The latest release of WordPress is here and it brings us loads of new features. In a nutshell, WordPress 5.9 is the next stop on the road to full site editing. But what does that mean? What is full site editing and what can you do with it? In this blog post, we’ll discuss exactly that and give you a few examples of WordPress websites that use full site editing.

First things first: what is full site editing?

You might have noticed this term buzzing around in the WordPress community, but what is full site editing? To break it down for you, full site editing is a collective term for several new WordPress features:

• Template editing: where you can customize the design of posts and pages.
• Site editing: for changing the design of your blog, archives or 404 page, as well as your site header and footer.
• A new Styles interface: where you can add your own color palettes and change colors, typography and spacing.
• A new kind of theme: that is fully editable, built with blocks.

The common thread in full site editing (FSE) is that all features use blocks to create your website. Full site editing also brings new tools to developers, including a new theme configuration file. Now, to take full advantage of the new features in WordPress version 5.9, you do need to activate a full site editing theme. An example of a full site editing theme is Twenty Twenty-Two.

What is the idea behind full site editing?

So, why is the WordPress community investing so much time in full site editing? Well, the idea behind full site editing is to extend the use of blocks for creating content to the rest of your website. To empower users and bring new customization possibilities to parts of your website that were previously only editable by using code or complex options. Therefore, making it easier for everyone using WordPress to change the design of their website and pages.

What are the advantages?

Simply put, the most significant advantages are that you can edit and preview your whole website in the editor. You can place blocks anywhere you like and then change the style of these blocks from a single interface. With this, full site editing brings a more complete and consistent editing experience. You don’t need to go to different admin pages to change your site title, update your menu, arrange widgets, or upload a logo. Instead, you can do all of this while you stay in the editor.

Another advantage worth mentioning is that themes can add premade designs for pages (templates), site headers and footers (parts), and block patterns. You can simply drag and drop block patterns to create unique designs and save them in your own templates.

The current state of full site editing

As mentioned before, the latest WordPress release is the next stop on the road to full site editing. But it is good to know that the new Site Editor added in WordPress 5.9 is in beta. You can use the new default theme Twenty Twenty-Two with WordPress 5.9 and you can expect bug fixes and improvements in future releases. It’s also good to know that you can use full site editing with and without the Gutenberg plugin.

There are many small parts in full site editing. Including new blocks and block settings that, unfortunately, were not ready in time for WordPress 5.9. But they are on the roadmap! Some of the planned improvements are:

• A new set of comment blocks
• Improved controls for spacing and positioning blocks, and for selecting font families
• New post author blocks
• More settings for the query block, which is used to display a list of posts (like your blog)

Two features that are still missing are better responsive controls and the ability to create new page templates for categories.

How does full site editing work?

When you activate a full site editing theme, you may be surprised to see that the menu screen, widgets, and the customizer are nowhere to be found in the WordPress admin. Instead, WordPress enables a new editor where you can preview and edit your site. The customizer is actually replaced by block settings and Styles. When it comes to widgets, those are actually no longer needed because you can place blocks anywhere. And the menu system is replaced by the navigation block.

The Site Editor

When you go to the new editor, the first page that you’ll see is your current home page. The editor has several optional sidebars: Settings, Styles, and the Site Editor navigation. To open the site editor navigation, click on the WordPress icon or site icon that you’ll find at the top left of the editor:

In the side editor navigation sidebar, you can find the options Templates and Template Parts. By selecting one of those, you open a separate page where you can view and manage all your templates and parts:

Editing your site header and navigation

One of the first things you probably want to try out is setting up your website’s menu(s). This is how you do that with full site editing:

1. Firstly, open the Editor (beta) from the Appearance menu in the WordPress admin.
2. You can either select the navigation block directly in the editor or select the block from the list view. The list view is a list of all the blocks on the page. To open the list view, click on the symbol with the three lines in the top toolbar.
3. Click on Header to expand the list. Next, click on the Navigation block to select it.

4. Now you can click on the plus icon to add new menu items. You can search for a post or page, create new drafts or even add a site logo, social icons or a search form:

The navigation block has several styling options. For example, you can add colors, change alignment and font size, and decide if the navigation should collapse behind a menu button. In addition, you can give your menu a custom name in the Advanced section.

When you’ve finished setting up your menu, don’t forget to select Save. You will be asked if you want to save your website’s header and the menu. Save both and check out the brand new menu of your website.

Changing the look of your site using Styles

To stay with our example of the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, this one has a dark header on the home page and the rest of the pages are white. Let’s go into changing the look of these pages. And let’s say you want to give the pages a dark background color.

1. Your first step is to open the Editor from the Appearance menu in the WordPress admin.
2. In the top bar, next to the save button, click on the black and white circle to open the Styles sidebar. Under Styles you can choose between typography, colors and spacing for the website and for the blocks.
3. To change the background color, select Colors. In this view, you will see the themes color palette and a list of elements like background, text, and links.
4. Select Background and change it to black. You can preview your color changes live in the editor.
5. You need to change the text and the link color as well to make them readable: Go back one step and do the same for text and links, but select white.

Changing the look of specific blocks

Okay, so that allows you to change the appearance of a few basics on your pages. But what if you want to change the look of specific blocks, for example, your post title block?

1. Go back to the top bar, next to the save button, and click on the black and white circle to open the Styles sidebar. Select Blocks at the bottom of the Styles sidebar, below the accompanying text: Customize the appearance of specific blocks for the whole site.
2. After that, select the post title block and open the Typography panel.
3. By using this options panel you can change the look of all post title blocks at once: Font family, size, line height, appearance (bold or italic) and letter spacing. Try a few of the settings and preview the changes live in the editor.
4. Save your changes. You will be asked if you want to save custom styles: Go ahead and confirm.

What if you change your mind and want to undo the changes?

No problem, this is possible at any moment. Simply click on the “More Global Styles Actions” ellipsis menu in the Styles toolbar and select “Reset to defaults”:

Creating a new page template with a sidebar

In the template editor, you can actually create new templates for your posts and pages. There are lots of options, but to give you an idea of how this works, let’s discuss how to create a new template for a page with a sidebar.

1. Open the page you want to add the sidebar to in the block editor. In the page settings sidebar, go to the Template section: and click on New. Pick a name for your new template, for example “Sidebar”.
2. After that, WordPress will open your new template in the template editor. You recognize the template editor from it’s dark grey border.
3. To add the sidebar, you will need to move the existing blocks. It may be easier to select and move blocks with the help of the list view. To open the list view, click on the symbol with the three lines in the top toolbar.
4. At the top of the editor, delete the site title, tagline and separator blocks. This is because you are going to replace them with a custom, premade header from the theme.

5. Insert a template part block, and select “Choose existing”. After that you can select one of the premade headers:

6. At the very bottom of the editor, below the content, repeat the process and insert a second template part for your footer:

7. With your new header and footer in place, you can add the columns block that will be used to position your content and sidebar. Select the group block that is in between the header and footer:

8. Inside the group block, add a columns block. The combination of 70/30 is a good option for your content and sidebar:

9. After that, select the second Group block and the Post Content block in the list view and drag all the content inside the wide column. Your page should now look something like this:

10. Place the blocks you would like to show in your sidebar in the narrow column. For example, a latest posts block, latest comments, a short text about the page author, or a gallery. Feel free to experiment. You can also test different color options and spacing.

Finally, you need to save the template and the page. If you like, you can re-use your new custom template on other pages as well.

Examples of websites using full site editing

So, are you looking for inspiration or want to know what you can actually achieve by using full site editing? We’ve collected some example websites for you to draw inspiration from!

Personal websites

One example of a personal website that was created with the use of full site editing is femkreations.com:

A few other examples of personal websites using full site editing:

• https://helen.blog
• https://richtabor.com
• https://lesley.pizza
• https://damonacook.com

Business websites

This might not come as a surprise, but an example of a business website that was created with the use of full site editing is fullsiteediting.com:

A few other examples of business websites using full site editing:

• https://sitefly.be
• https://wpvip.com
• https://ainoblocks.io
• https://pagely.com
• https://frostwp.com

Conclusion

Managing and editing every part of your site by using blocks can feel a bit scary at first. But trust us when we say that all the new customization opportunities outweigh the parts that can sometimes feel unpolished. The new ways to edit your website that we discussed in this article can be used to make many types of changes. Perhaps you want to change the text in your site footer or move the site logo? Full site editing makes this easier since you don’t need to change the code of your theme.

That being said, do make sure to put some thought into the changes you make. And if you are feeling overwhelmed, remember that these features are optional and that you don’t have to edit the blocks that don’t need any changing. The great part about full site editing is that it’s all up to you, so give it a try and let us know what you think!

Read more: WordPress 5.9 is here, now with full site editing! »

The post What is full site editing (FSE) in WordPress? appeared first on Yoast.

It’s been around 6 months since the last update, but WordPress 5.9 was really worth the wait. There are loads of exciting new features to sink your teeth into. Full site editing is the real highlight, but there are loads more new features too. So it’s time to break your WordPress site out of the standard mold and get creative! Let’s take a closer look at what’s new in version 5.9.

Full site editing

Full site editing (FSE) is a huge development for WordPress. This new feature is the next big step for Gutenberg, using blocks to bring you easier, more flexible customization options. The upshot is that you have more control than ever over the design of your site. And you don’t need to mess around with any code; it’s all ready-to-use, out of the box. You can play around with site-wide designs and styles, making big changes or tweaks — and updating all of it with just the push of a button. Pretty neat, right?

To enable the full site editing capabilities in WordPress 5.9, you’ll need to use a theme that supports FSE. The new default Twenty Twenty-Two theme supports it, so if you’re happy using that then you needn’t look any further. But what if you don’t want to use FSE? You’ll be glad to know it’s totally optional. So if you’ve already crafted a custom theme that’s perfect for your site, don’t worry. Your current theme will stay exactly the way you want it.

Can’t wait to get started? You can access the full site editor by clicking on ‘Editor’ in the sidebar, under ‘Appearance’.

Twenty Twenty-Two theme

The Twenty Twenty-Two theme brings a whole array of flexible design options with it. You can use the new Site Editor tool to select typography and fonts to apply on all your pages. Likewise, you have access to site-wide formatting settings. So you can easily create consistent color schemes and layouts across your site.

Twenty Twenty-Two also comes with a selection of patterns you can choose from to customize the look of everything. Just browse through the new Pattern Explorer to find one you like. And if that’s not enough choice, you can take a look in the Block Patterns Directory, which has loads of new ready-made layouts. You can now simply copy-and-paste these into your site!

Global Styles

The Global Styles interface is a whole new way of editing themes and style presets. The Customizer is completely gone in this update, and you’ll no longer need to fiddle around on admin pages to adjust your theme. Now you can set custom color palettes and layouts from a simple graphical interface whenever you want to make changes to blocks or your core site design. There’s a handy preview to show you what your changes will look like before you apply them, too.

Note that, as a full site editing feature, Global Styles are limited to themes and blocks that support the relevant functions.

Navigation block

There’s quite a lot of excitement about the new navigation block! While the current changes lay foundations for an even more powerful Navigation Editor that’s in the works, this update offers a lot of great features you can already use. The new navigation block offers a lot of flexibility. You can import existing (block-based) menu data, auto-fill your menu with certain data, or start from scratch. You can create re-usable navigation menus to add across your site, and also create a table of contents for an individual page. And, matching up with the new design capabilities in 5.9, you can place your menu blocks anywhere in your page layout, as well as adjusting the orientation, justification, wrapping and padding.

Read more: Optimizing your website menu for your users and for SEO »

Language switching and lazy loading improvements

There are so many new features in WordPress 5.9 that we can’t cover them all, but there are two more that we feel deserve a mention.

Firstly, if you use WordPress in more than one language, you’ll now get access to a language switcher on the login screen. It’s a small change, but definitely a helpful time-saver for sites in multiple languages.

Secondly, this release brings some (potential) improvements to lazy loading times. WordPress first introduced lazy loading in 5.5, and there have been various updates to the feature in previous releases. After testing the current set-up, it was found that trying to lazy-load all of the content on a page was actually slowing things down in some cases. So in this latest update, some tweaks have been made to improve the performance of lazy loading. Not all sites face this issue, so it’s not guaranteed that you’ll see automatic improvements after installing WordPress 5.9. But if you’re implementing a lot of lazy loading in your pages, then you could see some improved LCP numbers with this update.

The post WordPress 5.9 is here, now with full site editing! appeared first on Yoast.

After releasing Yoast SEO for Shopify last week, it’s time for a new update of our OG WordPress SEO plugin. With the holiday season just behind us and the focus on Shopify, Yoast SEO 18.0 is a smaller update that brings several fixes and enhancements. Find out what you can expect!

Yoast SEO 18.0 is out today

For Yoast SEO 18.0, we’ve made improvements to enhance the performance of the plugin, plus various fixes in the social previews section and the schema implementation. You can find the full list of fixes in the changelog.

Japanese compatibility with Yoast SEO add-ons

In Yoast SEO 17.9, we added a new language to our roster. Not just any language, Japanese! It’s a complex language that needs a lot of work to function correctly. Luckily, our team of brilliant linguists pulled it off, and now all Japanese people can enjoy readability and SEO analyses tailored to their language.

In this round of updates, we improve the handling of the Japanese language. In addition, we made sure that our other add-ons now work flawlessly in the Japanese language. We’ve updated Local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and Video SEO add-ons.

Small updates for your favorite tool: Duplicate post

Yoast Duplicate Post is an essential, free tool for busy site owners and content managers. It lets you duplicate existing pages with a single click to help you transform these into others. It also features a revolutionary rewrite and republish feature that everyone should be using. For the latest release, we fixed several bugs so the plugin performs even better.

Update now to Yoast SEO 18.0

That’s it for this release of Yoast SEO. Update to Yoast SEO 18.0 today and get to work on your site. More updates coming soon!

The post Yoast SEO 18.0: Fixes and enhancements appeared first on Yoast.

How you describe your product can make or break a sale. A unique product description gives you a chance to stand out from all those stores that use the descriptions provided by the manufacturer. It helps build trust with the audience, taking away any reservations about the product or your Shopify store. Find out how to write excellent product descriptions in Shopify.

Out now: Yoast SEO for Shopify!

We’ve officially released our new Yoast SEO for Shopify app! So now you can enjoy the benefits of Yoast SEO on your Shopify store too. Read more about our Shopify app on yoast.com, or go straight to the Shopify app store and start your free trial of Yoast SEO for Shopify!

Why you should put the effort into your product descriptions

Sometimes, you encounter product descriptions on Shopify that don’t make sense. These are simple lists of a few features of the product or just seemingly random words that don’t correctly describe the product.

For instance, try to make your way through this description we found online:

Say what now?

Simply listing a product’s specifications or going in hyperbole mode describing it as the best thing ever, doesn’t allow the customer to form a connection with the product. You have to list the benefits of a product and what problems it solves for the consumer. Great product descriptions are an essential part of Shopify SEO.

Write for humans so machines can understand

Writing a good product description helps people discover if that product is meant for them while also making sure that search engines understand what that product is all about to rank it for the relevant terms.

When you can’t read up on the product, you are less likely to buy it from that particular store. People use a combination of factors to determine what to buy and where to do that. With an accurate product description, you remove barriers, and you’ll offer consumers a much better shopping experience.

Besides that, you can use your style of product descriptions to give your store or products a certain charm. Developing a distinct tone of voice can help you stand out from the crowd. Of course, your style has to fit your brand, or it will be off-putting for customers.

Things to look out for when writing product descriptions

It sounds like a no-brainer, but your product description should tell your customer all they need to know about the product. But, it shouldn’t be filled with too much fluff, as that can be off-putting. They are looking for a solution to their problem and often need it quickly. Plus, you want to get the customer to convert as soon as possible, right?

While writing your product descriptions, you should avoid using words that only have meaning for people familiar with the product — in other words, jargon and techspeak. And, it shouldn’t be just about how fantastic you are. You are offering a solution, so talk about that in words that make sense and keep away from hyperbole — language that describes something as better or worse than it really is, says the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Of course, if you or your products have won accolades, feel free to mention these.

