in which the desired focus keyword has a prominent place.

    But don’t worry! Original SEO content doesn’t mean brand new content. Giving your (professional) opinion on a particular topic also counts as original content. Because your personal angle to a story will make your content unique and original. Of course, if your story is completely new, that automatically means it’s original.

    Think about your audience

    If you want to write original content, you should think about your audience and who they are. Also, ask yourself:

    • What do you want to tell your audience?
    • What will be the main message of your article?
    • Can you tell the purpose of your article?
    • What do you want your audience to do after they’ve read your article? (Do you want them to engage, buy your products/service, or read more posts?)

    Thinking about these questions will help you to come up with an original idea for your post or article.

    Content design and content SEO

    Content design is a process that helps you produce content based on actual user needs. It doesn’t just help you figure out what your user wants, but it also focuses on what the user actually needs. Thinking about your content in this way will help you create content in the language and format that your user needs.

    However, content design isn’t just a technique to help you produce better content – it’s a new way of thinking about content. If you want to know more about content design, read our post on content design: a great way to make user-centered content.

    Copywriting requires readable SEO content

    A key requirement for writing high-quality content is to write content that’s easy to read. Readability is important both for your audience and for Google. After all, not only people read your articles but Google does too.

    If your text is well structured and clearly written, readers will be able to clearly understand your message. And so will Google! If your main message is clear to Google, your post is far more likely to rank well in the search engines.

    Readability is about many factors, such as text structure, sentence length and writing clear paragraphs. You can read all about the importance of readability in this post. For more tips on readability, you can read our post on how to make an article more readable.

    Content, context and search intent

    As Google is getting smarter, it starts to understand content on sites better — thanks to a lot of developments in the natural language processing sphere, like BERT. It’s no longer just about the number of times a keyword pops on a page. It also takes into account the context of those keywords, like co-occurring terms and phrases, related words and synonyms. On top of that, as mentioned before, Google is able to understand queries of users better: it tries to determine what the search intent of the user is. Are they looking for a product or just information? Which pages fit that intent best?

    All these developments mean that you should focus on more than just using your keyword often enough. It means you should also think about the words you use around it: do they make clear what topic you’re discussing? And, do you have the purpose in mind of the post or page you’re creating? Does it just provide information or are you trying to sell something, and does that align with what your users are actually looking for? Yoast SEO Premium lets you optimize your SEO content with synonyms and related keyphrases, making it even easier to add context to your articles.

    Keep reading: Blog or vlog, which one is better? »

    Optimize content for search engines and readers

    The final requirement for writing high-quality content is to make sure the content is optimized for search engines. You want your SEO content to be easily found. Findability has to do with increasing the likelihood Google will pick up your content for the result pages. It’s important that you take this final step after you’ve written an original and readable post.

    Yoast SEO helps you tweak your text just a little bit more. If you’ve written your article, focused on that original idea, and optimized the readability of your post, you should take a look at the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO. Red and orange bullets indicate which aspects of your findability need a little bit more attention. You don’t need a green bullet for every aspect though, as long as your overall score is good.

    Yoast SEO will help you to optimize your snippet preview as well. These tweaks can vastly improve your chances to be picked up by the search engines. Read more about optimizing your post in our article on how to use the content and SEO analysis.

    Conclusion on content SEO

    Content SEO is such a huge part of SEO. It encompasses every aspect of writing and structuring content on your website. Content SEO is essential. No one will read your content if it’s crappy. Like visitors, Google reads and scans your website text. Google’s algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. And we all know content is king. So, you need to write awesome SEO content, focus on the right keywords and structure your website in such a way Google understands it. It’s a lot of work, but it will pay off in the long run.

    Read on: Blogging: the ultimate guide »

    Find out how SEO fit your content is!

    As you’ve learned from this guide, there’s a lot you need to do to keep your site’s content SEO fit. Take this short test and find out if there are some aspects of content SEO you may need to improve!

    The post The ultimate guide to content SEO appeared first on Yoast.

