Content freshness is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and has been that way for years. Google tends to favor unique, recent, and timely content on the search results page. However, there’s a repercussion stemming from this – many websites would relabel their old content as new to try to game the algorithm. This is not a good SEO practice, and we’ll discuss why that won’t help you rank better in this post!
Google likes fresh content, and so do we
Why does Google favor fresh content? It’s because we, as users, like new content.
We always want the most recent and up-to-date information. Whether it’s about the latest fashion trend, the latest face massager, or the latest SEO tips. Freshness is even more important for some topics, like medical information or breaking news. Of course, Google wants to meet its user’s demands. That’s why the search engine has introduced algorithm updates to help rank fresh and timely content.
What does Google mean by “fresh†content?
Google introduced the “Freshness update†way back in 2011. Since then, there have been multiple updates to the algorithm. But some things stay the same – fresh content is more favorable to rank high.
“Breaking news†queries, like a natural disaster.
Recurring event queries, like a sporting event or fashion show.
Current information queries, like the population of a country or inflation rate.
Product queries, like the new iPhone or new TV.
It’s good to know that not all queries and topics need the most recent update. For instance, queries that aim to learn about the history of World War 2 don’t require the most recent articles. An extensive report from years ago can contain just as good information.
Can you change the date of your content to make it fresh?
Many websites try to trick the algorithm into thinking they have fresh content. One way they do this is by changing the date on a page’s title or publishing date.
Some websites even go so far as to change the date/year on their page title or in their content in advance so they’re ahead of other competitors when that date hits.
For instance, if you search for ‘Best TV to buy’, you might get a search result like this:
At the time of writing this post, it’s not 2023 yet. And you can even see the publish date of one link is December 2022. Most likely, it’s an evergreen article that lists good TVs in 2022 and was frequently updated throughout the year. But since new TVs in 2023 don’t come out until later in the year, and people will search for ‘the best TVs in 2023’, these sites use this approach to stay ahead of the competition.
For the most part, this hack doesn’t work, and we advise you not to do the same! You won’t get a ranking boost by doing so. Even if you do, you’ll eventually fall off when other websites start to write better content on the same topic.
And we’re not saying this out of the blue, either. Take the word of Google’s Search Advocate John Muller, who pointed out in one of his tweets:
Is there significantly new content? Then update the dates. Is there no significantly new content? Then don't update the dates. We see a lot of spam & low-quality content that just arbitrarily updates dates ("Best fax machine for 2023"), it's pretty obvious & embarassing.
And that wasn’t the first time he answered that question:
When you write something new, or siginificantly change something existing, then change the date. Changing the date without doing anything else is just noise & useless.
Now, you shouldn’t always flat-out believe everything Google says, but in this case, they are right. Don’t “fake†your fresh content. A ranking boost doesn’t happen that easily. You’ll have to work hard and create fresh and valuable content to improve your ranking.
Fun fact (or just a fact) – We used to support current month and current year variables in the ‘SEO title’ field in the preview tool of Yoast SEO. But we decided to remove those altogether, partly because we don’t want our users to use them to “fake” refresh old content without putting in the work!
Does updating existing content make it fresh again?
Yes, it does! But it depends on how much you’ve added to that content.
If you only fix a few typos and add a few sentences here and there, that doesn’t count as making it fresh. On the other hand, if you make a significant update to a page, or frequent updates with new information, that does matter.
For instance, we’ve recently updated an article on page speed, adding much more information. The ranking for that post improved significantly after the update. That’s due to Google’s algorithm having to re-evaluate the post and compare it to other articles on the same topic.
The search performance chart of one of our recently updated post
In conclusion
Don’t try to trick the algorithm into thinking that you have fresh content while you don’t. You won’t gain any SEO benefit from relabeling your old evergreen content as new. Instead, put in the hard work and update your content with new and useful information. If your content is great, Google will give you the ranking boost you deserve! Want to learn how? Check out Marieke’s article on keeping your content fresh and up to date.
You might have been hearing more and more about it in the last few years: inclusive language. But what do people mean by it exactly? Is it a new thing? And why should you think about it when writing web copy? Find the answer to all of these questions in this post. We’ll do some myth-busting too!
