Bing has added aggregated ratings, expert reviews, product specifications and the ability to compare historic prices across sellers to its shopping search engine, the company announced Thursday. Clicking on the details within a shopping result takes the user to Bing’s detail page for that product (shown below). There, users can compare buying options, check out the price history, see excerpts from expert reviews and view product specifications. Why we care. These at-a-glance features may facilitate comparison shopping between products. Historical pricing data may also help users make buying decisions as well as inform marketers of how competitive their pricing is. In addition, these updates help Bing reach parity with (and in some regards, surpass) Google’s shopping search capabilities. Over the last few years, and especially since shifting consumer behavior due to the coronavirus pandemic resulted in an e-commerce boom, Bing and Google have dedicated more resources towards building out their shopping capabilities. Although Amazon remains the most dominant platform in the sector, Bing and Google are providing users with more comparison shopping features, such as the ability to sign up for alerts when prices drop. For Bing and Google, it’ll take a critical mass of these features to make them serious Amazon competitors. And, even if the search engines achieve this, Amazon is likely to maintain its position as the market leader due to its Prime subscription benefits, among other factors. However, success for the search engines doesn’t look like what it does for Amazon — if they can create better shopping experiences and save customers money (through features like the aforementioned price drop alerts or price comparison tables), then they can attract more users and sell more ads. More on the news.
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It’s common to hear “content is king” in the SEO industry. Although I agree with that statement, it should not be applied cart blanche for every single site in every single situation. In fact, there are cases in which adding too much low-value content can have the opposite effect for SMBs and local businesses. The situation. Last year, Sterling Sky worked with a personal injury lawyer client in Florida that wasn’t ranking very well for some of the main keywords that they were targeting. Prior to working with us, the law firm had another company set up dozens of boilerplate service area pages targeting social security disability terms. Each page was focused on an individual city or service area but provided no real value to the users who visited those pages. The issue. The pages had the following characteristics:
The solution. Because the pages weren’t adding value to the site, mainly due to points three and four listed above, we made the decision to delete them all and redirect them to the main pages on the site that were about social security disability. The result. Within weeks of doing this, my colleague Carrie Hill saw big increases in their local pack rankings for “social security disability attorney.” Here is the change using the ranking tool Places Scout: We also saw gains on the web search organic side for these keywords. This is a screenshot of the ranking tool Whitespark: Service area pages can work really well in some industries and markets. However, it’s essential to measure the impact of the content you’re adding to your site before implementing a strategy like the one this law firm had. Why we care. When you put effort behind any SEO strategy, it’s important to have a testing strategy that iterates and works to produce the desired results. It’s critical in every situation to analyze each client, their market, and the SERP landscape individually to determine if they need more content on their site, and, if so, what the best type of content is for the target audience they’re working to serve. Instead of writing and posting a bunch of content without a plan or a strategy to back it up, make sure you have a plan to build links to the content — this includes internal links — and see if existing pages you have created are actually gaining traffic. In the case study example, it would have been better to add a few service area pages and determine if they perform well instead of adding 50 of these service area pages as a first step. The post Case study: More content is not always better for ranking in Google appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3h4iGht Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, let’s talk about the cycle of spam and why some of you may be led down the wrong path without even knowing. In the newsletter items below you will read about how Google released its webspam report for 2020, saying how spam is increasing but Google’s efforts to detect and ultimately block spam from its search results are improving. If there is one guarantee in life, outside of taxes and death, is that as long as search engines are popular, spam will always be a concern for Google and those search engines. In What We’re Reading below, I listed an article I wrote (I also did read it after I wrote it, which is rare): Brands Value Domain Authority Because They Mistakenly Think Google Values It. It is a vicious circle with DA or domain authority. What you get is brands who don’t understand that DA is not a Google metric and those brands buying links from sites that have high DA. This causes a multitude of issues. Site owners work hard to get their DA scores up because for some reason certain marketers believe there is value in the score, then those sites then sell links on their sites because they have a good DA score. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines strictly forbid link selling in this manner, so what eventually happens is the people selling links on their sites will ultimately see their rankings in Google Search drop because Google will stop trusting the links on that site and trusting the site in general. You also then have those who are buying the link, paying for a link that does them no good – because Google isn’t counting it. This isn’t a new topic, we covered it before. In short – these marketers can end up obsessing about a metric called DA that’s not even used by Google but created by an SEO toolset provider. Instead, SEOs should be obsessing about what really matters: Building a website that has great content that people naturally want to link to, that helps users solve a problem and that people want to recommend to their friends. And that is what will perform well in Google in the long term, not pages with high DA scores but pages that have great content, user experience and that people love. Stop wasting your time, money and resources on vanity metrics. Barry Schwartz, Google Search spam prevention keep on improving says GoogleGoogle came out with its annual webspam report on how Google is getting better and better at detecting and blocking webspam in Google Search. Google said that it now detects 40 billion pages of spam every single day throughout 2020, that is a 60% – yes SIX ZERO – increase from 2019’s number of 25 billion per day. Google credits a lot of that to its AI capabilities, where it reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content from showing up in the search results by more than 80% compared to just a couple of years ago. Hacked spam detection improved as well, and improved by 50% the company said. Google also made efforts to protect “billions of searches” around COVID-19 topics from showing misinformation or scams and fraud. Google is busy fighting spam, as you can imagine, and that will never end. Being a spam fighter at Google is good job security. Google Ads API version 7.0Google has released version 7.0 of the Google Ads API with a slew of new features and goodies. Some of those features include these listed below:
Why we care. If you, your customers or toolset providers are using the Google Ads API, you can now explore more features within the API to get more done, in a more efficient way. Check out the full release notes to see what additional features you can utilize or nudge your tool provider to use to make your daily work-life as a search marketer easier. Facebook revenue almost doubled: Here’s what it means for advertisersEarnings reports released on Wednesday show that Facebook nearly doubled its Q1 earnings compared to last year. Revenue from advertising was up 146% compared to 2020 while daily active users only increased 8%. The increase was driven largely by an uptick in ad prices, according to the CFO outlook commentary on the earnings report: “We are pleased with the strength of our advertising revenue growth in the first quarter of 2021, which was driven by a 30% year-over-year increase in the average price per ad and a 12% increase in the number of ads delivered.” Pricing changes correspond with privacy initiatives. “Directly after the platform change [in response to IDFA], we saw an increase in both cost-per-click and cost-per-purchase across our client portfolio, regardless of industry,” said Lauren Clawson, social media team lead at Portent. “In addition to a decrease in overall metrics, some SMMs have been reporting a decline in the performance of lookalike audiences, which are typically our top performers. This was expected, as a decrease in attribution window decreases the data points that Facebook has to make connections between their users.” Why we care. “We expect second quarter 2021 year-over-year total revenue growth to remain stable or modestly accelerate relative to the growth rate in the first quarter of 2021 as we lap slower growth related to the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020,” Facebook’s CFO said in the announcement. The increase in ad prices will likely continue to bolster these predicted revenue increases. Google Discover ranking issues, dofollow links, Google publisher center and more.Suspending sites in Google Discover. No, this doesn’t really happen. Paul Bakaus from Google said on Twitter, “We don’t generally ‘suspend’ sites, and when you fix issues, you are always eligible to reappear.” What is happening is that the site, likely after a core update, no longer has enough quality to be in Google Discover. Google news video and regex. If you want to catch up on the SEO news from Google, John Mueller published a video on some of the latest changes at Google Search. My favorite part is at the end where he is trying to say regex. Google publisher center updated. The Google publisher center, where news publishers can manage their sites in Google News, has had a few design tweaks and help document changes. Dofollow. There is no such thing as a rel=”dofollow” link attribute, John Mueller of Google explained (not sure why it needed to be explained). I mean, you can add it to your links if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside but Google ignores it. All links are followed by Google unless you tell Google otherwise. We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