  • Thijs de Valk is stepping down as CEO of Yoast

    As of today, Thijs de Valk is no longer the CEO of Yoast. He decided to step down and pursue other dreams. Newfold Digital and Yoast will miss him and want to thank him for his time at Yoast and for all the wonderful things he has done.

    Thijs’ career at Yoast

    Thijs was one of the first Yoasters. He joined the company in 2012 as one of the first employees. He started out as a support engineer, did SEO consultancy, was active as a marketer, and later served as our Chief Commerce Officer.

    In the last year and a half, Thijs was the CEO of Yoast. He successfully led the company through the first year post-acquisition, in which Yoast had to adapt to the Newfold structure. In addition to that, he kicked off the launch of the Yoast SEO for Shopify App, bringing a whole new CMS to our WordPress-minded company. And just a few weeks ago, he rocked the stage at WordCamp Asia.

    In search of a new business leader

    With Thijs leaving, Yoast will search for a new business leader. We hope to join forces with a superb new business leader that can help us improve our product and our impact in both WordPress and SEO.

    While seeking a new business leader, Yoast will be led by the current Executive Team consisting of Chaya Oosterbroek (COO), Marieke van de Rakt (CGO), and Derek Herman (CTO), as well as our Leadership Team consisting of Sam Alderson, Floortje Scheurwater, Jono Alderson & Taco Verdonschot. Moreover, we’ll be assisted by Jason Cross, who is SVP Product: Commerce, Presence and WordPress at Newfold Digital. And Joost de Valk is still on board, providing guidance and expertise.

    While we are sad to see Thijs leave, we are also full of hope and enthusiasm about this next phase. The current SEO climate is one of changes and excitement. There’s a lot to look forward to and to be passionate about. Team Yoast and Newfold are as committed as ever to improving WordPress and remain passionate about our mission ‘SEO for everyone’. So, onwards it is!

    The post Thijs de Valk is stepping down as CEO of Yoast appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is keyword cannibalization?

    If you optimize your articles for similar terms, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization: you’ll be ‘devouring’ your own chances to rank in Google! Especially when your site is growing, chances are your content will start competing with itself. Here, I’ll explain why keyword cannibalism can be detrimental to SEO, how you can recognize it and what to do about it.

    What is keyword cannibalization?

    Keyword cannibalization means that you have various blog posts or articles on your site that can rank for the same search query in Google. Either because the topic they cover is too similar or because you optimized them for the same keyphrase. If you optimize posts or articles for similar search queries, they’re eating away at each other’s chances to rank. Usually, Google will only show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search results for a specific query. If you’re a high authority domain, you might get 3.

    An example of keyword cannibalization

    Let’s look at an example of optimizing posts for a similar keyphrase. I wrote two posts about whether or not readability is a ranking factor. The post ‘Does readability rank?‘ was optimized for [does readability rank], while the post ‘Readability ranks!‘ was optimized for the focus keyword [readability ranking factor]. The posts had a different angle but were still very similar. For Google, it is hard to figure out which of the two articles is the most important.

    Update: Did you see the same article? That’s correct, by now we’ve fixed this cannibalization issue, but we’ve kept this example for the sake of illustration.

    Why is keyword cannibalism bad for SEO?

    If you cannibalize your own keywords, you’re competing with yourself for ranking in Google. Let’s say you have two posts on the exact same topic. In that case, Google can’t distinguish which article should rank highest for a certain query. In addition, important factors like backlinks and CTR get diluted over several posts instead of one. As a result, they’ll probably both rank lower. Therefore, our SEO analysis will give a red bullet whenever you optimize a post for a focus keyword you’ve used before.

    How to recognize it?

    Checking whether or not your site suffers from keyword cannibalism is easy. You simply do a search for your site, for any specific keyword you suspect might have multiple results. In my case, I’ll google site:yoast.com readability ranks. The first two results are the articles I suspected to suffer from cannibalization.

    Googling ‘site:domain.com “keyword” will give you an easy answer to the question if you’re suffering from keyword cannibalism or not. You can check your findings by typing the same keyword into Google (using a private browser or local search result checker like https://valentin.app/). Which of your pages do you see in the search results, and what position do they rank? Of course, if two of your pages for the same keyword are ranking #1 and #2, that’s not a problem. But do you see your articles, for example on positions 7 and 8? Then it’s time to sort things out!