Your product descriptions should be easy to read and easy to scan. It helps to add bulleted lists to break down long paragraphs into easily digestible chunks. In our content analysis in Yoast SEO for Shopify, we added a check for this, to help remind you to add lists while writing your product descriptions in Shopify.

Don’t forget to think about SEO while writing your product descriptions, but don’t make everything for Google. You are writing for people, not for machines. Focus on their behavior and actions.

Also, we have more tips on how to improve your product descriptions and how to improve the SEO of your product pages in Shopify.

Examples of great product descriptions in Shopify

We want to present some exciting product descriptions we found. Now, in no way do we pretend that these have proven to be successful — we think these are some great examples of descriptions that stand out. We can’t see the numbers of any given Shopify store, so we can’t be sure what “success” means, so take it with a grain of salt. Use them for inspiration!

Example 1: Taylor Stitch

All you need and more from this product description by Taylor Stitch. It gives you a great sense of the uniqueness of the product — and the company that made these. What’s more, they found a very telling way to describe the heaviness yet tenderness of this particular product. That’s hard to pull off well!

Example 2: Colourpop

Colourpop is a trendy Shopify store selling makeup and skincare products. The people running the store are very good at giving its products a certain charm. Not only do they adequately describe their products and their advantages, but they also use a great structure to make it easy to scan and read. They don’t even have to use too much hyperbole to get their message across.

Example 3: Holstee

For some products, it makes sense to break up the product descriptions into a short introductory one and a longer one further down the page. This is what Holstee does on its Shopify store. The paragraph above gives you a good sense of what this product is about, what it does, and how you can use it. Please scroll down on the page to see a lot more background about how the product came to be, how to best use it, and a lot more. If you add more relevant content to your product descriptions, you might have a bigger chance of ranking for those.

Example 4: Decathlon

While not the most extended text in the history of product descriptions, Decathlon makes excellent use of supporting icons and text to make descriptions scannable and insightful. It gives a good idea of who made this product, for which audience to use under which circumstances. Customers can decide instantly if this is the product that warrants further investigation or if they should move on to the next one.

Example 5: Caseology

One of the most powerful tools in your writing kit is the bulleted list. Especially for product pages, adding a good list makes it much easier for the customer to scan its most essential features. In this example, Caseology provides consumers with a good feel for the product. The list answers most questions, while the paragraph below describes why this product stands out from all the others. Yoast SEO for Shopify reminds you to add lists.

How Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you write better product descriptions

We built the Yoast SEO for Shopify app to help you get more out of your online store. Not only does it make SEO more straightforward, but it also enables you to write better content that will help you make more money. For this, we added the SEO analysis and readability analysis to the app. What’s more, we tailored these to work with Shopify and product-related content properly.

The readability analysis in Yoast SEO for Shopify

The readability analysis in the Yoast SEO for Shopify app is about making sure that your product descriptions are easy to read. It keeps an eye on the length of the paragraphs, as long walls of text don’t work for anybody—short and sweet help. The same goes for your sentences. People don’t connect with long and winding sentences — they zone out and wonder what they just read.

The readability analysis also checks your text for the use of too much passive voice. Passive voice makes your text hard to read and distant. It is better to write in an active voice. We already mentioned the list check that will suggest adding a list to your product description as these can work wonders. Do try it out!

The SEO analysis in Yoast SEO for Shopify

The readability analysis in Yoast SEO for Shopify helps make your content rank well in the search engines. It checks if you’ve used enough text in your product description and whether you’ve used your focus keyphrase — your product title — in all the right places, from the title to image alt text and the meta description to the slug of the URL.

The SEO analysis also checks if you’ve added enough images and if these images have enough metadata so search engines can understand them. The SEO analysis does a lot more, and we encourage you to read up on what Yoast SEO for Shopify can do for your online store.

Automatically generating product descriptions in Shopify

There are a lot of developments around artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing and using these technologies to generate content for your pages automatically. While this technology has come leaps and bounds over the past year, it is not advisable to automatically create the product descriptions in your Shopify store. We understand that it is hard work to write all those pieces of text, but it is still the most valuable option.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t use these AI copywriters — they can be a great help and can kickstart your writing process. At the moment, they are not good enough to write everything by themselves without a little human help. In addition, Google is still not keen on content that an AI writes, although that might change shortly.

Product description behind a tab in Shopify

In online stores, it’s a widespread practice to save some room and put descriptions and specifications behind a tab. Doing so cleans up the interface and might make room for some meatier pieces of content as product descriptions. There is some risk to this, though. While Google said text in tabs is fine, a messy implementation might make it harder for them to read it.

What’s more, product descriptions in a tab might influence your conversion rates. Properly test the different variants. You have to see which one works best. Also, pay special attention to your performance on mobile devices as this might differ from desktop.

Have you tried the Yoast SEO for Shopify app?

Building awesome product pages and writing great descriptions will become easier with Yoast SEO for Shopify. This app will give you everything you need to write about your products in a way that both your customers and Google will enjoy. Be sure to try it out!

Read more: Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide »

The post How to write great product descriptions in Shopify appeared first on Yoast.

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 competitions 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. 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. The algorithm of Google 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 lines has the phrase “car tires” in it, most likely you will get annoyed and stop reading. The many different updates of Google – Panda, Hummingbird, BERT – have all shown us that Google ranks texts that are easy to read. Google wants to serve its users with accessible and useful information.

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 is a lot of work. Shortcuts often lead to suboptimal results. Games and tricks lead to a bad user experience and penalties by Google.

Is Artificial Intelligence a trick?

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write content is a shortcut. You don’t have to do the hard work. Does that mean that using AI cannot be part of a sustainable SEO strategy? Will it be bad for your rankings?

Not necessarily. The latest AI tools are actually quite good. They use natural language processing and actually draft readable, findable and optimized texts for the search engines without overdoing it at all. I tried out a couple of tools and was not disappointed at all. My favorite so far (although I haven’t done extensive research yet) is Copymatic. You can do a free trial and see how a text could read. I don’t think these AI-generated texts will hurt your rankings. In fact, these tools can actually help you write texts that are nice and easy to read.

Should I use AI to write content?

Indeed, AI can help you do the work when it comes to writing content. This does not mean, however, that writing is not an important skill, nor that AI can take over writing blog posts altogether. Texts written by AI do not provide any original ideas. If you want to write a text about guinea pigs, then the AI tool uses information that’s already out there on the internet to draft a text about guinea pigs. The AI isn’t able to come up with new information about guinea pigs. Perhaps that isn’t a big deal if you write about guinea pigs or if you draft a lot of product descriptions. But, for a lot of websites, original ideas are important.

I always state that high-quality content has three major demands. It should be original, it should be readable and it should be findable. The AI tools can help you make your content more readable and findable. However, your content will not be original if it is written entirely by AI. Writing is a means to get a certain message across. That’s why you should write content because you have a story to tell or a vision to share. It should be more than just some generated information about guinea pigs.

Is AI bad for sustainable SEO?

Using an AI tool to write your content is not necessarily a bad idea. In fact, it could even fit well into a sustainable SEO strategy. It all depends on how you use such a tool! You should be the architect of the story you want to tell. The idea, the message, the originality should come from you. And if you’re the architect who designs the building, then someone else can help do your construction work. If you use an AI tool to do the construction work for you, it could probably work out just fine! Just make sure to design an awesome story!

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. So whether you want to use AI tools or not, using our Yoast SEO plugin will always help you to focus on the most important things. Keep aiming for those green bullets and create a great user experience — it’s a strategy that will always stand the test of time.

Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!

Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only €99 EUR / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

The post Sustainable SEO: How to focus on a lasting SEO strategy appeared first on Yoast.

The new year has just begun. Maybe you’ve promised yourself that you’re going to really make an effort in SEO this year. Perhaps you’ve not been giving your site the proper SEO love it deserves and over time your rankings have been going down. Or maybe you’ve noticed a decrease in organic traffic and want to get back in the SEO game.

Don’t panic: we’ve all been there! Let’s get to work and give your site so much SEO love that your rankings will skyrocket! So where should you start? How do you make sure your website gets SEO fit again? In this post, I’ll give you practical tips on how to pick up your SEO strategy after you’ve been neglecting the SEO of your site for a while.

Why you should take action if you’ve neglected the SEO of your site

I am probably stating the obvious here, but SEO matters. The best place to hide a corpse is on the second page of Google, right? You want to rank high because you want visitors coming to your website. I get that! And Yoast SEO actually takes care of a lot of things, even when you’re not doing anything else. So, your SEO wasn’t entirely neglected if you had Yoast SEO running on it. However, in order to really drive traffic to your site, you need to put in some work regularly. Keeping that up can be hard. And you probably have a million other things to do as well. Try not to feel bad about your lack of SEO effort, and let’s give that site of yours some proper SEO love!

Four phases to get your site back in SEO shape!

My recipe to get back in tiptop SEO shape has four phases. In the first phase, you need to do some thinking. You need to use both your brain as well as some data (Google Analytics / Google Search Console) to get that thinking done. After the first phase, you’ll need to do some maintenance. If you’ve been neglecting your site’s SEO, you’ll need to take a few hours to clean up the internal linking of your site and get your technical SEO back in shape. Phase 3 is all about planning: what things do you want to tackle in order to improve the SEO of your site even more? And in phase 4 you’ll make SEO part of your routine (again). Let’s deep dive into all of these phases!

Phase 1: Thinking!

Take some time to think about your current audience

Before jumping into SEO action mode, take a little bit of time to think about your audience. This may seem easy enough, but knowing your audience is actually pretty hard. Who is your audience? Who are the people you want to attract to your website? What do they have in common? Perhaps they’re all teachers or gardeners, depending on what your site is about. At Yoast, our audience consists of people that have a website and want to attract traffic to that site. Don’t just think about your audience in general terms (age, gender, education). Try to really understand what drives them to your site. A few other questions you should ask yourself:

• What does your audience know about your website and brand?
• What does your audience want to read, do or buy on your site?
• With what search intent are people entering your website?
• Has you audience changed since you last worked on your SEO?
• Has your business changed?

Asking and answering these questions will help you to focus on the most important things. Are you ranking with the right content? Is your content focussed on the right audience? If you have thought about all these things, it will make it easier to start improving your site!

Asses where the low-hanging fruit hangs!

Before taking action on SEO, just take a look at your Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you haven’t looked at your traffic and how your site is doing for a while, there’s probably a lot of room for improvement. Check out what pages bring in the most money and which articles get you the most traffic. Could you improve these even further? Don’t forget to check out the trends in Google Analytics either. If a certain page did well in the past and is not attracting much traffic now, it might need some SEO love.

But, also make sure to check out which articles people spend the most time on, and which blog posts have a lot of comments. Those articles are the ones that your audience likes and interacts with! Check to see how these pages are doing in terms of traffic and their position in the search results. Could you improve the SEO of these pages? Maybe tweak those pages and give them an overdose of SEO love in order to rank higher?

With the new Wincher integration in Yoast SEO, you can easily track which keywords are performing well. You can also see how your site has been doing over time. That’ll give you a lot of valuable information on which articles may need updating.

Make a list of posts or pages that you feel are easy fixes. Just updating the content, adding some internal links, or tweaking a few things could make a difference and drive some extra traffic to your site.

Don’t forget to keep doing keyword research

Are you still focussing on the right keywords? Or has the search behavior of your audience changed? If you haven’t done keyword research in a while, you should make sure to do that again. As you’re just starting up your SEO game again, maybe do a quick peak alongside your Google Analytics and use Semrush to see whether you’re still focussing on the right terms.

Phase 2: Maintenance

Do some general content SEO maintenance: SEO workouts

Are you ranking with the articles you want to rank with? Is your internal linking structure up to date? If you haven’t paid any attention to your SEO lately, there’s a big chance that your internal linking needs a major update. In Yoast SEO Premium, you can find two practical workouts that’ll help you to get your internal linking structure back in shape. You can click through these workouts and solve some major problems with just a bit of your time. Investing a couple of hours will be enough to get your internal linking structure back in tip-top shape.

With the cornerstone content workout, you’ll be able to choose which articles are your most important ones. The ones you want to rank with. After that, the workout helps you to make sure that your internal linking structure is helping you to rank with exactly those articles. The orphaned content workout will help you to detect all your articles that do not have any internal links going to them. Perhaps you can add a few links to that page to make it findable? Or perhaps these should be removed (and redirected) from your site? The workout will help you decide and even suggest a few relevant internal links, to help you solve all of your orphaned content problems.

In my opinion, doing the SEO workouts in Yoast SEO is the best way to get started with your content SEO after you’ve been neglecting your site for a while. The workouts will help you to really clean up your site. After you’ve cleaned up, there’s room to create new content and to improve your existing content!

Do some general technical maintenance

Yoast SEO takes care of a whole lot of technical stuff for you. You don’t have to worry about all of that. However, if you’ve really been neglecting your SEO for a while, you should make sure to do some checks:

Get your site speed up to par

Check how your site’s speed is doing. Site speed is a ranking factor so the speed of your site should be top-notch. If you’ve been out of the SEO game for a while, make sure to check whether or not your site is still fast enough. Read all about how to measure site speed and how to get your site to load faster (if necessary) in our blog post on site speed!

Check and fix those 404s

You should actually be checking your 404s regularly. So, if you haven’t done that for some time, make sure to check whether or not there are any broken links on your page. Google hates those! And so does your audience! You can easily fix your broken links with the redirect manager in Yoast SEO. Read all about how to check for 404 errors and how to solve them in our blog post about 404s.

Phase 3: Planning

You probably have a million ideas on what you want to improve. So it’s important to make a plan. A doable plan. Something that you’ll be able to stick to. How much time are you willing to spend on doing SEO, could you maybe spare an hour a week? Plan your SEO activities for the next couple of months. You’ve done your thinking in the first phase, so you know which things need to be done. Make sure to start with that low-hanging fruit. That’ll give you quick results and gets you motivated to keep spreading that SEO love. In making your plan, make sure to alternate tasks you really like with tasks that don’t get you that excited (but just need to be done). Also, make sure to reserve some time to do some more keyword research!

Phase 4: Back to that SEO routine

The last phase to get back in the SEO game never really ends. When you’ve made a plan and you stick to it, you’ll never leave this phase. Make sure to work on your SEO regularly. Alternate between tasks. SEO is a combination of checking and tracking on the one hand and executing on the other hand. The following tasks should all become part of your routine:

Checking and tracking

• checking your 404s
• assessing your site speed
• checking your internal linking structure
• doing keyword research
• analyzing your data in Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Executing

• updating old content
• writing new content
• doing workouts in Yoast SEO
• redirecting 404s
• improving site speed

We’ve actually created a monthly workout schedule (PDF) that you can use to stay on top of your SEO. Of course, this is just a guideline so feel free to spend more or less time on the tasks mentioned. But it can help you stay motivated by checking off what you’ve done so far!

Love your site and keep doing SEO

I often joke and say that SEO stands for Seriously Effortful Optimization. And that isn’t untrue. We try our very best to build a plugin that automatically takes care of most aspects. But in order to really stand out in the search engines, you still need to put in some work. And to be honest, if you do it regularly, it’s not that much work. But starting over after you’ve neglected your SEO for a while, takes a bit of hard work at first! Just remember that your site really deserves that kind of love. Let’s spread that SEO love! 

Read more: How to measure the success of your content SEO strategy »

The post How to pick up SEO after you’ve neglected your site appeared first on Yoast.

It’s finally here, the official release of our newest product: Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app that can help Shopify users with the SEO of their online store. Not only can our Yoast SEO app help you optimize product pages in Shopify, but it also helps you write great blog posts in Shopify. Making you more findable online and attracting new (potential) customers to your online store. So let’s find out more about our newest product and the event we’re throwing to celebrate this release.

Introducing: Yoast SEO for Shopify

Shopify is a platform that enables its users to create an ecommerce website in a matter of minutes. This means that you can easily set up a store on Shopify to sell your products (or services) online. One of the great things about this platform is that you can install apps to add features or functionalities to your online store. Since today, one of those apps is our very own Yoast SEO for Shopify app.

For people who are familiar with our Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, this app for Shopify works pretty similarly. It handles some of the technical SEO stuff for you and gives you feedback on your content. Feedback that is focused on creating content that search engines will gladly show in their search results and content that convinces site visitors that you’re a reliable store to buy their products. All thanks to the SEO and readability analysis that looks at your pages and gives you personalized feedback points to improve your content where possible.