The post SEOs, stop wasting time and focus on what really matters; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3nxS5ui When advertisers upload a customer list, Google will now show them the estimated match rate (the percentage of the list that is usable with Customer Match) the company announced Thursday. Match rate data is also be available for previously uploaded customer lists as well. Improving your match rate. To get the most out of your customer lists and increase your match rate, Google recommends adding as much customer information as you can: “Advertisers who uploaded two types of customer information saw an average list size increase of 28%, and with three types they saw an increase of 35%.” Keeping your customer lists up-to-date can also provide Google with more information to reach your audience. Traffic and conversions for Customer Match lists increased by an average of 17% after they’ve been updated, according to Google’s internal data. Google will also automatically show a suggestion on the Recommendations page to remind you to update your lists. Additionally, fixing any formatting issues can also help to increase your match rates. Why we care. Prior to this update, advertisers had to wait to see what their match rate was. Having it available instantaneously can help to contextualize performance expectations and enable them to troubleshoot their lists much earlier if the match rate seems inaccurate. With the deprecation of third-party cookies, advertisers may turn to first-party data to help them reach customers. Customer Match is one way for advertisers to take advantage of the data their customers have given them, and having an instant match rate makes it a bit more transparent and easier to use. The post Instant match rates are now available for Customer Match lists in Google Ads appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3nywWjr Earnings reports released on Wednesday show that Facebook nearly doubled its Q1 earnings compared to last year. Revenue from advertising was up 146% compared to 2020 while daily active users only increased 8%. The increase was driven largely by an uptick in ad prices, according to the CFO outlook commentary on the earnings report: “We are pleased with the strength of our advertising revenue growth in the first quarter of 2021, which was driven by a 30% year-over-year increase in the average price per ad and a 12% increase in the number of ads delivered.” COVID affects reporting numbers. When pulling your own numbers, it’s important to remember that metrics for most businesses may be off one way or another this year as COVID lockdown began in Q1 of 2020 and lingered for the rest of the year. As such, numbers may have been lower or stagnant in 2020, making 2021 seem exceptionally high (or even low depending on your or your client’s business). COVID accelerated digital advertising. After an initial dip when COVID-19 lockdowns began and consumers figured out what was going on at work and at home, digital advertising increased. Quarantine, plus working and schooling from home, meant even more time in front of screens and more opportunity for advertisers to reach their audiences. It also meant an increase in competition for ad visibility and, hence, an increase in ad prices. What’s changing for Facebook? With the release of Apple’s iOS 14 and IDFA, Apple users will have to consent to cross-app tracking and advertisers will have two short lines of text to make their case to consumers. Facebook initially came out disparaging the change, saying it will hurt publisher revenues. “We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future,” wrote Facebook. In an update to the announcement, Facebook confirmed that they’d adopt Apple’s SKAdNetwork API but won’t implement Private Click Measurement (PCM), claiming that it doesn’t capture the complexities of the user journey. Instead, Facebook created Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) in order to measure conversion events on iOS. Pricing changes correspond with privacy initiatives, too. “Directly after the platform change, we saw an increase in both cost-per-click and cost-per-purchase across our client portfolio, regardless of industry,” said Lauren Clawson, social media team lead at Portent. “In addition to a decrease in overall metrics, some SMMs have been reporting a decline in the performance of lookalike audiences, which are typically our top performers. This was expected, as a decrease in attribution window decreases the data points that Facebook has to make connections between their users.” Why we care. “We expect second quarter 2021 year-over-year total revenue growth to remain stable or modestly accelerate relative to the growth rate in the first quarter of 2021 as we lap slower growth related to the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020,” Facebook’s CFO said in the announcement. The increase in ad prices will likely continue to bolster these predicted revenue increases. “It’s also on us to keep making the case that personalized advertising is good for people and businesses and to better explain how it works so that people realize that personalized ads can be privacy-protected,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on the earnings call, speaking to the privacy changes that pit tech against users against advertisers. The post Facebook revenue almost doubled: Here’s what it means for advertisers appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3u8r6YO Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and are you the kind of person who needs background noise to work? I’m the kind of person who relishes working in absolute silence. Maybe I need to hear the cogs of my own brain turning in order to sort things out, but there’s nothing like listening to just … nothing. My partner, on the other hand, is a verbal processor. In order to work through things, he has to talk through them. Opposites attract? And thanks to COVID work from home, we have been working from the same townhouse for over a year now. We’ve made it work by separating our working spaces by an entire floor (yes, I shoved him in the basement) and by setting boundaries about when he can come up and work through his work ideas via word waterfalls. I can’t help but think that people like him will be some of the FIRST in line when in-person events are open and safe again. And, I’ll admit, even I, president of the official introverts club, kinda can’t wait to see some in-person sessions and