    How do you resolve keyword cannibalization?

    We have an extensive article written by Joost that explains how to find and fix cannibalization issues on your site. It clearly describes the four steps you should take to solve these kind issues:

    1. Audit your content
    2. Analyze content performance
    3. Decide which ones to keep
    4. Act: merge, delete, redirect

    The first two steps will help you decide which articles to keep and which ones to merge or delete. In many cases, step 4 will consist of combining and deleting articles, but also improving the internal linking on your site.

    Merge or combine articles

    If two articles attract the same audience and tell the same story, you should combine them. Rewrite the two posts into one amazing, kickass article. That’ll help your rankings (Google loves lengthy and well-written content), and solve your keyword cannibalization problem.

    In fact, that’s exactly what we did with our two posts on readability being a ranking factor. You can use the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin to clone one of the posts and work from there. And don’t just press the delete button! Always make sure to redirect the post you delete to the one you keep. If that’s something you’re struggling with, Yoast SEO Premium can help: It makes creating redirects as easy as pie!

    Improve internal linking

    You can help Google figure out which article is most important by setting up a decent internal linking structure. This means that you should link from posts that are less important to posts that are the most important to you. That way, Google can figure out (by following links) which ones you want to pop up highest in the search engines.

    Your internal linking structure could solve a part of your keyword cannibalism problems. You should think about which article is most important to you and link from the less important long-tail articles, to your most important article. Read more about how to do this in my article about ranking with cornerstone content.

    Keyword cannibalization and online shops

    Now, if you have an online shop, you might be worried about all those product pages targeting similar keywords. For online shops, it makes sense that there are multiple pages for products that are alike. If that’s the case for you, then it’s very important to give site structure some thought. A good strategy is to link back from every product page to your category page – the page you should optimize to rank. In addition, you should keep an eye on old product pages that could potentially cannibalize more important pages. If that’s the case, simply delete and redirect those. And don’t forget that Yoast SEO Premium can help make redirecting easier with its handy redirect manager!

    Keyword cannibalism will affect growing websites

    If your site gets bigger, your chances will increase that you face keyword cannibalism on your own website. You’ll be writing about your favorite subjects and without even knowing it, you’ll write articles that end up being rather similar. That’s what happened to me too. Once in a while, you should check the keywords you want to rank for the most. Make sure to check whether you’re suffering from keyword cannibalism. You’ll probably need to make some changes in your site structure or to rewrite some articles every now and then.

    Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

    The post What is keyword cannibalization? appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is storytelling and why should you use it?

    Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Wende. She was incredibly intelligent, yet she had a hard time learning things by heart. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t memorize the planets of the solar system. One day, she asked her teacher what she should do. In response, he told her a story about the planets. A story about how the sun was lonely, and Mercury was his first friend. How Mercury fell madly in love with Venus, which made Planet Earth jealous. After telling her the story, Wende was able to remember all of the planets in the right order. Why? Because of the magic of storytelling. Wende could remember the story and with that, she could remember the planets.

    In this blog post, I’ll tell you what storytelling is and why it’s an important tool to use in the texts on your website.

    What is storytelling?

    The word storytelling speaks pretty much for itself, right? You tell stories. But storytelling is also about using stories to engage your audience or make something clearer, since stories are much easier to remember than simple facts. That’s why Wende from the story remembered the planets. In addition, stories are enjoyable; they stimulate your imagination. That’s why parents tell their children stories, and why we like to see movies and read books. People love stories!

    You can also use photos, pictures and film to help you tell a good story. You can even create your very own digital story with the use of storytelling.

    Do you want to learn all about storytelling and SEO copywriting? In our SEO copywriting training, which is part of our Yoast SEO Academy training subscription, we’ll teach you how to write copy that ranks!