How Yoast SEO for Shopify works

Yoast SEO app in Shopify gives you actionable feedback by using bullets. There are red bullets (problems), orange bullets (improvements) and green bullets (good results). When you change a feedback point on the page the bullets will update to reflect this change. For example, when you get the feedback that your page doesn’t have any images and you add an image, the bullet and its feedback will change right away.

You won’t have to bend over backwards to get every single bullet green, but by getting the overall readability and SEO bullet green you’ll make sure that your pages are optimized. Optimized for SEO, which means that they’re optimized to rank higher in Google. And optimized when it comes to readability, meaning that your content is easy to read and enjoyable for site visitors.

A different analysis for product pages and blog posts

When you own an online store on Shopify, you’ll probably have product pages that you want to see performing well. The SEO and readability analysis in Yoast SEO for Shopify help you with that. With feedback that is specifically aimed at optimizing product pages and giving people the information they’re looking for before making a purchase. But your product pages might not be the only pages that you want to optimize.

Shopify also gives you the option to have a blog on your online store. And blog posts give you a great opportunity to attract traffic to your site and build a relationship with (potential) customers. That’s why you can also use Yoast SEO for Shopify to optimize your blog posts. And to make sure you’re making the right improvements, we’ve created a slightly different SEO and readability analysis specifically focused on your blog posts.

But that’s not all…

In addition to this feedback, the app allows you to change how your pages will be presented on social media and get a preview of what they will look like when shared. In the settings, we’ll also help you to set up the data that Google needs to fully understand your site.

We’ll also help you connect your online store to different webmaster tools like Google Search Console so that you can get the insights you need to make improvements — and to see if they work. And, you also get access to reusable templates powered by variables to manage your meta tags like your product titles and meta descriptions easily.

Advanced options

While some of the more visible parts of Yoast SEO for Shopify are the SEO and readability analyses, there’s much more happening under the hood. Plus, there are advanced settings that you can use to tailor your online store to your liking. For instance, you can determine which parts of your store should or should not be indexed by search engines. And, you can determine default output options for all different content types — from collections to blog posts.

The SEO app also outputs the needed SEO metadata, including a full Schema structured data representation for your site — in JSON-LD format, of course. This might not mean that much to you, but it helps search engines understand your pages and products even better. Using this, you can tell search engines that your product pages contain products so they no longer have to guess. We also output this for other parts of your site to give all your details on a silver platter to Google. In the end, this will help you get rich results for your online store.

If you want to know more about what else Yoast SEO for Shopify does, go to our Yoast SEO for Shopify product page. Keep in mind that you also get full access to Yoast SEO academy when you sign up for our Shopify SEO app. In our Yoast SEO academy, you’ll find a Yoast SEO for Shopify course dedicated to helping you get the most out of the app!

Join our Shopify event on the 20th of January

In celebration of this new release, we’re hosting a themed YoastCon this year. An online YoastCon – Shopify edition that will take place on the 20th of January. During this event, you can expect lots of interesting SEO talks by experts in this field, like Aleyda Solis, Lily Ray, Mike King, our own Marieke van de Rakt, Willemien Hallebeek, Jono Alderson, Thijs de Valk, and yours truly. Plus, we have Kevin Indig and Jackson Lo from Shopify joining! Attend our YoastCon to learn all about SEO for online stores and how Yoast SEO in Shopify works.

The online YoastCon – Shopify edition takes place on Thursday, the 20th of January 2022. It starts at 4:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST and will be a few hours long. But tune in whenever you like. And if you’re not able to attend, it’s possible to watch the event at a different time. But of course, we hope to see you there. If you are attending, make sure to register right away!

Buy Yoast SEO for Shopify

Unlock powerful features and much more for your Shopify site with the Yoast SEO app!

Buy Yoast SEO for Shopify$29 / per 30 days (14 day free trial)

The post Today we’re officially launching Yoast SEO for Shopify appeared first on Yoast.

An auto-playing background video is a popular feature for the homepage of many websites, from big ecommerce brands to B2B software and services companies. You can use the added visual interest to capture the attention of new visitors and show off your brand personality. With WordPress, it’s very straightforward to set up a video background. However, it’s also very easy to inadvertently implement it in such a way that hampers website performance and SEO efforts.

In this post, we’ll go through the key factors to consider when putting an auto-playing background video in place. Then, we’ll learn how to optimize the feature for users and search engines alike.

Step 1: Pick the right method to get the video on your homepage

Option A: An embed code from a video hosting platform

You have the most flexibility with this option, but it also requires a small amount of technical knowledge. Just input the raw HTML embed code into an ‘embed’ Gutenberg block, or the source of the page if you’re editing directly. Use CSS to ensure the video is in line with your desired design.

This option is ideal if you’re comfortable with some light development work and want to use a hosting platform like Wistia or Vimeo. This way you can optimize the video style and appearance directly within the hosting platform. Then you can bring that onto your website via the embed code.

Option B: A ‘cover’ block via the Gutenberg editor

This option is by far the simplest to include a video background in WordPress. However, this method can create performance issues, as it requires you to self-host videos on your website. You end up loading the full-size video file on each page load. This can cause things to slow down significantly and hamper the user experience.

To use this method, simply select the “cover” block in the Gutenberg editor, then upload the video you want to use.

From here you can add a text overlay onto the video if you wish.

Option C: Use Elementor with YouTube

If you’re using Elementor page builder on your WordPress website, there is a built-in feature here that allows you to include a video background. This short video gives an excellent demonstration of how you can do this. It is quite simple. Just select a full-width template in Elementor, add in a background video element and you are good to go!

With Elementor, you can upload your own video and self-host it on the website as well. The video will then be played using the HTML5 video tag. Another option is to include a YouTube link. If you’re going down this route, I would highly recommend using the YouTube option. This helps to avoid the performance issues that can occur when serving videos from your own web host. 

From here, you can select which section of the video you would like to loop in the background by stipulating a start and an endpoint for the loop. 

Option D: Use a dedicated plugin

There are a number of free plugins available, such as Advanced WordPress Backgrounds, which include functionality for auto-playing background videos. Advanced WordPress Backgrounds allows you to add video from a Vimeo or YouTube URL, as well as self-host. I would recommend the former option for the same reason as with the Elementor approach.

Ultimately, there are pros and cons to each method. If you have the technical skills, I would recommend working directly with the code and including an embed, then adjusting the CSS to suit. But if that’s a bit beyond your skillset, go for the plugin or Elementor options.

Read more: Which is the best video hosting platform for SEO? »

Step 2: Load the background video asynchronously in WordPress

One major problem an auto-playing background video can cause is slow loading.

If a user is on a connection with limited bandwidth, the rest of the page elements may load, while the video background may fail to appear until much later. Or, worse, with poor implementation the slow-loading video may block the rendering of other critical page elements. In either case, not only will this hamper user experience, but can also negatively affect search rankings as well – especially given the preference Google has for fast and fluid websites.

To avoid both of these scenarios, make sure you set your video to load with asynchronous JavaScript so that the other page elements and the video load simultaneously. In addition, make sure you are hosting your video with a platform that supports adaptive streaming such as YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia. Adaptive streaming means the video host dynamically degrades the video bitrate to cope with a user’s bandwidth.

While this may sound a bit challenging from a technical standpoint, it really doesn’t have to be! Because the Yoast Video SEO plugin does it all for you, ensuring everything loads quickly and seamlessly. If you haven’t already set that up for your website, make that your immediate next action!

Step 3: Choose your loop and keep it short

An auto-playing background video needs to repeat on a loop. Therefore, selecting the appropriate sequence is critical to providing an appealing experience. The way to do this depends greatly on how your video was shot. If the video has lots of cuts and scene changes, a few seconds of each scene on rotation can work very nicely. It provides almost a “preview” of the expected video.

However, it’s a bit different for videos with more of a one-shot or animated feel. You instead need to find a sequence where the beginning and the end of the loop look very similar. This is to help them flow into each other nicely.

It is important to think about how you want your loop to work when you do your edit. Ideally you should edit a video specifically for this purpose. However, if you’re stuck using some pre-existing content that can’t be re-edited, try to find a start and an end-point within the existing asset that flow nicely into one another. Then use your hosting platform, or tools within WordPress (e.g. with the Gutenberg approach) to stipulate the start and end-points.

Auto-playing background videos should generally be about 10-30 seconds long. You want enough movement and change to provide some narrative and visual progression throughout the loop. But you don’t want the video to be so long and complex that it distracts from the rest of the page.

Step 4: Decide if your video background should be click-to-play and remove extra player elements

There are basically two types of auto-playing background videos. They either act as a teaser for the full video, or they exist purely as an independent visual asset. In the first case, you want your video to have additional functionality. You want a play button that takes users into a full-screen video experience, typically via an overlay/lightbox. In the second case, you want to remove all player elements, so the video appears purely as a moving image, rather than one with visible controls.

When you want your video to act as a moving thumbnail for a bigger experience, this requires a bit of extra work. Wistia embeds provide for this feature natively, and a great example of this is on the SparkToro homepage.

If you’re using a different platform, then you’ll need to essentially add a play button overlay onto the auto-playing video, which loads the secondary video over the top when clicked.

You can remove the player controls with most paid hosting platforms – such as Vimeo and Wistia. However, If you’re using a standard YouTube embed and want to remove the player controls, this will need to be handled via a secondary player. This is due to the YouTube player not allowing you to remove elements. Options C and D as detailed in step 1 provide a solution to this.

Step 5: Ensure the video background scales properly on mobile

Another common error with auto-playing background videos in WordPress is failing to ensure good mobile functionality. A 16×9 widescreen video is quite small when viewed through the standard vertical framing on a mobile device. Hence, the overall presentation of the page needs to be quite different.

Either the video can responsively adjust to just be small, with the rest of the page elements reordered and moving with it. Or the video can be hidden at a smaller screen size. Generally, I prefer to scale the video down with the rest of the page and use CSS to ensure the core text and menus are visible, along with the video even at that smaller size.

The core mistake to avoid is just having one giant video embed which gets truncated, or takes up the entirety of the page above the fold in a mobile view. Once again, the Yoast Video SEO plugin is your friend here! It automatically ensures videos are responsive for all of the major video hosting platforms.

Step 6: Include appropriate metadata for SEO

The last optimization step is to make sure you include all the necessary Schema.org metadata for Google search – specifically the video title, thumbnail, and duration. Note that as an auto-playing video, the thumbnail itself will never appear to users. Nevertheless, an image file needs to be referenced in the Schema.org data via microdata or JSON-LD. This ensures that the video can be presented as a video rich snippet in Google search.

Sounds complicated? Don’t worry, the Yoast Video SEO plugin automates it all for you! For a more detailed breakdown of the data required for SEO, take a look at this post on how to optimize your video pages.

Get your videos in the search results!

Get this plugin and make your videos eligible for Google’s video carousel and the Google Video search results!

Get Video SEO »Only €79 EUR / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

The post How to optimize an auto-playing background video in WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

Keywords. Optimization. Google rankings. Choose your goal, do the work, hope you win those top SERP positions. That’s why we do SEO in the first place, right? Of course, there’s a lot more to think about than just rankings and optimization. And if you’re getting enough visitors, and those visitors seem happy with your site and its content, do you really need to think about how your pages are ranking? The truth is, it’s not essential to track keyword rankings. But knowing how you measure up can help you make better decisions! Knowledge is power, after all. In this post we’ll explain why we think it’s a good idea to monitor how you perform in the search results, and how Yoast SEO can help you do that.

Keyword tracking: it’s about knowing where you stand

In many ways, SEO is a competition. You don’t have to play the rankings game. It’s still worth optimizing your content for a whole load of other reasons: it helps with user experience, for one, and it can improve other stats like bounce rate and conversion, which apply even if you’re only focused on paid advertising. But if you are putting content online and optimizing it (for whatever reason), it can’t hurt to know how that content is doing in the search results.

Tracking how your keywords are ranking provides you with a snapshot of how Google thinks your content measures up, compared to your competition. And that’s valuable information! It can help you to see if your optimization efforts are actually working. And we’re not just talking about how fast your site is, or how many times you’ve used a keyword on your page. Google pays a lot of attention to the substance of your content. Are you providing the best answer to a particular query? Is it easy to read, and formatted in a user-friendly way? All of that stuff matters. And if you’re not ranking well, it probably means there’s still room for improvement.

Tracking your rankings is hard work without the right tools

Tracking keywords and monitoring your pages’ positions in search isn’t all that easy. Google Analytics and Search Console show some information about search positions and the queries your pages are being found for, but it’s not provided in a way that’s easy-to-use. If you look up a particular page you can see its average search position, for instance, but that number is the search position across all queries that it’s found for. And it takes a bit of work to find out if your page is ranking for a specific query. The information is there, but it takes a lot of effort to monitor those keywords and pages regularly.

That’s where keyword rank trackers come into play. These tools (which you almost always have to pay for) are designed to take the hard work out of the process. You simply add the keyword you want your page to rank for, and they’ll pull all the information together and show you it in a format that’s easy to understand. A keyword rank tracker makes it much easier to monitor keywords over time, so it’s easy to notice when anything changes. And that means you can make strategic decisions, and take action right away.

New: integrated keyword tracking in Yoast SEO, thanks to Wincher

A particularly noteworthy keyword rank tracker is Wincher. Why? Firstly, it keeps things simple and easy-to-use, so you don’t need to be an analytics wizard to make sense of what you see. Secondly, unlike most of their competitors, Wincher’s keyword tracking is available for a reasonably low price. You can even get started for free! Plus, you’ll get features like daily ranking updates that you’ll have to upgrade your account for at other SEO tools.

To bring rank tracking to Yoast SEO, we’ve worked closely with Wincher to integrate their rank tracking capabilities in our SEO plugins. So now, all Yoast SEO users — both free and Premium — can monitor their keywords straight from the plugin!

That’s right — from Yoast SEO 17.8 onwards, you’ll see the following capabilities added to your plugin:

A significant benefit of using a keyword tracking tool is that you can stay on top of your rankings – whether they drop or rise:

• Get automatic daily updates of your keyword rankings
• See historical ranking data displayed in a handy graph so you can quickly notice any changes
• Monitor your site’s top-ranking keywords from the dashboard overview
• Explore more detailed ranking data in your account at Wincher.com

Not ranking where you want to be?

We said earlier that it can’t hurt to know where your pages stand in the Google rankings. That’s not completely true… when you’ve put your heart and soul into creating the perfect page, it can be painful to see that your page isn’t doing so well! But don’t despair. There are always things you can do to improve the situation:

Adjust your keyword strategy

It’s possible that your chosen keywords are just too competitive. If you’re trying to sell sports shoes and sportswear, for instance, you might be competing with Nike and Adidas. If you have the resources that these mega-brands have, go ahead and keep competing! But chances are that you don’t have those resources, and you don’t have much chance of ranking for those main keywords.

If you’re facing too much competition, your best strategy will be to opt for a long-tail keyword strategy, or find a niche. Or if your site is focused on a specific region, you could benefit from a local SEO strategy, too. These kinds of SEO strategies are the ones you can really win at, because the big brands don’t have time to focus on local targeting and niche customer needs.

Want some ideas for alternative keywords to target? You could take a look at the Related keyphrases tool to see similar keywords. Or you could check which queries your page is already ranking for and focus on those.

Keep improving and climb the rankings

Do you feel like you’re competing in the right arena already, but you’re just not getting the rankings you want? Remember that most sites don’t reach #1 position overnight. Keep improving your pages, and keep an eye on the results; you can climb the rankings bit by bit. If you want to try doing this, it’s a very good idea to do some competitor benchmarking! Then you’ll have a better idea of what you’re up against and what you need to improve.

Keep monitoring — and don’t forget the big picture!

One of the biggest benefits of using a keyword tracking tool is that you can see immediately if your rankings drop. So keep monitoring those keywords! If you do see a change for the worse, you can investigate what has changed. Are there new competitors climbing up the rankings? Have existing competitors improved their sites, or updated their content? By staying on top of what’s going on in the search results, you can be more competitive and (hopefully) maintain your search positions in the long run.

