Black Friday is right around the corner and we’re starting our sale extra early this year. This means that the Yoast Black Friday deals are here today! Are you waiting for that green traffic light? Now’s your chance — go go go! Buy Yoast SEO Premium or one of our other products and benefit from a whopping 30% discount. With $1 donated to One Tree Planted for every sale we make, it’s never been more worth it.
Our 2022 Black Friday 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!
Not convinced yet? Let me tell you all about the products and why you need them to outrank your competition in Google.
Skyrocket your rankings with Yoast’s best-seller and biggest plugin: Yoast SEO Premium! If you take your SEO seriously, Yoast SEO Premium is a must-have. It makes SEO easy and helps you get more visitors to your website. With this plugin, you’ll be able to write great and readable content that’s ready to climb the rankings. But that’s not all…
Yoast SEO also handles a lot of the technical SEO stuff for you:
Avoid 404’s and dead ends on your site
Automatically add structured data
Get your site indexed even better with our internal linking functionality.
You’ll also get access to these brand-new features we’ve been working on:
And don’t forget about our SEO workouts! These workouts take you by the hand and save you loads of time by helping you clean up your site. Why? Because it helps Google understand what your site is about.
To top this all off: a Premium subscription gives you access to our 24/7 support team (they are the best and nicest bunch of people you’ll ever meet) and all of our online Yoast SEO academy courses. You’ll learn everything you’ll ever need to know about SEO!
The first step in one of the SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium
Get more visitors to your online store with WooCommerce SEO and Yoast SEO for Shopify
When you have an online store, you want people to easily find you online right? And you want your products to look great in the search results. That’s why you need the WooCommerce SEO plugin or the Yoast SEO for Shopify app: to unlock extra tools and get the SEO of your store in top-notch condition! The structured data that the plugin generates helps you to get rich product results showing the price, rating and other information about your product. In addition, we’ll help you to optimize your product pages, improve your breadcrumb navigation, and much, much more! Get 30% off the WooCommerce SEO plugin and Yoast SEO for Shopify this Black Friday.
Example of a rich product result in Google’s search results
Increase your online presence on a local level with Local SEO
The Local SEO plugin helps you optimize your website for people in your area. Which makes it easier for them to find you. So, if you own a local business you most certainly need the Local SEO plugin in order to stand out in the local search results! Among many other things, the local SEO plugin helps you to set up all the necessary Schema to help you outrank your local competitors. It also embeds Google Maps and easily creates full-fledged contact pages.
Easily add all of your business details in our Local SEO plugin
Drive more search traffic to videos on your site with Video SEO
Video is becoming more important than ever, even in the world of SEO. But simply uploading them to your pages isn’t enough. Do you have videos on your website and do you want to drive more search traffic towards them? You’ll need our Yoast Video SEO plugin for sure! Help Google to uncover your video, with the schema we automatically add to your videos. Among many other things, you’ll also profit from faster loading times and responsive sizing. And ensure that video previews appear properly if someone shares your videos on social media!
Help Google uncover your videos with our Video SEO plugin
Are you aiming for that top stop in Google’s news carousel? Help search engines discover and understand your news articles right away. To do this, you’ll need our News SEO plugin! The plugin immediately pings Google whenever you publish a new post. In addition, it adds all the relevant Schema.org markup and does a number of other things to help you to outrank your competition in Google News!
The plugin allows you to do a more advanced News SEO
Are you thinking about buying more than one product? Bundle the SEO plugins and save even more money! Check out the 4 bundles or the biggest bang for your buck: the plugin subscription which includes all Yoast plugins! And start optimizing your site for SEO! Good luck!
Web sustainability is a huge topic and covers a lot of aspects, from technical details to design and the way you organize your content. Why is it such an important topic? Because climate change is a serious threat and can no longer be ignored. All of us need to work together to do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. And although it might not be the first thing that pops into your head, this also includes websites. Online traffic actually has an extensive impact on our environment and this impact is growing every year. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can get insight into the impact of your website. After that, we’ll give you a few suggestions to reduce your site’s carbon footprint. Let’s dive in and go green!
Is my website’s carbon footprint that big a deal?
Many of us don’t think about the environmental impact of our online activities. Why should we? When there are loads of other things happening that have a way bigger impact on our climate. And honestly, online is also the place we go to unwind while watching funny videos or browsing for new clothes. Which is understandable, especially with so much of our lives moving online nowadays. But we could do with a bit more awareness.
You see, every action we take online produces a carbon footprint, no matter how insignificant it might feel. In fact, digital technologies and internet usages are two massive players in polluting the environment as they use a considerable amount of electricity. Take a look at some statistics from the Shift Project that might surprise you:
Digital technologies are responsible for roughly 4% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The energy consumption of digital technologies is increasing by 9% a year.
As you can see, the internet and digital technologies have drawbacks, however easy they make our lives. And if you own a website – large or small – there’s no way around it: you’re leaving a carbon footprint. We realize that this isn’t fun to hear, but here at Yoast, we’re guilty of this too. So, what can we do to reduce this footprint? To start we’ll discuss what elements contribute to the carbon footprint of your website.
Every interaction on your website
As we mentioned above, every online action, including every interaction with your website results in electricity being used. For instance, whenever someone visits your website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to your server asking for information. Your server needs to respond to this request and return the necessary information. Whenever this happens, your server spends a small amount of energy to complete the request. On the other side, the browser also needs the power to process data and present the page to the visitor.
Even though the energy needed to complete a request like this is minimal, this adds up when you consider all the interactions on a website and the number of websites we have worldwide. It’s also good to know that the complexity of your website plays a part in this. The heavier and more complex your website is, the more energy is required to send and process data.
On the host side
If you own a website, you’ll know that your website needs a hosting provider to host your server and store your site’s files and data. And hosts do this by keeping all this information on computers in large data centers. In these data centers, you can find thousands of computers processing data and large, complex cooling solutions running all day and night to keep the computers cool. All of these things consume electricity to function. As a result, data centers have massive carbon footprints. Of course, not all data centers are equal. There are a lot of factors to consider, from the size of the centers, the technology they use, and the infrastructure in place. Some use far more energy than others, producing significantly more pollution.
Don’t forget about bot traffic
Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or app. It actually accounts for more than 40% of the total internet traffic in 2022 and you can safely assume that bots have visited your website. Similar to when a visitor enters your site, bots also make requests to your server that need to be processed. And when it comes to environmental impact, it makes no difference whether it’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bot that’s visiting your website. It’s difficult to estimate the total power consumption of bots’ activities, but considering that it’s such a big part of the total internet traffic we can say that this amount will not be small.
Check your website’s carbon footprint
When you do a quick search online, you’ll find several carbon footprint calculators. According to the Website Carbon Calculator, the average web page they test produces approximately 0.5 grams of CO2 per pageview. That translates to 60 kg of CO2 per year for a website with 10,000 monthly pageviews.
Naturally, we were curious to see how yoast.com would fare. So we used the tool to find out what the impact of our homepage is. Here’s the result:
The carbon footprint of our homepage, calculated by the Website Carbon Calculator
So if our homepage gets around 10,000 monthly pageviews, it produces 20kg of CO2 per year. This is equivalent to the amount of carbon one tree absorbs in a year. Of course, we’re happy that our homepage does quite well when it comes to the carbon it emits. However, this is only an estimation and it’s only for one page. Our website isn’t just a homepage, we have loads of other pages driving lots of pageviews daily. Still, it can give you an idea of how much improvement your pages need.