    The 4 elements of storytelling

    Now you know what storytelling is. But there’s more to it than simply telling a story, otherwise anyone could write a best-selling novel. To tell a good story, you usually have to include 4 elements: a character, a problem, an action, and a solution. Let’s dive a little deeper into these.

    Every story needs a main character with a problem. Why? Because if someone is happy, there’s not really a story. Take Wende, for example. She wasn’t happy because she couldn’t memorize the planets of the solar system. That was the problem of the story. Next, you need action. Because a main character who doesn’t do anything to fix their problem isn’t fun to read about. In my example, Wende asked her teacher to help her. The teacher then told her a story, which made it easier for her to remember the planets. So, the story was the solution.

    Why use storytelling?

    Using storytelling in your blog post will – if you do it right – make your post more engaging. Your post will become something people want to read. In other words: Stories increase the attention of your audience. But they will also help you to clearly communicate your message. My story about Alice (see screenshot below) is written in order to help people understand the importance of a clean site structure, which can be a difficult subject to grasp.

    Most importantly, however, is that people remember stories. Which means that if you use storytelling, people will also remember the message of your post or even your brand. You could even inspire people to take action, like cleaning up their website or getting started with storytelling in their blog posts and presentations.

    Storytelling

    When can you use storytelling?

    Storytelling is a great and versatile tool. You can use it for posts, product pages and even presentations! I first got the idea to use storytelling for presentations in 2017, when I visited a conference and saw David JP Phillips on stage. He talked about the magical science of storytelling. I was blown away. His talk was such an inspiration for me. Two weeks later, I used this inspiration for my own talk at a WordCamp.

    In addition to presentations, you can obviously use storytelling in writing. But it’s not limited to a certain type of blog. Lots of travel blogs or personal blogs use storytelling throughout all of their posts. Geraldine DeRuiter has a really funny blog about travel and many other things. Every post is a little story. Even informational blogs could use this principle by adding an anecdote or an example. In my post about site structure and why it is important, I use the exact same story as in my presentation at the WordCamp.

    In this series

    For this series, I’ve focused on using storytelling in your writing. For instance, I’ve written about how to use storytelling in a blog post, which discusses the elements that are necessary for a good story. The post also reveals some practical tips and examples of how to integrate storytelling into your blog posts! We also dove into the connection between storytelling and SEO, and discussed how you can use storytelling on product pages.

    If you have nice examples of your own use of storytelling, or suggestions for related topics you’d like to read more about, I would love to see those!

    Read more: The complete guide to SEO copywriting »

    The post What is storytelling and why should you use it? appeared first on Yoast.

  • How to use social media to reach your audience

    Your social media endeavors need to be a part of your SEO strategy. Especially now that the younger generations (Gen Z) are using platforms like TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. This means your site’s popularity on social media ties into your SEO more than ever!

    But which social media should you focus on? With so many platforms out there, you can feel overwhelmed with choices. Don’t worry, though! You don’t have to be active everywhere. That isn’t always sustainable. And if your most loyal customers are on Twitter, and you’re focusing on Pinterest, then you miss out on many opportunities.

    Instead, decide which platform your audience uses the most, then find a rhythm that works for you and build on that. Once you’ve got your social strategy in place, it’s time to start posting! Below are some tips you can use to set up or improve your social media strategy.

    1. Keep your account alive

    The most crucial advice when using social media is that you need to keep your account alive. But what does this mean? You’ll see a lot of advice about posting daily, but that’s not always realistic, especially if you’re a small business owner.

    Our advice: keep your account alive by posting regularly and going at your own pace. If you can only post a couple of times a week, then do it. A good starting pointing is:

    Gif of woman saying be yourself, because who you are is brilliant

    People will be able to tell that you’re being genuine and fall in love with you for that. What’s more, they’ll want to continue to follow you if you’re posting genuine content that they can relate to.

    Of course, everybody needs a vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your followers. That’s why we recommend scheduling posts for the time you are away or letting people know when you’ll be back. And be sure to share some photos of your vacay!