A word of warning, though: don’t obsess over your rankings. Being at the top of the search results isn’t the most important thing in the world. You can still get good results with lower rankings. And don’t underestimate the power of a good social media strategy and a loyal user base! Remember that without delivering a good user experience, top rankings and high traffic are worthless — all you’ll achieve is a lot of unsatisfied visitors. So stick to the golden rule: always put your users first.

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only €99 EUR / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

The post Rank tracking: why you should monitor your keywords appeared first on Yoast.

In just a couple of years, Shopify has become the leading online shopping platform. It has become something of an anti-Amazon, helping small and large retailers worldwide run successful online stores with minimal effort. Although Shopify makes everything easy, there’s a lot you can do to improve the SEO of your online shop. In this Shopify SEO ultimate guide, we’ll help you on the right track. In addition, we’ll also tell you what the best SEO app for Shopify is!

Coming soon: Yoast SEO for Shopify!

Up until now, Yoast WooCommerce SEO was the only ecommerce SEO plugin we offered. But that’s about to change. On January 18th, we’re releasing our new Yoast SEO for Shopify app! So now you can enjoy the benefits of Yoast SEO on your Shopify store too. Read more about it in our official announcement, or take a look at the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page to see what’s coming.

Introduction

Since the early days of Amazon, ecommerce has been building up a storm. Every year, more and more people start to see the value of online shopping. Every day, new online stores and online shopping solutions popped up. In 2020, we noticed that storm become a tornado, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic — suddenly, everyone was forced to buy online. And that trend is not dying down any time soon. These changes in buying behavior are permanent for many people.

Just look at this chart from McKinsey, which shows the jump in ecommerce penetration quite starkly:

One of the most apparent successes in the meteoric rise in online shopping is Shopify. And with the following SEO tips for Shopify, you can benefit from that rise as well.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an online tool that helps you build and maintain an online store with ease. It is a managed platform, meaning that the software is hosted on their servers, so you won’t need separate hosting. Shopify will take care of all of this for you. You simply take out a subscription to use it to build your online shop. Currently, Shopify has several plans:

• The Basic Shopify plan starts at $29 per month.
• The Shopify plan is $79.
• While and the Advanced Shopify plan is $299.
• In addition, there’s also the enterprise-grade Shopify Plus plan.

The differences between the plans mainly consist of having more options or different discounts on various costs. For instance, you’ll get better shipping rates and lower payment costs. You can find the biggest difference in the selling internationally section: only the higher plans will let you set up an international domain and let you set up specific pricing for these countries. Also, the basic plan does not come with reporting options.

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to be mindful of when thinking about SEO. As with all content management systems, you need to optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines alike.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a store that is technically sound and one that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use Shopify SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in. The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and we advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main points in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your Shopify store!

Does Shopify have good SEO?

Shopify makes sure that you set up your store quickly and customers and search engines can reach it. Shopify already has some basic SEO features and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for a lot of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, the control you have over SEO is limited to what the developers of Shopify allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be sub-optimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to have covered and how Shopify and Yoast SEO for Shopify can help you.

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with a bit of finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store on.

Most issues with Shopify arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Shopify products can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, Shopify adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is the canonical one. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about this but be aware of the limitations.

Another thing people have an issue with is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, and that makes for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a Shopify store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they will keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. There are apps to help with shipping your products, designing your store, and offering customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re a bit biased, but we think Yoast SEO for Shopify is the one that stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your Shopify SEO expert — coming January 18, 2022!

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible for all so that everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 12 million websites trust Yoast SEO. Now, Yoast SEO comes to Shopify – ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify not only helps store owners improve their site in a technical sense, but it also comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will help you enhance your product page descriptions by suggesting improvements to make. These suggestions help you make the best product descriptions.

In addition, these analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO for Shopify app helps you write high-quality, readable content that strikes a chord with potential customers.

Of course, that’s not all the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify to find out more.

SEO basics for Shopify

Shopify is a great platform to host your online shop on, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive for potential customers. In this ultimate guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll go over everything you need to know to make your ecommerce site successful!

Define who you are and what you stand for

To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of getting into words what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for the SEO and marketing strategy for your online store. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

Start with keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research is the process you undertake to produce a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found for. Doing keyword research will give you insights into your audience, which words they use, with solutions they prefer, and how they behave. Do it well, and you get to fill in your SEO strategy for your Shopify site instantly.

There are various tools out there that can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for, and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Keep in mind that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

You should also look at the different search intents around your products or services. No one is going from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey goes through a whole number of steps. You need to provide content for those steps.

Look at what the competition is doing

When doing keyword research, you also need to see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you need to look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting and by which terms do they do that?

Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or strategy that you might make use of. Or, you can find something that gives you the inspiration to work from. Take an extra careful look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on?

Write unique and high-quality product descriptions

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means; the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do a bit of keyword research for the products to find out which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

Always try to describe your products as a solution to a problem the consumer might have. We have more tips on how to improve your product descriptions in your online store in general, plus we have an article on how to do that, specifically in Shopify.

Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and helps you improve both readability and SEO.

Write great titles and meta descriptions

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should be epic as well. The title and meta descriptions are essential aspects you can focus on to improve Shopify SEO. Use your keywords tactically and make sure to write something enticing those consumers will want to click.

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions for you based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles and meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings. Simply go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview in Shopify. Here, you can add a title and meta description for the search results pages. These differ from the regular title and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. So, you might have a certain title visible on your store and choose something else to show in the search results pages.

You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO for Shopify makes this process a lot easier. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables. Thanks to variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself but this allows you to automate some parts of it. Which can be helpful when you have lots of products.

How to create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify

SEO-friendly URLs are URLs that are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, Shopify is somewhat inflexible, and there isn’t much wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters

The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest.

Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation

One of the most impactful things you can do to improve your Shopify SEO is to fine-tune your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system in Shopify should make sense. Keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need as well. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site.

For your navigation, you should keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations as your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base!, right?

Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them.

Make products findable with an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are like a map detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also goes for your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. In your Shopify XML sitemap, you’ll find product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages.

You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have a lot more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps as well.

To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results by adding a noindex. In addition, you can decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will probably be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can.

Don’t add a bunch of Shopify apps you won’t use

While it’s exciting to try out every Shopify app under the sun, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add a lot of extra code to your store as everything needs to be loaded all the time. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the apps that do that job the best and remove the rest.

Properly working with images on your store to improve Shopify SEO

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can’t get a good feel for the product without great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest ways to work on your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having to have the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as it is one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos get to stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Optimize the file sizes

One of the most significant improvements you can make to the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

Average product pages might have around five or more images. If all of these product photos are enormous, hi-res files, then the loading times of your product page will go up. You need to keep your file sizes in check. There’s no need to upload 3MB photographs. Be sure to size them and run them through an optimizer properly. In the Shopify App Store, you can find several tools that can help you do this.

When uploading, Shopify already compresses images but not to a massive extent. In addition, Shopify automatically converts your images to the next-gen WebP image format and serves those smaller files to browsers that support these.

Do your image optimization before you upload the images to Shopify. If you already have them uploaded to Shopify, you can use an app to fix them. Compressing thousands of images is tedious, and there are better ways of spending your time than going through them one by one. Luckily, some tools can help you speed this up. In the Shopify App Store, you’ll find multiple apps that take care of the compression and optimization of your photos. You could try TinyIMG or Crush.pics to get started.

Lazy loading images

Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should never lazy load all your images as you want the images at the top of your browser window to be always visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice.

While Shopify does some lazy loading by default, you might have to check your theme if it has incorporated it. In the past, you needed to use JavaScript libraries to get this done. Today, you don’t have to use those for lazy loading — simply use native lazy loading. This works in almost all major browsers, with Safari being the last hold-out. For Apple devices, you must turn this on manually in Safari as of now (for the curious: Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features > Lazy image loading). It shouldn’t be too long before Apple rolls it out for everyone.

<img src="screenshot.jpg" loading="lazy">

Preventing CLS

While you’re at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign for Google that your user experience is lacking. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. On that site, you can also learn more about why and how to optimize your site for CLS.

<img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200">
<img
  alt="{{ image.alt }}"
  src="{{ image.src }}"
  width="{{ image.width }}"
  height="{{ image.height }}"
>

Add alt text and good file names

When working on your product images, you need to take care of other things: alt texts and file names. Both describe the image for search engines. In addition, alt text is important for accessibility reasons as well. Screen readers use this to read out what’s on the image.

For alt text, keep it short and sweet. Describe the image in proper wording and don’t overdo it on the keywords.

File names also help Google make sense of your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. So, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 13, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_13_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

Just as with the proper compression of images, give your pictures an appropriate file name before uploading them to Shopify, as it’s hard to fix once they’ve been uploaded. Of course, you can also delete the image you’ve already uploaded and re-upload the proper one.

Can you create a blog on Shopify?

You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, Shopify has a basic blogging engine, but it functions properly, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way of enhancing your SEO strategy, trying to reach an audience via the search engines. It’s a wonderful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company.

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. From here, you can add a blog post by clicking the green button. By default, Shopify comes with a blog called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side.

If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, then there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post of your choice to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis at your disposal. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data.

Is blogging good for my Shopify store?

Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog gives you a chance to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize.

First, you have to determine what the goal of your blog is. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or instead, what’s the type of content that resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

Blog on WordPress or Shopify?

WordPress is the king of blogs, while Shopify comes with a basic but competent blogging feature. Wouldn’t it make sense to simply use WordPress to build a blog and tie that into your Shopify store? While WordPress does give you more tools to create a perfect blog, combining these two is probably not worth the hassle. You would be running WordPress on a subdomain which isn’t always the best option. Unless you have particular hard-core needs, the ease of using the built-in blogging tool in Shopify probably makes a lot of sense for most people.

If you already have an excellent WordPress site, you can simply integrate your Shopify store with a plugin like WP Shopify. This does make handling your store a bit different from how you would typically do it. Primarily if you use any third-party apps, many of these won’t function correctly in this manner, due to the limitations of the Shopify API. Luckily, you can at least use Yoast SEO on WordPress and Shopify to optimize your store and site.

How to pick a good Shopify theme

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. The theme you choose influences so many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Shopify Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store. Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

• Determine what you want and need: Are you going to run a store with a single product, or do you want a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
• Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple of hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
• Check the themes in the marketplace: There are quite a few themes available, and Shopify has even structured these in several collections like the size of the catalog or the type of industry, like clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on the homepage of a shop. Now, there are over 80 themes available in the Shopify Theme Store.
• Read the reviews: You are probably not the first one picking a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with the theme.
• Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
• Make sure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
• Try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The Shopify theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to take a close look at those online stores and run these through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
• Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, it’s essential that your online shop functions correctly. Again, the theme store gives you the possibility to see a mobile view of the theme.
• Test the user experience: The Shopify theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, check how images load, animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store so you get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
• Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

Having your own Shopify theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. There’s only so much customization possible in an existing theme — both in a technical as well as a design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

Building your theme is quite complex, though, and you have to think through what you want and need. You need to plan to make sure that you don’t run into issues later on. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to learn more about building and adapting store themes.

Technical SEO for Shopify

Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights.

Optimize your Shopify store for speed

Being a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide its users with a speedy experience. There’s a lot of focus on speed at Shopify to help their customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts!

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, Shopify has performance high on the list of priorities. For instance, it comes with an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has an Online Store Speed report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing when it comes to loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on how your store performs.

While Shopify provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps that you hardly use.

How to prevent duplicate content in your Shopify store

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on more than one URL. This is not ideal, as Google might be confused as to which one is the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your performance in search.

Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs:

https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

and:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. However, there is a way to ensure that Shopify only shows the original product URL and keeps that as the one linked everywhere.

For this, you need to edit the product-grid-item.liquid file in the Snippets folder and change the following code from (only edit code if you know what you are doing and be sure to make a backup! You should always have a duplicate of your theme ready in case of emergency):

<a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

to:

<a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

With the new Dawn Shopify theme, this workaround is no longer needed, and it will automatically output the correct URL. For other themes or older ones, you still might want to check this workaround.

Working with product variants

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants, of course, is that it’s hard to get these to show in Google properly. Depending on your needs, you might not need that, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

Of course, you need to provide sufficiently different product descriptions and the like if you want them to turn up individually in Google.

Faceted navigation or product filters

Out of the box, Shopify comes with only a handful of filtering options for your online store — no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways of getting more filters in your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you are using an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage it for you.

The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. In addition, they also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically.

Whatever you pick, just make sure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

Here’s an example of a faceted URL :

https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool

Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines

Shopify hired many top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve the platform’s capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over the robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do on your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues that SEOs have with Shopify.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

You can find your robots.txt file on https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this pretty well, and most users probably don’t have to touch this file. But for more complex or expansive sites, it might make sense to add some rules to ensure that some more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results.

You can now edit the robots.txt liquid file by going to your Online Store admin page. From there, go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from at the bottom. Click create template, and you can start editing.

Structured data for your products

Structured data is essential in this day and age. Structured data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org in this case — that search engines read to get a better understanding of your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products.

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the name of the product, the description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, and a lot more. Search engines like Google might give your product listings a rich result in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search result that features information about prices, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output a bit of product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without having to code, you can use one of the structured data apps in the Shopify App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify output structured data automatically

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! Now, we bring part of that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app. Unfortunately, we can’t include everything we want yet as it is a bit finicky to get everything going in Shopify. Nonetheless, we succeeded and got the essential things in there, and we can now tell Google all about your products and their details.

To get Yoast SEO to output Schema, you need to go through some steps to start. A lot of structured data is added automatically, but we do need your input for some things. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock.

Schema structured data for your articles and pages

Yoast SEO for Shopify does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google all about your business — what the name is, its logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service.

Yoast SEO for Shopify comes with an additional structured data option to set yourself for posts and pages. For pages, you can now describe it in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that, using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

This also goes for articles. By default, Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article, but you can easily change this. There are options for news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and much more. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less.

How to manage redirects in Shopify

Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when you are working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. You can use this when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links.

Shopify has a redirect feature built-in. For one, Shopify automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. You can upload CSV files with your redirects if you need to do large-scale work on your site. Or simply use the URL redirect feature in the navigation section of the admin settings. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want to old one to point to.

Add your Shopify store to Google Search Console

With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into how your store performs in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must.

Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated:

• Open Search Console and log in,
• Add a new property
• Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party
• Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works)
• Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed)
• Enter your domain name (including https://)
• Copy the HTML file
• Open your site theme settings
• Click Actions > Edit code
• Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag
• Save and wait for Google to verify your site

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes it easy to add the verification code to your ecommerce store. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Simply open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste in the verification code you received. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added.

How to increase sales in Shopify

When you have your store up and running, the next thing will be getting those customers — and getting them to return and spend more and more. For fledgling stores, it’s not easy to rank products in the search results. You must do more to get noticed and marketing your Shopify store can get you there. Also, improving the UX can help you get those conversions up.

Marketing in addition to SEO

Every online store needs marketing. You can do many things to get people interested in your products and get them to your shop. In this part of the Shopify SEO ultimate guide, we’d like to highlight some options quickly.

Paid ads and Google Shopping

Many Shopify stores get their first customers from paid ads. Paid ads are a great way of gaining visibility quickly. You get to carefully target who you want your ads to appear for based on terms and outcomes of your choosing. There’s no limit to what you can do with paid ads — the only limiting factor being what you want to pay for those ads, of course.

Then there’s Google Shopping, where you can get your products noticed as well. Getting listed there doesn’t even cost money if you’re in selected countries, that is. There’s a Google channel app that makes connecting your Shopify store to that boundless platform easy.

Social media marketing

Social media is vast — use it to your advantage! There are a ton of well-known platforms out there, like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but also more niche ones, like Reddit. Get creative and find out where your audience lives. Find out what they need and connect! Build your brand, your voice, and push your store.

Video marketing

Buying something is a very delicate affair, and the more you can support your customer, the better. Video is an excellent way of getting your customers to learn more about your products. Video is booming, so don’t forget to invest in a proper video SEO strategy. We have a ton of great content if you want to learn how to do video SEO.

