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Google Discover: What it is and how to get your content in

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 14:02:15 GMT

Google Discover offers users a different way to search. Actually, it’s not really search — it’s queryless discovery of content that fits your preferences and interests. It suggests new content based on your search activity and interaction with the Discover app. And it learns what you like, so it can provide even better content the next time you use it. But how can you get your content in Discover?

What is Google Discover?
- Google moving from strings to things
How to get your content in Google Discover
Check your Discover performance in Google Search Console
Test and improve

What is Google Discover?

Google Discover is a mobile experience that lets you discover content you didn’t even know you needed. It is a totally different search experience, meaning the searching is mostly gone. If the system learns enough about you, you can simply keep swiping to keep the fresh content flowing.

Google suggests content for a user based on your search activity and activity found on your device. It looks at web and application activity, location history and location settings. You can follow certain topics or certain entities to build up your profile and to get set limits on what Discover should uncover for you.

Discover is a smart tool that learns how you search and what you like in order to provide your with the best, or most timely content for your needs. Plus, it does that without you looking for it.

The Discover experience gets news stuff all the time. Just last month, Google added Web Stories to the feed. That’s really useful, because Web Stores are an excellent way to get eyeballs on specific types of content because of the mobile-oriented format. More on that later in this article.

Google moving from strings to things

These past couple of years, Google has been on a quest move “from strings to things” as they call it. For them, search is no longer about entering a query in a search bar resulting in a simple page with ten blue links. Today, search takes the whole world into account and even makes that world an interface.

Google Discover takes the query part out of the equation and provides you with a smart system that suggest new content based on your activity and interests. It’s a totally different way of finding and experiencing content. It relies less on text and more on attractive visuals.

The goal of Discover is to make you come into contact with new, but relevant things. Always there when you didn’t know you needed it. The system doesn’t take long to find out if you are on the lookout for something else — say, when you are planning your holiday. Your actions indicate changes and new timely and evergreen content will pop up for your reading pleasure.

The Google App has Discover fully integrated for a seamless experience

Google Discover is personal, so everyone will have their own experience with it. Discover will even take the experience you have with a topic into account. If you are just beginning to explore a topic you’ll get content for beginners. If you’re more advanced, you’ll get more advanced stuff. So there’s no way to get everyone to read the same article as not everyone is looking at it at the exact same time — or has the interest in it at the same time. But, once a reader has shown an interest in your brand or content by clicking an article you’re on your way!

How to get your content in Google Discover

Getting your content in Discover isn’t that different from regular SEO. All the basic principles apply, so practice Holistic SEO whatever you do. In general, there isn’t really anything you need to do specifically for Discover. You need to have great content, written for the right audience, plus you need to have a great website that offers a stellar user experience. Still, I’d like to highlight some things you need to keep in mind.

Make great content

Content should be the focal point for everything you do. But not just any old content, no awesome, high-quality content that answers the questions your readers might have. At Yoast, we know the value of great content — it’s one of the reasons we’ve built tools like the readability analyses.

Improve your content

The best way to get into Discover is to write better content than everyone else. Of course, if you have branded content it might be easier to get in. But if your content is about general topics and you’re up against a lot of competition, you need to focus on quality. Research your audience, your competitors, your industry and write the best possible piece on a relevant topic.

Make sure that you know what kind of questions your readers are asking and answer these in a way that is easy to understand and a pleasure to read. You could also try your hand at storytelling. Combining this with good visuals might make you stand out — not just on Discover but search as well.

As always, see what your competitors are doing. Is their content popping up in Discover? Try to find out how they did that. Did they do something special? Why do you think that that piece of content got in? Try to mimic their success — without copying, of course.

Take a look at your content. Does it have a powerful headline? Does it deliver on its promises? If you mention X in the title but never mention X in the article, it’s not going work. Be truthful, genuine and authoritative. Write great titles and avoid clickbait stuff.

Write timely stuff

Discover can uncover content at a moments notice and that also goes for news-worthy content. Post your content in a timely manner and it has a higher chance to do well in Discover. Look at trending topics or popular subjects in your niche or industry and write about those.

But it’s not just new stuff that pops up in Discover. High-quality, evergreen content can do well. Since Discover learns what you do, changes in your habit trigger new types of content. So, if you are swiping your feed and see a news item about Croatia pop up, it might make you think about going there on a holiday. If you follow up on that with a search about Croatia — or you follow the topic Croatia in Discover —, you’ll get not only the latest on that topic but also evergreen content. This is content that has proven it’s worth and keeps valuable at all times. Maybe something like the top 10 destinations in Croatia?

Improve expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness

One of the most interesting lines in the Google’s documentation on how to get your content in Discover is this:

Our automated systems surface content in Discover from sites that have many individual pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Those looking to improve E-A-T can consider some of the same questions we encourage site owners to consider for Search. While Search and Discover are different, the overall principles for E-A-T as it applies to content within them are similar.

E-A-T, of course, stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness — key factors for determining how much you can “trust” a piece of content or it’s writers. There are some industries where it is incredibly important for the author has to have the skills and background to provide information that people can rely on.

One of those industries is the medical industry, but also the financial industry and many others. These sites are called Your Money or Your Life sites — YMYL for short. These sites offer advice that can directly impact people’s lives. For these, people need to know that you are who say you are and that you have the qualifications needed.

E-A-T is not just a factor for Discover, of course, it’s an increasingly helpful for Google to weed out misleading and, sometimes, plain dangerous content from the index. For your content, you need to prove that you know what you’re talking about. Make sure that people understand why they should trust you. Let them know you are the authority on this subject!

Google collected some suggested reading on E-A-T.

Support your entities with structured data

While you don’t need to apply special pieces of Schema structured data to get your content in Google Discover, it does make sense to make sure that your Schema implementation is top notch. Whenever you are writing about something, you need to give as much information about your entities as possible.

What’s more, describing your content well also goes for what’s happening behind the scenes. If you support your entities with great structured data, search engines can use that data to get a firmer sense of what your content is about — and who wrote it. Yoast SEO has a flexible Schema implementation that helps you get the most out of it.

Make it visual

One of the most import parts of optimizing for Google Discover is the visual aspect. Discover is a visual medium. People scan a feed, swiping their way to content that looks and sounds appealing. One of the eye-catchers in Discover is the main image of your content. This is one of the first things that the eye of your reader will focus on.

Make sure that your image stands out, but keep it relevant. Use compelling, high-quality images in your content. And make sure they are large enough to appear properly in Discover. Your images need to be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting. Don’t worry, Yoast SEO adds this setting automatically for you.

Of course, this also goes for video. If you have a great video on a topic, add it to the content. As video is getting more important by the day, having a way to make high-quality video’s will pay dividends. Now, you don’t need a million dollar set-up but make sure that your video content looks professional. Make them engaging!

Improve your site

As always, there’s not one thing that get’s your content listed quickly. Producing awesome content comes first, of course, but there’s a lot of other things to improve as well. If you’re aiming for Discover traffic, make sure that your site is perfectly usable on mobile. It has to offer an awesome user experience, plus it has to load quickly. More on that in our Mobile SEO ultimate guide.

Try Google Web Stories

Discover is all about mobile. It’s the ultimate stream of content that helps you find whatever you weren’t thinking about at that moment. To reach these users, you have a new tool at your disposal: Web Stories. A Web Story is mobile visual storytelling at its best. Its Google’s take on the social media story format you all know from Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. But, this is open, findable in search — and in Google Discover.

Web Stories are a great fit for Discover. The snackable, mobile-oriented stories are easy to discover and quick to swipe through. Building stories for your content might get you an easy way in the Discover feed. They are easy to build and quite fun too. Try it!

Web Stories get their own spot in Google Discover

Check your Discover performance in Google Search Console

Google Search Console not only helps you gain insights into how your site performs in search, but also in Discover. There’s a dedicated tab that helps you analyze the performance of your content in Discover. Here, you can find your overall traffic over a longer period of time. Also, you can dive into the traffic generated by specific posts.

Our post on Web Stories had a nice spike in views and clicks from Discover

Use these insights to learn about what your content does. Is it a straight line of continuous traffic or is it spiking? Does it return? Why do you think a specific post got a large amount of traffic on a particular day? See if you can analyze these trends and make more informed decisions about your Discover content.

Test and improve

In this article, you got a couple of insights into how Discover works and what you can do to get in. I hope these insights help you make the most of your work. One thing you need to remember is that Discover is a living, breathing thing and fully built on what you feed it. What you see is different from what your friends see. That makes it difficult to predict success. Test, experiment and fine-tune your way to success!

The post Google Discover: What it is and how to get your content in appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 15.2: Swedish word forms, Slack URLs, performance

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 09:17:59 GMT

Today, we are releasing Yoast SEO 15.2 into the wild. For this release, we’ve focussed on providing word form support for another language: Swedish. We have also added an interesting improvement for Slack users — better visibility for your content when your URL is shared on Slack. Last but not least, we improved the performance of the plugin in the backend due to us loading less JavaScript.

Swedish word form support in Yoast SEO Premium
Make your URL stand out on Slack
Performance improvements
Other enhancements
Yoast SEO 15.2: Get it now

Swedish word form support in Yoast SEO Premium

High-quality content is essential for getting your site noticed by readers and search engines alike. Making your content awesome can be hard, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-optimizing your articles by using your focus keyphrase over and over again. Writing like this leads to content that’s hard to read. Since adding our readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you to circumvent these problems and improve your writing. Yoast SEO Premium takes that to another level and enables you to drastically improve your content.

The Premium analysis makes the writing process much more natural. It’s flexible and smart, helping you improve your articles without having to go to great lengths to fit in your focus keyphrases awkwardly. We’ve added quite a few languages over the last couple of months and we’re adding a new one today. As of 15.2, Yoast SEO Premium is much better at finding your focus keyphrases in Swedish, even if the words are in a different grammatical form — and spread across a sentence.

Here’s a video that explains how it works — in Swedish, of course.

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis also comes with support for synonyms and related keyphrases. Using synonyms in your text makes the content come alive and reduces the need for repetition of your main focus keyphrase. By also adding related keyphrases, you can paint a complete picture of your subject, making the text rich and authoritative.

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $89 USD (ex VAT)

Make your URL stand out on Slack

Slack is an incredibly popular and powerful tool for professional communication. Today, in a world where we hardly come into the office anymore tools like Slack are a godsend. At Yoast, we use Slack a lot and we came up with a nifty little addition that makes sharing URLs on there much more helpful.

Our new enhanced Slack sharing feature adds an author byline and an estimated reading time to your metadata. If you share a URL from your site on Slack, it will now look much better and gives you more information about who wrote it and how long it would take to read. We’ve also added it to our WooCommerce SEO plugin so product metadata will also show up on Slack. You can turn the feature on and off in SEO > General > Features.

An example of a Yoast.com URL shared on Slack: notice the new metadata

Performance improvements

We’re always working on the performance of our plugin. This time, we focused on improving the handling of JavaScript inside the admin. On some pages, we would load more JavaScript than needed. We now split our JavaScript bundles better, which means that we load as much as 2.5MB less on some pages. While this does not speed up your site, it does make the experience in the backend that much more pleasant.