Inclusive language
First things first: What is inclusive language? Inclusive language is language that avoids terms that might exclude marginalized groups of people. Typically these are terms that perpetuate prejudice, stigma, or erasure. Inclusive language favors alternatives over these terms that are less likely to be experienced as harmful or exclusionary. At the same time, these alternatives aim to keep the intended meaning.
Advocates of inclusive language generally strive for a more inclusive society. Language is an important aspect of society and it’s known to have the power to normalize ideas or beliefs. Therefore avoiding terms that imply sexist, racist, ableist, or otherwise biased ideas, can make more people feel genuinely part of society.
Some examples of inclusive alternatives
As this may sound complicated, let’s show some examples to demonstrate how this works.
Firemen vs firefighters
Take a look at this example:
” What happened? I saw all these firemen passing by!”
The word firemen generates a male or masculine image of the word in your mind. However, firefighters don’t have to be men. So, unless you’re referring to a group of male firefighters specifically, a better and more accurate alternative would be firefighters. A better sentence here would be:
” What happened? I saw all these firefighters passing by!”
By using this word in the right context you’re making sure all firefighters, whatever their gender, feel addressed, seen, or heard.
Inclusive language is context and language-specific
Inclusive language is a nuanced subject. What is or isn’t inclusive can depend on the context of the word. Some words are derogatory on all occasions; other words’ appropriateness can depend on the way they are used in a sentence.
For instance, in English using the word seniors when referring to older people is considered non-inclusive, while seniors when referring to children in high school is considered perfectly fine. At the same time, in Dutch, the word senioren (the literal translation of seniors) is actually considered more appropriate than oudere mensen (literal translation of older people). So what’s inclusive or not can really differ per context and per language.
Why write inclusive web copy?
So why would you write more inclusive content for the web? Well, when you’re creating content for your website you probably want as many people as possible to see, read and enjoy it. If you want people to feel seen and heard in your content it’s not only ethical but also smart to avoid certain words and phrases. By writing more inclusively you can give more people a better user experience as you’re making your content more accessible and relatable. That in itself is already a great reason to write more inclusively.
But it has more advantages. Creating inclusive content allows you to broaden your audience: it’s more likely people will engage with, link to, or share your content if they feel like you’ve written it for them. Which, in turn, is great for SEO, not to mention conversion. In fact, Google’s John Mueller stated on Twitter that they value and promote writing more inclusively as well. And as he says: “You might not get it right all the time but taking steps to get better matters too.”
Let’s conclude this post by debunking some myths that exist around the inclusive language phenomenon.
(Non-)inclusive language doesn’t have any real-life effects
Language has the power to influence how we think about something. It can normalize certain ideas or beliefs. If an idea is encoded through language and we hear it repeated over and over again, it gets normalized. Particularly if it’s part of standard or mainstream language! Non-inclusive language can also function as microaggressions. If you’d like to learn how this works, read this article about the power of everyday language.
So inclusive language affects real life AND vice versa. The more places that are safe for marginalized people appear in real life, the more these values reflect in how we communicate with each other.
Inclusive language is a new invention
The topic of inclusive language has been quite popular lately, this may make it seem like it’s a new invention. However, language has always been connected to social and cultural norms. It reflects them, and can also play a role in spreading them. When norms change, so does language. And when people try to challenge harmful ideas, they often also challenge the use of language that reflects and normalizes them.
For example, feminist activists of the 1960s and 70s were challenging the use of words like ‘he’ and ‘man’ to refer to humans in general. This was part of their fight to increase the visibility and status of women. You can read more about this here and here.
It is arbitrarily decided what language is inclusive
Society is always changing and evolving, and so is our understanding of it. This means that with time, we can realize that language that at one point was seen as inclusive, is not so inclusive after all.
An example of advice that has evolved is the use of handicapped vs special needs vs disabled. It used to be common to use the term special needs to replace the non-inclusive term handicapped. But conversations around disability have evolved into including disabled people. Therefore, inclusive language advocates now recommend using the word disabled instead.
These changes can happen fast, which may seem like there are constantly new ‘rules’ about what language is inclusive and what isn’t. And it may even feel like people can’t make up their minds about what language they want you to use, and make up new rules just to make your life harder.