    Save time by automating

    If you also have a blog where you write regularly, Yoast SEO Premium can help you automate some of your postings. With our Zapier integration, you can automate your social sharing and stay in control of what your social link posts look like. This integration makes it possible to automatically post to your favorite social network whenever you publish new content to your site. It saves you time without compromising on the quality of your social posts.

    For social media like Instagram and TikTok, there are also a number of platforms that you can use to stay on top of your schedule and keep all your media in one place, ready to post.

    2. Write captivating excerpts

    Depending on the type of content you want to share, you need to make sure the copy that goes with your posts is appealing enough to draw people in. There are a number of ways you can approach this. For instance, you can choose the most important sentence or the main point of the blog post you’re going to share. You could also share the introduction of the post if you feel that is captivating enough.

    Depending on the platform, you could share a story behind a photo you’re posting or the failures you’ve had when testing new products. Or maybe you just want to jump on the latest trend and apply it to your brand.

    Is it thumb-stopping?

    You want this piece of copy to get people to click on the link in your bio or read the whole caption on the platform. But the basic formula is:

    Hook: Something that is going to grab their attention.

    Pain point: What is it that your followers are struggling with?

    Solution: Well, it’s a good thing you have an answer!

    CTA: Don’t forget to ask your readers to do something.

    If you want to learn more about copywriting for social media, check out our article about social media writing tips.

    3. Diversify your posts

    Having a few solid content pillars is important. They are particularly helpful in keeping you on track with your content creation. Need some inspiration? Here are a few different types of posts you could create. Remember, you’re no longer limited to just posting photos!

    To help you out, let’s look at a few examples. First, you could share your blog posts with a link post. This is one of the most basic post types you can use:

    But don’t be afraid to change it up. Not all your social media posts need to necessarily direct people to your website. They can also be focused on informing people about a recent piece of news or simply increasing engagement on your social media platforms themselves.

    And like we said in the intro, short-form videos are huge right now. They’re a great way to give your audience a few quick tips or take your fans behind the scenes.

    @yoastseo

    Hey TikTok! #YoastSEO

    ♬ original sound – Hamilton

    To decide which posts do well on social media and which content you should make more of, you need to analyze the numbers. This could be the number of views, the number of comments, and how many times a post was shared or saved. Of course, numbers won’t mean anything if you don’t have a goal in mind. However, it’s a good rule of thumb to post more of the content that received numerous views, saves and shares.

    Speaking of diversifying your content

    At Yoast, we believe in the importance of inclusivity. In addition to diversifying when it comes to types of posts, you should also pay attention to making your content accessible and relatable, for as many people as possible. You need to show diversity to make this happen and being as visual as it is, social media is a great place for that. That being said, the topic of diversity shouldn’t be limited to your social media presence. This is a company-wide issue that you need to take seriously and nowadays is non-negotiable in both marketing and social media. Be aware of the image that you’re currently putting out there and invest time and resources into making that relatable to everyone.

    But it’s not all about visuals. You should also use inclusive language, language that avoids excluding marginalized groups of people as much as possible. You might not get all of it right in one go, but becoming aware of it and changing it as you go is a great start. Not only does inclusive language help you reach a bigger audience, but it also helps all of us move toward a more inclusive society. And you might have noticed that social media platforms are being used a lot to talk about this and create more awareness on the topics of inclusiveness and diversity. So be part of the change and use inclusive language on your socials and in your website content. If you’re not sure where to start, our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO gives you feedback on which words might be harmful and provides you with alternatives to use!

    4. Handle comments

    If you share your posts on social media, you’ll get comments. This is something many people forget about, or try to do in some cases. Because sometimes comments will be good, and sometimes they will be bad. But the comment section is also where conversations are happening. Answering questions, then following up with one of your own is a great way to keep your audience engaged.

    Don’t forget to monitor your comments!

    While you may get the odd troll in the comments, most of the time you’ll find your fans cheering you on and recommending you to their friends. There are some wonderful people in the comment section. Longtime followers can also become huge advocates for you and your brand, so make sure to have a chat with them.

    But you should handle the trolls quickly! You don’t want your comments section to become a toxic place. Your fans won’t like it, but it can also have an effect on your mental health. So make sure your comments section is a safe space.