Other enhancements

In Yoast SEO 15.2, we have a couple of nice enhancements. First, we’ve added an Open Graph integration for The Events Calendar. The purpose, of course, is to provide a tighter integration of the Schema code generated by The Events Calendar plugin. It transforms the Schema code generated by The Events Calendar and puts it into a Schema_Piece. Props to Hendrik Luehrsen for making this happen.

Secondly, we now set the default Schema type for Web Stories to Article as that is what they should be according to Google. Thanks for helping get that in, Pascal Birchler. Thirdly, Jonny Harris helped us add a filter to WPSEO_Image_Utils class, to allow highjacking of image meta data. This filter is especially useful for those using a plugin that loads image from a third party source like S3 or Unsplash.

Yoast SEO 15.2: Get it now

Yoast SEO 15.2 comes with a nice set of improvements. For Premium users, we’ve added word form support for the Swedish language. We added a cool new way to help your URLs stand out on Slack, plus we’ve improved the performance of the plugin in the backend.

We hope you enjoy Yoast SEO 15.2!

The post Yoast SEO 15.2: Swedish word forms, Slack URLs, performance appeared first on Yoast.

Using Google’s search results to create great content

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 14:00:00 GMT

What is search intent?
Google tries to predict a user's intent
So, how can the search results help you create great content?
Creating great intent-based content yourself
Examples of how to create content using the search results
- Creating a post for our own blog
- Another example: selling recycled jewelry
Conclusion

To get your page to the top of the search results, you need to create content that people are actually looking for. That’s why you need to consider search intent before you start writing. Google is getting better and better at guessing what people want or need when they type in their – sometimes cryptic – search terms. So, creating great content means focusing on the search intent of your potential audience. But, what is search intent again? And how do you take it into consideration while creating your content? This post is all about that!

What is search intent?

Let’s start with a quick refresher on the term ‘search intent’. The easiest way to explain it is to think about your own online searches. Whenever you type in a search term you also have a particular intent in mind right? Sometimes, you just want to find some information. Other times, you’re looking to research or buy a certain product right away. And don’t forget those times you enter a brand name because you don’t want to type out the site’s entire URL. We generally distinguish four types of searcher intent: informational, commercial, transactional and navigational. If this is new to you, quickly head over to our SEO basics article on search intent, that’ll make understanding this post a bit easier.

Knowing what search intent your visitor has when it comes to their online search can help you create the content that they’re looking for. Great intent-based content that will increase the chance of them visiting your site, staying on your site and clicking through to your different pages. So, what do Google’s search results have to do with finding out more about the search intent of your audience?

Google tries to predict a user’s intent

Search engines, such as Google, use data to interpret what the dominant intent of a search is. They want to present results that match user intent exactly. And looking at these results can help you understand and match the search intent people have when searching for a certain keyword or keyphrase. Of course, within the four main categories of user intent, there can still be a lot of variation in what a user is exactly looking for. Before we can use the results to create great content that matches search intent, we need to understand how Google tries to determine someone’s search intent:

Search terms with one dominant intent

Sometimes, a search term has one dominant interpretation. Those terms can be very straightforward, like [buy King Louie Betty dress] or [symptoms of diabetes]. For the first term, Google will mainly show pages offering that particular model of dress for sale, or similar dresses by that brand. For the second search term, the results will be filled with answer boxes and sites offering medical information.

But it doesn’t end there, because Google also understands the search intent behind terms that aren’t as literal. For example, whenever people all over the world enter [white house] as a search term, Google will understand that they’re probably not looking for information on painting their house white. They want to know something about the residence of the president of the United States, and search engines show results accordingly.

Search terms referring to several entities

In many cases, people use the same term to look for very different things. For example, take the search term [Mercury]. Some people will be looking for the planet, others for the element, even others for the Roman god of commerce, and a few might be looking for the lead singer of the band Queen. This one word can be used to describe several distinctly different things – also described as entities. The context makes clear which entity a word is referring to. It’s important to be aware of how this works in search engines, so we wrote a post about entities and semantics that can help you with that.

All these searches for the term [Mercury] might have an informational intent, but they’re not looking for the same thing. While it’s difficult – especially with just one word – search engines still try to figure out what their users really want when typing in their search term. So, if fewer people click the ‘mercury-element’ results than the ‘mercury-planet’ results, search engines will deduce that more people want information about the planet Mercury, and alter the results pages accordingly. If we take a look at the search results for the term [Mercury], we’ll see that most results relate to the planet. From that, we can conclude that it’s the dominant intent: most people who type in this term are looking for the planet.

Google tries to satisfy multiple intents for the search term [mercury]. However, most results relate to the planet, which tells us that’s probably what most users are looking for.

Search terms without dominant intent

Some search terms don’t have one clear-cut intent, which leaves search engines guessing at what to show. You can recognize these searches by the many different results shown on the results pages. Take the query [treehouse], for example. Depending on your location, the search results can show images of treehouses, information and videos on how to build one, advertisements for buying one, and businesses called ‘Treehouse’, including a brewery, restaurants, holiday homes, and a code learning web platform. This variety means that Google has most types of intent behind this query covered. But it may make ranking on this term more difficult.

So, how can the search results help you create great content?

Simply put: the search results give you a direct insight into what people are looking for when they type in your keywords. You can easily lose sight of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as your most direct source of information. But if you focus on your site alone, or only look at things through the eyes of online tools, you’re missing invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. Search results pages not only show you how you and your competitors are doing, but also where new opportunities lie and whether you need to adjust your SEO strategy. For instance, if you see a lot of informational content on a keyphrase that you’re trying to rank on with a very purchase orientated page, it might be a good idea to rethink the content on that page. Or if you see a lot of images in the results pages for your keyphrase, and you don’t have any, that’s another opportunity to improve your content!

To get the most objective idea of the search results for a query, make sure you use a private browser window. A local SERP-checker, such as valentin.app can also help you get more objective results, and find out what the results look like in other cities.

Creating great intent-based content yourself

There are a few steps you can take to attune your content better to user intent and work towards creating great content.

Choose keywords from your keyword research and enter them in a private browser window or SERP-checker.
Analyze what you see on the results pages. Which type of intent is most common (informational, commercial, etc)? Is there one dominant interpretation and if so, what is it? Do you see videos? Images? Related searches? Questions?
Evaluate whether the content you have – or plan to publish – is in line with the content you found on the results pages. Do the types of intent match? Is your content in the right form?
1. If yes, great! Perhaps you can find ranking ideas in related searches. And, have a quick peek at the competition, to see what you’re up against.
2. Are you noticing that things don’t match up, and the SERPs show intent that doesn’t align with your content? If there isn’t a dominant type of intent, you might still be able to rank. However, if you find intent that unanimously doesn’t match what you have to offer at all -unless you have a high authority site- ranking will be difficult. If this is the case, consider whether it’s worth the effort to create or alter this content, or if you need to adjust your strategy a little. A solution could be to target a slightly different related keyword, with better matching user intent. Yoast SEO can help you find those related keyphrases that are being used by your audience and might be a better fit.

This might still sound a bit abstract. So, let’s look at a few examples to give you a better idea of this process in practice.

Examples of how to create content using the search results

Creating a post for our own blog

Here at Yoast, we write about all aspects of SEO. One of those aspects is keeping your website in good shape. We had an article planned on this topic, and one of the most important terms we used in this article was ‘Website maintenance’. Our article was about keeping your site content fresh and your site’s structure well-maintained in the process. However, when we started looking at the SERPs, we noticed that wasn’t what people were looking for at all when they used that term. The content in the answer box wasn’t really related, and the other results almost exclusively consisted of companies offering services to work on technical site maintenance and hosting, with some results stressing the importance of this.

Results page for the search term [website maintenance]

So, from analyzing the SERPs, we got two important insights. Firstly, many people using the search term [website maintenance] have commercial intent, rather than informational. Secondly, they were actually looking for something completely different. So, while we could write an article about website maintenance to rank, it needed to be a completely different article. It should discuss things like hosting, technical site performance, etc, as that’s what searchers are looking for.

We realized we had to make changes to the article, adapt our strategy and target a keyword with better matching intent. We changed some of the wording in this article (and related ones as well) from ‘maintenance’ to ‘keep old content’, ‘update or delete’ and ‘cannibalization’. Of course, you could argue that we didn’t pick the right words here in the first place. The reason for that might’ve been that we got a bit stuck in our own content bubble, and forgot about the user. Looking at the SERPs helped change perspective in this case.

Another example: selling recycled jewelry

Let’s look at one more example, one that small business owners might relate to. Say, you run an online shop that sells jewelry made with recycled materials. One of your product groups is jewelry made of recycled nespresso pods. So, you’re thinking of trying to rank for [recycled nespresso pods] with a product page or category page. Is that a good idea? Time to look at the search results pages!

Of course, it somewhat depends on location, but prominent on the results page for [recycled nespresso pods] are results about how the pods are recycled. A few are from Nespresso itself, and you could also find some of their videos on recycling. Other results cover the process of recycling and how consumers can get their pods recycled. There is nothing on using recycled pods as a crafting material. So, now you know that this phrase will be difficult to rank for, as it’s not what users are looking for.

Results page for [recycled nespresso pods jewelry].

What about [recycled nespresso pods jewelry], then? As can be expected, the results align a lot better with what you have to offer. However, most results are geared towards informational intent. While the top result is Etsy -which would be difficult to compete with- other results show ideas and tutorials. This means, again, it would be hard to get your commercial or transactional product (category) pages on this list. However, you could still rank if you change your strategy and write a tutorial on crafting a basic piece of Nespresso jewelry. In such a tutorial, you could easily refer people to your products if they’re looking for more intricate pieces. Another way to find inspiration for your content is the ‘People also ask’ box in the search results. You can write content focused on answering these questions and refer to your products where this is fitting.

Conclusion

This post covers a lot of different aspects of search intent and how this can help you create great content. The exact steps to take will differ on a case to case basis. A good takeaway is to always have a good look at the results pages for keyphrases you’re targeting. Analyze what you see, as it’s valuable, first-hand information. Be realistic and be prepared to put in the work if you find you need to change your strategy. SEO is a lot of work, and you need to work hard to be the best result. But trust us, it will be worth it in the end!

The post Using Google’s search results to create great content appeared first on Yoast.

Facebook & Instagram embeds on WordPress break soon

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:45:16 GMT

Some time ago, Facebook announced that it would change the way it handles embeds on other sites. From October 24, you can no longer simply paste your links in WordPress to make your Facebook and Instagram content appear on your site. Because of this matter, WordPress has to drop support for the Facebook oEmbed API. Now, you have to switch to a Facebook developer account and register an app to get an access token. Luckily, there are easier ways to keep your embeds working.

What will happen?

Up until now, you could simply paste a link to a Facebook or Instagram post in your WordPress post. WordPress would take that URL and automatically turn it into a nice looking embed. As of October 24, this is no longer possible without some work from your end. Also, not doing anything might mean your current embeds stop working as well. There’s a chance some of the content you’ve embedded content on your pages breaks.