However, this is not true – when there is any significant pushback against certain words or phrases, it is usually for a good reason. The reason may not be obvious at first, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And of course, it doesn’t mean that people always get it right – as mentioned earlier, our idea of what is and isn’t inclusive is always evolving. But the point is that more often than not people have specific reasons for advocating for or against certain language, even if sometimes their reasoning ends up being misguided.
The Yoast help articles on inclusive language can serve as useful explanations of why certain words and phrases are targeted by our inclusive language check.
You should feel bad for using non-inclusive language
It’s not a nice feeling to realize that the language you’ve been using might be harmful to other people. But we have all done it, and even the most dedicated people still make mistakes and are learning. As mentioned, our understanding of what is and isn’t inclusive can evolve quite fast, so naturally, we will be making mistakes along the way. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you have (unintentionally) used language that is not inclusive. In the first section of this article on Medium the writer does a good job of explaining this.
Inclusive language is language that makes everyone happy
Making everyone happy is impossible. Inclusive language is about avoiding language that harms certain groups of people, for example through stereotyping or erasing them. Some people may even be unhappy when they see inclusive language being used. For example, people who hold transphobic views may feel unhappy when they see trans-inclusive language being used. However, inclusive language doesn’t harm anyone, even if it can make some people unhappy by challenging their (harmful) beliefs. In fact, challenging harmful beliefs is part of what makes inclusive language inclusive.
Inclusive language is language that doesn’t offend anyone
Non-inclusive language is often offensive to people, however not all language that offends people is non-inclusive. Being offended is a subjective feeling – people can get offended by different things. For example, a person who expresses racist views may be offended if someone calls them racist. This doesn’t mean that calling racist behavior racist is not inclusive. There is a difference between language that causes personal offense and language that causes harm. Inclusive language is about avoiding the latter.
How to write more inclusively
So now you know what it is (and isn’t) and why you should use it. But how to make sure your content is inclusive? There are many guides on the internet on how to write more inclusive. So you might feel overwhelmed and not 100% up to date on best practices regarding inclusive language. We understand! It can be difficult because you might not be aware of potentially harmful words. Even when you are, you’d also need to know the alternatives! Also, as we explained, guidelines might change and that’s hard to keep up with.
Fortunately, Yoast can help you with an easy solution if you create content on WordPress or Shopify. It’s our Inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO. It will check your copy for non-inclusive terms. These checks are developed by our in-house linguists, in cooperation with Maxwell Hope from the University of Delaware. The analysis will highlight the words that could be non-inclusive and will also provide alternatives. Check out how it works in this screenshot:
Example of a check in the inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO
It checks for problematic terms in the following categories: Age, appearance, race, culture, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, gender and socio-economic status. Here you’ll find an overview of these categories. It’s opt-in, so you can switch it on if you care about this topic and want to make great content for everyone!
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.
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!
No, it’s not writing about nature. It means you write in a way that flows well and sounds natural. As if you were talking to someone. Now, we’re not saying to write slang words and half-finished sentences, because that wouldn’t read very well. So, what is natural writing? Read more to find out!
Write like you talk (kind of)
As we mentioned before, natural writing is writing in a way that’s similar to how you talk. Except a little prettier. Words like ‘kinda’ and ‘yeah’ and ‘cuz’ aren’t generally accepted as ‘professional’ language, so if you want to write for businesses (maybe your own) you should avoid slang.
However, there are things you can copy from the way you talk. For example, keeping things short and to the point! Just think about it: If you’re telling a story to friends, you won’t spend paragraphs introducing your story. Generally, you give context in a few sentences before you dive right in. And that’s also what you should do when writing!
Use short and common words
If you’re a language nerd, you probably know a lot of big, impressive words. Which is exceptional, exemplary, and marvelous! But they can also make your texts harder to read. If you use short and simple words, your writing will read more quickly. Of course, it’s fine to use ‘receive’ instead of ‘get’ every once in a while. But try to keep your vocabulary relatively simple.
Read your texts out loud
Natural writing is all about flow. The best way to find out if your story flows well and sounds natural is to read it out loud. You’ll quickly notice which parts feel awkward, too long, or overly formal. Imagine how you would say those sentences if you were telling the story instead. Then write that down.