Email marketing

A good email newsletter is essential for your store. It is one of the most successful ways of reaching people and keeping them connected to your store. You can use email marketing to keep customers up to date with the latest products and sales. In addition, you can also use it as part of your content marketing strategy — getting your content noticed by the right people.

Shopify comes with a dedicated email campaign app that lets you get started quickly. The first 2,500 emails per month are free of charge. Designing an email is picking a template and customizing it to your liking. You even get data to track the success of your newsletters.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing might be an option for you. In most niches, you’ll find influencers who’d like to talk about or promote your product. Influencer marketing is an exciting way of getting your name out there, and it might make sense for your industry.

Offline marketing

Don’t forget old-school offline marketing for your Shopify store. If you are a local store catering to a local audience, you have to think about offline marketing. Think of advertising in the local paper, printing some flyers, or doing a guerrilla sticker campaign. The options are endless.

Conversion rate optimization in Shopify

Your store should have great products, good content, an excellent design, and proper SEO to make the most of it. But even then, the chances are that you are still not getting the most out of your store. Getting customers is one thing — getting them to convert and come back again is a whole different thing.

Besides improving your store, you should also improve the experience a customer has in your store. You should try to take away any bump in the road that might keep a visitor from becoming a customer. These could be technical things — your shopping cart loads poorly. Or it might be related to your content — is the text on that CTA explicit enough? Can you find ways to improve your product pages?

This is the domain of conversion rate optimization. Start thinking about the user journey and see if you’ve missed a step in the process. Test different setups of your shopping cart to see which performs better. Put your product pages through the wringer. Track, test, change and improve!

Internationalization

Expanding your online store to markets outside your country has always been a chore. Things get complex fast, even with Shopify, getting everything set up — from international domains to hreflang, localization, and targeting. But there’s money to be made in the world, and why wouldn’t your shop have a piece of the pie?

To make selling a more viable option for online stores internationally, Shopify recently announced Markets. Shopify Markets takes the guesswork out of internationalization. It comes with automatic solutions for payments in local currencies, translation of content and interfaces, fulfillment and shipping, and even tax and custom handling.

For SEOs, the beautiful thing about Shopify Markets is the part of the international domain. Here, you can simply pick your proposed global domain setup, whether you use subfolders, subdomains, or top-level domains. A new Geolocator app helps redirect the customers to the proper domain in their respective countries. Shopify will automatically add the appropriate hreflang tags to the pages so search engines can also make sense of the setup.

How to move from WooCommerce to Shopify

One of the biggest competitors of Shopify is WooCommerce — we’ve compared them both in an article on this site. If you are looking to move from WooCommerce to Shopify, you can rest assured, as the process of migrating is pretty straightforward. First, you need to export your data from WooCommerce. Then, import your data into Shopify by way of the Store Importer app. Lastly, carefully check and review the imported data. Missing products or customers can be added manually. Check Shopify’s store migration guide for more information.

Learn more? Try the Yoast SEO for Shopify training course

In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your Shopify store. Of course, there’s more to Shopify — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. After the launch of the app on January 18, 2022, you’ll find two online courses that develop your skills in our Yoast SEO academy. Please try the ecommerce training and the Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.

Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Shopify is a popular platform to run your online store on. Rightly so because it is easy to use and performs pretty well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. Hopefully, this ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gave you a good place to start.

Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify app!

The post Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

Today, we’re launching Yoast SEO 17.9. In this release, we have an awesome new feature to share with you. We’ve partnered up with SEO tool Wincher to bring you keyphrase performance tracking. This new feature will allow you to get a better understanding of how your posts are ranking over time. Let’s find out more about this brand-new feature in Yoast SEO 17.9!

Yoast and Wincher have joined forces to empower you even more when it comes to doing your own SEO.

Keyword tracking with the Wincher integration

The reason that we’re joining forces with Wincher is that we both believe in the power of SEO. Like Yoast, the team at Wincher wants to help you optimize your content for users and search engines. Wincher is an SEO tool that helps you track your keywords. This means that it can give you insight into how you’re ranking on the keywords or keyphrases that you’ve chosen for certain pages. This allows you to see how well your pages are performing, making it way easier to track the progress of your SEO efforts.

To bring keyword tracking to your website, we’ve built a Wincher integration that you can use in both Yoast SEO free and Yoast SEO Premium! In both versions of our plugin, you’re able to choose a free or premium Wincher account. When you decide on a free account, you’ll be able to track up to a total of 5 keywords for your entire site. With a premium Wincher account, you can track up to 500 – 10.000 keywords (depending on the plan you choose). Regardless of which one you choose, make sure to give it a try. Because this integration gives you a better understanding of how your most important posts are ranking over time and can give you the right tools to climb to that #1 position!

How to activate the Wincher integration

When you’ve updated to Yoast SEO 17.9, you will be able to active the Wincher integration in the sidebar of your post editor right away. The first time you use it, Yoast SEO will ask you to either login or register for Wincher. After that, you’ll be able to start tracking the performance of your keyphrases in the post editor! Just go to a post and click the tab ‘Track SEO performance’ in the sidebar. You will get a popup that shows you the position that this post has for this keyphrase and it also shows you a graph of your position over time. If you want to read more about how it works, check out our help article on how to use the Wincher integration in Yoast SEO.

It’s important to remember that when you choose to use the free version of this Wincher integration, that you’ll only be able to track a total of 5 keyphrases on your entire website. So make sure to choose wisely and track your most important pages! In the example below, you’ll see tracking for multiple keyphrases on one post, but this is only possible with the related keyphrases feature in Yoast SEO Premium.

An extra bonus for our Yoast SEO Premium users

When you use the free version of Yoast SEO, you’ll be able to track one keyphrase per post (with a premium Wincher account that is). However, in Yoast SEO Premium we also have the related keyphrases feature allowing you to fill in multiple keyphrases per post (phrases that are related to your focus keyphrase). With the new Wincher integration, this means that you can also track these related keyphrases per post. Meaning that you’re able to track five keyphrases per post.

Yoast SEO 17.9 also comes with Japanese language support

In addition to the Wincher integration, Yoast SEO 17.9 also comes with full language support for Japanese. This means that Yoast SEO now recognizes the Japanese language and gives you feedback on your content, both on readability and SEO! Find out why that’s so important on our page on language availability in Yoast SEO.

Users of Yoast SEO Premium have access to the full suite of tools in Japanese. That includes the related keyphrase, synonym and word forms features. These features help Yoast SEO recognize different versions of your focus keyword and include them in the analysis. Which makes the analysis a lot smarter and even more accurate. Japanese is actually the 20th language that Yoast SEO understands and we’re not planning on slowing down any time soon.

Update to Yoast SEO 17.9 now!

Yoast SEO 17.9 is now available for you to download. And thanks to our partnership with Wincher, it comes with a shiny new feature that allows you to keep an eye on how your pages are ranking for certain focus keyphrases. It’s available in both Yoast SEO free and Yoast SEO Premium and you can decide on a free or Premium account. Whichever fits your needs best. Make sure to try out this new keyphrase tracking feature and let us know what you think.

Go Premium and get access to all our features!

Premium comes with lots of features and free access to our SEO courses!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $99 USD / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

The post Yoast SEO 17.9: Track the performance of your keyphrases with Wincher appeared first on Yoast.

A blog is a great marketing tool. It might feel like an ‘old-school thing’, but it’s still a really strong SEO tool in 2022. Google just loves great content! So if you’re thinking about starting a blog, I only have one thing to say: go for it! Let’s make 2022 the year in which you finally start your blog! But what kind of things should you think about before starting a blog? If you take a little time to think about how to set up your blog before you begin, you’ll have less work later on. Which things could really use some extra SEO love? In this post, I’ll tell you all about why a blog is so important for SEO and give you practical tips on how to set up a blog on your site.

Why is a blog important for SEO?

Google reads text. That means that sites with a lot of great content have a higher chance to rank high in the search engines. A blog is a perfect way to write about what you know. It’ll give you the opportunity to write things that your audience will want to read. You probably want to rank for some very competitive terms. If you write all kinds of blog posts on different aspects of those competitive terms, you’ll make it much easier to rank for those competitive terms too. All you need is (SEO) love and some great internal links to get ahead in those search engine result pages.

Tips on how to start a blog

If you start from scratch and you don’t even have a site, you’ll need to dive into things such as hosting, themes and installing awesome SEO plugins. But let’s just assume that you have a site, but don’t have a blog (yet). How do you start that first post? Let’s go through some practical tips together!

1. Choose your niche

You should always write about what you know. But you should not write about everything you know. Pick a niche! Decide upon the main topic and write posts related to that topic. It’s more likely that your audience will come back and read your other posts if you’re writing about similar topics. People will know what to expect. Starting a mom blog implies that you write about all things concerning your children and family life. Starting a travel blog implies you write about traveling. You can write about something slightly off-topic once in a while of course, but try to stick to your niche. An audience of a travel blog doesn’t expect a blog post about gardening.

2. Do your keyword research

Once you’ve chosen your niche, read up on the basics of keyword research. Try to find out what people are searching for. What words are they using when they want to read about your niche and your topic? You should really get inside the heads of your potential audience. If you do your keyword research properly, you should end up with a long list of keywords you would like to be found for. Try to come up with competitive, head keywords as well as with less competitive long-tail keywords. And, don’t forget to give search intent some thought as well!

3. Think about site structure

You’ll start with a clean slate, so this is the best time to think about site structure. What categories are popular in your niche? What are the most important head keywords you’d like to rank for? You should write a long, kick-ass article about each of these keywords. Those will be your most essential articles, or in other words, your cornerstone content. You should give those articles a prominent place on your site.

After you’ve written those beautiful cornerstone articles, write lots of blog posts on subtopics of that main topic and always link to your cornerstones. That way, you’ll be telling Google exactly what the most important articles on your website are.

Read more: How to set up a cornerstone content strategy with Yoast SEO »

4. Think about style and personality

A blog usually has an informal style. Blog posts are usually rather casual, like talking to a friend. But it all depends on your personality and the topic of your blog. Before you start a blog, decide upon a style. What kind of vibe do you want your posts to have? If your blog is about accountancy or corporate finance, your blog should have a rather formal tone of voice. However, a blog about guinea pigs could pull off a totally different vibe!

A short recipe for that very first blog post

After you’ve done a little bit of thinking, you just need to start writing! Put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and just do it. Your blog starts with the very first post. That post doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be published. Let me help you there and give you a short recipe for that very first blog post.

1. Choose a topic! What are you going to write about?
2. Write down your message: what is the thing you want people to remember from this post?
3. Write…. and read more about writing… because it’s more easily said than done.
4. Add pictures and videos. A successful blog has pictures and videos as well. Every post should feature at least one image. Taking nice photos yourself is a great way of creating images. Making short videos is a really good blogging strategy as well. Especially if you’re blogging about (aspects) of your own life, photos of it are a necessity.
5. Optimize for the Search Engines! Before publishing your post, optimize it using Yoast SEO. Don’t forget to create an awesome SEO title and a decent snippet. Finetune your text. Make sure your text is readable, as well as SEO-friendly. And remember to add some links pointing towards your new post, otherwise users and Google will never find it!
6. Promote your blog: Using social media is the best way to reach and grow the audience of your blog. That’s why your blog should have a Facebook page. Sharing your posts on Facebook is a good marketing strategy. Don’t forget Instagram and Twitter either! In addition to the use of social media to promote your blog, we advise you send out a digital newsletter. Let people sign up for it and send out emails with your latest blog posts and other content they might enjoy.

Keep reading: Marketing your blog »

Love your site and start that blog

The most important thing when starting a blog – besides setting up your new blog – is writing that very first blog post. Once you’ve written that first post, your blog has started. From that moment on, you should continue writing blog posts. Just continue with the SEO love. Try to determine a frequency to publish new posts, so your readers know what to expect. You don’t have to blog every day, once a month could also be a nice frequency to start with. Starting a blog is hard work. But your site really deserves a little love. Let’s spread that SEO love! 

Read on: Blogging: the ultimate guide »

The post How to start a blog appeared first on Yoast.

By the end of this month, we’ll launch a Yoast SEO app for Shopify! That’s huge news! In this post, we’ll explain why we chose to build an app for Shopify. We thought long and hard about it. And it took some time and effort to build it as well. I’ll discuss some business reasons and some, equally important, reasons around our core values. 

SEO for everyone 

Our mission is SEO for everyone. We want everyone to have a fair chance in the search engines. Shopify is a large ecommerce platform and it’s growing fast. Extending our services to Shopify will help us to get closer to our mission. We’re currently also working on a desktop app that can be used by everyone, regardless of their CMS of choice. Next to our WordPress plugin, we also already offer an SEO solution for Typo3 and a WooCommerce SEO plugin too.

Business reasons 

Let me be clear and blunt about this. An app on the Shopify platform is a huge business opportunity. Shopify is growing fast. It makes sense to build an app and profit from the growth of that specific platform. The price points in Shopify are very different from the prices in WordPress (and maybe a tad bit more reasonable as well). That makes the Shopify market attractive to extend to. We have big dreams to grow our company further (in and outside of WordPress) and success in Shopify would make that a lot easier. 

The growth of Yoast (up until now) has been highly dependent on WordPress. That makes us a bit vulnerable. When deciding to build the Shopify app, we were not acquired by Newfold Digital yet. The decision to build that app was also one of risk-diversification. Having an app or plugin on multiple platforms just makes sure that our company can grow sustainably. 

Why Shopify? 

We’re breaking with our tradition to only release Yoast SEO software to open-source platforms. Shopify is closed source. We had a lot of conversations about that because at Yoast we’re open-source fanboys and girls. At the same time, making the web better is also something very dear to our heart. And we think that Shopify is making the web better. We strongly believe in Shopify’s mission to bring small businesses online. We feel that it is important for the internet that people have their own website and not sell their products via a third party. With our Yoast SEO for Shopify app, we want to help people rank with their own online store. 

Next to that, the values of Shopify really resonate with us. They are focused on small businesses and helping them to grow their businesses online. They want to make commerce better for everyone. They build for the long term; they believe in sustainability and are excited about social impact initiatives. So Shopify is the kind of company that we would like to be friends with. 

What about WordPress? 

Yoast has a specific, unconditional love for WordPress. We take our responsibility for the WordPress ecosystem very seriously. The five for the future initiative is something that we are certainly passionate about. We’ll continue to support at least five for the future! We’ll keep investing in WordCamps and in our WordPress Core team. We will also continue to add awesome features in our WordPress plugin, including two amazing new releases this month.

Five for the web 

As we love the five for the future initiative in WordPress, we want to make it into a bigger thing. With the money we make in Shopify, we want to give back as well. We’re going to give that money back to initiatives that make the entire web better. We’re already doing some things there. Yoast is a member of the W3C, and our very own Jono Alderson is in the AMP advisory board. We’re planning to grow our efforts and initiatives to make the web better and give 5% of our Shopify revenue back to the web. 

Excited for the launch! 

I’m really excited about the upcoming Yoast SEO for Shopify launch on January 18th. We had a wonderful time building the app and we can’t wait for people to optimize their shops with Yoast SEO! To celebrate, we are having an online YoastCon (- I know it’s not the same as a live one) on January 20th. We’ll have some amazing speakers talking about all things ecommerce SEO. Interesting for Shopify-ers and WordPressers alike! 

Register for Online YoastCon – Shopify edition now!

The post Yoast SEO for Shopify! Whaaaaaat?  appeared first on Yoast.

For over 10 years, Yoast SEO has helped WordPress users all around the world with their SEO. And we’re quite proud to say that with more than 12 million active users, it’s one of the most popular SEO plugins in the WordPress community. We’re not going anywhere, our WordPress plugins will remain one of our main focuses. But we are bringing Yoast SEO to another platform: Shopify! Just like our Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin, this Shopify app will help users work on their own SEO and create pages that both people and search engines will love. And to properly launch our newest product, we’re hosting a Shopify event!

The Yoast SEO app will soon be on Shopify

In two weeks, on the 18th of January, we’ll release our new Yoast SEO on Shopify app and we’re super excited! We can’t wait to bring our product to a whole new platform and help its users with their SEO. At the moment, we’re still dotting the last few i’s, but it’s almost ready to go. So if you have a Shopify store, or know someone who does, make sure to keep an eye on our website or the app store in Shopify. Yoast SEO will be joining Shopify very soon! If you want to read more about why we’re introducing this new product, make sure to read the blog post in which our CEO Thijs de Valk explains why we’ve brought Yoast SEO to Shopify.