Why is this happening?

There is an open standard to make sure embeds work well everywhere and that is called oEmbed. By using this, every platform can authenticate shared content in a similar way. Unfortunately, Facebook will now drop support for oEmbed and require users to use its own API’s.

That’s all fine, but WordPress as a platform can’t follow that move. WordPress cannot sign you up for that Developer account and register itself as an app. WordPress can’t claim ownership over that app, so that’s why this feature will be dropped from core in WordPress 5.5.2.

Next week, your Facebook and Instagram embeds will probably stop working and you will need to take the necessary steps to prevent this from happening — and to keep that easy way to embed your Facebook and Instagram content on your WordPress site.

What can you do?

To keep everything working, Facebook would really like you to put in the effort. Their solution is for you to sign up for a Developer account, register an app, add an oEmbed Product to that app, create an access token, et cetera, et cetera. You can find more on Facebook’s oEmbed documentation.

As you can see, that’s simply not a viable option for most people. So, what are your options to get embeds working like they used to?

Use Facebook’s method, which is complicated and messy.
Use the oEmbed Plus WordPress plugin that reinstates embedding for Facebook and Instagram content. While easier, this still requires you to go through the process of registering a Facebook developer account and create an app ID.
Use Smash Balloon’s updated Facebook and Instagram plugins. These plugins fix the oEmbed issue, while keeping all your existing content working. The free versions of these plugins work well, but the paid Pro versions have many more features should you need them.
Use Jetpack: For Jetpack 9.0, the development team worked with Facebook to provide a simple way to make everything work and to keep it that way. All you need to do is connect your site to Jetpack.

The Smash Balloon plugins let you re-enable your Facebook and Instagram embeds on your WordPress site

Does this mean anything for Yoast SEO?

You might think that this might influence Yoast SEO as well, because we offer social sharing and social previews as part of our Premium feature set. Well, Yoast SEO is not affected by this in any way. Our plugin doesn’t offer ways to embed content on your WordPress site, but it does offer ways of checking how your shared content would look on other sites.

Your Facebook embeds can break

Do you have a lot of embeds on your sites? If those consist of Facebook and Instagram posts, a new API change by Facebook might break these embeds. It will also break the possibility to embed new social posts in your posts. There are reasons why WordPress can’t fix this for you, so you need to take action yourself if you want your embeds to keep working in the future.

The post Facebook & Instagram embeds on WordPress break soon appeared first on Yoast.

Google Search On 2020 event: AI improvements for search

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 12:42:13 GMT

Search is a never-ending story. A search engine is never done fine-tuning the way they get their results to you in a way that makes sense for them and for you. First, Google was all about digging through loads of information to find what you need, but now, AI increasingly helps them make sense of our world in all its complex glory. Here’s what’s coming soon as presented in yesterday’s Google Search On event.

What is search in 2020?

Google has come a long way since that old algorithm of ranking pages Sergei Brin and Larry Page introduced in 1998. At that time, though, the internet was just starting and it was a much simpler place. What’s more, the world itself was a much simpler place. Today, many of the things we take for granted are being questioned as some people continue to sow distrust and spread rumours, fake news and ‘alternative facts’.

In 2020, information is everywhere, and it’s available on more platforms and devices than ever. A search engine in 2020 is no longer a tool to find an answer to your question, but also a window to the world. Search is text, search is visual, search is voice — and search is moving into the third dimension with AR. A search engine is also a provider of important information regarding world events like COVID-19 and the US elections.

A search engine in 2020 is looking to understand the world at a level not seen before. New layers are being added to the knowledge graph to help understand knowledge, respond with valuable responses and present increasingly complex material to the searcher. Data set search with graphs made especially for your search? You got it. Understanding atoms by projecting a 3D model on your kitchen table? Of course, why not? Humming that song you have stuck in your head to find out what it is? Maybe a niche thing, but you can.

Increasingly, search is a combination of the offline and online world. This was one of the things that stood out at yesterday’s Google Search On event.

Understanding language

All of this starts with a thorough understanding of language. A while back, Google launched an incredible new NLP technology called BERT. BERT is unique, because it considers the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. This helps Google understand the intent behind searches. BERT was launched to great success and will now be used for almost every search in the English language, with many languages following.

Google also introduced the biggest improvement of their spelling algorithm in the last five years. They’ve built a deep neural net that gives them more power to decipher more complex misspellings and present the corrections in record time.

Ranking passages

Search isn’t all about finding a page that completely answers your search query. Sometimes, what you want is an answer to a question so specific that it’s merely hinted to on a page. To help find those needles in a haystack, Google will now start ranking passages from pages and make these available in the search engine. By analyzing these separately, Google can answer an even broader set of answers. This is targeted at a fairly small number of searches, about 7%.

Ranking passages makes it possible to uncover relevant answers from articles that aren’t strictly relevant to the search query

Understanding topics and subtopics

AI also helps Google differentiate between topics and subtopics. This means that Google can now make search results more helpful by dividing them in different subtopics, based on what it knows about that broad search term. In Google’s example, the broad search term home exercise equipment will now be followed by more specified subtopics like budget home exercise equipment or small space home fitness equipment, making it easier to pick the results to your liking.

Fully understanding a topic helps Google to break these up in relevant subtopics

Understanding video

Video is a huge deal on the web and it is only going to become more important as we go along. For years, Google has been using transcriptions to get an idea of what a video is about. This year, they are betting on AI to help them gain more and better insights into video. Not just, what’s said when, but also about the semantics. Google can now identify the key moments in a video and let’s jump there with a single click.

More ways to search

Search is no longer only about entering a keyphrase in a search box. Today, search is everywhere and the possibilities are growing. In yesterday’s event, Google shared new ways to search and interact with their Lens app, for instance. Not only can you take a picture of a piece of text in a foreign language to get it translated, but the app can now also pronounce it for you. Google is filling the knowledge graph with all sorts of learning elements so it will also let you solve math problems, for instance. No cheating on that test, though!

Google Lens can also help you shop. Simply upload the photo of a product you like and the app will give you suggestions. Here, AR will also come into play. Increasingly, augmented reality will help you look at the product you like in a 3D space. Be it a cool sweater or that new car you’ve been looking at.

Data set search thanks to Data Commons

Google is opening up a huge data set for the world to use. The Data Commons Project is an open knowledge database filled with statistical data from different reputable sources. All this data is now available in Google Search. A new data layer in the knowledge graph helps you find statical data that’s otherwise hard or impossible to find. It even makes graphs for you on the fly.

Google uses its natural language processing skills to understand the question you are asking and to find the data aswering that question. Of course, you can also run comparisons to other data points.

What this means for the future

From the looks of it, it almost seems as if Google has been fitted with a new brain. In increasing the use of AI in their processes, they have achieved an unprecedented understanding of not just language, but the world around us. Google is using those insights to provide us with simple answers to ever-more complex questions, from math problems to working with big data sets.

As for SEO, since Google is becoming much better at understanding language and topics, it will also be better at spotting high-quality content. Focusing on quality and investing in fast and flawless website will continu to be the main focal point for you. It also interesting to see how the indexing of passages will turn out as this might seem like some kind of super powered featured snippet. In general, the search results might become a bit more diverse in the coming months.

I asked our resident SEO expert Jono Alderson what he thought of the event:

“It’s important to remember that Google’s core objective has never been to return a list of search results when you type something in. Their goal has been to solve the problems of their users. What we’re seeing here is a huge step forward in that mission. Google is increasingly acting as our personal assistant, and ‘conventional search’ is just one small part of that. That means that as SEO folks, webmasters, and business owners, we need to be thinking not just about ‘how do I rank higher?’, but, ‘how do I solve the problems of Google’s users?’. That’s about content strategy, differentiation, and building brands.”
Jono Alderson

That’s it for the Google Search On event

The evolution of Google is mighty interesting. Today, Google is like an incredible powerful brain that is at your disposal. You can ask it very complex questions and you get results you can use to do your work, shopping, learning or research. You can use your voice or vision to search and you can ‘touch’ objects generated in AR for you.

Who would have thought that in 1998?

Search in 2020 is extremely powerful.

The post Google Search On 2020 event: AI improvements for search appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast and SEMrush working together

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:49:38 GMT

Today we’re announcing something really awesome: Yoast has partnered up with SEMrush. The reason why we’re so excited? Keyword research is hard, getting keyword data is even harder and this puts it at your fingertips. Right where you’re writing.

Why would Yoast and SEMrush work together?

Yoast has a lot of users; 11 million+ websites currently run Yoast SEO. When we add an integration to our free plugin, we ask ourselves a couple of questions. One of them is: will our partner hold up under the load of our huge user base? The answer to that was clearly and simply: yes. SEMrush is one of the biggest SEO tool providers out there and they’ve been around for quite a while. They can handle this.

Webinars

SEMrush is also keen on teaching people, in fact, our own Jono has been on quite a few of SEMrush’ webinars.

The other question we ask ourselves: is this going to the majority of our users? The answer to that was even more clearly: yes. Absolutely. Just look at this with me, the full set of features available in Yoast SEO 15.1 that are powered by SEMrush data:

Get related keywords that are similar to your query (for your country of choice).
Get volume and trend data for every one of these keywords.
Easily add those keywords as related keywords (Yoast SEO premium only).
Uncover new profitable keyword ideas for your content.

Related keyphrases modal

Note that I don’t think this removes the need for proper keyword research. It’s still very important to do that. But it does help you find related keyphrases and it might even help you validate your keyword choice.

In all, I’m very happy we’re working with SEMrush on this, it’s been a very pleasant collaboration so far. So pleasant that I’m quite sure we won’t stop here!

The post Yoast and SEMrush working together appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO 15.1: Keyword research with SEMrush

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:39:37 GMT

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get keyword data while working on your content in Yoast SEO? Well, we asked ourselves that same question and now we have an answer! Yes, you can now find related keyphrases inside the post editor. And it’s not any old data — no, it’s powered by our good friends at SEMrush, a world-class provider of SEO and internet marketing tools! Here’s what’s new in Yoast SEO 15.1.

In Yoast SEO 15.1, you’ll find a number of improvements:

A new SEMrush integration for finding related keyphrases (Free and Premium)
Farsi keyphrase recognition (Free and Premium)
An improved look for the internal linking suggestions (Premium)
Improved optimization of your SEO data (Free and Premium)
Performance improvements (Free and Premium)

Find related keyphrases with SEMrush data

Keyword research is hard and we are going to help you with that. In Yoast SEO 15.1, you’ll find a new integration with one of the leading SEO and internet marketing software companies in the world: SEMrush. Together, we’ve built an integration that helps you find related keyphrases for your focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO. The SEMrush integration will make it easier to find the right keywords that will help you with your rankings!

Find related keyphrases right where you need them — with Yoast SEO Premium, you can add them to your analysis with one click

The tool is very easy to use. Find the Get related keyphrases button underneath the Focus keyphrase field and click it. The first time you do that a screen opens asking you to connect your SEMrush account, or make a new one and authorize Yoast SEO to use that. After that, you can find related keyphrases right from within the post editor. You even get insights on search volume and trends! Plus, you can select the country where you want so search. How cool is that.