Don’t overuse your keyword
Why not? Well, if you repeat the same keyword over and over again, your text will read very unnaturally. Just think about it. Would you rather read: “A blueberry pie is the best dessert to eat during the holidays. Everyone likes blueberry pie. That’s why I created this blueberry pie recipe. So you can treat everyone with a delicious blueberry pie this year.” Or: “A blueberry pie is the best dessert to eat during the holidays. Everyone likes it. That’s why I created this recipe, so you can treat everyone this year.” The second reads better, right?
And overusing your keyword is not even necessary for your SEO! Because Google wants your audience to have a great experience on your website. But if your text is unreadable, your audience will quickly click away, and Google won’t rank your page or post very high.
Let your sentences flow
Okay, we mentioned ‘flow’ a few times now. After all, flow is important if you want your text to read naturally. But what does it mean when a text flows well? Generally, a good flow is when your sentence length alternates. You can go: short, medium, long. Or: long, short, long. Heck, you could even try: short, short, long. As long as you alternate your sentence length and never write four short/medium/long sentences in a row, you’re good to go! And try to read your writing out loud afterwards. It really does help!
Dictate, then write
If you’re struggling with writing like you speak, why not switch it around? Dictate your text, or simply record what you’re saying, then write it down. Of course, you’ll still need to review your text. When people talk they sometimes forget the point they’re trying to make. But that’s fine. You can always edit and adjust until it sounds coherent.
The text was written naturally by you
This is an example of a passive sentence. And let’s be honest: Who talks in passive sentences? No one! Sure, they come up every once in a while, but not often. So if you want to write more naturally, be mindful of the passive voice. It can come across as impersonal, or simply boring.
Unfortunately, passive sentences still creep into your texts sometimes. So what do you need to look out for? Search for sentences with the word ‘to’. People often use ‘to’ when they’re slipping into a passive voice. For example, “When it’s time to clean your house, you better clear your calendar.†A more active sentence would be: “Clear your calendar before you clean your house.†Or even: “Need to clean your house? Then clear your calendar.â€
Good to note: Passive sentences aren’t wrong. They’re totally fine to use every once in a while. Just be mindful of them. Especially if you tend to use them a lot in your writing. Luckily, the Yoast SEO Premium plugin scans your text and highlights passive sentences, so you can easily fix them.
Example of what natural writing is
Natural writing sounds great in theory, but what does it look like in practice? Well, let’s look at an example. First, we have a formal and slightly boring text:
Stamp collecting is generally accepted as one of the areas that make up the wider subject of philately, which is the study of stamps. A philatelist may, but does not have to, collect stamps. It is not uncommon for the term philatelist to be used to mean a stamp collector. Many casual stamp collectors accumulate stamps for sheer enjoyment and relaxation without worrying about the tiny details. The creation of a large or comprehensive collection, however, generally requires some philatelic knowledge and will usually contain areas of philatelic studies.
Be honest. Did you read all of that? Probably not. So let’s make it a more interesting text by using short and simple words, alternating our sentence length, and just getting straight to the point. You’ll get:
Philately is the study of stamps. You’d think that a philatelist is someone who collects stamps, but that isn’t always true. Some philatelists collect stamps, and some don’t. But why do people collect the little squares in the first place? Multiple reasons! Sometimes for enjoyment and relaxation. Others, however, simply want to own a large collection. In order to start a collection though, you have to know at least something about stamps.
Reads better, right?
Anyone can write naturally
Like most skills, natural writing is also something you can learn. You just have to know what to do, then practice! And don’t worry if you don’t get it right on the first try. Most people have to revise their texts at least once. Just remember to get straight to the point, use simple words, and alternate your sentences. And when you’re done, read your text out loud to see how it flows. Good luck!
Search has come a long way since its early beginnings. Altavista and AskJeeves are long gone, and most of us can’t imagine a world without Google these days. But search continues to change. It has always been a work in progress, and it will probably always be that way. And the search engines that we’re using today might not always reign supreme. So let’s talk about the direction that search is heading in and what Schema has to do with it.
The search engines they are a-changing
The year 2022 has already shaken search up quite a bit, with the revelation that almost 40% of Gen Z use TikTok instead of Google to search for information. Meanwhile, on more traditional search platforms we’ve seen a lot of changes too. Google and Bing have both been busy sprucing up their search results this year. With new arrivals like Google’s multisearch and Bing’s buying guides, it’s clear that search is doing anything but standing still.