But what can this new Shopify app do for me?

Now you might be wondering what you can expect from this new app on Shopify. Similar to our WordPress plugin, it helps you optimize your pages by giving you feedback on the findability and readability of your pages. This feedback helps you improve your pages to get them higher in the search results and improve your sales. In addition to this feedback, the Yoast SEO for Shopify app also gives you control over how your pages are shown on Google and social media. And last but certainly not least, it actually outputs all the needed SEO meta data and a complete Schema graph for your site, which search engines can use to understand your pages even better. There are a few other functionalities that come with this new app. If you want to dive into that, make sure to check out our Yoast SEO for Shopify product page.

Join our free online Shopify event

To celebrate and kick off our new product, we’re hosting a very special YoastCon this year. An online YoastCon – Shopify edition on the 20th of January that will be chockfull of lots of interesting SEO talks by experts in this field. You can expect to learn more about how to improve the SEO of your online store and how Yoast SEO in Shopify works. And if you’ve ever been to a Yoast event, you’ll know that we also like to have fun. So you can also expect some sort of entertainment!

Speakers from Shopify and renowned SEO companies

We want to make sure that everyone takes something away from this event. That’s why we’ve invited guests from different companies that will talk about SEO for online stores. We’ll kick off the event with a welcome and product demo by our CEO Thijs de Valk and CPO Joost de Valk. After that, Aleyda Solis will talk us through the worst SEO issues of online stores in 2022 and how to fix them. Another topic that will be discussed is how to make a perfect ecommerce website, a talk by our own Jono Alderson.

But that’s not all. We’ll also have talks by Shopify’s Kevin Indig & Jackson Lo and Mike King. More information on these talks and the schedule will follow soon! Just keep an eye on our event page.

Practical information

This event, the online YoastCon – Shopify edition, will take place on Thursday, the 20th of January 2022. It starts at 4:30 pm CET / 1:30 pm EST and will be a few hours long. But you can tune in whenever you like! And if you can’t make it that day, don’t worry, it’s also possible to watch the event at a different time.

Register for the Shopify event now!

The post We have big news: Yoast SEO is coming to Shopify! appeared first on Yoast.

What a year it has been! Big things have happened within Yoast the company as well as in our Yoast SEO plugin. In this post, I look back at a wonderfully exciting 2021! In addition, I have asked Thijs de Valk – our brand new CEO – all kinds of questions to shine his light on 2021 as well. Care to join us?

The biggest thing of 2021: Yoast joins Newfold

The biggest thing happening in 2021 was the fact that Yoast joined Newfold Digital. In August of this year, the shareholders of Yoast sold their stock to Newfold Digital. And, while we’re no longer the owners of the best company in the world, we’re still really happy and excited to work here.

I asked Thijs how the company is doing, half a year after the acquisition. ‘We’re in the middle of our integration in Newfold,’ Thijs explains. ‘We’ve moved all of our tooling from Google Drive to Microsoft Office. That was a big thing internally. Apart from that, we’re pretty much doing all the things we did before the acquisition. Except that we now have more time to focus on our product.’

Changes within Yoast – the company

It was a weird year. At the beginning of 2021, we were positive that this would be the year in which we would beat COVID. However, the situation in the Netherlands now is not that good. We’re in lockdown light again. We’re working from home. Yoast was always a company in which a lot of people worked from our local offices. We now have become a hybrid company. Some people work from home, others work at the office, most people prefer a combination of both.

‘We’ve hired a lot of new colleagues this year,’ says Thijs. ‘Some awesome new developers, we expanded our support team and we hired some new marketeers. I am especially proud of our Business Intelligence team. I think we finally have a state-of-the-art Business Intelligence team. And we need that, with 12 million users. ‘

Thijs also talks about expansion outside of the Netherlands. Yoast is becoming an international company: ‘We noticed, due to COVID, that working remotely is very possible. Our company culture has become more international as well. Internally, we try to do everything bilingual. We used to be very Dutch.’

Changes within Yoast – the plugin

We’ve done some wonderful releases this year! At Yoast, we’re most excited about our new SEO workouts. Have you seen them? Our workouts are designed to solve specific SEO tasks that really help you to improve the SEO-friendliness of your website. They are quick, easy, and fun to do.

Thijs is also a big fan of our new workouts. ‘I especially love the cornerstone content workout. That workout helps you to choose your most important articles. And, after that, to make sure that Google also knows that those are your favorites. A lot of people tend to forget the importance of internal linking. This workout really helps you to update the internal linking structure of your site. And that’s so important for SEO.’

Check out Thijs’ favorite workout below:

The new CEO

More big news and big changes in 2021. Marieke (that’s me by the way) decided to step down as CEO. I wanted to focus more on marketing and less on the corporate things that tend to become your day-to-day job when you’re leading the company. Luckily, Thijs de Valk was up and ready to take over the role of CEO.

‘I am really happy with the new role,’ Thijs says when I congratulate him (again) on his new job. ‘It’s an honor to lead such a great company. And these are exciting times. Integrating into Newfold is both scary and exhilarating. We have so many new things lined up for next year. I can’t wait for 2022 to start.’

Conferences, WordCamps, webinars and workshops

2021 was a year with a lot of online conferences and WordCamps. We’ve visited so many events and met a lot of nice people from all over the world. In 2021 we also did a lot of webinars and online workshops at Yoast. Those were a big success. Remember our awesome Yoast summer school in which we did a number of really cool online workshops? And we’re not slowing down, we’re planning on doing more webinars and online workshops in 2022!

What about next year?

2022 is just around the corner. Thijs is ready for it: ‘I can’t wait for 2022. We have some really awesome things lined up… three exciting things in January! And that’s only the beginning!’

2021 was a great year for Yoast. And we’re ready to go and make 2022 just as awesome. If only this COVID-thing would disappear. We hope you all have a great 2022 too! And please: stay healthy and stay safe.

Read more: SEO in 2022: Your chance to shine! »

The post Looking back at Yoast in 2021 appeared first on Yoast.

Although it also brought many good things, 2021 was a year to forget for most of us quickly. So let us take a look at next year. For most sites, SEO in 2021 is not much different from the past couple of years: you still need to improve the same, but you need to set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you need to take a step back to see if you are still reaching the right people at the right time. Search intent needs to determine your keyword research and content marketing decisions. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2022.

2021 is over, now what?

2020 and 2021 were tough for many of us, but hopefully, 2022 will be a more positive year. The pandemic is still breaking many of our systems, but it also unveiled new possibilities. If we look at our industry, SEO, we see that the online world has made a pretty big jump. As people moved indoors, the business moved online. Many people shop online for the first time, and many of them will keep doing that. There’s never been a better time to build an online business.

But it’s not just business. The web has always made it possible to present your creativity or learn whatever you wanted to know, but this accelerated in 2021. For instance, people picked up new hobbies and started sites to blog or show off their photography. Everything moved online. This is expected to continue into the next year and maybe beyond.

So, with all these people waiting for your content — how would you use SEO in 2022?

It’s all about quality

2021 is all about quality. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what exactly it is you do. Evaluate your products and services, and the way you describe these. Have trouble describing what you do? Well, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No-one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.

SEO in 2022

I could talk about the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, or conversational interactions, but I’m not going to do that. It would help if you took note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is critical. Content quality is vital. So, these SEO trends for 2022 are not hyped-up stuff but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?

It’s all about mobile

First up, we have to talk about mobile. Since Google switched over to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when most of your traffic is from the desktop. Give your mobile site special care and work on its mobile SEO. You should test whether your site works just as well on mobile as well as desktop. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Make it lightning-fast, easy to use, and valuable. 2021 had many people experience mobile shopping for the first time, and it looks like they will come back for more in 2022.

Improve site quality

If you’ve been playing this SEO game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you really should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know many factors that search engines take into account to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s not possible. While nobody knows precisely what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a more significant period to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?

Quality.

To win in SEO in 2022, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and great content, target the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed needs to improve. It also means incorporating and improving schema.org structured data, as schema.org remains one of the critical developments for some time to come.

Let’s go over some of the things you need to focus on in 2022.

Page experience with the Core Web Vitals will continue to

As part of an effort to get sites to speed up and to provide a great user experience, Google announced the Page Experience algorithm update that rolled out in 2021. This update will give you another reason to put site speed front and center. While the impact of the Page Experience update has been relatively marginal as of today, we expect it to continue to develop in the coming year.

Site speed has been an essential factor for a couple of years, but it will become critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a more challenging time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s an excellent tradeoff.

Enhance the user experience

Page experience ties in with user experience. Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in an instant? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a sure-fire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!

Untangle your site structure

Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts, and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors, as well as search engines. Everything should have its proper place, and if something is old, outdated, or deprecated, maybe you should delete it and point it to something relevant.

This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or improvements to be made? How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing up the flow of your site? The new SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium can help you get started on this.

Implement Schema.org structured data

Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to connect parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data makes your site eligible for so-called rich results. There are many rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many recent developments, like voice search.

Implementing structured data has never been easy, but we’re solving that problem. Yoast SEO automatically outputs a complete graph of structured data, describing your site and content in detail for search engines. For specific pages, you can tell the content in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor let you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online training course on structured data to help you improve your SEO in 2022.

Content quality

There is a ton of content out there — and there’s a lot of new content published every day. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrases? Is it perfect enough to beat the competition? Are you publishing unique, all-encompassing content that answers the questions your audience has?

Keep search intent front and center

Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior. Thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing with BERT and MUM, Google is starting to know the language inside out. In 2022, we’ll see Google use these new skills to bring better and more accurate search results — and present them in innovative new ways.

Of course, we can still help search engines pick the correct version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to a searcher’s specific goals. Map these intents to your content, and you’re good to go.

Re-do your keyword research

2020 and 2021 were impactful years for many of us, and a lot has changed. Keeping this in mind, it’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of changes in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research is missing out on significant opportunities. Read up on the research about consumer trends for 2022 and beyond. After that, ask yourself these questions:

• What changed in my company?
• What changed in and around my audience?
• Has something changed in people’s language?
• What has changed in where people search?

Content is context

Context is one of the essential words in the SEO field. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become more innovative and intelligent, providing them with as much related information as possible is becoming more critical. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema provides another way to show search engines what’s connected.

By mapping the context of your subject, you might find you have a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or perhaps the pandemic threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.

Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages

If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content in that time. That’s not a bad thing, of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization can become a big issue, so content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Is that what you want to happen?

To find out how you are doing, you need to re-assess your content. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles in one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be to hold the writing for a while and improve what you have!

Work on your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness

Now search engines can understand the content; they are increasingly looking at its value. Is it trustworthy? Who is the person claiming these things? Why should we trust the author? Is the author an authority on the subject? Google looks not just at the quality of the content but also at whether that content can be assessed professionally. Trust and expertise will be essential, especially for YMLY (Your Money or Your Life) pages, like medical or financial content. E-A-T looks at this and is set to become a big part of SEO in 2022.

Hone those writing skills!

Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth, and easy to understand. Search engines are getting better at determining an article’s text quality and making decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across as more professional, and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content. So, brush up on those writing skills! We have an excellent SEO copywriting guide and an SEO copywriting course if you need help. If you buy Yoast SEO Premium, you get complimentary access to all our SEO training courses — for one low price.

Search is on the move

As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere, not specifically in Google. Search is moving beyond the website or social media platform for investigations and actions. There are loads of devices that can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Machines that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are powerful e-commerce platforms that seem to get the majority of product searches, not to mention all those app-based services out there. Visual search is also on the rise. Maybe these have value for you?

(Progressive web) apps

Links to apps continue to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Many sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere; even Google is now testing structured data for software apps. What’s more, Google expands its mobile homepage with the Discover app that suggests new content based on your interests.

Where’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi-hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes a better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, it might be a good idea to look into apps. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there are always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot off this year!

Video

Video is huge! And there’s no end in sight for the video boom. YouTube might be the most crucial search engine for many people besides Google. We’ve seen the arrival of short-form content providers like Tik Tok, and we’ve seen several enhancements in how video gets presented on the search results pages. You can count on it that video will only become more critical. If you have the means, invest in video. Remember, it doesn’t always have to be flashy and professional — make it heartfelt. In addition to our Video SEO WordPress plugin, we also have a ton of content on how to do video SEO well.

Other platforms

Traditionally, many searches happen not on search engines but social media and other types of platforms. Now, these past years we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion coming from social media. Different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. Plus, there are all those short-form videos going around. Maybe that’s something to attract a new audience? Also, did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Neeva? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and their goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Indeed, something to think about!

Don’t just think: “I need to publish a blog post on my website” — there are so many great destinations out there that might fit the goal of your message better.

A system for getting traffic with SEO in 2022

Now, if we’d recap all this, what does it all boil down to? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:

• A lot has changed in the last two years, so restart your research and read up on consumer trends for 2022.
• You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that genuinely helps visitors.
• This website needs to be supported by a brand that offers high-quality products and services.
• Depending on your niche, this might also mean that you need an app strategy or a strategy for an external platform.

SEO in 2022: What’s next?

It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2022 because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic searches. The social media traffic is down, conversational search is rising, but not big enough to put a dent in organic. And then there’s video. In the end, you have to keep improving your site in all the right places.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff happening simultaneously, and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we’ll start to see Google less like a search engine and more as a virtual assistant — a person who lives on your phone and solves problems for you. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.

Have a great 2022!

Read more: Google’s MUM understands what you need: 1000x more powerful than BERT »

The post SEO in 2022: Your chance to shine! appeared first on Yoast.

In the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll find a focus keyphrase input field for every page on your site. Here, you can enter the keyword or keyphrase you’d like the page to rank for in Google. If you do, Yoast SEO will run a check on the content of that page to see if search engines will recognize what your page is about. Here, we’ll explain what the purpose of a focus keyphrase is and how to choose it well.

Looking for keyphrase suggestions? When you’ve set a focus keyword in Yoast SEO, you can click on ‘Get related keyphrases’ and our SEMrush integration will help you find high-performing keyphrases!

What is a focus keyword?

The focus keyword or keyphrase is the search term that you want a page or post to rank for most. When people search for that phrase, they should find you. If you set a focus keyphrase for a page with Yoast SEO, the plugin evaluates the page’s content and provides feedback on how to improve the content to increase the chances of ranking higher for that search term.

You’ll find the input field for your focus keyphrase in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right side of your editor. If you don’t see the Yoast SEO sidebar, click on the Yoast icon on the top right of your screen first.

You can also find the focus keyphrase input field in the Yoast SEO meta box below the post editor:

You’ll find the feedback to improve your content in the SEO analysis tab. If you amend your page with this feedback, it will be easier for search engines to recognize what your post or page is about.

Check out this video to see how it works:

Why a focus keyphrase?

Regularly adding quality content to your website or blog is a good SEO strategy. Google sees that your website is active because you add new information and you increase the volume of your content.

But randomly adding content to your site isn’t very useful. You have to craft a keyword strategy, and based on that strategy you should create high-quality content your audience is looking for. When you write those articles, it’s important to optimize them for the keyphrases you’re aiming at. And that’s what Yoast SEO helps you with.

How to choose a focus keyphrase

In our view, there are at least three things you should do to determine which keywords or keyphrases you should optimize your blog posts for:

1. Find a focus keyword people search for
2. Research the search volume
3. Google your keyphrase

Let’s elaborate on these steps a bit:

1. Find a focus keyword people search for

As mentioned above, your keyword strategy should have given you some idea of what you want to write about. If you don’t have a keyword strategy yet, you should really create one. You can read our ultimate guide to keyword research or take our keyword research training course if you need help to find your perfect keywords and keyphrases.

Long-tail keywords

If you want a post or page to rank, you can increase your chance of success by aiming for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords often exist of more words and are less searched for than very popular ‘head’ keywords. But less popular also means less competition and the chances to convert are usually higher as you can read in this guide to content SEO.

Tools that help you find long-tail and related keyphrases

When you’ve done your keyword research and you already have an idea of what you want to write about, you can use various tools to find long-tail variants of that keyphrase or related keyphrases. Read more about these keyword research tools.