This feature is available for free, but Premium users get the added benefit of using it in the related keyphrase feature. This feature of Yoast SEO Premium gives you the chance to optimize your content for multiple keyphrases and synonyms. The new related keyphrase tool lets you add the relevant ones you find with a simple click of the button. After that, you can simply optimize your text for these keyphrases in the post editor sidebar.

Get Yoast SEO Premium, not just for the related keyphrase features, but also for the redirect manager, advanced text analysis that recognizes word forms, social previews and much more.

This is just the beginning

Farsi keyphrase recognition

Recently, we’ve started adding language support for right-to-left languages. Now, we support Hebrew and Arabic, with the latter already having full language support including word forms. Today, we’re taking the first steps to support Farsi (Persian). We can now better recognize and understand sentences for this RTL-language. This helps us find and recognize keyphrases for the Farsi language.

To get this to work properly, we’ve improved all keyphrase-based assessments for Farsi by filtering function words. Yoast SEO can now check whether you’ve used your Farsi focus keyphrase in all the right places. This helps you optimize your text in a way that makes sense for search engines, without overdoing it for your users.

Improved internal linking suggestions

Improved internal linking

In Yoast SEO 14.7, we launched a new version of our internal linking suggestions tool. This tool helps you improve your site structure by linking to relevant content. It analyzes your text and automatically suggests relevant content on your site to link to. In Yoast SEO 14.7, we made it a lot smarter and made it look at your metadata and other post types as well.

Today, the tool works better than ever and in Yoast SEO 15.1, we’re improve the visual aspect of the internal linking suggestions. Of course, visuals matter and these can make or break a tool. The updated interface for the internal linking suggestions still follows the same Gutenberg styling, but we made more some subtle improvements, most notably in the way we distinguish between cornerstone content, regular posts and other post types.

Improved optimization of SEO data

Behind the scenes, Yoast SEO uses a lot of complex processes to get important data about your site. For instance, we need to build our indexables so we can speed up your site and we need to get an overview of your content to feed our internal linking suggestions. For this to work, you need to press a magic button.

Much easier to understand, right?

This used to be separate processes, but we tied these together so they can run in the proper order. Only then, will it give the best results. So, if you haven’t yet — hit that button. Of course, the time this process takes depends on the size and set up of your size.

Performance improvements and other enhancements

Many site owners and developers run a staging environment to test stuff and to improve their sites. While working on a staging environment, Yoast SEO doesn’t have to do some of the stuff it does on live sites. And with WordPress 5.5’s new wp_get_environment_type() function retrieving a site’s current environment type, we had to prevent several processes from happening on non-production environments. As of now, we won’t index the indexables, ping search engines about XML sitemaps, send tracking information or check the indexing of the site with Ryte on these kinds of environments. This prevents this data from appearing on your real site once you push your site into the real world.

Also, we now flush all permalinks from the indexables tables when the value of the permalink_structure or the home_url option changes. We’ve also introduced a notification to ask for a reindex in those cases. Also, whether the home_url was changed manually and resets the permalinks accordingly. We do all of this to keep the tables occupied with the most recent version of your permalinks.

That’s Yoast SEO 15.1 for you!

In Yoast SEO 15.1, we’ve introduced a really cool new feature and a new partnership with SEMrush. You get related keyphrases right where you need them. If you have Premium, you can even quickly add them as related keyphrases in a jiffy. Awesome, right? Don’t have Premium? Now is a good time to get it!

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $89 USD $75.65 USD (ex VAT)

The post Yoast SEO 15.1: Keyword research with SEMrush appeared first on Yoast.

eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 14:20:00 GMT

Usability is an integral part of holistic SEO. It influences factors such as bounce rate, time on page and conversion rate, to name a few, and many of these metrics affect your website’s SEO. Optimizing usability is essential for all sites, but even more so for eCommerce sites.

User testing is one way to optimize your eCommerce shop – read our introduction to user testing to get started -, but a lot can be done just by looking at best practice, comparing that with your site and making improvements. This ultimate guide to eCommerce websites takes you through that testing process and looks at everything you need to address to give your visitors the best experience possible.

In short, this eCommerce usability guide will tell you all about:

Online shop homepage usability 101
- Focus on your target audience
- Homepage call-to-action
Internal search
- Filter options
Category page optimization
Landing page optimization
Product page optimization
- Best practices
- Call-to-action
Checkout page optimization
Conclusion: eCommerce usability is a trade of its own

That’ll cover most, if not all of eCommerce usability, which essentially boils down to your visitors’ on-site shopping experience. Let’s get started!

Now is the time to get your store ready for the sales season: you’ll get a 15% discount on all our products! Optimize your online store with the Yoast WooCommerce Premium bundle or make sure your customers will find your small business site with Yoast’s Local Premium bundle.

Yes, I want 15% discount. Take me to your shop!

Online shop homepage usability 101

Have you ever looked closely at the homepage of your online shop? Chances are you just went with the WooCommerce theme that your designer presented and implemented the available options. While most of these themes are nicely designed and set up with the user in mind, that might not be best for your particular target audience.

Out of the box, a stock WooCommerce theme is hardly ever a good fit for your site

Focus on your target audience

The first step in eCommerce usability, even before setting up a design, is understanding the needs of your target audience. You need to investigate the search intent. Are your potential customers looking for the best price, or do they want to read a dozen reviews before buying? Are there cultural differences you need to take into account? These things determine the setup and layout of your shop’s homepage. Do you need to highlight sale items? Are you addressing a particular niche? If so, you’ll need to make that clear from the start.

If one of the pillars of your mission is to provide the best price possible, the sale banner should probably be the most prominent item on your homepage. But, if you are selling high-quality products that people are willing to pay a bit more for, sentiment and emotion should be your focus. You could use larger images and focus on core product features and benefits.

Homepage call-to-action

The job of your homepage is to guide the visitor to your products. The homepage of your online store shouldn’t necessarily be set up with SEO in mind but should focus on the user instead. That also means you’ll have to create a killer call-to-action on that homepage. Not having a great CTA is one of the most common SEO mistakes. Here are some useful tips for setting up that call-to-action:

Make sure it stands out from the design. Use a different color or button shape.
Make sure it looks like a button. I wouldn’t recommend so-called ghost buttons.
Write active text, so your button shouldn’t say ‘Submit’ but rather a variation of ‘buy our stuff’.
Use plenty of whitespace around it, or reduce clutter.
Using a hero image is popular these days and for good reason: it sets a mood.
Don’t use sliders, period.

After welcoming the visitor to your website, you can guide them to where you make your money: the product pages. Before we address these, let’s look at how to optimize your internal search and category/landing pages.

Internal search

Internal search is the most important navigational option for your online store, and you should optimize it to the max. You’ll notice that larger brands and online stores focus a lot on their internal search. The reason is simple: if you can find the product you are looking for, you can buy it!

As well as optimizing that internal search option, you need to make sure that your search result pages look focused and give a great overview. You need to show the price and even an ‘Add to Cart’ button next to the product’s name and image, and a comparison option will come in handy if, for example, you have a shop selling Bluetooth speakers.

Target has a great internal search option, plus awesome landing pages

Filter options

After the search query, online clothing shops will allow for filtering by size, gender, color – the lot. Filtering options like these, or sorting by price or availability, will help your visitor to find the product they want as quickly as possible. To read more about this and see some examples, I recommend my post Enhance online shopping with eCommerce filters.

Category page optimization

Your category pages could be even more important than your product pages because these are the main entry points for customers. In addition, these give customers the option to choose and compare, much like your internal search result pages. Your shop category page should be considered a regular page for SEO, but is so much more important when it comes to eCommerce usability.

Lego.com doesn’t just have a theme-based product category page, but also an About page featuring in-depth content about the chosen theme

Here are some of the things you need to keep in mind:

Make sure the page has a valuable piece of content – preferrably at the top of the page. It’s the glue that holds your products together and one of the reasons the potential buyer ended up here. Even if they scroll right to the product listings, they’ll appreciate the extra information (and Google certainly does).
List all other categories as well, or at least make them accessible via a drop-down, especially when you have a lot of categories like Amazon does. It makes more sense to make them available rather than listing them all. But if your shop only has ten categories, list them, for example in a sidebar or footer menu.
Product listings need a proper call-to-action, so don’t hide it. Add a button.
The product image in the listing will help convince the visitor to click, buy or compare an item. Use good quality, stunning images that display the product well.
Optimize the product title, for example by including the SKU as well. As well as having SEO benefits, people searching for specific products – like that one particular Lego set they are looking for – will thank you for it.
State whether a product is available. Nothing is more disappointing than finally finding the product you want only to find out it’s sold out when you get to the shopping cart. Add a notice to the category page listing instead.

Another important factor in eCommerce usability is the optimization of your landing pages.

Landing page optimization

A landing page is a page where your visitors end up when they follow a link from outside the site, for example, search engines or social media. Landing pages on your online shop should be optimized to evoke a particular reaction from the visitor, such as buying a specific product.

Focus on one product or product bundle and optimize that page to guide your visitor to the purchase – in other words, welcome them. Make sure the visitor feels safe paying you by setting up HTTPS on your site and maybe adding trust signals. Add social proof in the form of testimonials, so your visitor will understand why your product is so good, and why they need it.

We strongly recommend using headings and images to deliver your message as these help a lot, particularly for buyers scanning your landing page. Make sure these deliver the right message to your visitors.

When you’ve created, tested and optimized a landing page, reap the benefits of that time investment. You can clone the landing page with Yoast Duplicate Post and use the same format for similar landing pages.

To find out more about landing pages, see our article What is a landing page?

A special hats off to Apple’s epic Airpods Pro storytelling landing page

And because we’re discussing the usability of your online shop, we can’t forget product pages.

Product page optimization

Generally speaking, make your product page as usable as possible. Product pages need to be optimized for SEO, by using Schema.org data, for instance. If your shop runs on WooCommerce, our WooCommerce SEO plugin helps with a lot of these things. Read more about product pages in our article on product page SEO. But when your visitor arrives on that page, you need to convince them to buy.

Best practices

Let’s go over some best practices for product pages:

Create scarcity: if you have only a limited number of products available, that will encourage visitors to buy. But be honest about the numbers.
Add ratings and reviews. Social proof helps in comparisons and builds trust.
In stock or not? Be clear about that, as it will help manage visitor expectations.
Add to cart AND add to wish list. People might not want to purchase right away for budget or other reasons.
Multiple product images. Make up for the fact that the customer can’t pick up the product and look at it from all angles by adding more than one image.
Offer product bundles. Buy this and that, as these products belong together. You might offer a discount for that bundle as a sales promotion.
Free shipping, or free shipping on any orders over a certain amount. It’s a nice gesture and yet another reason to buy from you.
Related products, people who bought this product also bought that product, etc. If you show them more products, they might spend more money.
Show people using the product (as a part of your product images). People will find it easier to relate to and see why they need your product.