How to reduce your website’s carbon footprint
There are several things we can do to minimize the carbon impact of our websites. And some of these suggestions may have a minimal effect. But do remember that every little thing we do and every bit of effort we make will bring us closer to the goal of net zero carbon emissions.
Choose a green host
A great way to lower the environmental impact of your website is to use a “green” hosting provider. Green hosting providers are companies using data centers with high energy efficiency and who are committed to using sustainable energy sources.
You can look for one or check your current host on The Green Web Foundation’s directory. The website lists over 500 hosting providers worldwide that have a tangible commitment to the use of green energy. We’re hosting our site on Cloudflare, which is certified as a green host.
Reduce the size of your images and videos
For most websites, images are the most significant contributor to a page’s weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files are, the more data is transferred, and the more energy is used in the process. Let’s be real, you don’t need razor-sharp images that are a few MBs in size. You need your images to be sharp enough. Besides, heavy images are the culprit of a slow-loading page, which is a terrible experience for your visitors. Slow-loading pages are also bad for SEO. So, export images with the correct size and format and compress them using a tool or plugin to reduce their weight. We recommend using a tool like ImageOptim or websites like Squoosh, JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io.
It’s the same situation with on-page and self-hosted videos, although it’s better to compress videos before uploading them to your site. Or better, avoid hosting videos on your site altogether and use embedded links from video hosting platforms like Wistia or YouTube. Next, you can further reduce data usage from video streaming by removing auto-play and keeping video content short. Auto-playing video is hard to optimize anyway.
Regularly check for redundant content
Whenever we have something new to tell or a new product to sell, it’s easy to create a new dedicated page. Creating new pages isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to keep track of the number of pages on your site. Is this new page essential or are you cluttering your website? And if it is necessary, what other content may become redundant or could easily be integrated into this page? Regularly cleaning up pages that you’re not using anymore is not only saving energy, but it also helps site visitors find the right content and not get lost on your website.
In line with this, it’s also good to take a look at your writing style. Writing in a clear and understandable way benefits your SEO and helps users find what they’re looking for more easily. This also means that you’re reducing the time they need to look around on your website and get to where they need to be. A more focused website for you, less frustration for them, and less energy spent on unnecessary scrolling and clicking around. Yoast SEO comes with a readability analysis that can help you improve your content and make it easier to read.
One last thing: Although the goal of SEO and other marketing efforts might be to get more people on your website, you shouldn’t write content with the sole purpose of getting more visits. Write content that adds value and answers actual questions your audience might have. We strongly advise against using misleading keyphrases and stuffing your content with keywords. Not only will you hurt your reputation, but it also causes online traffic that might lose you customers and costs loads of energy on requests that aren’t necessary. Plus, search engines are getting better at picking this up so it might hurt your rankings as well. Always focus your content on getting the right people on your website, not just as many people as you can.
Reduce other data transfer by:
Making your website technically lean
A technically lean and clean website benefits both users and the environment. Keep your code clean and simple while avoiding duplications. In addition, avoid installing unnecessary plugins that add bloat to your site and keep away from unnecessary plugins that add excessive weight.
If you’re running a WordPress site, you can use plugins to compress and clean up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These plugins don’t alter your code; they remove things like redundant spacing or bring lines of code onto the same row instead of spreading them out on multiple rows. Doing this only reduces the size of these files by a tiny bit. But you know the deal, every bit of effort matters!
Using a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers in different geographic locations. They work together to get content to load faster by serving it from a location near your visitors. Much of your website content is static – like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files – that stays the same for every user. CDNs work by having a copy of these files on each of their servers in the network. When a user enters your website, these files are served from a local server instead of the origin server. That means data doesn’t have to travel as far, which also helps your site load faster. A fast-loading site is more attractive to users and prevents a scenario where someone requests to load a webpage only to click the back button. Which wastes energy that’s already used in the data-transferring process.
Not to mention, serving images through CDNs is an excellent choice for reducing image file size. Many CDNs offer a wide range of image-reducing methods like serving images in the WebP format, offering the same compression quality as JPEG but a significantly smaller file size.
Block bots to lower unnecessary traffic to your site
As we mentioned above, bot traffic accounts for a lot of online traffic. It helps to identify bots that are not valuable to you and block them from entering your site. If they request your server but you’re telling your server not to answer them, you’re saving energy. You can block bad bots by looking at your server log for unusual behavior and blocking the individual or the entire range of IPs where unusual traffic comes from. An alternative is to use a bot management solution from providers like Cloudflare. For the ‘good’ bots, you can determine whether they bring value to your site or not. If the answer is no, don’t hesitate to block them as well.
Reduce unnecessary crawling on your site
In our post about bot traffic, we give an example of the crawling activities of Google on our site on a given day. But Google bots are not the only bots visiting our website. There are also bots from other search engines, commercial bots, SEO bots, etc. If they support the craw-delay directives in robots.txt, set a craw delay for them to limit unnecessary crawling.
Use the crawl settings feature in Yoast SEO Premium
Search engines have a vast amount of resources at their disposal, so they have the power to crawl everything they find on your website. However, this is not necessarily the most efficient way to operate. Adding to that is the fact that almost every CMS outputs assets that are nonessential for your website and users. These assets get URLs, but since they don’t bring any added value for most websites, we think crawlers could safely skip them most of the time.
In Yoast SEO Premium, we introduced a crawl settings feature to remove unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets from your WordPress site. By removing these, you help crawlers crawl your site more efficiently and reduce their crawling activities. By doing this, you’re saving energy for your server and the search engines themselves. This is our way to contribute to the net-zero goal and it can also be yours. Use our plugin to reduce the carbon footprint of your WordPress website!
The crawl settings feature allows you to decide per type of asset whether you want to remove the URLs it creates. So you’re always in control. This screenshot of our plugin shows you where to find it and here you can read how it works exactly:
Remove links that are not needed and automatically output by WordPress
Final thoughts: every bit of effort helps
Reducing the carbon footprint of your website will probably not be a priority in your day-to-day life. We understand that completely. But it’s time to start investing in our future. The longer takes us to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, the more damage we’re doing to our environment. Let’s make sure we’re doing what we can to do our part. The planet and your site visitors will thank you for it. So, let’s join forces and conserve this planet we call home!
You’re probably familiar with SEO, but what do we mean by sustainable SEO? Well, it’s all about spending your time on the right things in order to outrank competitors in the search engines! But how do you keep doing SEO in an efficient and successful way? How do you keep ranking in the long run? If you’re not in it for the short-term success, but for the long haul. And is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a sustainable SEO solution? Read all about sustainable SEO in this blog post!
What is sustainable SEO?
Ranking in search engines usually doesn’t happen overnight. It’s hard work. So, if you do succeed in ranking high in Google, you want to keep ranking that high in Google. A good SEO strategy takes time and effort and is always focused on long-term results. In order to have a sustainable SEO strategy, you need to comply with Google’s mission. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google wants to give people the information they find accessible and useful. That means that you need to make sure that your website provides just that.
No games and no tricks
In the old days, SEO was all about tricks. Back then, you could write a text and mention your keyword in every other sentence. That would help with your ranking. Writing white text on a white background could fool Google. However, Google has gotten amazingly smart in understanding texts. Google’s algorithm is trying to mimic a human being. It tries to read texts like human beings. Therefore, it is not a good idea to stuff your writing with keywords, because texts like that are awful to read. Imagine yourself reading an article about car tires where almost every line has the phrase “car tires†in it, most likely you will get annoyed and stop reading.