Challenges in search and SEO
So, there’s been a lot going on. But there are still many challenges for search and for SEO (besides social media and Gen Z). Ambiguous phrases and names are difficult for search engines and users to differentiate. And they can make it really hard to optimize content for search.
On top of that, expertise, authority and trust are important factors too. There’s too much spam and misinformation out there. We need search to become more precise and deliver better-quality results.
How Schema can help
This is where we turn to structured data. Schema.org structured data, in particular. Its standardized framework enables search engines to move away from simple text-matching, allowing them to piece together the relationships between concepts. In this way, search can identify relevant phrases and content in a more semantic way.
Here’s an example. There’s more than one Joost de Valk in the world (we actually found 3 more besides the one we know). With a good Schema implementation, search engines can tell the difference between each of these people. In the future, Google could even look at your other searches to guesstimate which Joost you’re looking for. Neat, huh?
Where is search heading?
But that’s not where the story ends. Search is becoming much more experiential too. With things like knowledge graphs, Google Discover, and the Multitask United Model, search could become a lot more powerful. And a lot more personal. Whether it’s about showing your preferred sources first or offering tailored results for very specific multi-layered questions, there are huge developments in the works.
Besides making quality information more findable, what happens within search is set to change too. Google has been testing new shopping features in their search results on an almost-monthly basis in 2022. In the near future, you could be comparing and buying products directly from search, and then tracking your shipment there too.
Many of these new search features rely heavily on structured data. And in the distant future, Schema could pave the way for a much more entity-based search, with less focus on individual keywords. So don’t be hesitant about getting started with structured data — it’s probably only going to get more important as time goes on.
What does this all mean for SEO?
Whew! It’s a dizzying prospect to think about what this could mean for the future of SEO. First things first — as long as search exists, it should always be possible to optimize your content for it. Structured data is likely to play an increasingly important role in that.
If, and when, entities take a more central role in search, having content that refers to all the facts and entities related to your topic may be the way to go. It could be a case of optimizing with context more than optimizing with keywords. And of course, some things will never change. The need to create quality content is one of them — even if you’re making that content for TikTok.
Offering the best information and a seamless user experience is bound to pay off. At the very least, it’s going to help you rank in the short and long term. It could also earn you a fanbase that will be shown your content preferentially above other sources in the future. Invest in that content now, and keep an eye on the search landscape as it changes. That’s your best bet.
Want to stay up to date with all the latest news in SEO? Hear it from the experts in our monthly SEO news webinar!
Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to provide the most important pages and posts with more link value than other, less valuable pages. So using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO! In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of internal linking, how to approach it, and how Yoast SEO can help you with internal linking.
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it.
There are several types of internal links. In addition to links on your homepage, menu, post feed, etc., you can also add links within your content. We call those contextual links. Contextual links point your users to interesting and related content. Moreover, they allow search engines to determine what content on your site is related and its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.
Internal links vs. external links
Every website — even online stores — consists of internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your website, and external links connect your pages to other websites. This post focuses on internal links and what they mean for SEO. See our posts on link building if you want to get more external links pointing to your site.
Why are links important to Google?
Internal linking is an essential factor for Google and other search engines. But why? Google follows links to discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If a post or page gets many links, this signals to Google that it’s an essential or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external links.
Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. You’ll guide visitors and Google to your most important pages with the correct internal links. Our internal linking tool (not available yet in Yoast SEO for Shopify) can help you suggest related posts to link to!
Internal links establish relationships between content
Google crawls websites by following internal and external links using a bot called Googlebot. This bot arrives at the website’s homepage, renders the page, and follows the first link. By following the links, Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts, and other content. This way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover a similar subject matter.
For example, this post will have links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’, and ‘Site structure’ tags. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.
Internal links help search engines better find your content
As websites grow in size and complexity, orphaned content becomes an issue for many. Orphaned content refers to pages on your website that have no internal links pointing to them. This issue is because search engines can’t find and index them without any internal link to lead the Googlebot to these pages.
Even though websites nowadays have sitemaps that list the URL of — most — pages on your site, search engines may take a long time to reach these pages eventually. This is especially true for very big websites that take a lot of resources to crawl or newly created sites that don’t get visited often by Google. Adding internal links to your newly published pages provides search engines with more ways to reach those content.