Call-to-action

Just like your homepage, your product page needs a strong call-to-action. In most cases that will be the Add to Cart button. Limit all distractions, make the text actionable, and use the right color. And if possible, add a review somewhere near that button. There’s more on calls-to-action here, and more on button design here.

Can’t miss that CTA, right?

There are more details and real-life examples in our product page UX article, and there are more insights on creating trust in this article: 7 ways to increase sales by creating trust. Our post on testimonials and reviews offers some great insights, and you should also read our post on The psychology of discounts.

After your product page, customers proceed to your shopping cart, which is part of your checkout process.

Checkout page optimization

Shopping cart abandonment

There are many reasons why people might leave your website without buying anything. They might even put products into their cart, only to abandon it. In our post on Shopping cart abandonment, we go over what might lead to this, like:

“I wanted to do more research.”
“I found it cheaper elsewhere.”
“I wanted to wait for it to go on sale.”

For mobile carts, there are even more reasons, like loading speed and poor design. Investigating this will make your online shop better and can increase your sales.

You are about to close the deal: the customer wants to buy your product, so let’s gently guide them to our payment page. The first thing we need is to tell them where we are in the checkout process, so be sure to add a progress bar.

At the start of the checkout process, we give the customer an overview of the products they want to buy. This is, of course, the same as the cart overview. There are a couple of elements that are required here:

Product image, even a small one will confirm to the soon-to-be customer that the right product is in the cart.
Prices, not just the price of one item, but also the number of items and the total price.
Additional costs, like shipping costs. There should be no extra surprise costs after the cart overview.
Payment options, just to let the customer know how they can pay.
Security signs, like the green padlock and address bar for SSL sites, plus perhaps extra logos like Trustpilot right below the cart overview.

Guest purchase

You should also make sure a guest purchase is possible. Having to register for a one-time sale is a deal-breaker for me.

Short forms

If you need to ask for more than just an email address, make sure to make the form as short as possible. Think about useful things like a checkbox to confirm that the delivery and invoice address are the same, instead of making customers fill in their details twice.

Payment

Make payment easy by choosing a trusted payment provider and offering convenient payment options. These will vary depending on the shop and its customer base.

Finally, after that optimized shopping process, a happy customer will leave your online shop. Now make sure you keep that customer happy. There are some extra things you can do to make that happen and you’ll find more tips in our article on checkout page UX!

Optimize site speed

Lastly, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of site speed when it comes to eCommerce usability. Today, every shopper expects sites to load quickly. It doesn’t make sense to wait age for one site to load while the competitor loads in just a couple of seconds. Seconds truly count here. Google hasn’t deemed site speed a ranking factor for nothing, you know. Do everything you can to speed up those pages! We have several posts on site speed, with site speed tools and more on how to check – and think about – site speed.

Conclusion: eCommerce usability is a trade of its own

Don’t trust your theme or eCommerce platform to fill in the blanks for you. Put some real effort into optimizing the usability of your eCommerce website. You’ll find that a better user experience will bring the SEO and conversion of your online store to the next level.

The post eCommerce usability: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

How to get ratings and reviews for your online business

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:50:00 GMT

Reviews or testimonials are mostly said to work on the basis of social proof. Social proof is a psychological process in which people copy the behavior of others, in an attempt to reflect correct behavior. In this post, I’ll take a look at how reviews work, how you can get them and how structured data can help bring them to the search results.

Testimonial, rating, review?
How to get reviews and ratings
Ratings, reviews, and Schema.org structured data
- Reviews and ratings
Review structured data example
- Products
- Local businesses
Online reviews and how to get them

Testimonial, rating, review?

First off, when is something a review and when is it just a rating? And what about testimonials? These terms are used a lot and sometimes they get to mean something similar. So, what is the difference between testimonials, ratings and reviews?

Testimonials

A testimonial tells you that someone you can identify with has bought a product and loved it. That must mean the product is just the right thing for you as well. A testimonial is often a page of text and photos customers explaining why your product or business is great. Also, video works really well for this. You could be feature a recognizable expert endorsing your product.

An example of a testimonial on Yoast.com

Ratings

Ratings are — often star-based — valuation of your website, online store or service. Rating can be given for your entire business or a specific product.

Business ratings

Ratings for your brand or shop will most probably be given on a website like Resellerratings.com or Google My Business. Google will see these ratings and will even add Google My Business ratings to their Knowledge Graph information.

Made.com’s Trustpilot score is highlighted in Google’s search results

The time that Google added stars to search result pages for any website that added these ratings in Schema.org is over. Google was simply flooded with ratings, and it made less sense to add them to all the results anymore. That doesn’t mean they are entirely gone, as the opinion of your visitor or customer is still very valuable to Google. So where it makes sense, Google will still show that rating. Google also tends to show shop ratings in their Google Shopping results, by the way.

Product ratings

Product ratings are a bit of a different breed, although they work pretty much the same. Have people rate your product, and add an Aggregate rating on a nice spot on your product page. Next to Google picking up on that rating and showing it in, for instance, the Google Shopping result, it increases trust in a product.

Google Shopping shows a score for the product as well as the seller

Besides, in the search results, you can also find product reviews from major websites in the search result pages, like this one from CNET:

The CNET reviews appear highlighted in the search results

CNET is a trusted source for Google, so they feel comfortable showing that rating and link these reviews on page one in the search result pages.

Obviously, it’s key to monitor these ratings and act if a product is just getting negative reviews. Either contact the reseller and ask them to fix the issues or stop selling that specific product. More on negative reviews later on in this post.

Reviews

Most of the times the ratings we discussed earlier are just half of a package deal. Ratings are great, and great ratings even greater. But if that rating is accompanied by a detailed review as well, people will be able to relate to the experience another customer had even more. Regardless if that’s for a product or an entire website. These reviews influence the decision-making process of your visitor. If they come to your website and see only negative reviews, written by real people that speak from experience, they will think twice. If these reviews are all raving about the product, people will might be a little less hesitant to hit that buy button.

Reviews influence local ranking

Especially for local rankings, or local products, reviews are important — especially for the local three pack. Reviews tell Google about the public perception of a brand or website. Google can process these reviews and take them into account for rankings if needed. Websites like Yelp and Tripadvisor help people from all over the world to find the right coffee shop or bakery. Sites like Booking.com tell people where to stay and allow people to share their experiences afterward. If you have sufficient reviews, Google shows these ratings and allows you to pick right from their search result pages already. If you search for a specific hotel in Google, you’ll find even more reviews in the search result pages:

Reviews and ratings aplenty in the travel business (also, notice the FAQ beneath this rich result)

It’s up to you which source you trust more. But we think you can’t go wrong with this hotel, right?

In addition to the usual suspects, you shouldn’t rule out reviews from Facebook as well. Maintain an active page and allow for reviews. Again, monitor these. All this positive ‘word of mouth’ combined will contribute to Google liking and ranking your online shop even better.

How to get reviews and ratings

If you’re a (local) business owner, one of your online goals should be getting more local reviews from your (satisfied) customers. These reviews or ratings help Google in determining the value of your company for their users. If you have a nice amount of four-star and five-star ratings, Google considers you a more valuable result on their search result pages, which contributes to better rankings for your site. Here, we’ll dig a bit deeper into these local reviews and convince you to ask your customers for reviews. Of course, loads of positive reviews will also help build trust for your potential customer.

First, let’s see what Google has to say about local reviews. On their review datatype page, they clearly state that Google may display information from aggregate ratings markup in the Knowledge Panels with your business’ details.

They state that they’re using the following review snippet guidelines:

Ratings and reviews must come directly from the users.
The reviews and ratings have to have content attached to it, they need to be visible for visitors.
There is a difference between these user ratings and critic reviews (human editors that curate or compile ratings information for local businesses). That’s a different ball game.
Don’t copy reviews from Yelp or whatever other review site, but collect them from your users directly and display these on your site.

There is a clear focus on genuine reviews. Add name, position, photo and any other relevant, public information on the reviewer. That always helps in showing that your reviews are indeed genuine. Also, try to keep a fresh stream of reviews coming in. Don’t aim for a thousand in an hour and then nothing for months, for instance, as that might seem suspicious to Google.

Ask your customers for a review in person

It’s really that simple: ask your customers for a review. Yelp may advise against this, Google promotes it. I agree with Google on this. A friend of mine is in the coaching business and he asks his customers after finishing the coaching process to leave a review on his Google My Business page. This has helped him achieving a local #1 ranking — that and his optimized site, of course.

It might feel a bit odd, to ask your customers for a positive review. However, I bet most of your customers will be more than happy to do this for you. It’s a small token of appreciation for your great service, product or your friendly staff. If you believe in your business, and you’re taking extra steps to help your customer, your customer will for sure leave that review for you. Especially in local businesses, where you know your customer and perhaps have been serving him or her for decades, just ask.

Ask your customers for reviews online

Feel free to ask your customer for a review on your website, for example, right after a purchase. If a customer wanted your product so bad he or she made the purchase, they may be willing to leave a review about their shopping experience as well. Even a simple “How would you rate your experience with our company” could give you that local rating you want.

Email

If you have built a list for your email newsletter, you are sitting on a treasure chest. Email is by far the most popular way of communicating with customers. Of course, you can also use this to collect reviews or insights from customers. It might be as simple as a ‘how do you rate our services on a scale from 1-5’ type of deal at the end of your newsletter. Or, you could get more personal by sending them personalised emails. There are a lot of possibilities, but just don’t invade their privacy and send unwanted mails or you might be in violation of GDPR laws.

And why not leverage Twitter, Facebook and other social media here? I find Twitter to work pretty decently for local purposes. There’s a separate ‘community’ of tweeps talking to each other on Twitter in our hometown. I’m sure most of them visit local stores. Not just that, but they’ll probably also have an opinion on these stores. And they might just be willing to share that opinion.

Some time ago, one of our local shops won a national award and a lot of locals congratulated the owners with this ‘very much deserved’ win on Facebook. How’s that for an opportunity to ask for Facebook reviews? Facebook is an awesome opportunity for any local business to get reviews. Don’t underestimate how many people search for your business on Facebook.

As mentioned in the section about Google and local reviews: “Don’t copy reviews from Yelp or whatever other review sites”. The same goes for these Facebook reviews. It’s very nice to get them, but leave them on Facebook (or use them in your offline print campaign) and get separate local reviews for your website.

Even negative reviews matter

Asking for reviews, for instance, right from your (support) email inbox, like in the signature of your email, might feel a bit strange at first. However, it will trigger your brand ambassadors to leave a review, after seeing that signature email after email. And yes, you will get some negative reviews as well from people that are not completely satisfied with your product or service. And you want these.

Don’t feel bad when you get one, feel motivated! Negative reviews give you a chance to go beyond yourself in showing how customer-driven you are. They allow you to fix the issue this customer has. After fixing it, ask them to share the solution and/or their experience with your company, so others can see what you have done to turn that disappointed customer into a satisfied customer. Learn how to respond to online reviews of your business.

It’s your job to make your customer happy, and good reviews will follow. Speed up that process by asking your customers for their feedback!