    5. Use eye-catching photos or illustrations

    Even with all the recent updates and focus on short-form video content, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, said there is still a place for photo posts on Instagram. Just like on Facebook, where visual content is also essential. And let’s not forget Pinterest, which is all about images.

    However, you might not have a graphic designer on staff or a photography department at your disposal. Don’t worry, though! There are plenty of online tools that can help you create your posts. Just remember to use clear images that either show your products or yourself. This could either be a crisp photo or a delightful illustration. Great quality will make your post stand out in someone’s feed, which can increase the post’s engagement, saves and shares.

    Thankfully, if you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, you can check what your blog posts, product page or collections will look like before sharing them on social media. So you can easily adjust your content before posting it online. See how easy it is!

    6. Be part of the community

    If you’re not already part of a community, make one! Being active in a certain community or niche can help build allies, brand ambassadors, and new ideas. In any community, you’ll soon discover other interesting people. What’s more, talking to customers and end-users can be a great way for you to develop your product. And make sure to let people know that they are always welcome to join.

    Additionally, you can make these people fall in love with your brand quicker by giving them exclusive access to discounts, Betas or just generally behind the scenes.

    7. Add metadata

    All the social platforms are becoming their own little search engines. So in order to be found, you need to make sure that you’re including some metadata in the form of hashtags. These can help your growth immensely. For instance, if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event in your post. Everyone searching for the event will then come across it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology.

    Some people also have bots set up that retweet everything that is posted in a certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of random hashtags. Keep them relevant to your post, and make sure they are accessibility-friendly!

    Note that tags on social media work a lot differently than tags on your site. If you’re using tags on your site the same way you would on social media, take a look at this post to find out why that’s not good for your SEO.

    Conclusion

    Social media is a key aspect of every (off-page) SEO strategy. Setting up a comprehensive social media strategy can be hard. It will certainly ask for a bit of creativity, and it’ll definitely be time-consuming. But trust us when we say that it’ll be worth it! And if you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in many aspects. You just need to get into the flow of it! Good luck!

    The post How to use social media to reach your audience appeared first on Yoast.

  • What is site structure and why is it important?

    Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. Why? Because the structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines with your site’s structure. And good news: You can start improving your site structure today! In this post, you’ll read why site structure helps SEO, and we’ll give you three quick tips on how to start improving it.

    What is site structure?

    Site structure refers to how you organize your website’s content. In other words: the pages and posts on your website. These often have a variety of – related – topics, and site structure deals with how this content is grouped, linked and presented to the visitor. You can use taxonomies, like categories and tags, but also internal links, your navigation, and breadcrumbs as tools to improve your site structure. If you do this well, your users will find their way around your website more easily. Plus, Google can index your URLs better!

    Learn how to do this well. Our site structure training teaches you how to set up the best site structure for your visitors and Google!

    As your site grows, it’ll get cluttered

    As you’re writing more blog posts or add more product pages, your site will get cluttered. You need to organize it neatly to make sure that you, your visitors, and Google will be able to find what they’re looking for. But why is that? Well, let me tell you a little story.

    Once upon a time, there was this young woman. Her name is Alice. Alice gets up every morning, sits down at her desk and starts to write a beautiful story. She writes one story every day. Alice types all her stories on this beautiful old-fashioned typewriter. Whenever she’s done writing, she pulls the paper out of the machine and puts her lovely new story on her desk. As you can imagine, her desk will slowly get cluttered with all these sheets of paper. After a year of writing, she’ll have 365 sheets of paper on it. After three years of writing, she’ll have more than a thousand. Alice will not be able to find her favorite story, because of the abundance of stories on her desk.

    Conclusion: If you don’t structure your stuff neatly, your stories, blog posts and product pages will get lost. In addition, your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for, and Google will also get lost (which is bad for your SEO).

    Why is site structure important for Google – and users?

    There are three reasons why site structure is important for Google and, therefore, your chance of ranking in the search engines.

    1. Structure is a guide for Google

    The way your site is structured will give Google clues about where to find the most essential content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about and what you’re selling.