Link value
In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the most significant link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page and so on.
Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage instead of only on the category page. And Google will find recent posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.
When you understand that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. That’s because Google deems a page with lots of valuable links more important; you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking.
Setting up an internal linking strategy
It’s crucial for your SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy regularly. It’s one of the ways to improve the fitness of your website. By adding the right internal links, you make sure Google understands the following:
the relevance of pages;
the relationship between pages;
and the value of pages.
There are several things to consider to set up your internal linking strategy. How you go about it depends on your site and goals, but the following steps are a good rule of thumb.
1. Determine the ideal structure for your site
We always advise website owners to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage; below are some sections or categories, and further down are individual posts and pages — possibly with subcategories in between.
Your website’s menu should reflect this structure if you do it well. In our Ultimate guide to site structure, you can read how to create the best site structure for your site.
2. Decide what your most important content is
It would help if you determined what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete content about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when searching for topics or products you specialize in.
You must add many links to inform Google that this is your most important content. There are various spots from where you can link to your cornerstone content. Here, we’ll give the most common options, from your post’s copy to your navigation.
3. Add contextual links
When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic, you should contextually link them. This will show Google – and your users – that those articles are topically related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.
Moreover, you want to show Google which articles are your cornerstone: your most complete article on this topic. To do so, you must add a link to the cornerstone in all articles on this topic. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone to the individual posts.
Contextual linking: an example
Our blog has a cornerstone content article called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. This post will rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results.
So we’ve added links from other relevant articles, such as ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘, ‘ What is keyword research‘, or ‘Focus on long tail keywords‘ to the main article. And we link back from the main article to these posts. In doing so, Google will understand that the ultimate guide contains the most information about [keyword research]. So, in the end, Google will rank the ultimate guide above the other shorter posts about keyword research.
4. Link hierarchical pages
If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to their child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. These pages should be related to each other on a well-organized site, and connecting them like this make perfect sense.
You can find many plugins and modules to add complete related post sections to your posts. This is an excellent way to show your posts to more visitors. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts are related. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best. That’s what we do on Yoast.com – we select a related post manually (or with a bit of help from our internal linking tool – more on that later) and place a link to that post at the bottom of the article. The related links block in Yoast SEO Premium helps you do this in a jiffy.
Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links from the homepage or the top navigation menu. It would help if you did this with the posts and pages most important to your business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and strengthen them in Google’s eyes.
7. Add links to your taxonomies
Taxonomies, like categories and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google understand your content. If you have a blog, adding internal links to the taxonomies that the post belongs to could be beneficial. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google understand your blog’s structure and helps visitors navigate related posts more easily.
A good practice after you publish a post or page is to link to that newly published post from other content on your site. Of course, the posts or pages that link to the recently published post must be of a similar topic. You shouldn’t just link to this new post from a random post or page on your site.
Now, this might sound daunting, especially if you regularly publish content. But it’s worth the hassle, as you won’t end up with a bunch of orphaned content that needs fixing. Besides, adding internal links to your most recent posts ensure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index them when they land on other pages on your site.
9. Consider adding links to popular posts
The last option to mention is creating internal links to your website’s most popular posts or pages. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts. As link value passes to these most popular posts from many different pages, they get a boost. Besides, the posts will be more accessible for visitors, increasing traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign for Google.
More on internal links
Nofollow links
You also probably have links that aren’t important for SEO on your website. For example, if you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, you don’t want to leak link value to your login page – that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.
You used to be able to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a nofollow tag. A nofollow tag asks Google not to follow the link, so no link value is passed. Now you might think: “I’m going to nofollow less important links to give the most important links more link value.” While this worked in the past, Google has become more competent. Now it seems that the link value for those nofollow links doesn’t automatically flow to the other links on the page. The nofollow link will be counted as a link, and the link value will be lost. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of nofollowing some of the links.
Adding a nofollow tag doesn’t mean those target pages can’t be found in Google’s search results. You should give them a noindex tag if you don’t want pages or posts to appear in the search results. The noindex tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.
Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, using the correct anchor text is essential. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the two internal links in the example below are ‘link schemes’ and ‘paid links’:
You can see the anchor text containing the link in this image.