Ratings, reviews, and Schema.org structured data

Google uses structured data to include extra information in the search results. The markup for structured data is taken from a vocabulary called Schema.org. A combined effort of Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and Yandex, this open data format’s goal is to offer structured data that search engines can consistently use to present rich results. This could be product information, ratings, and reviews, or information about your local business. You can find in-depth information about structured data and how to apply it in our ultimate guide to structured data.

To implement structured data, you need to offer search engines the correct markup. There are a couple of ways of doing that: Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD. According to Google, the latter is the easiest way of adding metadata to sites these days. JSON-LD is a lightweight data-format that’s easy to read for both humans and machines. You can test your code in Google’s Rich Results Test Tool. Yoast SEO adds a lot structured data to your site automatically and you can use the Schema tab to finetune the implementation based on the type of content you have. You can append your reviews to it. We have documentation on how to integrate with the Yoast SEO Schema implementation.

Yoast SEO also has structured data powered rating stars in Google

Reviews and ratings

By adding certain Schema.org elements to your code, it’s possible for Google to add reviews and ratings to your search results. You need to tell which parts are about the review and what that element represents. In Schema.org, a rating is the aggregate value a product gets. A review is a rating, with an explanation in text.

Recently, Google put the squeeze on how they look at reviews and which types of Schema it supports. For the LocalBusiness and Organization types, it is no longer possible to add self-serving reviews to your site. These are reviews about businesses you collect yourself and put on your own site. It’s also not allowed to add external reviews via a widget. Of course, other types of content can still get reviews. You won’t be in violation if you have self-serving reviews on your site right now, but Google will simply not show your reviews in search anymore. Do follow Google’s guidelines or else you will get a penalty.

Google also limited the types for which it accepts review structured data. It now supports the following items:

Let’s take a look at a small review structured data example.

Review structured data example

In the example below, you see a typical Schema.org review in JSON-LD format. A couple of highlights:

type: The schema.org type (a review)
- itemReviewed: What you are reviewing
- type: The schema.org thing (a thing)
- Any subsets to specify the thing
reviewRating: Is it a review or a rating?
- type: It’s a rating
- ratingValue: The number of stars (1-5)
name: The title of the review
author: Who wrote it?
- type: It’s a person, of course
- name: Name of the author
reviewBody: The body of the review
- publisher: Where was the review published?
- type: Most of the time it’s an organization
- name: Name of the organization

<html>
<head>
<title>Yoast SEO Review</title>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
 "@context": "http://schema.org/",
 "@type": "Review",
  "itemReviewed": {
  "@type": "SoftwareApplication",
  "operatingSystem": "Web",
  "applicationCategory": "WebApplication",
  "image": "https://cdn-images.yoast.com/uploads/2010/10/Yoast_SEO_WP_plugin_FB.png",
  "name": "Yoast SEO"
 },
 "reviewRating": {
  "@type": "Rating",
  "ratingValue": "5"
 },
 "name": "The best SEO plugin ever!",
  "author": {
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Calvin Jones"
 },
 "reviewBody": "I love working with it.",
  "publisher": {
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "WordPress.org"
 }
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Products

The same can be done for product listings. If you use the right markup, Google can pick up the data and show it in the results. You can add specifications, price, availability, reviews and ratings, and more to your listings. The code to use is comparable to the one above. Running WooCommerce? The Yoast SEO WooCommerce SEO plugin does a lot of hard work for you so you can focus on improving your site.

Local businesses

Reviews are a godsend for local businesses. That’s why it’s rather important to add them to your listings. Using Schema.org and, for instance, JSON-LD, you give Google the opportunity to add your ratings to the search results. Potential customers will get a good idea of the quality of your business, right in the search engine. Need a helping hand with your local SEO efforts? Our Local SEO plugin might do the trick!

Read on: Use JSON-LD to add schema.org to your website »

Online reviews and how to get them

Hopefully, this guide has given you some ideas on how to get online reviews and rating. In addition, we’ve told you how to add them using structured data so search engines know they are looking at a review. Especially for local business, having good reviews is getting more important by the day. Be sure to reach out to your current customers and get them to share their experiences so others can become your newest customers.

Good luck!

The post How to get ratings and reviews for your online business appeared first on Yoast.

15% off everything: Get your store ready for the sale season!

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 12:19:32 GMT

As with everything in 2020, the holiday shopping season is going to be different. What hasn’t changed, is that the best time to start preparing is now! Starting ahead of time is an investment you’ll easily earn back, so make sure to start the holiday sale season well-prepared! Best thing: all Yoast products are now with 15% off! What can we help you with? Here’s a list.

1. Improve your rankings with Yoast SEO Premium

Get more visitors to your online store straight from the search engines and from social media. You’ll also get access to Premium optimization tools that will save you a ton of time and make your work a lot easier! It’s the #1 WordPress plugin in the world. Don’t have it yet? Now is the perfect time to get it!

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $89 USD $75.65 USD (ex VAT)

2. Make your products stand out with the Yoast WooCommerce Premium bundle

Do you want to get more potential buyers to your site? The Yoast WooCommerce Premium bundle helps to make your products stand out in the search results. And, it makes your products easier to find on your website. Time to sell more online!

Combine the power of the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin to keep your shop optimized to the fullest extent!

Get the Woo premium bundle Only $129 USD $109.65 USD (ex VAT)

Already own Yoast SEO Premium? You can also get the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin on its own.

3. Increase your online presence and reach local customers with the Local Premium bundle

At the moment, your customers’ search focuses more than ever on local results. That’s why it’s a crucial moment to increase your online presence on a local level. Making ranking high in their local search results of the utmost importance!

How to improve your rankings or get that top position in their search results? Combine the powers of Yoast SEO Premium and the Local SEO plugin with the Yoast Local Premium bundle!

Get the Local bundle Only $129 USD $109.65 USD (ex VAT)

Already own Yoast SEO Premium? You can also get the Local SEO plugin on its own.

Need more tips to get ready for the season?

The upcoming holiday season could bring a lot of customers your way — either online or offline. But this year is not like any other year. So, we’ve collected a series of tips to get ready for the 2020 holiday season. Read it and prepare!

And don’t forget, when we mean everything is on sale at Yoast, we mean everything.

Get shopping!

The post 15% off everything: Get your store ready for the sale season! appeared first on Yoast.

How to build Google Web Stories in WordPress

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 12:10:19 GMT

What do Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Snapchat Stories and Twitter Fleets have in common? They are all so-called social media implementations of the same stories idea. A story is a series of images or others types of content that belong together, and thus, tell a story. Visual storytelling is huge and now the web has an open story format as well. Launched back in 2018 as AMP Stories, Google’s Web Stories are now available in WordPress.

What are Web Stories?

Web Stories are a swipeable, rich visual storytelling format for use on mobile devices. Web Stories offer a fullscreen experience that can incorporate every type of content imaginable. In contrast to closed formats like Instagram Stories, Web Stories are open and freely distributable. You can make and publish them on your own site. You own your stories.

What’s more, Web Stories get their own place in the Google search results — right at the top. And that’s not all, because stories can also appear on Google Images, Discover and the Google app. All very prominently.

Web Stories give you much more control over what you publish and how you do that. You are free to determine the format, where you publish it and how long you want a story to ‘live’. These stories are lightning fast, offering you a quick and easy to digest type of content.

Keep in mind that, while Web Stories are intended for use on mobile devices, every story automatically also gets a simple desktop viewer. This means that your mobile content is truly available for everyone.

Goodbye AMP Stories, hello Web Stories

Early 2018, Google introduced AMP Stories as a way of quickly building visual stories for the web using open technologies. In May 2020, AMP Stories became Web Stories and by October 2020, launched on the number one platform in the world: WordPress. The Web Stories plugin for WordPress has made it so much easier to build stories on the platform that you own: your website.

Google continues to make improvements to Web Stories, while also pushing the adoption. Earlier this year, announced that some of its other tools like the Rich Results Testing Tools and Search Console can now recognize Web Stories as such. In the settings of the WordPress plugin, you can set the tracking ID for Analytics. This helps you get a sense of how your Stories are performing.

Examples of Web Stories

You can use Web Stories for a lot of things and we’ve seen many big media brands do it. While it seems they are best fit for bite-sized content, you can go a pretty deep with your stories. If you can build an engaging story, people might flock to it. This is just the thing that might make your content go viral.

Here are some cool example of Web Stories (and its predecessor AMP Stories):

The BBC made a Web Story about the moon

PCGamesN made a story about battle royal games with only videos

The Atlantic is always on the lookout for journalistic stories

CNN made a great web story about Antarctica

These are fairly high-level Web Stories and, of course, you don’t have to use the same journalistic approach to creating them — just make sure your stories are high-quality and valuable to you and your reader.

How to build Web Stories with the WordPress plugin

Getting started with Web Stories is easy if you have a WordPress site. Simply install the official Google Web Stories plugin — and don’t forget to read Google’s documentation to get your story ready for the search engine. The plugin was developed in the open by an awesome team of Google developers and is a work of art. It has now launched officially, so everyone can get building stories.

After you’ve installed the plugin, go to the Editor Settings and fill in the details asked. Then you’re good to go! If you lack inspiration or if you want to get a sense of what a Web Story can be, please explore the template section. See one you like? Simply click Use template and the editor opens with the template. Now, you can use the various tools to adapt the story to your liking.

Of course, you’re free to build Web Stories from scratch. Let’s see how that goes.

Open the Web Stories plugin
After installing the plugin, start a new story by clicking Create New Story from the Web Stories Dashboard. You can also start a new story by hovering over the WordPress menu > Stories > Add New.
Introducing the Web Stories interface
If you made a new story, the interface opens with a blank template. On the left-hand side you can see the assets manager with images you’ve uploaded, and material you can use in your story. The T icon opens the text tab and triangle opens shapes.
Add an image to explore the right-hand side
Click on the blue Upload button and pick an image to upload. Double click the image to add it the canvas. You’ll notice the settings on the right-hand side change. Here, you can find the properties and design options for each item. These differ from type to type, so text has different option from images.
Get accustomed to the interface
If you’ve ever used any kind of design tool, you’ll feel right at home in the interface of the Web Stories WordPress plugin. You can align things, rotate, layer, change text types, colors, almost everything you’d ever need is here. You can work with images, illustrations, text, video, et cetera.
Now try to build a simple web story
We’re going to build a quick thing as an example. Open a new story and upload an image to get started. I picked one of our illustrations as I want to make a post about the opening of store. Click on the image and you’ll notice blue lines around it, this lets you scale, rotate and zoom the image. Double click on the image to see the full image and how it fits now. Make the image fit in a way that looks great.
Add text to your web story
Click the T in the left-hand corner to go to the text tab. Here, you’ll see the different sizes. These are based on regular HTML headings, so the biggest one is an h1 and a paragraph gets a p. Please use these correctly in your web story. Give your title an h1 and subheadings an h2 or something else. Use the paragraph for your paragraphs. This way, your web content will follow all regular guidelines.
Colors, fills and alignment
If your image has a busy background like mine, you might need to give your text a color to stand out or maybe even a background fill color. Luckily, you can. Click on Heading 1 to add a heading to your image. Drag and drop it where you want it to appear.
A new page for your web story
To add a new page to your story, click big + button at the button of the screen. If you want to duplicate the current page because you’d like to use that as a template for the next screen, click on Duplicate page. Fill your story with all the pages you need.
Link to your site
One of the cool things of Web Stories is that you can freely link out to your own content. Simply click on an element and add a link. Don’t overdo it, keep the number of links limited.
Fill in metadata and publish
Once you’ve finished your web story, test it by clicking Preview. Before you hit Publish, you need to fill in some metadata to improve the story. You need this to have a valid web story according to Google. Click Document and fill in the logo, cover image, excerpt and pick a good permalink. Ready? Publish your story! The Web Stories plugin will ask you if you want to make a new post for this story. If you do, click the button and a new post will open with your story embedded in it.