    Google crawls websites by following internal and external links, using a bot called Googlebot. By following those links, Google determines the relationship between the various pages. In other words: Your site structure is like a guide to Google, and therefore very crucial.

    2. Not competing with your content

    You probably have blog posts or articles on your site that cover the same topic. At Yoast, for example, we write a lot about SEO. We have multiple posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. But Google won’t know which of these is most important unless we ‘tell’ Google.

    A good tip is to order your content by importance. Think about Alice’s cluttered desk. She could clean up by making piles of her sheets of papers. She could order her stories by topic: bumble bees, flowers, and fairies. But, if Alice were to make these piles without any kind of structure and without putting the most beautiful stories at the top of the pile, no one would ever know which story is most important to her.

    In conclusion: If you don’t tell Google which posts are most important, all of your posts will be competing for attention. You’ll be competing with your own pages for a high ranking in Google. Luckily, the solution is rather simple: Let Google know which page you consider to be the most important. To do this, you need a good internal linking structure.

    3. Site structure is important for UX

    Did you know that your site structure is also important for your User eXperience (UX)? After all, when people can easily find their way on your website, they’ll have a better browsing experience. This will also increase your chances for people to convert: buy your products; subscribe to your newsletter or return for another visit. And Google likes sites that perform well too! So make sure your site structure is reflected in the navigation of your website.

    How to get started with site structure

    What do you need to do to improve your structure? And what can you do to avoid your site structure becoming an issue?  Read on for three basic tips on how to quickly improve your site structure.

    1. Remove old content

    Lots of shops sell a different collection of products (clothes, shoes, etc.) every season. And when the season is done, the item pages are removed. This is a great practice if you don’t expect to sell the same product again. But what about all the links that point to the deleted product page? As you know, links to your page are valuable for your SEO! That’s why you should redirect the URL. This way, you still benefit from the links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore.

    2. Evaluate your categories

    You should ensure that categories are about the same size. Think of Alice and her stories. Alice could categorize her stories by making piles. Now imagine one of these piles becoming huge, while the others remain much smaller. It would be hard to find a specific story in that big pile, while it would be much easier to search through a small pile. At the same time, that big heap is probably very important, because Alice wrote a lot of stories about that specific topic.

    Categories can become too large when you write a lot about one specific subject and less about others. At some point, you should divide the big category into two smaller categories. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category. When one category is significantly larger than other ones, your site becomes unbalanced. You’ll have a hard time ranking with blog posts within a huge category. The pile has become too large to search through. In this case, you should evaluate and optimize your categories; perhaps merge or split some of them.

    3. Improve your internal linking structure

    You should link to the most essential content on your site to show Google that these are your best and most complete articles. But it makes sense to users too. You want them to read your best posts, right? Read Meike’s blogpost about Internal linking for SEO to learn how to improve your internal linking structure.

    Read more: Avoid these site structure mistakes! »

    Yoast helps you out!

    Yoast SEO premium can really help you set up and improve the structure of your site. The redirect functionality will allow you to easily redirect pages you deleted (so you’ll pass on the linking juice to another page). And our related links functionality will make sure you are interlinking articles with similar topics.

    On top of that, we have a site structure training. This can be especially helpful if you need some guidance when starting with site structure. This training will guide you through the process. So, take a look!

    Conclusion: Get started with improving your site structure

    It’s important to remember that site structure is part of a bigger, ongoing process. Your site will grow and therefore, the structure will require maintenance. Improving and maintaining the structure of a site should be a core aspect of every SEO strategy. It’s a very actionable part of SEO, because it’s something you can control and improve rather quickly. So, let’s get started!

    Keep reading: Site structure: the Ultimate guide »

    The post What is site structure and why is it important? appeared first on Yoast.

  • Cyber Monday: 1 day left for a 30% discount on all products

    It’s Cyber Monday, and the Yoast Black Friday deals are still going strong. Have you claimed your 30% discount yet? If not, hurry! Time is running out. Get the advanced features of our Premium plugins and outrank your competitors in Google. Are you looking to save time and access easy tools and practical tips on boosting your rankings? Yes?! Then you should get Yoast SEO Premium! 