chat with real humans face-to-face in giant, sunlit expo halls (even if only just for a few moments). I’m not alone, according to our Events Participation Index survey. Check out the details below. Carolyn Lyden, Google announces travel advisory notices and updates to its trip planning toolsGoogle continues to push towards making itself an all-in-one travel planning resource with the addition of more COVID-related travel advisory information in search, a redesigned Explore section within google.com/travel and road trip support for Maps on desktop. This endeavor dates back over a decade to when Google purchased ITA Software to create its flight search engine. Now, users can comparison shop for flights, plan road trips and stay informed about travel restrictions all in one place. When users search for travel-related queries, Google will show advisory details for their destination (shown above), such as whether visitors must provide their immunization records, proof of test results or if they must quarantine once they arrive; signed-in users can also opt-in to receiving email notifications for advisory updates. The revamped Explore section now shows more destinations on the map, like national parks and smaller cities. And, road trip support in Maps on desktop enables users to select from different types of places to stop at. These feature updates may help Google keep users in its ecosystem, making it more difficult for the company’s competitors in the online travel industry. There may also be trickle-down effects for marketers as we must leverage the platforms that our audiences use (in this case, Google) to market to them. Google now lets you report indexing issues with your siteGoogle has added a new feature to report an indexing issue directly to their search team. You can access this feature in the footer of the URL inspection help document and indexing coverage report document. Google is “currently piloting this in the US only and it should be fully available to all in the US within a week or less,” the company said. Why we care. One of the more common issues we have seen SEOs struggle with is indexing issues with Google Search. Most of the time, Google would say those issues are related to technical or quality issues with the website, but sometimes they can be issues with Google Search. In fact, we reported numerous confirmed indexing issues with Google over the years. This form gives both Google and SEOs a method to escalate these indexing issues with Google Search. Google Ads earnings up 32% while Microsoft Advertising earnings up 17%Both Microsoft (Bing) and Alphabet (Google) announced earnings last night and both had pretty big uplifts with their search advertising revenues and earnings. Microsoft was up 17% for its search advertising revenue category and Google was up 32% for its search advertising revenue category, year-over-year. “Alphabet reported strong year-over-year growth across all three of Google’s lines of ad business, with search and Network Members revenues up about 30% and YouTube up about 49%. This performance was at or slightly above our expectations for the quarter, meaning Google is on track for a forecast of 25.3% growth in net ad revenues worldwide for this year. Google’s Network Members revenue, in particular, grew faster than we expected, suggesting broad strength in the programmatic display ad market as well as at Google’s owned and operated properties. These results show Google’s digital ad offerings are continuing to attract more advertiser interest,” said Nicole Perrin, eMarketer principal analyst for Insider Intelligence. In-person events for marketers may be back in early 2022The majority of marketers are ready to come back to in-person conferences by the start of 2022. But improvements in virtual conferences and lingering uneasiness about the pandemic will likely mean smaller shows at the outset. The data derives from the March edition of the Events Participation Index survey, which we have fielded regularly since the beginning of the pandemic. About 38% of the nearly 250 marketers we surveyed in March said it is extremely likely that they will attend an in-person show in the first half of 2022, while about 45% gave the prospect a moderate to somewhat likely possibility. The numbers shrink as you get closer to the present, with only 21% saying it is extremely likely they would attend in-person events in the fourth quarter of 2021 and an even smaller 17% saying it is extremely likely they’d attend in the third quarter. The COVID-19 pandemic gave new life to digital events. The pivot from in-person also equalized experiences, as major trade shows and smaller regional conferences were generally reduced to video-based education and networking. It’s a medium that found an audience out of necessity, and it’s likely to stick around. About 92% of marketers who took our survey said organizers should keep offering virtual events even when in-person events return. And the reasons are not surprising. Most cited the ability to attend more events and to more easily integrate them into their schedules. Others cited safety during the pandemic and the lesser environmental impact of digital shows. But most often respondents cited the expense. Verizon is the latest to test a FLoC alternativePrivacy is the topic du jour, and it seems like almost everyone is in the race to figure out how to preserve the privacy of internet users by eliminating the need for third-party data while still being able to serve them targeted and customized ads. Google, of course, introduced FLoC, which plans to bucket consumers by interest and allow advertisers to market to those interest groups — which effectively cloaks individual data, according to Google. “Verizon Media became the latest player to enter the space earlier this month with the launch of Next-Gen Solutions, a