And here’s a quick video of how that looks!

This is but an incredibly simple story, purely meant to help you find your way around the interface. Think about all the cool things you can do!

Keep in mind

Web stories are a cool new addition for your content arsenal. It’s a completely different tool for a completely different goal. Of course, not everyone will find use for these stories, but do look at the possibilities. It is easy to get started, but it’s powerful!

Here are a couple of things you need to keep in mind:

Make sure that the URLs of your stories are available in your XML sitemap (Yoast SEO does this for you)
Add Schema structured data to make it easier for Google to understand your stories (Yoast SEO does this for you)
Link to your stories from other (relevant) parts of your site
Make sure that your stories are valuable and of high quality
You can add ads, but don’t overdo it
Don’t add too many links to outside sources, that will distract readers
Keep the story short and snappy (Google says 5-30 pages, with a sweet spot between 10-20)
Keep the title short
Don’t use too much text on pages
Add alt text to describe images for accessibility
Stories are ideal for video, but keep them short

And, as Google wrote in their SEO for Web Stories post:

Do all the SEO things you would do for any other page on your website. If it helps rank your non-Story pages, it’ll probably help the Stories as well.

One word will jump out at you while reading through the list above: short. A good story is short, while still being valuable and insightful. Experiment with that. Find what your audience likes to see and in what format. This is still new, so there are no ‘rules’, so to say. Luckily, Google’s Web Stories plugin for WordPress makes it a joy to build these stories!

Don’t forget to test your Web Stories in the AMP Test Tool to see if your stories are eligible for inclusion in the search results.

Check if your web story is valid and get a sense of how it will look in Google

That’s how to build Web Stories in WordPress

You’ve just read a short primer on Web Stories in WordPress. These short form pieces of content are very enjoyable to consume on mobile phones, but even on desktop they work fine. Google has done a lot of work making the stories format a success and adoption is sure to surge — especially since these stories get their own spot in the Google search results.

Try it and report back, we’d love to see what you come up with!

The post How to build Google Web Stories in WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

Which redirect should I use?

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 12:00:00 GMT

As an SEO or website owner, sooner or later you are bound to run into redirects. Whenever you delete a page, change your URL structure or switch to a new domain, you’ll have to redirect your URLs. Changing URLs is really important for your SEO, but can be quite daunting. That’s why Yoast SEO Premium offers the redirect manager. That’ll make redirecting URLs a lot easier!

A redirect tells search engine robots to go somewhere else, either temporarily or permanently, to access a particular page. Choosing the wrong type of redirect might adversely impact your SEO, so be careful which you pick. This post explains the different types of redirects and when you should use them.

Why use redirects?

In general, you should try to avoid redirects but if you do need them, please apply them properly. Redirecting URLs is part of your regular website maintenance. There are many reasons for using them, but these are the most common:

HTTP status codes

To understand how redirects work and how you can influence what a server returns to a browser, you need to know about HTTP status codes. An HTTP status code is a set number that a server sends to a browser following a particular request for a page. These codes may include 200, 301, 404 and 503, for example, and each code serves a particular purpose. A 404, for instance, indicates that a page has not been found. A 503 means that the server is temporarily offline for maintenance or due to overload.

If you want to maintain your site faultlessly, you need to know your HTTP status codes, and you can read up on them in more detail here: HTTP status codes and what they mean for SEO.

Types of redirects

There are a couple of redirects that you’ll run into on a daily basis, so it’s a good idea to remember them:

301 Permanent
302 Found
307 Temporary

These aren’t really redirects, but still useful:

410 Content deleted
451 Content unavailable for legal reasons

301 Permanent redirect

The 301 is one of the most common redirects, and you should use this if you permanently want to redirect a deleted or moved page, or if you’ve changed something in your permalink structure. This code tells search engine robots that the page in question is no longer available at this location and that it should not be indexed anymore. If you don’t set a redirect correctly, the chances are your visitors – and crawl bots – will see 404 error messages – and that’s not something you want to happen.

Since a 301 permanently leads visitors from the old URL to a new one, you should only use it if you’re sure you’ll never use the old URL again. If you do want to use the URL again, you need a temporary redirect instead. A 301 passes all the link value a discarded URL has accumulated over the years over to the new URL, so it causes the new URL to gain or retain value. To learn how to implement your 301 redirects with WordPress, read this post by Jimmy or just use the redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium.

302 Found

A 302 is a fairly ambiguous redirect and is often used as a temporary one. The code means that the requested content has been found, but it lives in a different location. It doesn’t say why. If you want to send visitors to an alternative page when visiting this particular page, and you want to reuse the URL in the future, use a 302.

Since this is a temporary redirect, Google expects something to return later. If you leave the 302 for a long period of time, Google will start treating it as a 301 and passing along any of the value that link had.

307 Temporary

302s are often used to create temporary redirects, but, with the advent of HTTP 1.1, 307 has replaced it as a valid temporary redirect. While a 302 is a little vague, a 307 states precisely that the requested URL has been moved to a temporary location and will be back in a while. Since this request can change in the future, the request should continue to be made using the original URL. Use this redirect if you’re sure the move is temporary and you’ll still need the original URL later on.

Not really redirects, but still relevant

As well as the traditional codes, you’ll find two more that don’t really redirect. However, these are still relevant for day-to-day maintenance work on your site. You could see 410 and 451 as your server saying: Hey, there used to be something here, but not anymore.

410 Content deleted

404 error pages are one of the biggest problems on websites, and if you look at your readouts in Google Search Console, you are bound to find a few. These must be fixed because no-one likes these errors: Google sees them as a sign of bad maintenance, and visitors are confused by them. 404 errors often occur when the requested page or post has been deleted from the site and the URL has not been redirected.

Use a 301 to redirect pages showing 404 errors to a relevant page, or the homepage. Sometimes, however, you might prefer another method: telling search engines – and users – this page has been deleted with a 410 redirect. They will then know that the page won’t return and can, therefore, delete the page from the index.

451 Content unavailable for legal reasons

Should you ever be unlucky enough to be ordered by a judge to delete a page or if you get a notice and takedown request, give the deleted page a 451 header. This tells search engines that there was a post here and that you wanted to fulfill this request, but you can’t for legal reasons. Find out how and why to make a 451 header, should you ever find yourself in that situation.

REGEX redirects

If you’re a professional SEO and you need to do complex redirects, you may need to use REGEX redirects. With normal ones, you specify a single source URL and a destination URL. With REGEX – regular expressions – redirects, you can, for instance, create a single one to move entire groups of URLs that include a keyword to a new location. This could save you a ton of time while working on a massive SEO project. However, you should only use REGEX if you know what you are doing because they can easily break your site.

Manage redirects with Yoast SEO Premium

Of course you can fix your redirects on the server or use other tools, but, as a user of Yoast SEO Premium, you have the best possible tool to work with redirects at your disposal. The redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium helps you set the correct one, and whenever you delete or move a page, Yoast SEO will ask you how to treat it: should it have a 301 or a 410? Or maybe a 451? The redirect manager supports 301, 302, 307, 410 and 451 redirects, all in an easy to manage workflow.

Working with redirects

Working with redirects is a daily job for many SEOs. This article has covered the different options for redirecting pages and shown you how and when to use them. But be careful when choosing! And don’t 302 your entire site when you’re moving to a new domain because you’ll cause serious problems down the line. Think about what you want to accomplish, and then pick the most appropriate method.

The post Which redirect should I use? appeared first on Yoast.

SEO tips for non-profit organizations

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 12:33:00 GMT

SEO is important for every website that wants to attract traffic. SEO for non-profits, in that regard, isn’t that different from SEO for other businesses. For non-profits -often struggling to make ends meet- it can be a cheap and effective way of attracting traffic. Making sure your website is findable in the search engines increases the chance that people will find their way to your non-profit organization. So, what SEO challenges are the most urgent for non-profit organizations? I’ll tell you all about those in this post.

SEO is a must for a non-profit organization

It’s important for your non-profit organization to rank well in Google. Why? You want your audience, the people you’re aiming to help, to find their way to your website. When you’re findable, it’s much easier for them to get in touch and receive your information. Also, you want potential donators to find your website. Their sponsorship could help you to grow your non-profit business, expand your mission and help more people.

SEO is relatively cheap. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot of work. So, you need lots of time, writing skills, and some technical help with our plugin. Provided you have those at your disposal, ranking in the search engines is doable and will get you more traffic and visitors.

What SEO aspects to focus on?

There are a few SEO tactics that are especially important for non-profit organizations. SEO for non-profits isn’t essentially different from SEO for other companies. However, due to the distinct nature of (most) non-profit organizations, there are a few SEO tactics that’ll prove to be extra beneficial.

Content: write about what you do!

The first SEO aspect to focus on as a non-profit organization should be your content. While many businesses have trouble coming up with topics to write about, for most non-profits finding inspiration won’t be the problem. On the contrary, every non-profit organization has stories, a mission, a reason to exist. Translating those stories into awesome content is a great SEO strategy. Write about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why that’s such a great thing.

Of course, you can also write about the results of your mission, for instance, stories about the people, the animals, nature, or organizations you’ve helped. Testimonials are a great way to show people the results of your efforts. If you write about all of this, you’ll probably write content around your most important keywords without even knowing it.

A good strategy is to write a few great lengthy cornerstone articles, which truly reflect your main mission. Other (smaller) posts should link to those cornerstone articles.

Optimize for your brand

Make sure that people find you when they search for the brand name of your non-profit organization. Lots of non-profits are known for their name. You want to be found on your brand name, when people search for it. So you’d better ensure you rank number one for that name. This shouldn’t be that hard if you focus on decent writing and make sure your site structure is in order.

Local SEO

Lots of non-profit organizations focus on a specific location or have multiple locations. You want people in your area to find you. If that’s the case for your organization, make sure that your website is findable on Google maps. Enter the information about your organization via Google My Business. Check out our local SEO plugin if your non-profit organization focuses on multiple or specific locations. That’ll really pay off!

Want to learn all about local SEO? For free?! In our Local SEO training, you’ll learn how to optimize the website of your local business for search engines. So you’ll start ranking in your area! And the best news? It’s temporarily free!

Yes, I want access to the new & free Local SEO training!