SEO should not be a game. SEO should not be about tricks. We often joke that the acronym of SEO actually stands for Seriously Effortful Optimization. This is because SEO requires efforts to succeed. Writing high-quality content, providing a good user experience (UX), and building a beautiful and accessible website are a lot of work. Shortcuts often lead to suboptimal results. Games and tricks lead to a bad user experience and penalties by Google.
Helpful content is the way to go
The many different updates of Google – Panda, Hummingbird, BERT – have all shown us that Google ranks texts that are easy to read. Above all, Google wants to serve its users with accessible and useful information. So it’s important to try and win those rankings by making quality content and not by trying to trick the algorithm.
In fact, Google’s latest update was called the ‘helpful content update’, because that’s the kind of content they want to deliver to users. Its goal is to make the search results better with more original, helpful content — content made for people, by people. From now on, we expect (more than ever) to see Google rewarding content that gives readers a satisfying experience and demoting content written only to please search engines.
Some tips on how to do sustainable SEO
What should you be doing if you focus on ranking in Google in the long run? Let’s check out our three top tips!
1. Write some awesome cornerstone content
First and foremost, make sure to write some really good articles on your website. It is of great importance that you put effort into writing articles with content that is evergreen and valuable for years to come. Those articles should be lengthy, well-optimized, readable little gems. Moreover, make sure to put in some SEO love and update such articles regularly.
2. Get your internal linking structure in good shape
Google has a hard time figuring out which content is the most important. Your internal linking structure is really important to help Google figure out where the most important content on your website is located. Internal linking is something you need to maintain and update regularly.
3. Regularly do keyword research
You need to make sure you’re writing about the topics your audience wants to read about. And that could very well change over time. So, every now and then you need to get inside the heads of your readers again. Which topics do they like, which words are they using to search and find your content? Is your keyword strategy still up to date or does it need refinement?
Conclusion: Sustainable SEO needs to be part of your routine!
In order to really have a sustainable SEO strategy, you need to have a routine. You just need to make sure to regularly evaluate what you’re doing. You can definitely use tools like Semrush for your keyword research or even an AI tool for your content.
Nonetheless, you should never stop thinking and evaluating yourself, as sustainable SEO has to do with carefully thinking about what content would benefit your user most. If you keep your audience in mind, you’ll always be on the right track. Using our Yoast SEO plugin will always help you to focus on the most important things. Keep aiming for those green traffic lights and create a great user experience — it’s a strategy that will always stand the test of time.
Disclosure: This blog post contains sponsored links.
Exact keyword matching used to be an important SEO tactic, but those days are long gone. Now search engines can understand when similar phrases and related terms mean the same thing. Adding too many exact match keywords might make Google think your post is just another piece of spam. We’ll explain how to write naturally while still using your keywords. You’ll be seeing green bullets in no time!
As we mentioned in the introduction, focusing on just exact keyword matching isn’t really necessary anymore. It can actually be harmful to your SEO by making your writing seem spammy. In fact, in Google’s helpful content update, they said they wanted to see: “helpful content written by people, for people”. This means that the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings. So you should focus on creating content that’s written in a natural way, using a variety of related keywords and phrases. Automatically-generated content or content that’s spam-full with keywords simply won’t work anymore.
What does writing naturally mean?
Using a natural writing style means that if someone reads your text aloud, it sounds like normal human speech. Think of the way it sounds when a friend, family member, or teacher explains something to you — that’s ‘natural’. In contrast, a legal document or a technical handbook is written in an ‘unnatural writing style’; very few (if any) people speak in that way.
A natural writing style has lots of benefits! It’s usually more comfortable for users to read, and can be a lot more engaging. Many people find writing in a natural way easier, too. Think about it — reading a magazine article feels a lot more enjoyable than reading a set of terms and conditions. It feels like the author is talking to you, and you can get to know the person writing.
Natural writing and SEO
Let’s say you’re preparing for the holiday season. You want to optimize your site so people can find it, which is great! But thinking too much about keywords and calls to action can be a distraction. The result? Clunky, hard-to-read text with too many keywords or keyphrases squeezed in where they don’t belong. Unfortunately, those keyphrases aren’t likely to help your rankings much, and any user who does find your page in the search results probably won’t read your content.
Does that make it harder to optimize your text for search engines? Not at all! Especially if you use the Yoast Premium SEO analysis because this feature recognizes related keywords, synonyms and variations of your keyphrase as well. It allows you to write high-quality content for your visitors and much more natural-sounding texts! Because when we speak naturally, we say the same thing in lots of different ways too.
“Yoast SEO only recognizes my exact focus keyphrase”
So, what’s the difference between the Premium SEO analysis and the free version? Is it really worth getting the premium version to prepare your site for Black Friday (and other holidays)? While the free version of Yoast SEO is great for getting a general idea of how many times you mention your focus keyword, our premium plugin helps you write more naturally. You’ll get high-quality content and the best SEO results. Not convinced? Let’s look at an example.
Imagine this: You’re trying to optimize your post for the term [guinea pig]. In your text, you’ll probably use guinea pig (singular) and guinea pigs (plural). However, if your focus keyword is the singular [guinea pig], the keyword density check in the free version does not recognize your plurals and will give you a red traffic light.
In this text snippet, the term guinea pigs is used three times and guinea pig only once. That means we get a red traffic light…
The free version of Yoast SEO is great for getting a general idea of how many times you mention your focus keyword. But if you want to write naturally and get the best SEO results, our premium plugin can help.
How our premium analysis can help you
So how does the analysis in Yoast SEO Premium help you to write more naturally? Firstly, in the premium analysis, plurals and past tense are recognized as occurrences of your focus keyword, so they’ll count towards your SEO assessment and will help you get those bullets green!
Let’s look at the example again. With our premium plugin, both guinea pig and guinea pigs are highlighted:
The premium analysis recognizes both the singular and plural versions of my keyword. Which means: no red traffic light!
Why is the analysis a premium feature?
Recognizing plurals and past tense isn’t easy. And it’s different for all languages. Simply put, it’s a lot of work. That’s why we have an entire team of linguists working on it, making sure we’re adding more and more languages.
You can ignore the keyword density check in the free version of our plugin. But if you do, it’s still important to check for yourself that you’re using your keyphrase(s) in a varied and natural way. This will cost you time and effort, however. And with Black Friday and the holiday season coming up, you might want to save yourself the hassle of manually checking your keyphrases by using the Yoast SEO Premium analysis!
Besides allowing variants of your keyword, the premium analysis also lets you add related keywords and synonyms. For instance, instead of always using the keyphrase guinea pig, you can switch it up and refer to cavia or cavy instead, which is another name for the guinea pig. When you add cavy as a related keyphrase, you’ll get another SEO check for that phrase too.
Let’s look at another example: if your focus keyphrase is [playing with your cats], it will recognize that keyphrase in the sentence ‘You canuse toy mice to play with your cat‘. Or, if you want to optimize for [games for cats] it will recognize the sentence, ‘Another game your cat will love …’as well. The analysis is able to recognize these variations on your keyphrase and add them up to your total usage of the focus keyphrase.
Yoast SEO Premium makes it easier than ever to write SEO-optimized texts in a natural way. And it gets even better — by using synonyms and related keyphrases, you increase your chances of ranking for different related queries in the search results too! Read more about this in our post about how to use synonyms and related keywords.
Focus on writing naturally
You want your visitors to find and love your content. And you want Google to love it too! In order to achieve both, you should focus more on writing naturally, which is the whole idea behind our premium analysis. No more awkwardly rewriting your sentences, so the SEO analysis picks up on your keyword. No more wondering if you really didn’t use your keyword often enough, or if the plugin simply doesn’t recognize every instance. Our plugin will give you little nudges to optimize your text a bit more, without tempting you to chase the green traffic lights with exact keyword matching. You’ll write quality content that users will enjoy reading!