tool that helps advertisers and publishers target audiences without any online identifiers. Using artificial intelligence (AI) trained on first-party data from Verizon Media websites like Yahoo, Next-Gen Solutions infers audience characteristics based on context and real-time signals from devices. Similar to Google’s FLoCs, Verizon’s solution does not rely on cookies, mobile app IDs, or hashed email. What differentiates the product is that Verizon’s Next-Gen Solutions requires no user-level profiles, and it works across multiple Internet browsers,” wrote Stephanie Miles for Street Fight Magazine. Why we care. “This is going to fuel the next generation of ad tech solutions,” said Patrick O’Leary, CEO of the publisher ad sales CRM Boostr. “Marketers will likely be confused and will need to run lots of experiments to find what gives them comparable or better ROAS than targeting solutions based on third-party cookies.” What does hybrid mean to you?As more and more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 the idea of going back to in-person events is becoming more realistic (see our survey data above). Although many events will remain online until 2022, it’s the time to start thinking about what events will look like post-COVID. I don’t expect an immediate return to what was considered “normal” before the pandemic. It’s likely that events as we knew them have changed forever. More and more, I hear about hybrid events, but I’m realizing that hybrid means different things to different people. I’ve seen explanations describing hybrid events as in-person events with sessions that are live streamed at the same time. Another description of hybrid events is one larger in-person event with smaller virtual events on the same subject matter happening throughout the year. Rising Media, producers of SMX London, SMX Munich, SMX Paris and others are trying an innovative hybrid event idea for SMX Advanced Europe taking place June 21-22 that has piqued my interest. Sandra Finlay, Conference Director at Rising Media explained their plan. SMX Advanced Europe will take place virtually. However, there will also be in-person hubs throughout Europe for a maximum of 10 people each depending on local COVID restrictions. At these hubs, attendees will watch virtual sessions and will have the added benefit of interacting with others in-person. In some cases, there will be speakers presenting their virtual sessions from these hubs and a lucky few will get to witness the session in person. If Europe experiences more COVID restrictions that won’t allow for the hubs, the event will continue as planned virtually. I loved this creative idea for a hybrid event that allows attendees an option for an in-person experience if they choose it. It feels like a step toward getting back to some definition of normal. What do you want to see in a hybrid event? Let me know at [email protected] Pinterest replaces mall visits, changing nav to improve SEO and addictive social media algosPinterest earnings show 30% YoY increase in users. “The sudden increase in focus on eCommerce saw Pinterest benefit from a significant surge, as it replaced regular mall visits for shopping, providing connection to a broad range of artisan goods aligned to user interests,” wrote Andrew Hutchinson for Social Media Today. Can changing your header nav help rankings? Yes, according to a case study from Holly Miller Anderson. “Post launch, roughly 70 days until now (the early part of April), the new URLs in the header nav are contributing 35% of site Visits… None of the new URLs were previously in the header nav so that’s an additional 35% of traffic on top of the URLs that were contributing, on their own, roughly 56% of Visits. Not a bad return.” Senators want more transparency into ‘addictive’ social media algorithms. At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Senators signaled interest in increased transparency regarding how social media and video algorithms are built and work. “Misinformation is not in our interest. Our business relies on the trust of our users, but also our advertisers who on our platform advertise on single pieces of content,” said Alexandra Veitch, YouTube’s director of government affairs and public policy for the Americas and emerging markets. The Black experience at work in charts: The pipeline is brokenMcKinsey’s latest report on Black Americans’ experience in the US workplace pulled data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Census Bureau, and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as well as 24 companies representing 3.7 million US employees. “The scale of the issues facing Black US workers is massive, and the roots of the problem are deep,” concluded authors Bryan Hancock, James Manyika, Monne Williams, and Lareina Yee. One major issue, among the ten listed, is a lack of representation in management at leadership. “Companies often lack Black leaders and miss out on the known benefits of diversity. Those employees who do become managers rarely reach the very top levels,” said the authors. There are only four Black CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. If these companies represented the actual population density, this number would be closer to 60, the data points out. It makes sense then, that Black workers report a lack of managerial sponsorship and allyship. “Research describes an “emotional tax”—a heightened feeling of being different that has detrimental effects on health—that Black employees experience at work. Sponsorship and allyship can diminish that feeling, but only one-third of Black employees report having even one sponsor,” according to the McKinsey data. So what’s the solution? The study authors suggest companies redouble their efforts along five lines:
Further reading… >> The onus of diversity should not fall to Black marketers The post You can report indexing issues directly to Google now; Plus, in-person events back in 2022; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3u47C7w Google detected 40 billion pages of spam every day in 2020, which is up from the previous year by 60%. These 40 billion pages included hacked sites, deceptively created sites, and other forms of web spam, scams and fraud. Google announced its new webspam report for 2020 that can be accessed here. AI helps. Google has credited advancements in AI with having reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content from showing up in its search results “by more than 80% compared to a couple of years ago,” the company said. While hacked spam was “still rampant in 2020,” Google said they improved “detection capability by more than 50%” which resulted in the company removing most of hacked spam from its search results. Google shared this cute graphic to show how it fights spam: COVID. Google also said it focused a lot of protecting searchers from misinformation around the pandemic. They “devoted significant effort in extending protection to the billions of searches” on such important topics around COVID. They also “made significant progress in improving our coverage and protecting more users against online scams and fraud,” Google wrote. This includes Google adding the “more about this result” feature. Ads. Google also referenced the bad ads report that was released earlier this year where the company removed 3.1 billion ads in 2020. Why not release the reports together? Well, the Google Search team is separate from the Google Ads teams and they try not to work closely together. Why we care. Google continues to grow and searchers seem to continue to come back to Google to search for more and more queries. We, as search marketers, like it when Google does not show spammy, low quality and especially harmful sites above ours. Hopefully, these efforts by Google help your legitimate sites rank better and also keep us safe searching. The post Google webspam report: 60% increase in spam detection appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3aKusJG Google has released a new version of the Google Ads API. This is version 7.0, which is an upgrade from version 6.1.0 which was released on April 10, 2021. What is the Google Ads API. The Google Ads API lets you programmatically interface with your Google Ads accounts so that you can automatically bring in reporting to your own stack, and/or build in procedures to automate your ad creation, change your bids or bidding strategies and more. The API enables developers to interact directly with the Google Ads platform. Some features include…
What is new in version 7.0. There is a full list of changes in the release notes if you want to do a deep dive, but here are some highlights:
Why we care. If you, your customers or toolset providers are using the Google Ads API, you can now explore more features within the API to get more done and in a more efficient way. Check out the full release notes to see what additional features you can utilize or nudge your tool provider to use to make your daily work-life as a search marketer easier. The post Google released Google Ads API version 7.0 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3eLPedk You’ve audited websites a lot of times and probably used different tools to identify the issues that harm SEO and UX. While this process is nothing new to you, there might be different ways to look at it and new tools to try out. This post will show you how to efficiently audit a website using a US-based marketing agency site as an example. We’ve purposefully selected a website from Google’s page 2—by studying its backbone, we’ll try to figure out if any technical flaws can hold this website back from success. Chances are those are the same common issues the updated SE Ranking’s Website Audit detected on 170K+ websites in the last couple of months: Get the big picture before diving into detailsWhen you audit a website, you may feel eager to immediately start fixing all the errors detected by an auditing tool. However, we find it really beneficial to study the big picture before tackling all the issues. Try to get a holistic view of your website’s technical health to identify areas that are crying for help as well as issues that are not that critical for your website’s performance. That way, you’ll spend your time wisely by focusing on things that really matter. Now, if your website auditing tool leaves you with tonnes of uncategorized data, you’ll have to spend hours, if not days, processing it. Thus, you may feel tempted to skip the step and start fixing your internal links and flooding your developer’s inbox with tasks on fixing CSS and redirect errors. Still, if you choose the right tool, you can see the big picture without wasting your time. For example,some solutions provide easy-to-understand graphs that show your website’s general health score, Core Web Vitals data, list of top issues, issue distribution stats, and other important stats. In the screenshot above, we can see the stats of our example website. The general health score is extremely low and slow speed issues exceed all other identified problems, even though the Core Web Vitals score doesn’t seem that bad. Seeing redirect chains among the top issues and many code-related warnings (JavaScript and CSS) helps understand where page loading speed problems come from—and all of that is evident just from the tool’s overview. Plus, every graph is clickable so you can learn more about each issue by jumping to the respective section. The overview also helps evaluate the situation with indexing and server status codes. In the example website, we know just by glancing at the audit results that page indexation dynamics leaves much to be desired. We see that over half of