One of these tools is right there at your disposal in Yoast SEO: a SEMrush integration to easily find related keyphrases. When you know what to write about you can click on ‘Get related keyphrases’ below your focus keyphrase to see what phrases people search for in Google:

A screen will open with related keyphrase suggestions:

2. Check the search volume for your keyphrase

Once you have found a long-tail search term you want to rank for, you should research whether there are many searches for that keyword or phrase. This used to require quite some effort: you’d need to dive into Google Adwords or Google Trends. But, as you can see in the image above, you can now easily get information about related or long-tail keyphrases in Yoast SEO!

For instance, you can check out the search volume (how often it is searched for in a specified period of time) and trends (how that changed over time). Now you can easily compare the possible related keyphrases and decide which one(s) you want to focus on in your current or other posts.

Add more than one keyphrase

Optimizing your post for related keyphrases can improve the quality of your content: it will make it more complete and easier to understand for Google. If you want to set one of these related keyphrases for your posts you can do so with one click in Yoast SEO Premium. After that, go back to the post editor and optimize your post for the new related keyphrase.

In addition to setting related keyphrases and synonyms, Yoast SEO Premium better recognizes your keyphrase when it’s in plural or past tense, for instance. Google is smart, get an analysis that’s just as smart!

Check your posts that already rank

If you already have some (blog) posts that rank well for good terms, you will know how many visitors these posts attract. Using Google Trends to compare the focus keyphrases of older posts (which you can view the statistics for) with the focus keyphrase you have in mind for your new post, could give you some idea about the potential traffic this new keyphrase could bring. Make sure to choose older posts that are most similar to the post you’re planning to write: if you’re planning to choose a long-tail keyword, compare posts with long-tail keywords as well.

For instance, this post about the focus keyphrase could be compared with a post about snippet previews, a related feature of the Yoast SEO plugin we already wrote about:

As you can see the amount of traffic is a bit lower but comparable, we know the search traffic to our snippet preview post is reasonably good, so we know it’s worth optimizing for. Doing this to compare your old focus keyphrase or keyword and the one you want to use will give you some insights about the prospects for your focus keyphrase.

Another good way to use this is when you are considering a number of (long-tail) focus keywords. Because it will easily show you which search term will have the highest search volume compared to another. Therefore, it will help you decide which long-tail keyword is most commonly used in search.

For additional tools, see this post by Marieke about keyword research tools.

3. Google your proposed focus keyword!

Apart from knowing which search terms are actually used by people, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the needs and expectations of the people who use these search terms. You need to find out what the search intent is. One way to find out whether your content meets people’s needs is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself.

Check the search engine result pages

Take the time to look at the search engine result pages (SERPs) Are the articles in the Google results of similar character to your article? Could your article fit the results shown in these search pages? If you decide to write your blog post or page, while optimizing for this exact focus keyword, you are aiming to get your post amongst these results.

The type of content shown on the search results will help you decide on what kind of content to create: does Google show product pages or blog posts? Or perhaps videos, images? If there’s one dominant type, Google probably “thinks” this is the type of content people are looking for, so it’s worth investing time in creating that type of content too. Of course, the results change when the search intent change. Remember: you’ll have to beat the other search results, so only do this when you’re sure you can create something truly outstanding and useful for your audience!

Content of the results pages

Be sure to use the content of the result pages as an inspiration for your blog post. Are there any useful ideas? We are NOT encouraging you to copy content, merely to see whether you perhaps missed some information or arguments for your post or page. And, most importantly: How can you make sure your post will stand out? In what way could your post be better, funnier, more original than the post presently displayed in the result pages? Try to come up with content that will make the audience click and share!

Check out social media and forums

Another great tip: Check what people ask and have to say about this topic on social media and various online forums. This will probably give you loads of input for your post or page. You can directly address the questions people have and the difficulties they encounter regarding this topic. On top of this, it will help you use the right wording, which is crucial if you want to reach your audience.

Don’t forget to repeat your research now and then!

Remember that these search suggestions change all the time. The suggestions will often be tuned to what you’ve been searching for before. When we searched for the term “focus keyword” some time ago, this was the suggest output:

Later on, the output showed this:

Suggest changes based on the problems people have, so monitoring it for important keywords makes sense. New results can give you input for your post or other, but related posts.

Yoast SEO checks the quality of your keyphrase

A good focus keyword for your post is essential if it needs to stand a chance in the search engines. Therefore Yoast SEO checks some aspects of your keyphrase. First of all, we check the length of your keyphrase, to make sure your keyphrase isn’t too long. In addition to this, Yoast SEO checks whether the keyphrase only consists of function words.

The function word check in Yoast SEO

Function words (words such as the, a, and, or, have) carry very little meaning. They don’t help Google figure out the topic of the copy. We warn you if you only have words like these in your keyphrase. Even though it’s not very likely to come up with such a keyphrase yourself, it can happen that you were distracted while typing in your keyphrase. For instance, you could have just typed [the] instead of [the best movies of 2020]. To prevent keeping your focus keyphrase like this, Yoast SEO will show a warning with a grey bullet in the SEO analysis of your post and help you stay focused!

In rare cases, you might actually mean to rank for a phrase that consists of function words only. For instance, if you are writing a post about a meme “Why would you do that?”. In exceptional cases like this, you can avoid getting a red bullet by adding a double quote before and after your keyphrase. Doing so, our tool will just look for the exact match of this phrase and the warning will disappear.

Read more about the function word check in Yoast SEO.

Should every page have a focus keyphrase?

People often ask us whether their about page or contact page should have a focus keyword, and, if so, what should it be?

The answer is easy: not every page needs a focus keyword. Your contact page should be easily reachable, it might, for instance, need to rank for “<company name> address.” That probably doesn’t make sense as a focus keyword though, and it’s perfectly fine to leave it empty.

Also, ask yourself: Do I want this post to rank in the long term? Some posts, for instance, temporary announcements, are probably not worth optimizing either.

Conclusion and further readings

Choosing a perfect focus keyword or keyphrase is not an exact science. You should aim for a combination of words that are actually used by a search audience. Aim for a keyphrase that is relatively high in volume and one that will suit your audience.

We have lots more articles on this subject: you can read about keyword research, content writing and improving your site structure. We’ve also combined all of these different topics into an SEO copywriting course. 

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post How to choose the right focus keyword appeared first on Yoast.

Nowadays, building an online store is easier than ever. Picking the right tool to power your new store isn’t. There are many tools out there, but for most people, the choice will be between the two market leaders: Shopify and WooCommerce. Although both ecommerce platforms have a comparable feature set, they have a different philosophy. Let’s take a look at both.

TLDR: There’s no perfect solution

Let’s start with the conclusion. The answer to the question of which ecommerce platform you should pick is those two words that every SEO expert likes to utter regularly: it depends! It’s almost a philosophical battle between two different worlds: open and flexible, and closed and “rigid”. In general, you can achieve the same things on both platforms. Both WooCommerce and Shopify are great platforms that help site owners build awesome online stores. The main difference is how they do it and the philosophy behind it.

WooCommerce gives you great flexibility and total ownership over your shop and data. This is a great option if you want to control everything — and if you embrace the open-source mentality. Plus, if you already have a WordPress site then it makes much more sense to add a WooCommerce store to it than to start a new store on Shopify. And, if you want a hosted version of WooCommerce, there are plenty of great hosting providers that can provide you that option.

With Shopify, you get a closed system — also known as a SaaS, or Software as a Service. Everything is arranged for you and everything is set up in such a way that you can literally build and launch an online store in minutes. A closed framework like Shopify has many benefits as you get a system that is perfectly tuned to its task: getting you to sell as much as possible. It does mean that Shopify owns your data and that you lose flexibility. Everything you can do is inside the platform and its apps.

Simply put, it’s not that one is better than the other. You simply need to pick the platform that fits your goals and preferences.

What is Shopify?

Launched in 2006, Shopify is an ecommerce platform that powers around 1.7 million online stores worldwide. Shopify is a hosted web application, which means that it’s Software as a Service (SaaS), carefully fine-tuned to make it very easy to build and run online stores. It offers a ton of tools that shop owners can use to start and run their online store.

Over the years, Shopify built many in-house solutions to common ecommerce problems, like payment systems (Shopify Payments) and fulfillment networks. Today, Shopify is a full-service ecommerce platform that makes a lot of sense and gives enough options for a lot of people.

What is WooCommerce?

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce firmly has its roots in the open-source WordPress community. WooCommerce is a complete ecommerce plugin that you can simply bolt onto your WordPress site. It’s full-featured and robust, with tried and tested performance. Since 2015, WooCommerce is part of the Automattic family.

WooCommerce is a very popular and cost-efficient way of running an online store. On this basis, WooCommerce doesn’t cost anything and even many of the extensions are free to use. There’s a whole economy built around WooCommerce, with thousands of services, themes, and plugins at various price points. People value the freedom they feel while building a store with WooCommerce.

A managed platform vs. a self-hosted one

The biggest difference between Shopify and WooCommerce is the way they host your site. With WooCommerce, you can download the free WordPress plugin and install it on any given server. Simply pick a good hosting plan and you are good to go. You have full control over the way WooCommerce works and you can scale your tech stack if your site is doing great.

This does also have its drawbacks, of course. For instance, you are fully responsible for every part of your store. You need to keep everything safe and secure and you are the one making the performance optimizations needed to perform well. Of course, there are services to help you do this, but it still requires some extra effort. So, while WooCommerce is free to use, it’s not without cost. This is something to take note of. And, if you really want a hosted solution with WooCommerce, you can always sign up for the ecommerce plans on different WordPress hosting providers.

When you choose Shopify, you sign up with them, pay them a monthly fee to host and run your store. Everything you do is inside their “walls”, so to say. Shopify comes with restraints purposely built in to make sure that their stores all function properly. Shopify takes care of everything, from payment to backup and security.

If you do want to expand a bit, Shopify comes with an app store that features many helpful tools, like SEO apps, email marketing, inventory management, and much more. These range from free to a monthly added cost that’ll quickly increase the price you pay for your store. Another thing to remember is that Shopify charges a 2% transaction fee on the cheapest plan, when not using Shopify Payment. More on that later.

Comparing Shopify vs. WooCommerce

Shopify and WooCommerce haven’t become the two leading e-commerce platforms in the world by chance. Both platforms are very robust, easy-to-use, secure, and offer loads of features. The features are comparable, and so is the way they think about ecommerce. The biggest difference is in the flexibility of open-source versus the solidness of closeness. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the two.

Pricing

Shopify is paid software and doesn’t come with a free plan. There are three plans to choose from, starting from $29 a month up to $299 a month. The different plans come with different options, for instance, the basic plan doesn’t come with reports and internationalization features. For the enterprise-level businesses, there’s also Shopify Plus. Another plan is Shopify Lite that lets you add products to an existing blog for a small fee.

The kind of plan you get, also influences what you pay Shopify for handling transactions. For instance, the transaction fee if you are not using Shopify’s own payment system is 2% for the Basic plan, 1% for the middle plan, and 0.5% for the Advanced plan. There are also different rates for online handling of credit cards, starting at 2.9% + 30¢ USD per transaction.

If you use WooCommerce Payments, you don’t pay a fee to handle credit cards but there is a regular charge of 2.9% + 30¢ USD per transaction. WooCommerce itself is free to install and use, but will come with a lot of added costs. For instance, you need to pay for hosting (pick a good WordPress host — that’s essential), a domain, themes, plugins, development costs, et cetera. It is possible to keep it low budget and do most of it yourself, but if you can’t you will need to invest.

Still, a WooCommerce store will probably turn out cheaper — especially if you are on more expensive Shopify plans and need some expensive app subscriptions to get your store to run properly.

Ease-of-use

While both products are pretty easy to use, Shopify is on another level. One of the biggest advantages of a hosted ecommerce platform is that after you sign up, you can immediately start to work on your site. Shopify is set up to guide you from A to Z in such a way that you can launch your site in minutes. You won’t see any code and you can just click around to get your store looking like you want.

With WooCommerce, it might take a little more to get going because you need to go through the process of installing it. What’s more, if you don’t have a WordPress site you need to set that up as well. Luckily, there are plenty of high-quality web hosts that offer all-in-one plans for WooCommerce shops. Once you’ve set up everything, you can run through the settings, install WooCommerce add-ons, pick a theme et cetera, et cetera.

As WooCommerce is proud of its flexibility, it comes with everything and the kitchen sink, giving you detailed control over the store. What WooCommerce doesn’t have out of the box, you can add via add-ons. All of this does mean that WooCommerce is less beginner-friendly than Shopify.

Appearance: themes

Having a great, functional look for your online store is important. If your site appears messy, potential customers will likely not trust it. Luckily, both ecommerce platforms come with ample choice to get the design you want for your products to stand out.

Shopify has around eighty themes available in the Theme Store, both free and premium. Not too long ago, Shopify announced Online Store 2.0, a completely redesigned theme architecture — including a cutting-edge new default theme. This makes it a lot easier to customize themes as you can now edit every section of your site, not just your homepage. Shopify will use a Gutenberg-like block system to help you build those pages. All of this will help you get more done, without touching any code.

WooCommerce benefits from having a massive market built around it. While there are about forty themes available in the official marketplace, resellers like ThemeForest and TemplateMonster offer thousands of WooCommerce themes in all shapes and sizes. Not to mention high-quality individual WooCommerce-proof WordPress themes like Astra. This being the WordPress space, you simply have a ton of options. But, of course, this can also be overwhelming if you are trying to find something quickly.

Flexibility

Is it possible to take control of your online store and change little details or are you stuck in a system someone else controls? It’s good to have options and, while both WooCommerce and Shopify have ample settings to explores and extensions to add, Shopify feels a bit more limited.

Of course, offering flexibility is great as it gives the user the power to tune the ecommerce site to their liking. On the other hand, it adds complexity and it takes time and effort to set it up and keep it running like a well-oiled machine. As mentioned, Shopify is a closed platform that is built to give you everything you need, but not too much. While WooCommerce is open, free to adapt and turn into something unique. The choice is yours.

Apps

The concept of apps or add-ons is well-established by now. In many solutions, you get a program that is set up to give you the minimal amount of tools you need to get your store going. If you want, you can work within these constraints and build a successful store. But, if you want more control, more insights, more features — you need apps to extend the platforms.

Shopify has a great set of apps you can use, from advanced analytics to email marketing. Some of those are free to use, but the best ones are paid services you sign up for with a monthly fee. These are not cheap and the price level is different from what we see in the WordPress space. Our WordPress plugin Yoast SEO Premium, for instance, costs just $89 a year, while, on average, a Shopify app costs around $20 to $30 a month. Sign up for a couple of apps and you are racking up the cost of your Shopify store. Also, keep in mind that it’s not wise to install more apps than you need as this can affect performance.

WooCommerce is WordPress, with all its pros and cons. WooCommerce comes with a lot of ecommerce tools built-in, but you can add specific features via add-ons. There are a ton of extensions for WooCommerce, in all shapes and sizes — built by WooCommerce, as well as any third parties. In general, these add-ons are less costly than their Shopify counterparts. Pricing is just different in the WordPress space.

Whatever you choose, both platforms let you extend your online store with specific and sometimes niche apps or add-ons that help you make the most of it.

Payment providers

Accepting payments is at the heart of every online store — without it, there is no store. It’s also the part where the costs and availability of (local) payment providers will play a big role. Rest assured, both WooCommerce and Shopify shine on this front. But, one is not like the other.

Shopify is adamant of you using Shopify Payments. You’re not required to use it, but it does have a cost-benefit. Shopify offers tons of payment options and almost every provider in the world is taken care of. But, Shopify would rather have you use Payments as that is within their walls. If you choose a different provider, you’ll notice that Shopify will add transaction fees that might rack up for you. Unfortunately, Shopify only offers Payments in a couple of territories, so in many cases, you have to use a payment provider specific to your locale. This will cost you extra.

Last year, WooCommerce introduces its own version of Shopify Payments called WooCommerce Payments. Yes, really. It doesn’t support everything for every locale, but you can extend this with add-ons for almost every payment provider in the world. WooCommerce doesn’t charge extra for using a different payment provider. Except for the costs that the provider itself charges. WooCommerce Payments doesn’t require a monthly fee, but it does incur costs per transaction.