In July 2022, Google launched a new video indexing report in Google Search Console. This report will allow you to see how many pages Google has found, crawled, and indexed a video on, and much more. It’s incredibly useful because it helps you understand the foundation of your video SEO performance. Plus, the report also identifies possible fixes for any videos that don’t seem to be appearing in the search results.
So where can you find the report? Easy! Under the index heading in the sidebar of Google Search Console.
The video indexing report in Google Search Console
At the top, it provides a snapshot of how many videos are indexed and how many pages have video data. If Google hasn’t located and indexed a video, it is marked as “No video indexedâ€.
Green is good. Grey shows that Google had problems indexing your videos
Ideally, every video on your site will be indexed and included in the green tab. In reality, however, there may be issues on some pages that prevent indexation.
In this post, we’ll run through some of the major uses of this report for managing your video SEO.
1. Discover which pages have videos indexed
To find out which of your pages Google has indexed a video on, click on the “Video data about indexed video pages†link just below the main bar chart.
Video page is the indexed page. Video URL is the URL of the video on the hosting platform.
You’ll receive a table that lists the pages where a video has been found, and the URL of the video player or file which has been indexed and associated with that page (usually a link to a page on your video hosting platform). You’ll also see the date the video was last crawled. This is really handy because it’ll tell you how up-to-date the information in Google’s index is.Â
2. Understand which data Google is using to inform display in Video Search
If you click on any of the results within the table, you can see a granular, page-level report that tells you which discovered URLs Googlebot believes are video files. The method used for each URL is indicated in the report. Usually, though, it’s determined through HTML tags, Open Graph data, or Schema.org markup.
Google tells you which data sources it is using to find and index videos from different hosting platforms
You’ll also see the source of the thumbnail Google chose to associate with each video. This is typically through Open Graph or Schema.org data (labeled as “structured dataâ€).
Lastly, the report indicates “Video Placementâ€. This can mean two things: Google considers the video to be the core page asset or supplementary content. But don’t worry too much about this identification. Unless you have a page with just an isolated video embed and a title, Google will typically consider your videos to be “supplementary contentâ€.
In many cases, the report will show multiple video URLs for a single video. This can be due to fallbacks and multiple methods of video delivery. As long as each URL indicates the same video, this isn’t a problem, but if there are inconsistencies here, this can be an indicator of why a video is failing to consistently appear in search results.
3. Identify duplication in video indexation
If you export the data from the indexed videos report, you can quickly pull it into excel or Google sheets. You can then perform an analysis to identify any pages being indexed with the same video. It’s easiest to look at the “Video URL” column. Good to note: Video duplication across multiple pages is not necessarily a problem. There are many examples where the same video serves a good purpose in several locations. For example, in a blog post, on a product page, and also within a video gallery page.
However, keep in mind that you lose control of which page Google will decide to rank for any given query where the video is a relevant result. This might cause issues. For example, if you end up sending users to a video gallery page for a query where a product page would be more appropriate.
This investigative work can also illuminate canonical issues, for example with tracking parameters that Google fails to interpret as duplicated content.
4. Assess video indexation problems
Below the core report is a table titled “Why videos in pages aren’t indexedâ€. This table shows a list of issues Google has encountered while trying to index videos on your website. And it’s quite detailed too. You can find information on each of the pages where this issue was discovered.
Some of the issues are self-explanatory, but some are indicative of wider issues with video implementation
Most common problems
Let’s look at the most common problems you can encounter, and how you can fix them.
Google could not determine the prominent video on the page
This is by far the most common issue you’re likely to run into with video indexation. Unfortunately, it covers a multitude of different scenarios rather than simply “prominenceâ€.
Sometimes it can simply mean that Google found a video on the page, but assessed it was too far down. Or that the video was too insignificant in regards to the page to be included in the video search results. If this is the case, a simple fix is to change the position and size of the video to something more significant. For example, near the top of the page. If your video is already in a prime location but hidden on first paint with some CSS, then amending this may also be a sufficient fix.
In other instances, it can be a rendering problem. If the video requires JavaScript to load, then Googlebot will often determine the video insufficiently “prominentâ€. Why? Because on a basic page load, the crawler cannot find an embedded video player. This sort of issue frequently occurs when videos are included in carousels or other dynamic page elements.
Cannot determine video position and size
This typically occurs when using a lightbox or other “click to load†feature that rely on JavaScript. Sometimes plugins or tools decide to delay loading a video player until a user presses play. After all, this can save bandwidth and reduce page load times. Unfortunately, the side effect is that Google cannot find or render the videos.
If you’re concerned about site speed and video, the best solution is to load the video player asynchronously. Good news: You can easily do this with the Yoast Video SEO Plugin!
Unknown Video Format
This error means there is a problem with the URL indicating the video file or player in your Schema.org or OpenGraph markup. A common example: OpenGraph sometimes creates a self-referencing URL marked as “videoâ€. In doing so, they create a reference for a video file, which now points to the URL of the page rather than the media asset.
Video Not Found on Host Service
This issue is normally found with YouTube embeds where the video has been deleted or marked as private. If you see this error, the video you’re referencing has probably been removed. The fix? Update the embed to prevent users from receiving an error too.
In conclusion
The new video indexing report in Google Search Console is incredibly useful. You’ll be able to gain invaluable insights into your video SEO performance. Just be aware of some of the problems you can encounter. And have fun clicking through the new reports! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.
These days, the way we do SEO is somewhat different from how things were done ca. 10 years ago. There’s one important reason for that: search engines have been continuously improving their algorithms to give searchers the best possible results. Over the last decade, Google, as the leading search engine, introduced several major updates, and each of them has had a major impact on best practices for SEO. Here’s a — by no means exhaustive — list of Google’s important algorithm updates so far, as well as some of their implications for search and SEO.
Obviously, Google was around long before 2011. We’re starting with the Panda update because it was the first major update in the ‘modern SEO’ era. Google’s Panda update tried to deal with websites that were purely created to rank in the search engines. It mostly focused on on-page factors. In other words, it determined whether a website genuinely offered information about the search term visitors used.
Two types of sites were hit especially hard by the Panda update:
Affiliate sites (sites which mainly exist to link to other pages).
Sites with very thin content.
Google periodically re-ran the Panda algorithm after its first release, and included it in the core algorithm in 2016. The Panda update has permanently affected how we do SEO, as site owners could no longer get away with building a site full of low-quality pages.
2012 – Venice
Google’s algorithm update Venice was a noteworthy update, as it showed that Google understood that searchers are sometimes looking for results that are local to them. After Venice, Google’s search results included pages based on the location you set, or your IP address.
2012 – Penguin
Google’s Penguin update looked at the links websites got from other sites. It analyzed whether backlinks to a site were genuine, or if they’d been bought to trick the search engines. In the past, lots of people paid for links as a shortcut to boosting their rankings. Google’s Penguin update tried to discourage buying, exchanging or otherwise artificially creating links. If it found artificial links, Google assigned a negative value to the site concerned, rather than the positive link value it would have previously received. The Penguin update ran several times since it first appeared and Google added it to the core algorithm in 2016.
As you can imagine, it mostly hit websites with a lot of artificial links hard. They disappeared from the search results, as the low-quality links suddenly had a negative, rather than positive impact on their rankings. Penguin has permanently changed link building: it no longer suffices to get low-effort, paid backlinks. Instead, you have to work on building a successful link building strategy to get relevant links from valued sources.