the pages are not in the index and that practically no work has been done with the meta robots tag, X-Robots-Tag, and robots.txt file to block certain pages from getting indexed. From the status code graph, we learn that we have to reduce the number of redirects and error pages—having a lot of them, which is the case here, might harm your loading speed and, ultimately, rankings. By clicking on each server code, you’ll be redirected to the Crawled Pages section, where you can view the full list of pages with a certain status code and filter them by other parameters. The Detached Pages graph points to internal linking issues that need to be fixed as soon as possible. A lot of orphans and dead-end pages make it harder for search engines to crawl the website. As you can see, a lot of valuable information is neatly squeezed into the tool’s overview. Study every issue and set your priorities rightOnce you have the general picture, go through each particular issue in detail. SE Ranking’s Website Audit has an Issue Report section for that purpose. Every identified issue is conveniently put into one of 18 categories ranging from security to content—that way you immediately see the most affected areas of your website. Besides, issues are grouped by their level of urgency—errors, warnings, and notices. In this article, we’ll focus on the errors detected on our sample website. By analyzing the tab, we see that non-200 pages aren’t the only ones threatening the example website’s health and rankings. Mixed content—resources on HTTPS-pages that are loaded over HTTP and are usually blocked by browsers—and broken images and code files are also to blame here. These issues are part of the foundation of a website’s security and performance, so you don’t want to neglect them. By clicking on the number of issues in any subcategory, you can see a full list of pages and their essential parameters (availability in a sitemap, status codes). While further scrolling the report, we can identify some problems with content as well: identical H1 and title tags, missing description tags, or tags being too small. If you disagree on the optimum title tag and description meta tag values defined by the tool, you can amend them to your liking using the tool settings. This is where you can set your own values for certain metrics, exclude some parameters from the report and generally customize the tool to fit your needs. Now, let’s proceed to the Localization section—it also shows some critical errors. For example, when a localized page doesn’t link out to itself or the hreflang attribute points to a non-canonical page version, search engines may get confused and show the wrong language or regional page version to website visitors. Pay attention to the Fixed and New columns—with their help you can track what issues have been resolved and what new ones have surfaced. The tool categorizes issues by severity, but if you have a lot of errors in your report like our example website, you have to set your priorities and choose the most crucial aspects to fix first. Localized pages and tags have to be corrected at some point, but it makes sense to concentrate on the most damaging problems for the example website: fix heavy and broken JS and CSS, optimize images, eliminate redirect chains. Now, in this article, we’ve focused on the issues detected on our sample website. But it’s worth noting the SE Ranking’s Website Audit checks over 110 parameters, including:
Examine each page in greater detailWhile studying ready-made graphs and categorized reports is extremely convenient and saves you a great deal of time, sometimes you may want to dig deeper into details and scrupulously study every page of your website. With SE Ranking, you can do so under the Crawled Pages section. Here, you can sort pages by 50+ parameters—choose the ones you need for your purposes by clicking on Columns. By clicking on Filters, you can set multiple filters to distinguish a certain group of pages or issues. For our example site, it makes sense to filter the list of crawled pages to identify all slow 200 pages: sort them by different parameters—page, image, CSS, or JS size—to find out what resources are blocking them from becoming usable and interactive as soon as possible. Measure your progress with check comparisonOne important thing many SEOs tend to forget is that you need to audit your website regularly. With scheduled SEO audits, you’ll be able to timely spot and fix any critical errors before your rankings have been affected. Besides, it’s good to monitor your website’s progress over time—how many issues have been fixed and which new error emerged on your site. This is useful when working both with your own and client websites. In the former case, you’ll always be on track, while in the latter case, you’ll provide clients with accurate reports and measurable progress data. Improve your rankings thanks to regular auditsRegardless of your website’s size or niche, you need to regularly check it against major SEO parameters to keep up with the best SEO practices.
The post Skyrocket your rankings with a head-to-toe website audit appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3eJgglt With all of the changes Google has been making over the past year, including its cookieless world, and as we begin to enter the new post-normal, marketers are looking to reinvent their search strategies — especially personalization. But where do you start? Join Adthena for a live webinar and learn how to adapt to the new post-normal. Register for “Why Google’s Cookieless Data Policy Isn’t The Only Concern in Search Marketing,” presented by Adthena. The post Why Google’s cookieless data policy isn’t the only concern in search marketing appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3b66Bob |
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