Marketing

Setting up your store is only part of the journey, of course. Marketing will play a big role in how and if you can reach an audience that will buy in your store. Having marketing at your disposal right from the backend makes a lot of sense.

Shopify comes with a number of cool marketing tools, like a Facebook channel, the option to sell on Amazon, email marketing, gift card options, sales and discounts, and much more. Marketing is also where the Shopify apps shine as there are many dedicated tools that are aimed at getting more customers — or to get current customers to spend more. Shopify also comes with an abandoned cart recovery feature in every plan.

WooCommerce comes with fewer marketing features out of the box, but it has a whole app store full of marketing extensions. WooCommerce doesn’t come with its own email marketing feature but does integrate with things like MailPoet and Mailchimp. That means that you will be able to set up your marketing the way you want to, it will just take you a bit more effort to find the right extensions.

Content marketing

Marketing your shop isn’t just about writing an engaging product description. It’s also good to find a way to tell your story and produce content that will do well in the search engines. This makes it easier for potential customers to find you, even if they are not looking for your products yet. One of the tools you can use for this is having your very own blog.

Shopify has a blog feature and it’s pretty easy to get started with. Unfortunately, it’s also very basic and bare-bones. It’s good that it’s there and that it gives you the option, but you shouldn’t expect this to have to power of WordPress.

Of course, WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress so it uses the block editor. Adding a blog to your site with WooCommerce is easy and it gives you a very powerful tool to tell your story. You’ll also get to use all those cool tools, like the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure that the content is well-written and ready for the search engines. What’s more, the block editor will let you build even more cool stuff, like landing pages and the like. WooCommerce even comes with its own blocks for the block editor.

SEO

SEO is essential in bringing in customers. Of course, SEO is more than just setting up permalinks and working on your site structure. It also contains user experience, content writing, performance optimization, and much more.

Shopify comes with a default setup that is pretty SEO-friendly. You can work on your meta descriptions, canonicals are generated automatically, redirects work properly and you can even edit your robots.txt file, if necessary. If you want to do more, there are several SEO plugins in the Appstore that can help you. Of course, not everything is perfect and there are certainly improvements to make to the default setup. For instance, duplicate content can turn out to be a nasty issue in Shopify.

WooCommerce has a major advantage: because it is built on top of WordPress you can do a lot to improve your WordPress SEO. WooCommerce is pretty good at SEO and you get a lot more control over it — especially if you install a plugin like the Yoast WooCommerce SEO add-on. This plugin helps you set up the metadata for your products properly, including the necessary structured data markup. It also optimizes the product XML sitemap for your site and helps you visualize your products in Google.

Help your online store stand out!

Get this and much more in the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin!

Get WooCommerce SEO »Only $69 USD / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site – incl. 1 year free updates and support

Performance

A fast site offers a good user experience and a good user experience helps turn visitors into customers. It’s important to focus on improving the performance of your online store as much as possible. Again, Shopify and WooCommerce do this in different ways.

As Shopify is a managed web app, performance optimization is in their hands. There are not that many things you can do to enhance it, except for making sure that everything is set up properly and that you limit the use of apps, have a well-built theme, and optimize your images. Luckily, performance is one of the focal points for the Shopify development team and they are rolling out enhancements all the time. Another cool thing is that Shopify comes with a Fastly/Cloudflare CDN by default. If you need more control over the performance, you can always upgrade to the enterprise-level Shopify Plus plan.

With WooCommerce, you can control the performance in great detail. That’s awesome, but it’s also a drawback as you are responsible for the performance. This means you have to choose where to host it and to make sure that even more is set up properly. You need to pick a fast theme, manage your plugins, optimize scripts, get a CDN, et cetera, et cetera. This is awesome because you get to choose which knobs to turn. Of course, it is a lot less beginner-friendly. Luckily, with great WordPress hosting, your WooCommerce store will probably perform pretty well without having to finetune too much stuff.

Security

Security is paramount for an online store. You don’t want your store to leak your customers’ credit card details, do you? It makes all the sense in the world to take extra care of security. Security is a major trust factor and if your customers can not trust your site, they won’t buy anything.

Because of their different approaches, Shopify and WooCommerce are not equal regarding security out of the box. Shopify is a web-based service so it controls everything it does. They take care of the hosting and security of your site. All the standard security things are available right away, like SSL certificates and 2-factor authentication. Shopify is also PCI-DSS compliant right out of the box, meaning you can accept credit cards right away.

With WooCommerce, things are different. WooCommerce as software is very secure, but you need to take care of it yourself. You install it on a server that you need to maintain, you’re responsible for getting an SSL certificate, keep your software updated et cetera. Of course, there are many tools and services that can help you secure your site in a professional way. None of this is really hard, but it is something to take note of.

Shopify vs WooCommerce conclusion

There are no answers to the question of whether Shopify or WooCommerce is better. Both are awesome tools to power your ecommerce store. Both have their merits and drawbacks, but the main difference is how it runs your online store.

With Shopify, you live and breathe on its platform, while WooCommerce lets you take control over everything. WooCommerce might be more cost-effective, but Shopify is a more lean-back solution. It’s not that one is better than the other, it’s just a choice you need to make depending on your skills, budget, and goals.

Read more: Check out our blog posts on ecommerce SEO »

The post Picking an ecommerce platform: WooCommerce or Shopify? appeared first on Yoast.

Using transition words in your writing can help you enhance the readability of your content. These words help your text flow and show readers the relationship between phrases and paragraphs. That’s why the readability check in Yoast SEO provides feedback on your use of transition words. But what are they exactly? Why are they so important? And how should you use them?

Did you get a red or orange bullet for your use of transition words? Jump to the section about the Yoast SEO transition words check. Or go straight to learning how you can improve your use of transition words.

What are transition words?

Transition words are words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and ‘because’. They show your reader the relationship between phrases, sentences, or even paragraphs. When you use them, you make it easier for your readers to understand how your thoughts and ideas are connected. What is more, they prepare your reader for what’s coming. 

Let’s consider an example.

I pushed the domino. As a result, it fell over.

When you start a sentence with ‘as a result’, your reader will immediately know two things:

1. What happened in the first sentence caused something;
2. The second sentence is going to describe the effect.

By using the phrase ‘as a result’ here, you show that the two separate sentences are part of one process. Without having even read the rest of the sentence, your reader can already guess what’s coming. In a way, transition words are the glue that holds your text together. Without them, your text is a collection of sentences. With them, the individual parts come together to form one whole.

Transition words don’t always have to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Consider the following examples.

He’s a very nice guy. He took us out to dinner yesterday, for instance.

In this example, ‘for instance’ is placed at the end of the sentence. Nonetheless, it still provides the reader with information as to how the two sentences are related.

I enjoy his company because he always tells interesting stories.

In this example, ‘because’ doesn’t connect two sentences, but two clauses. Transition words can connect anything from short phrases to entire paragraphs.

Exploring transition words with an example

Let’s use a more concrete example. Below, you see Text A and Text B. Text A contains no transition words. On the surface, Text B is the exact same, only we’ve added transition words to make it easier to read.

Text A
I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to learning skills. The only way to truly master a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are some people who will disagree. It is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they’ve heard or read. That number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory to practice. Following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.

Text B
In this paragraph, I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to mastering skills. Firstly, the only way to truly learn a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. Secondly, I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are, however, some people who will disagree. Thirdly, and most importantly, it is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they read or hear. Moreover, that number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory to practice. In conclusion, following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.

Text A is not a terrible paragraph. However, the differences are clear as day. Text B does a better job of showing there are three separate arguments to support the statement with a definite conclusion. The reader never has to wonder whether a sentence still belongs to the previous argument or a new one. Moreover, it even shows the relationship between sentences within one argument. Therefore, people are going to find it easier to read this text and will stay on the page longer. And this is just one short, conveniently arranged paragraph!

Types of transition words

Transition words can be divided into several categories, based on the type of transition you want to make. There are often several words available for one transition. Sometimes they mean exactly the same, sometimes there are slight differences. If you’re not a native speaker or struggle with language in general, you’ll have to study and practice their use so that you can make better choices.

Check out this article for transition words in other languages.

Why are they important for SEO?

Transition words make it easier to read and understand a text. And readability is very important for SEO. Although they don’t influence your SEO directly, they are one of the key factors to readability.

Transition words also play a crucial role in structuring your text. This leads to a better understanding of your text by your readers. A well-structured text helps to attract readers to your blog and contributes to SEO!

What does the transition words check in Yoast SEO do?

The transition words check in Yoast SEO assesses whether or not you use enough transition words. If at least 30% of the sentences in your text contain a transition word, the bullet will be green. You get an orange bullet if you use them in more than 20%, or in less than 30% of your sentences. The bullet will be red if less than 20% of the sentences of your text contain a transition word. That’s less than 1 in 5 sentences.

Want to read more on how we came to the exact measurements of the transition words check and of the other readability checks? Check out our article about the methodological choices of the readability analysis.

Want to find out which transition words Yoast SEO recognizes? Check out our article on transition words in your language.

How to improve your use of transition words

There are several potential problem areas when it comes to transition words. Let’s start with the good news: everyone uses them in some way. There are very few authors who never use the words ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’, and the like. Using them correctly or frequently enough, however, doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Using transition words successfully requires a couple of things. You have to:

1. Know the transition words;
2. Have a clear idea of the relationships between separate thoughts and ideas within your text;
3. Know how to apply transition words properly and in context;

1. Know the words

Actually knowing the transition words is most commonly a problem for non-native speakers. However, many native speakers could also benefit from studying the less frequent ones. In any case, it is easy to do. You simply look up a list of transition words and study their definitions. Don’t underestimate it either, though! They are often quite nuanced and really depend on context.

2. Be aware of how your thoughts and ideas relate to each other

In the blog post assignments people hand in for feedback in our SEO training courses, we see a clear pattern. People who have a better idea of the structure of their text also use more transition words and do it more effectively. Too often, people just start writing and then basically just see what happens. So what can you do?

Break your text down into an introduction, body, and conclusion, and make sure you know what goal every paragraph serves. Then, survey your text on a sentence level. Find opportunities to make transitions that make sense. If you struggle with this, try reading texts by other authors and see how they use transition words.

Want to learn more about transition words and how to write great content? Our SEO Copywriting course can help you with that. You can get access to this course and all of our other SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium, which also gives you access to extra features in the Yoast SEO plugin.

Go Premium and get free access to our SEO courses!

Learn how to write great content for SEO and unlock lots of features with Yoast SEO Premium:

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $89 USD / per year (ex VAT) for 1 site

Conclusion

Transition words are very important for the readability of your text. However, many people struggle with them. If you do, study them and make sure you practice a lot. Our SEO Copywriting training can help you with that. In addition, make sure you’re aware of the structure of your text. In this way, it will be easier to pick the best transition words available.

Read more: How to use the readability analysis in Yoast SEO »

The post Transition words: why and how to use them appeared first on Yoast.

Paragraphs? Isn’t that what you get when you insert a white space after a bunch of sentences? Do you need to think about where to put that whitespace? Or can you just put one in whenever you feel like it? Well, writing correct and clear paragraphs is really important for the readability of a text. And, as Google ‘reads’ text too, it’s also important for Google! So in order to get that great content, you’ll need to give your paragraphs some extra SEO love! In this post, I’ll explain why paragraphs are important for SEO and I’ll give tips on how to write clear and SEO-friendly paragraphs.

Why are clear paragraphs important for SEO?

Paragraphs give structure to a text and help readers understand the meaning of a text. They divide a text into little chunks and make clear which sentences belong together. Readers use that structure to make sense of the text. When written properly, paragraphs help readers to understand the connection between the topics that are presented in the text. Paragraphs make a text easier to read, especially if they are accompanied by the right subheadings.

As Google is trying to mimic a human-like experience, writing clear paragraphs is really important for SEO as well. Google wants to present the user with well-written text. Google wants the reader to be able to understand the text. And, Google itself will have a much easier time understanding your text and assessing the topic, if that text is written well.

Core sentences

When deciding whether or not to read a certain article, people tend to scan through a text. While scanning, they tend to read the first sentences of every paragraph. I usually refer to these sentences as core sentences. These core sentences are the most important ones in your paragraph and should contain your most important message. Lots of English writers call them ‘topic sentences’, but I like the term ‘core sentences’ (this shows that I am native Dutch, as I translated the Dutch term into English). The idea is that if someone reads the first sentences of all the paragraphs in a well-written article, they’ll understand what the article is about. They’ll understand the core of the article.

The existence of core sentences or topic sentences is not unknown to Google. Google understands that readers pay extra attention to those, Google knows that writers will use these sentences to get their message across. So when you’re writing, use these sentences for SEO! If possible, make sure to put your focus keyphrase in that first sentence of a paragraph.

What does a clear and SEO-friendly paragraph look like?

A paragraph is more than just a bunch of sentences and whitespace. So what does a clear and SEO-friendly paragraph look like? Let’s explore some characteristics!

Address one topic

A paragraph should always be about one topic, one aspect, one thing. It should have one message. You should not try to address multiple things in one paragraph (unless you’re summarizing). A paragraph should really be a thematic union. The sentences of a paragraph should belong together and when you want to start talking about something else, you should start a new paragraph.

Make them complete

Your paragraph should be complete. That means that you should not go one about the same thing in the next paragraph. Everything you are going to discuss about a certain topic should be in one paragraph. After a whitespace, there should be a change in the focus of the text.

Keep them short

An SEO-friendly paragraph should be rather short. Try to keep paragraphs to a maximum of 10 sentences. You can have some paragraphs that are longer. Mixing up shorter and longer paragraphs makes for a good read. If a topic is too large, you may have to cut it up into two categories and make two paragraphs out of it. In that case, make sure to critically assess your topic. If you are writing about something for more than 10 sentences, you’re probably addressing different things. Make sure to divide your paragraph in a smart way.

Use subheadings!

Add subheadings to your paragraphs to help readers to understand what that specific paragraph is about. Subheadings really help a reader to grasp the main message of your text. People use subheadings to determine whether or not to read your article. And, they use them to understand the argumentation of the text.

Start with your core sentence

An SEO-friendly paragraph always starts with a core sentence in which the message of the paragraph becomes clear. After that, a good paragraph has a few supporting sentences that are all about that same message, but elaborate upon or bring nuance to that main message. The paragraph optionally has a concluding or a transitional sentence, which rounds things up or creates a bridge to the next paragraph.

Short recipe for a clear and SEO-friendly paragraph

So, let’s make this practical. Let me give you a short SEO love recipe for clear paragraphs. And let’s make them SEO-friendly while we’re at it!

1. Decide what the message of the paragraph is. What is it that you want to say in this specific paragraph? What is the central topic in this paragraph?
2. Get that message into a sentence. That’ll be the first sentence of that paragraph. Is it possible to use your focus keyword in this sentence? That would be awesome! Will it make you sentence weird? Don’t use it.
3. Write a few supporting sentences in which you elaborate on that first sentence. You could also bring nuance or a different view. But make sure to stay on topic.
4. Optional: write a concluding sentence in which you round things up. You could also write a transitional sentence to make room for your next topic.
5. Assess whether or not your paragraph is too long. If the paragraph is rather lengthy (more than 10 sentences), consider splitting it up into two paragraphs.
6. Do you need a subheading for this specific paragraph? If so, write one. When in doubt, use a subheading. People generally don’t use enough subheadings in their text. And if it makes sense, try to use your focus keyphrase in the subheading.
7. Re-read that paragraph. Does it make sense?
8. Last checks: make sure you don’t use too many long sentences. Avoid passive voice as much as possible and check whether or not you used enough transition words.

Love your site and write clear paragraphs

You write posts and articles because you want people to read them. You want people to understand them too! And you want Google to rank your content high in the search engines. Writing clear paragraphs really helps make your texts more readable. And, it will help Google understand your texts as well. So, give those paragraphs some of your SEO love. Especially those first core sentences deserve some extra SEO love. That could really make all the difference. And it’s not hard work. It’s just a little love. Let’s spread that SEO love! 

Read more: How to write an SEO-friendly introduction for a blog post »

The post How to write clear and SEO-friendly paragraphs appeared first on Yoast.