2012 – Pirate
The Pirate update combatted the illegal spreading of copyrighted content. It considered (many) DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests for a website as a negative ranking factor for the first time.
2013 – Hummingbird
The Hummingbird update saw Google lay down the groundwork for voice-search, which was (and still is) becoming more and more important as more devices (Google Home, Alexa) use it. Hummingbird pays more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole search phrase is taken into account, rather than just particular words. Why? To understand a user’s query better and to be able to give them the answer, instead of just a list of results.
The impact of the Hummingbird update wasn’t immediately clear, as it wasn’t directly intended to punish bad practice. In the end, it mostly enforced the view that SEO copy should be readable, use natural language, and shouldn’t be over-optimized for the same few words, but use synonyms instead.
2014 – Pigeon
Another bird-related Google update followed in 2014 with Google Pigeon, which focused on local SEO. The Pigeon update affected both the results pages and Google Maps. It led to more accurate localization, giving preference to results near the user’s location. It also aimed to make local results more relevant and higher quality, taking organic ranking factors into account.
2014 – HTTPS/SSL
To underline the importance of security, Google decided to give a small ranking boost to sites that correctly implemented HTTPS to make the connection between website and user secure. At the time, HTTPS was introduced as a lightweight ranking signal. But Google had already hinted at the possibility of making encryption more important, once webmasters had had the time to implement it.
2015 – Mobile Update
The SEO industry dubbed this Google update ‘​Mobilegeddon​’ as they thought it would totally shake up the search results. By 2015 more than 50% of Google’s search queries were already coming from mobile devices, which probably led to this update. The Mobile Update gave mobile-friendly sites a ranking advantage in Google’s mobile search results. In spite of its dramatic nickname, the mobile update didn’t instantly mess up most people’s rankings. Nevertheless, it was an important shift that heralded the ever-increasing importance of mobile.
2015 – RankBrain
RankBrain is a state-of-the-art Google algorithm, employing machine learning to handle queries. It can make guesses about words it doesn’t know, to find words with similar meanings and then offer relevant results. The RankBrain algorithm analyzed past searches, determining the best result, in order to improve.
Its release marks another big step for Google to better decipher the meaning behind searches, and serve the best-matching results. In March 2016, Google revealed that RankBrain was one of the three most important of its ranking signals. Unlike other ranking factors, you can’t really optimize for RankBrain in the traditional sense, other than by writing quality content. Nevertheless, its impact on the results pages is undeniable.
2016 – Possum
In September 2016 it was time for another local update. Google’s algorithm update ​Possum update​ applied several changes to Google’s local ranking filter to further improve local search. After Possum, local results became more varied, depending more on the physical location of the searcher and the phrasing of the query. Some businesses, not doing well in organic search, found it easier to rank locally after this update. This indicated that this update made local search more independent of the organic results.
Acknowledging users’ need for fast delivery of information, Google implemented this update that made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches, as was already the case for desktop searches. The update mostly affected sites with a particularly slow mobile version.
2018 – Medic
This broad core algorithm update caused quite a stir for those affected, leading to some shifts in ranking. While a relatively high number of medical sites were hit with lower rankings, the update wasn’t solely aimed at them and it’s unclear what its exact purpose was. It may have been an attempt to better match results to searchers’ intent, or perhaps it aimed to protect users’ wellbeing from (what Google decided was) disreputable information.
Google’s BERT update was announced as the “biggest change of the last five yearsâ€, one that would “impact one in ten searches.â€
It’s a machine learning algorithm, a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP). The name BERT is short for: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
BERT can figure out the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. In other words, it uses the context and relations of all the words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. This means: a big improvement in interpreting a search query and the intent behind it.
Page experience isn’t entirely new as a ranking signal. In this update, existing page experience signals will be combined with Core Web Vitals, a real-life measurement of key user experience factors. In general, the Page Experience update means that Google will take a more holistic perspective of on-page user experience into account.
Google states that these new Page Experience factors are still not as important as “having great, relevant content.†To help you monitor your Core Web Vitals and Page Experience and make actionable improvements, Google has added dedicated tools in Search Console.
Announced by Google at I/O 2021, the MUM update introduces big changes in search.
MUM is short for ‘Multitask United Model’, a name that hints at the power of this new algorithm: it can handle multiple tasks simultaneously. It can read, understand, and learn in over 75 languages using a variety of sources, including video and audio!
The idea is that MUM will combine information from many sources to deliver multi-layered answers to complex search queries. It has already been seen in action with COVID-19 vaccine searches, but that’s still just the beginning. Google’s MUM AI will be slowly introduced over the coming months and years, so don’t expect to see big changes happening overnight.
The helpful content update brought an increased focus on the quality of content appearing in the search results. It’s all about rewarding ‘people-first’ content — content that really answers users questions and provides a satisfying experience.
The early impact on search results has been subtle, but Google has made it clear that this isn’t a one-off. The helpful content update represents an ongoing effort to tidy up the SERPs, eliminating low-quality results to make way for more diverse voices. This update particularly affects sites with a lot of low-quality content, which may perform less well in search as a result.
As you can see, Google has become increasingly advanced since the early 2010s. Its early major updates in the decade focused on battling spammy results and sites trying to cheat the system. But as time progressed, updates contributed more and more to search results catered to giving desktop, mobile and local searchers exactly what they’re looking for. Obviously, the page experience ranking factor will fit in nicely there. While the algorithm was advanced to begin with, the additions over the years, including machine learning and NLP, make it absolutely state of the art.
With the ongoing focus on intent, it seems likely that Google Search will continue to focus its algorithm on perfecting its interpretation of search queries and styling the results pages accordingly. That seems to be their current focus working towards their mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.†But whatever direction it takes, being the best result and working on having an excellent site will always be the way to go!
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the different names and years? Don’t worry! We made a handy infographic that shows when each Google update happened and briefly describes what the purpose was.
At Yoast, we try to combat the notion that SEO is just a trick. While tricks might get you ranked quickly, they usually don’t work in the long run, and they might even backfire. Permanently ranking well in Google demands an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website; the technical stuff, the user experience, the content on your website, and the security of your website all need to be in order. So, to keep ranking well in Google, you should develop a holistic approach to SEO. Let us explain what that is, here.
What is holistic SEO?
Holistic SEO (search engine optimization) refers to improving all important aspects of a website to make it rank higher in search engines. The ultimate goal is to make a website that fulfills its users’ needs on all levels. Not only by providing the right information at the right time but also by being easy and safe to use. To reach this goal, website owners should, at least, work on the following aspects of their site:
We’ll also include resources to help you learn SEO and optimize various parts of your website at the end of this post. Do check them out!
Why a holistic SEO approach?
Google’s mission is to build the perfect search engine that helps people find what they are looking for, whether that’s the answer to “Where is Wijchen?”, a recipe for apple pie, or the best toaster. That’s why making your website and your marketing strategy fit this goal is the way to go.
Let’s use an analogy to explain the holistic approach to SEO. Think of working on your site’s SEO as similar to taking a ship to a ship-building competition, where the judges are Google and other search engines. Similar to a website, a ship is big and has lots of moving parts that need to be managed. Your design is the ship’s exterior, your content is the interior and services, and your technical setup is the engine. The goal here is to appeal to the judges so they rate you highly and recommend you to people.