    Our 2022 Cyber Monday sale has now ended. But you can still sign up for our newsletter: you’ll get all the latest Yoast SEO news and blog posts delivered straight to your inbox. Register now so you don’t miss our next sale!



    Privacy policy

    Not convinced yet? In this post, we’ll tell you all about the benefits of Yoast SEO Premium and why your site can’t do without it — interested in one of our other plugins? Check out this post! 

    Write content that ranks in the search engines

    To stand out in search engines, you must write high-quality, SEO-friendly content. SEO is still king (or queen!). Why? People don’t want SEO-friendly content per se; they like what SEO-friendly content can do for them. You need to optimize your text for the right keywords without over-optimizing. Your text should be easy to read. You definitely should add keywords in a text; you should optimize your text. However, optimizing for search engines should never compromise the readability of your text. That could hurt your rankings. 

    Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced analysis that recognizes different word forms and synonyms. It can recognize plurals, past tense, and other word orders. You can add related keywords too. With Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll be able to optimize your text for SEO without compromising the readability of the text. 

    Setting related keyphrases and synonyms in the Yoast Premium SEO plugin
    An example from a text optimized with Yoast SEO Premium for [puppy training] with the synonym [obedience classes]

    Help Google to understand your site 

    Google is brilliant, but it needs help understanding the structure of your site. Always bear in mind that Google’s bots follow your internal links. That’s the way Google crawls through your site. That means you can’t have any dead ends or 404s on your site. Otherwise, Google will get lost. Yoast SEO Premium will help you to take care of all 404s with the redirect manager.  

    Posts with many will appear more important to Google than posts with little or no internal links. This means that you’ll need to optimize your internal links so that Google knows what the most important content is. Yoast SEO Premium offers practical SEO workouts to help you quickly improve and optimize your internal linking structure. Also, you’ll get internal linking suggestions within every post to further enhance your internal linking structure.  

    The cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium helps you to link to the most important articles

    Manage the SEO of a growing website 

    If you keep adding content to your website, Google will have more trouble crawling through a big site. And what to do with outdated content? You shouldn’t have old stale content on your site. How do you keep track of it all? 

    Yoast SEO Premium will help you with your SEO maintenance. We will remind you to update those stale articles and tell you if you don’t update your most essential pages regularly. Our SEO workouts will help you keep track of your SEO and solve all kinds of problems you’ll encounter if your site gets large. With SEO workouts, we help you get the work done. We’ve made it incredibly easy to stay on top of your SEO, saving you precious time and effort. If you follow the steps in our workouts, we’ll make sure to keep your website crawlable.

    Yoast SEO Premium also gets you access to a recent feature built to optimize crawling on your site. The crawl cleanup settings give you more control over which unnecessary and unimportant URLs, scripts, and metadata in WordPress you want to keep Google from crawling. WordPress automatically adds these to your site, only adding unneeded overhead. Blocking these URLs makes your site easier to crawl — making your site a lot more sustainable!

    In the Crawl optimization section of Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find a load of options to finetune crawling

    Learn EVERYTHING about SEO with Yoast SEO academy 

    Buying Yoast SEO Premium will give you access to all of the online courses of Yoast SEO academy. And you want that! We’ll help you get started with keyword research and how to set up an internal linking strategy, but we’ll also teach you everything about structured data. Everything you ever want to learn about SEO is covered in one of our courses.  

    Each course consists of multiple short videos, reading materials, and quizzes. We’ll share a lot of practical tips that you can put into practice right away.  

    A small sampling of what’s available in Yoast SEO academy

    Only a couple of hours left to go green on Cyber Monday! 

    What are you waiting for? Make sure to go green today and buy Yoast SEO Premium with a 30% discount. And start outranking your competitors! But be quick, as this sale won’t last forever…

    Go Premium and unlock this feature!

    Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:

    Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €99 EUR / year (ex VAT)

    The post Cyber Monday: 1 day left for a 30% discount on all products appeared first on Yoast.