If you over-optimize anchor text, you might hurt your website. By over-optimizing, we mean keyword stuffing. Previously, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword, and Google would rank your site higher for that keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So please ensure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it’s OK to use keywords but don’t add the same keywords to every link’s anchor text.
Yoast SEO includes several checks and features to help you improve your internal linking.
On a post level, the Yoast SEO plugin helps ensure you give internal links some thought. In the plugin meta box — or the sidebar, as shown below –, the internal link assessment of Yoast SEO checks whether you’ve created links to other pages on your website in your text. It also checks if these links are followed or nofollowed.
For Yoast SEO for Shopify, this check only works on posts or pages. You do not have internal links on your product pages or product descriptions because you want to keep customers there — not send them to another part of your site. You need your customer to convert as quickly as possible. An essential part of Shopify SEO, right?
Checking if you've added enough internal links in Yoast SEO
Checking if you've added enough internal links in Yoast SEO for Shopify only works in posts and pages, not products
Add internal contextual links to relevant content on your site to get a green bullet for this check.
Text link counter
If you install Yoast SEO for WordPress, you’ll also get a handy tool in your post overview called the text link counter. This tool counts the internal links in a post and the internal links pointing to a post. This visualizes which posts should receive more links. This will all help you work purposely on your site structure.
You can see the number of internal links pointing to and from a post with Yoast SEO
Easy internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium
The internal linking suggestion
You are probably aware of the importance of internal linking for SEO. But handpicking articles – and relevant articles – to link to isn’t always easy. Even if you have a small website, you might not remember every little thing you’ve published over the years. And suppose you’re managing a medium to large website, especially one where various people can write and publish content. In that case, knowing all your content on a given topic is difficult. When this happens, internal linking can take much more of your time than it should.
That’s precisely why we’ve built a dedicated feature in Yoast SEO Premium for internal linking – the internal linking suggestion. It’s incredibly easy to use, and you only need to set up this feature once. Yoast SEO will first scan, analyze and try to make sense of all your content in WordPress. Then when you write a post, you can immediately link to a related post by copying or dragging the link directly into the editor. You’ll see the suggestions in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right-hand side of your screen. For instance, the screenshot below shows the internal linking suggestions for this post you’re reading! The green tick indicates that we’re linking to the suggested post from this one.
This feature makes internal linking much more intuitive. And that’s thanks to Yoast SEO content analysis running in real-time in the background. It analyses and compares your text to existing content on your site to pick out articles that best fit your new post, all while you’re writing! Even if the articles were written a while ago or by someone else on your team, Yoast SEO won’t miss them. This will help you create an outstanding structure by connecting related content without immediately overlooking articles you might not think of.
Internal linking suggestions by Yoast SEO Premium for this article
The cornerstone approach internal linking workout
Getting your internal links back in shape is important because that helps you rank with the content you want to rank. That’s why we’ve introduced the cornerstone content internal linking workout in Yoast SEO Premium. You can use this workout to improve your internal linking based on the cornerstone approach we discussed earlier. In six easy steps, you can improve your site structure by learning where to find your cornerstones, how many links they have, and how to add links pointing to these important posts.
The first step in the cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium
The orphaned content internal linking workout
Orphaned content is pages and posts with no internal links. That makes them hard for users to find and also hard for search engines to crawl. In the orphaned content workout, we identify your orphaned content and give you all the options and tools you need to deal with it! Maybe you don’t want those pages to be found. Maybe you want to delete them. Or maybe you want these pages to rank in Google and be found by your visitors. Whatever you decide for each page, the steps in this SEO workout make it easy to clean up your content.
The first step in the orphaned content workout in Yoast SEO Premium
When you have our Premium plugin, you can find these internal linking workouts in the backend of your WordPress website. Go to Yoast SEO in your left menu, and select the menu item ‘Workouts’. This will take you to a page where you can find our workouts. Of course, we’ll add other SEO workouts as we go along, which you’ll also find here when they’re released!
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:
In the WordPress block editor, you can also easily link child and sibling pages with Yoast SEO premium. If you want to make sure you link all child and sibling pages, just select the sibling or subpages block, add it to your post, and you’re done. Of course, this only works for hierarchical post types.
Without links, your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and your users will understand your site better, which will, in turn, increase your chance of ranking.
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!
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.
(@JohnMu) November 26, 2022