This competition is packed, so to get a good ranking, you not only need a great-looking ship and a fast and reliable engine but also a good interior and high-quality onboard services. If you have a great-looking ship on the outside (an eye-catching design) but the interior (content) is lacking, people are less likely to want to be on that ship. On the other hand, if you have an amazing interior and onboard services, but your ship is slow and your engine is prone to issues (technical setup), people will look for other alternatives.
As you can imagine, the judges (search engines) would give high ranking and recommend ships (websites) that meet and exceed the standards mentioned above. Their mission and reputation depend on giving good recommendations, so they take this very seriously. That’s why using “tricks” to make it seem like you’ve improved your ship won’t work, because you haven’t actually improved it.
By working on improving every part of the ship, over time, your ship will become better across the board. At the same time, you’re not the only ship trying to be better, others are doing the same. In a competition so fierce and packed, every small gain and improvement will add up to be significant. With that, you may get a higher ranking in the competition and become a recommendation.
SEO tricks are of the past, holistic SEO is the way forward
Back in the early days of SEO, people could get away with doing tricks. They used to stuff keywords and internal links on pages, wrote thin and irrelevant content, or scraped content from other sites and ranked with that content. These are things of the past. Since then, Google and other search engines have been improving their algorithms by the day. No longer do they fall for such tricks (for the most part).
While Google has changed its algorithm numerous times, most of our advice has remained the same ever since we started. This advice is simple (which doesn’t mean it’s easy though!): you have to ensure your site is exceptionally good. Having a website with high-quality content, offering a great user experience and up-to-date security will not instantly improve your ranking. In the long run, though, it will definitely have a positive effect on your SEO!
In addition, great websites tend to get more backlinks from other websites and will also receive more social media attention. Remember the analogy about the ship earlier? This is similar to getting recommendations from other ships (websites) in and outside of that competition, which is a strong signal to search engines that your website is amazing.
On top of that, people behave differently on a website that they like, compared to a website they don’t understand. Google uses these kinds of user signals to find out how people experience your site. Awesome websites will also result in higher conversions. If your audience likes and understands your website, the chance of them buying your products or returning to your website is, of course, much higher.
Understanding that SEO takes time to bear fruit is a key point in the holistic SEO approach. You only have so much time and resources to work on improving your site. So, you need to identify what you want to improve, come up with a plan of attack, execute your planning, and see the results of those changes after some time. Sometimes you make big changes, other times you make smaller ones that don’t feel so important. But over time, they will add up, which gradually turns your site into a better one.
In addition, whenever you implement a change or improvement, it takes some time for Google to notice that change as it comes around and crawls your pages. Then, Google needs to take these changes into account in its complex ranking algorithm. So don’t worry too much if you don’t see the results that you expect after a few weeks or even months. Just remember that it takes time, and keep on working on improving every aspect of your website to the best of your capability!
Learn SEO, the holistic way
Sure, you say, but where to start? We understand you might feel overwhelmed by this advice. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your knowledge about the above-mentioned topics.
For starters, we offer a free SEO for beginners course, a great starting point to learn how SEO works. If you really want to put this knowledge into practice, consider trying our All-around SEO training, you’ll get lots of hands-on tips to start improving many aspects of your own site.
Go Premium and get access to all of our SEO courses
Unlock all the premium features and learn holistic SEO with our experts today!
Just want to read? These beginner guides are great starting points! If you’re a bit more knowledgeable and are looking for resources to optimize various aspects of your website, we recommend checking these articles out:
WordPress SEO: the definitive guide – This is the original WordPress SEO article since 2008, fully updated for 2022. It demonstrates our holistic SEO approach by giving you an overview of the various aspects that affect your SEO.
Content creation is and will remain a vital part of your online efforts. Good content improves your SEO, user experience, reputation and much more. But how can you tell that you’re focusing on the right things? And how do you create content that achieves the goals you set out to achieve? Creating content can feel a bit abstract from time to time and knowing how to spend your time best can be difficult. But we have someone who can help you with all of this, meet content expert Hannah Smith.
Say hi to Hannah!
With more than 15 years of experience in the industry, Hannah Smith has worked with a range of well-known companies, and her creative work has won multiple awards. She knows her stuff when it comes to creative content. That’s why we decided to pick her brain and ask her a few questions about content strategy and how to create content that helps you achieve your goals.
The SEO industry agrees that having a good “content strategy” is critical. But what does that mean?
I think that part of the challenge here is the term “content strategy†itself. It’s a term that means different things to different people, right? There are a bunch of definitions out there, but the one Adria Saracino and I came up with when we were at Distilled (c. 2014) is still the one I use today:
“A content strategy is the high-level vision that guides future content development to deliver against a specific business objective.â€
I like this definition because I believe all content should be goal-driven: i.e., what you create depends on what you want to achieve. As such, the first question you must answer when formulating your strategy is: what is your core objective for this content?
For example, if you want to increase your revenue, one way to do that might be to rank better in organic search for terms relating to your business. If that’s the direction you want to go in, then you’ll need to figure out what you think you’ll need to do to achieve that.
You may need to update and improve existing pages and/or create new pages. Plus, page content aside, you’ll also need to think about how you will help those pages rank. So you’ll need to think about internal links; and potentially external links too. I like thinking about content strategy this way because it forces you to plan out your activity sensibly and think about measurement from the outset.
But back to your question – of what a “good†content strategy should look like – to my mind, a content strategy should have the following:
A clear objective
A well-researched hypothesis and a plan – i.e., what you’re going to do to achieve that objective
Clearly outlines internal and external resources required, plus costs
Explains how these efforts will be measured (i.e., appropriate tracking is in place)
Includes key timelines and dates to review progress and results
Is appropriate and realistic – i.e., this is something that the business can execute
How do you close the gap between “writing blog posts and articles” to producing creative stuff that’s more impactful and successful?Â
I get the sense that you’re talking about creating content designed to get coverage externally – e.g., from journalists and/or other high-authority sites in your niche.
First and foremost, I’d encourage people to think hard about their objectives before embarking on anything like this. Do you need to get coverage from journalists to achieve your objectives? Or might there be a different way to go about this?
Let’s assume that you’ve done your research and need linked coverage from journalists. Where do you begin? I suggest starting with 5-10 publications on which you’d like coverage. Look closely at the articles journalists are writing – which topics appear repeatedly? What sorts of emotions are those articles provoking? Why do you think journalists are writing those articles?
Then, based on this research, I’d encourage people to think about what sorts of things they might be able to create that could add to the articles that those journalists are writing.
What are the challenges and risks of this type of activity?
The main thing to note is that this type of activity fails at a pretty high rate. I recently benchmarked the performance of more than 2,000 digital PR pieces created by eleven agencies and in-house teams.
To give some context, asset-led digital PR pieces are those where there is something live on the client’s site that a journalist could link to, ranging from a blog post to a fully-interactive page. Only a press release is created for a digital PR piece without assets; there is no asset live on the client’s site for the journalist to link to:
Number of pieces of Linked Coverage
% of Asset-Led Digital PR Pieces (1,398 pieces)
% of Digital PR Pieces without Assets(730 pieces)
0 pieces of linked coverage
5%
31%
1-9 pieces of linked coverage
35%
49%
10-29 pieces of linked coverage
31%
13%
30-49 pieces of linked coverage
11%
5%
50-99 pieces of linked coverage
10%
1%
100+ pieces of linked coverage
8%
1%
If you’re new to this, I’d expect your failure rates to be higher than this. As such, you might consider using a freelancer or agency to do this work for you.
What about small businesses in particular? How can they stand out and get coverage?
A digital PR tactic like offering expert commentary to journalists can be an excellent option for small businesses that want coverage but don’t have the budget or resources to create bespoke content.
You’ll likely have noticed #journorequest on Twitter, plus there are services like HARO (help a reporter out), to help you filter and keep track of requests like this. I’d strongly recommend taking a look at Surena Chande’s BrightonSEO talk. In her talk, she covers what journalists are looking for and how best to respond to requests like these.
Here’s a quick and dirty version. Resist the urge to sell or promote yourself or your products, and instead try to:
Provide actual expertise (should go without saying, but doesn’t)
Offer something unique: a new perspective or alternative take is better than the same old advice everyone spouts, and it will increase your chances of coverage
Educate readers via unbiased, honest, useful, accurate, and up-to-date advice
All that said, I think it bears repeating that not all small businesses need to get coverage. I run a small business myself and don’t do any digital PR for my own company. Honestly, I don’t think it would make sense to me. Coverage is unlikely to get me the clients I want, which is my core objective. Instead, I focus on speaking at industry events, appearing on podcasts, writing for industry sites like this one, and my newsletter.
How can folks learn to be more creative? Are there tools, processes, resources, or shortcuts they can take?
Creativity is a skill, not a talent: it’s something you can learn 🙂
Here’s my process:
Inspiration
You can’t come up with ideas in a vacuum, so I spend a lot of time seeking inspiration. I review the most shared articles on the client’s target publications to identify resonant topics, seek data sources, talk to humans, read books, etc.
Generation
I do this bit quickly. Only one in twenty ideas I come up with is likely worth making, so if I’m trying to come up with four ideas for a client, I need to generate 80. The stuff I generate aren’t ideas yet; that stuff happens in the final stage.
Development & validation
Turning the seed of an idea I’ve generated into something which can be made.
An example of this in practice
I’m aware that in the abstract, this doesn’t make a heap of sense, so here’s an example of how “Grilled Cheese-us†(a phrase I wrote down during the generation process) eventually became Making Faces, a piece we created for one of our clients when I was at Verve Search.
What do I mean by “Grilled Cheese-usâ€? Our propensity to see faces in inanimate objects – e.g., when people see Jesus in a slice of cheese on toast. I wondered whether or not this was something that had been studied previously, and after a little googling, I found this BBC article. It was there that I discovered that there was a proper name for this propensity (it’s called pareidolia); plus, I learned tonnes more about it:
There could be evolutionary reasons why we are especially prone to seeing faces. Human survival depends so heavily on others – whether we need their help or fear their violence – that we must react quickly and understand their motives. So the brain may be wired to detect others whenever it can quickly. If we occasionally make a mistake and see a face in tree bark, that’s less serious than failing to spot someone hiding in the bushes.
According to other researchers, a more speculative view is that a similar mechanism could explain human spirituality. The idea is that the brain, being hard-wired to understand people and their motivations, tries to look for human-like intentions in everything around us – a thunderstorm, a plague, or a terrifying and abstract concept like death. To make sense of our fears, we begin to personify them, filling the world with gods and demons. Intriguingly, Tapani Riekki at the University of Helsinki in Finland and colleagues have found that religious people are likelier to see faces in ambiguous photos than atheists.
Finding out all of this stuff (in a very roundabout way) led me to propose that we:
Create our own thing, allowing people to discover whether they’re more or less likely to see faces in inanimate objects than the Great British public.
To do this, we took photos and then ran 2,000 survey respondents through the piece (we asked them a bunch of questions, plus for each image, we asked – “can you see a face here?â€)
Are brainstorms evil?
Ha! I’m not a fan of brainstorms. I’m an introvert, and I do my best work alone. That’s not true for everyone, of course. But I think brainstorming without prior research into the publications you’re seeking to target is often a waste of time.
How do you think the relationships between content, strategy, campaigns, creativity, and link-building have changed over time? And what’s next?
I’m not sure it has! People are still buying links, and PR isn’t new.
I’d hope that digital PR becomes less siloed in the future. Many of us are doing stuff for links because that’s what our clients want us to do, but it’s often very disconnected from other types of SEO, content, and marketing activity. I’d love for that to change.
I’d also love to see more long-term thinking and investment. Most clients want an ‘x’ number of campaigns per quarter, and they want them all to be shiny new things. My concern is that there’s not much appetite to build stuff that lasts. I’m thinking something like the Michelin Guide (which was started in 1900!).
More about Hannah Smith
Hannah is the founder of Worderist.com. She offers creative content consultancy, coaching, and training to agencies and in-house marketing teams and has a fortnightly newsletter, Manufacturing Serendipity. Her creative work for clients has won multiple awards, and she’s worked with various companies, including the BBC, Dyson, Expedia, GoCompare, MailChimp, Salesforce, and Zoopla. She has spoken at numerous conferences across Europe and the US, interviewed Google’s John Mueller live on stage in front of an audience of 3,000, and acted as a guest lecturer at the University of Greenwich.Â
Enjoyed reading this interview and want to hear more of what Hannah has to say? You’re in luck! We recently hosted a news webinar where she and Jono Alderson discussed the SEO news in October.
Do you have a website? And do you want more traffic? If yes, then there’s no doubt about it: SEO should be part of your marketing efforts. It’s a great way to get and keep people on your website. But what does it actually entail? In this post, we’ll explain what SEO is and how you can get started!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. It’s the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google and other search engines. In other words: People will be more likely to encounter your website when searching online. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic – aka non-paid – search results.
Google’s search result page for the term ‘neptune planet’
In the image above, we see the first few results when someone searches for the keyphrase ‘Neptune planet’. In this case, Wikipedia is the first result and this means that their page on Neptune ranks #1 on this search term. The idea behind SEO is that when you optimize your page to become the best result, you can climb those rankings and become one of the first results that people see. Which will get you more clicks and traffic to your site!
Although this example only shows us organic results, that isn’t always the case. Depending on the search term someone uses, there can also be ads or a rich result at the top, or a few products by Google Shopping. There are a lot of different possibilities. What Google shows can also depend on what it knows about the searcher (the country they live in, for example).
Why is SEO important?
You’ve created a website because you want people to buy your product, subscribe to your service, or read your content. Whatever your goal, you want people to visit your website. If you own a donut shop in Amsterdam, for example, you want your website to be number 1 when people Google: “donuts Amsterdam”. Because the chances of people clicking on your website are much higher when it’s the top result!
But how do you make this happen? One word: Search Engine Optimization! SEO is a great way to get people to your website for free. Which is especially useful if you’re a small business owner who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising.
What determines how high you rank?
How high each result ranks is determined by Google’s algorithm. And although parts of Google’s algorithm remain secret, years of experience in SEO have given us insight into the most important ranking factors. These ranking factors can be divided into two categories:
On-page SEO factors
The ranking of your pages is partly determined by on-page factors. On-page factors are all the things on your website that you have a direct influence on. These factors include technical aspects (e.g. the quality of your code and site speed) and content-related aspects, like the structure of your website or the quality of the copy on your website. These are all crucial on-page SEO factors that you can work on.
Off-page SEO factors
In addition to on-page SEO factors, your rankings are also determined by a few off-page SEO factors. These factors include links from other websites, social media attention, and other marketing activities that happen off of your own website. Although not impossible, these off-page SEO factors can be more difficult to influence. The most important of these off-page factors is the number and quality of links pointing towards your site. The more quality, relevant sites that link to your website, the higher your position in Google will be.
Another off-page factor that plays a role in SEO is your competition relating to the niche of your particular business. In some niches, it is much harder to rank than in others. The competitiveness of your market therefore also has a major influence on your chances of ranking.
Holistic SEO: A long-term strategy
At Yoast, we practice ‘holistic SEO‘. With holistic SEO, your primary goal is to build and maintain the best possible website. You don’t try to fool Google; Instead, you invest your time and effort in a sustainable long-term strategy. If you work on improving your pages and having a high-quality website, then your chances of ranking will improve too. After all, Google wants to offer its users the best results to their search query, and the best results often have great content and are user-friendly, fast, and easily accessible.
Ranking well in search engines like Google asks for an extensive SEO strategy focused on every aspect of your website and its marketing. The technical side, the user experience (UX), the content on your website: all need to be top-notch. To keep ranking well in Google, you should develop – what we call – a holistic SEO approach.
A holistic SEO approach isn’t just better for your rankings — it also helps users find what they need more quickly. And that’s better for environmental sustainability too!
How can we help you get started?
At Yoast, our mission is to make SEO accessible for everyone. That’s why we have a few plugins that can help you with that, like our popular Yoast SEO plugin. We have a free and premium version of this plugin. One of the main advantages is that it helps you create high-ranking content. Our free SEO and readability analysis gives you detailed suggestions to create copy humans and search engines enjoy!
The premium version of our plugin will help you get to that next level and optimize your content for synonyms and related keywords and boost your site structure with our internal linking suggestions. You’ll also get access to all of our SEO courses, where you can learn vital SEO skills that you will be able to apply immediately!
Go Premium and get access to all our features!
Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!
SEO is the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. At Yoast, we believe that holistic SEO is the best way to rank your pages because you focus on optimizing every aspect of your site.
Don’t use any black-hat tricks, because eventually, this will have negative consequences for your rankings. Instead, practice sustainable SEO with your user in mind, and you will benefit in the long run. Read more on how to rank high in Google or if you use WordPress, make sure to check out our ultimate guide on SEO in WordPress:
A blog can be a great marketing tool for your ecommerce site. It gives you the possibility to tell readers all about your brand, products, and company. Plus, by blogging on a regular basis you’ll increase the chances of your site ranking in the search results. That being said, coming up with new ideas can be difficult. In this post, I’ll discuss 5 topic ideas that will help you maintain an awesome blog on your ecommerce site!
Why should you blog?
It might seem like a lot of work, but maintaining a blog on your ecommerce site is definitely worth your time. A blog allows your audience to learn more about your brand and products. You’ll be able to tell the story of your brand and products from your own perspective, and inform your audience about new ideas or plans you might have. This builds trust between you and your audience and increases their engagement.
But that’s not all! Maintaining a blog contributes to SEO as well. Every time you publish a new blog post to your ecommerce site, you’re adding fresh content. Which Google loves. You can use these blog posts to answer questions your potential customers have (and for which your products offer a solution). Or use them to show your expertise on topics that are related to your business. By blogging regularly and using the right keywords, your blog will help increase the overall rankings of your ecommerce site. Including your product pages.
A blog can help your audience to find you online. But maintaining it can be hard. You’ll have to continuously come up with new and unique ideas for your ecommerce blog. On top of that, you’ll want to create awesome content to make sure your audience keeps returning to your site. So, let’s start with a first and quite essential step in creating and maintaining your ecommerce blog: keyword research.
1. Input from keyword research
You can write about whatever you want on your blog, but before you start, it’s important to do proper keyword research. Keyword research will help you understand which search terms your audience uses, and therefore which search terms you want to be found on. You might have an idea of the search terms you want your site or products to be found on, but make sure to research them to make sure you’re using the right ones. Who knows, your audience might use a totally different word for a product you offer, which means you’re missing out on potential customers by focusing on the wrong search term!
You can Google the keyword you came up with to check the searches Google suggests (while you’re typing). Or use tools such as Google Trends to research how often your search term is used compared to similar terms. But keyword research is so much more. And if you spend the time to do it properly, this will pay off by providing you with a list of focus keywords that will help you rank for the right search terms.
A great way to come up with new topic ideas for your ecommerce blog is by following current events and writing about them. Keep an eye on different news sites and write posts in which you give your view or expertise on news in your niche. To make sure you don’t miss anything, you can even set up alerts for specific topics. And if a holiday or event is coming up, write a post about how your products could be used during that holiday or event.
The fun part? You’re writing about something people are interested in at that moment. Because it’s happening now. And if it’s an important event in your niche (or in general), that means that your audience will be probably want to read more about this topic.
To give an example of how we do this at Yoast, a while ago Google announced Web Vitals – a new set of metrics to measure speed and user experience of websites. Because we know our readers will want to know more about this, as they are often concerned with optimizing their site, we wrote different blog posts explaining what these Web Vitals are and what impact they can have on sites.
3. Audience questions or comments
It might seem a bit scary at first, but giving readers the possibility to leave comments on your blog is a great way to get input for new posts. Inviting people to leave comments on your blog means you will probably receive feedback and questions. Which you can then use to determine what subjects your audience wants to know more about and what you can write a new blog post on.
Also, this interaction is a great way to connect to people and make sure they’ll come back to your site. If you’re still a bit hesitant about allowing comments on your blog, we have a post that will help you handle comments on your blog.
4. Blogs with a personal touch
Writing blog posts allows you to add a personal touch to your site, and with it your brand and company. Even a large company or brand can really benefit from a blog that appeals to people on a personal level. One way to do this is by showing the authors of your blog. Let your readers get to know the people who write your blog posts and their expertise. And, if possible, let your CEO (or experts in your team) write about their own view on the market or the ways they use the products your company sells. By giving your blogs a personal touch, you’re giving the company and your brand a face that people can relate to. That helps people connect to your company and might even convince them to return to your online shop.
If you’re having trouble standing out in a sea of similar ecommerce blogs, this article about staying unique in a competitive niche might help you find your tone of voice. Which will make it much easier to add a personal touch to your blog posts and connect with your audience.
5. Stories about your products
Your product page is the perfect place to describe your product. Your blog, however, is a perfect place to share stories about your product. If you sell cleaning supplies, write blogs about which stains are best removed with your products. If you sell kids clothes, write blog posts about children playing while wearing your clothes. And don’t underestimate the importance of photos, so make sure to add lots of them! If you don’t have any, try to add images that are related to your business or brand to liven up your posts.
Tell stories about the different ways people use your products and make these stories informative and entertaining. Don’t make these blogs too salesy. Show people why they should buy your stuff instead of telling them they should buy it.
Tip: Want to make sure your product pages perform well in the search results? With our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin, you can take advantage of Yoast SEO’s excellent structured data to get rich product results. Plus, you can preview what your products look like in the search results! And if you run a Shopify store, that’s no problem either. Yoast SEO for Shopify will help you boost your traffic and optimize your content.
Customer stories
Another great way to do this is by asking your customers to share their stories. Ask them about their experiences with your products and if they have photos you’re allowed to share on your site. With the permission of these customers, you can write beautiful blog posts based on their experiences. Or you could ask your clients if they would want to write a guest blog.
As I said before, a blog can be a great marketing tool for any ecommerce site. Which is why it should, in my opinion, be part of your ecommerce SEO strategy. It will allow you to get more people to your site, increase their engagement, and present your brand and company the way you want to be seen. I hope these 5 blog ideas for ecommerce sites will provide you with enough input to start and maintain an awesome blog!
If you want to learn more about writing content that’s optimized for search engines, then you might be interested in our SEO copywriting training. Among other things, you’ll learn which steps you need to take to create aready-to-publish text for your website. Plus, how to come up with a list of relevant keywords for your website. Useful, right?