Keep reading: Ranking your local business: introduction »

Mobile

Mobile search is becoming more and more important. So it’s very important that your website is mobile-friendly. Lots of people will search for and visit your website on a mobile phone. The design should be responsive and your site speed on mobile should be in order. Check out Google’s mobile-friendliness test to see whether or not your site is mobile friendly.

Conclusion on non-profit SEO

SEO for non-profits isn’t that different from SEO for businesses, blogs or online shops. SEO should be part of the online marketing strategy of every non-profit organization, as Google is the most important channel for information for most people. Ranking high in Google is the way to reach your audience.

Non-profits should have no problem coming up with ideas for content. Focusing on writing awesome content will probably be the best and most effective SEO strategy. Top that off with great technical excellence and good site structure and there’s no doubt your non-profit organization will be on the (search) map!

Read on: SEO for everyone: Yoast’s mission explained »

The post SEO tips for non-profit organizations appeared first on Yoast.

The latest news in SEO and WordPress: September 2020

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 13:18:29 GMT

Another month, another SEO news webinar at Yoast HQ! For the uninitiated, in these webinars, Jono Alderson and myself, run through the most important bits of news relevant to us and to you. We cover many SEO topics and expand on internet marketing and the state of the web itself. Plus, we’re having a ton of fun doing so and you get to ask your questions as well. One regular viewer already called the webinar one of the best hours of his month!

Stay on top of the latest changes in SEO by getting a Yoast SEO academy training subscription. This also gives you the opportunity to watch earlier videos of SEO News and develop vital SEO skills by completing a variety of courses.

What’s new in Google

The most important news from Google is them trying to aim for ‘safer’ search results. With everything that’s going on right now, it makes sense for them to highlight this. From the outside at least, it looks like Google is doing everything it can to make sure that the search results won’t be vandalized with the upcoming election — and everything after that. To do this, they need to become even better at separating fact from fiction.

How does Google corroborate facts? How does it validate them? These days, everything happens so fast and not everyone is speaking the truth. But what’s truth? They are investing a lot in technologies to understand those sentiments. BERT, for instance, helps them understand language better. And in the background, Google’s fact checking Schema can help them distinguish facts from fake news.

As this technology evolves, it is has other consequences. As a site owner, you will also come into contact with this. It is going to be more important to be truthful and you have to prove that you know what you are talking about. You won’t be able to rank anymore if you are trying to be someone you aren’t, for instance. If you tell people the grass is purple while the consensus is that it’s green, you’ll strike out.

Google hiding search terms in ads

Google has made it harder to get precise keyword data for your ads. That’s really important in the ads world because some of those keywords might be expensive to bid on, and you might end up bidding on keywords that you don’t want to be bidding on because it’s not a good fit because of an error. Or you might be missing data on small keywords that convert really well, but now you have no idea. Very annoying. We’ll be flying largely blind like when Google removed organic keywords.

This move won’t make Google more money. If nothing else, I think this will cost Google money, which is why I think that they’re doing this for legal reasons.

New nearby filters in product search

Google also launched a couple of new search features, one being the new nearby filters for products. This shows stores around you that are selling that product you want right now. It even mentions that it is available for curbside pickup. This is really cool, as it might get people to take their bike and go to the store to pick it up instead of ordering online. I know I would!

Google’s new nearby shopping filter on mobile

New Schema for licensing images and eCommerce

More Schema is always a good thing. We’re obsessed about Schema because this is the future of how we communicate with search engines. This month, Google added new image licensing labels to Google Images, powered by Schema. These give the owner of an image the chance to highlight the license of a particular image in Google. It gives them more control over how people can uses these images and even make money from it by selling them on a dedicated page. We’re looking to see if we can get this built in to WordPress.

If you have an online store, Google now also lets you describe your shipping details for use in Google Shopping. Google uses the shippingDetails Schema to understand what your delivery times are or what you charge for shipping.

What’s new in Bing and Microsoft

Bing has been quite busy improving their search experience using AI. Their autosuggest and Also Asked features should now be much smarter. Also, as mentioned last time, there are new goodies to be found in the Bing Webmaster Tools. This time it’s a solid URL Inspection Tool that let you uncover issues.

Microsoft as a sole licenser of GPT-3

Microsoft has teamed up with Open AI to exclusively license to the GPT-3 language model, which is a topic that we talked about in our August webinar. The GPT-3 stuff certainly is incredible, and if Microsoft is commitment to using it at any layer of their technology, they can build some awesome stuff. Something to keep a close eye on.

What’s new in Facebook

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny right now and we’re also not very excited about the two bits of news we discussed.

Breaking the embeds

Starting on October 24, you can no longer simply drop a link to your Facebook or Instagram post in your WordPress post and see an embed appear. Facebook is killing the API that handles that. In it’s place, every site will need an API key to have that work. Luckily, there are plugins that will allow this to keep on working. But WordPress can’t ship with an API for this, so you’ll have to do it yourself.

Facebook and Instagram embeds should remain working for stuff that’s already embedded, but we’re not 100% sure that they will, new embeds will become impossible without a plugin. Of course, all of this is an ongoing desire to have everything happen within the walled garden of Facebook itself.

Facebook Business Suite

Which brings us to the next topic of more walled garden stuff: Facebook’s Business Suite. We’ve seen this coming for a while. You can now use Facebook as the singular resource for your business. They really want you to see Facebook as the everything-you-need eCommerce solution. Facebook doesn’t want you to have a website, and they don’t want you to be in the Yellow Pages. For Facebook, Facebook is where you need to be. I’m not too delighted about more walled gardens.

Facebook Business Suite combines a lot of features

Let me remind you of one of my golden rules: own your own online property. Have a website where you can do whatever you want. Don’t be tricked into having everything on a third party platform just for the sake of convenience.

What’s new in WordPress

WordPress is at the heart of everything we do and we try to communicate about that. We not only build a plugin that helps you gain success in the search engines with your WordPress site, but we are actively helping build WordPress itself. At the moment we have four people working fulltime on WordPress and the fifth one — an awesome lead for our WordPress team, Francesca Marano — started today.

Google launches the Web Stories WordPress plugin

Google has released a Web Stories plugin for WordPress that allows you to build web stories that look like the example below in the search results. This is some of the best UI I’ve seen built on WordPress. Plus, it’s all open technologies. Much of the stuff Facebook and Instagram do goes against the thought of the open web, while this is very open web. It’s an open source competitor or equivalent to Instagram’s story format. Visual storytelling is a thing and this Web Stories plugin will help everyone build cool stories on your own website.

The Web Stories plugin enables visual storytelling on your own website

The team at Google, impressively, built this in a relatively short time, and it shows you how much Google is invested in the WordPress ecosystem, which makes me very happy.

What’s new in Yoast SEO

On the day of the webinar, we launched Yoast SEO 15.0. While that sounds like a huge deal, it’s actually just a continuation of our versioning. That’s not to say this is a small release, which it isn’t, but might be interpreted as one. I am actually very happy with Yoast SEO 15.0 as it gives you a couple of great new tools and improvements.

For one, we’ve completed our Gutenberg roadmap and finally have everything from the Classic Editor meta box ported over to the block editor sidebar. Yes, you can do all your post improvements and settings from the sidebar. We’re big fans of the block editor so where very excited to bring you this.

In addition, we also launched a table of contents block for the block editor. This is a very simple, but powerful feature that lets you drop in a TOC with the click of your mouse/tap of your finger. The contents are generated automatically with IDs — which also lets you get jump links for your content in Google. Last but not least, Yoast SEO 15.0 comes with full Arabic word form support in the Premium analysis.

Other news

We can’t list everything we talked about in the SEO news webinar, but there are a couple of asserted bits of news that I wanted to highlight.

Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine

Cloudflare is on fire. It is a business that bring some of the most cutting edge technologies to the make. It offers a lot of services to improve the performance of your site, while also keeping it safe from hackers. At Yoast, we use their tools and we love them. If don’t know who they are, please check them out. They are building the future of the web and we owe them for doing that.

Cloudflare is announcing new features and technologies left and right, but I wanted to mention the partnership they struck with the Wayback Machine. There used to be a feature where if your website goes down thanks to a crash at your hosting, Cloudflare would continue to serve a version of your website from their cache. This meant, your visitors get to see a cached version of your site while you fix. They’ve improved that so works with the Wayback Machine. Now, they can get a much more up-to-date and much more accurate version of your site. It’s nice partnership that makes websites more robust and a bit more secure.

That shared hosting research

Last month, there was an article doing the rounds which led to a lot of discussions. It was a comprehensive and pretty well done study on the ranking differences between sites hosted on a shared hosting platform and sites on a hosted platform. The theory has always been that sites that potentially share hosting with spammers, malware spreaders, porn and other low quality, and maybe even harmful sites would be detrimental for performance in the search results.

With the necessary caveats, this research proved that theory to be true — although it is hard to make any judgments based on this. Of course, John Mueller from Google already said this isn’t how it works and there’s no value in this. But, we all know that’s not entirely true.

Even if this is flawed research, it is further evidence of one of our arguments to win at SEO: invest in a good hosting plan! It’s not that shared hosting is bad, but if you make money with your website don’t skimp on proper hosting. Every dollar you invest in this will pay dividends. Get better hosting is what we say to everyone. Do it!

That’s it for the SEO news in September

Join us next time for another SEO news webinar! Sign up for Yoast SEO Academy and you’ll automatically be invited once we’ve planned a new date for our next webinar. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you soon!

The post The latest news in SEO and WordPress: September 2020 appeared first on Yoast.

New WordPress core team lead: Francesca Marano

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 07:24:17 GMT

I’m very excited to announce that Francesca Marano is joining team Yoast as our new WordPress core team lead. When we recently added two WordPress core contributors to our team, we hinted that we were looking for more people. We feel that to be in line with our core values of sharing and collaboration and making the web better, we need to do more. One of the roles we had to fill was for WordPress core team lead. The team is growing and it felt like the right time to hire a lead.

Francesca Marano

Finding a lead for a team like this isn’t easy. You need someone who has experience leading people and projects. But you also need someone who knows WordPress like the back of her hand and can navigate all of its teams and intricacies with ease. When I realized we might able to hire Francesca I got very excited. She’s the perfect fit. We were on a call together and we quickly realized that we could (and probably will) talk for hours. But we also realized that we also should do this.

What does Francesca have to say?

In Francesca’s own words:

Team Yoast was my unofficial team since I joined the WordPress Community. I met Taco Verdonschot on the first day of the Community Summit back in Philadelphia in 2015. I had never been to a WordPress event before and being there on my own was quite intimidating. Taco made me feel at ease right from the start. In the following years we crossed paths many times with Yoasters. Sometimes we were at events with large teams, sometimes just a couple of people from different companies coming together as part of the same community. As peers and friends.
So I am very excited to become a Yoaster officially from today: this new role will allow me to contribute all my time to WordPress, a platform that gave me a lot, personally and professionally, and do it with some of the best minds in the community. Yoast’s commitment to give back to WordPress is unparalleled. I have a lot to learn and I can not wait to dig in.

Francesca has spent the last few years at SiteGround, which is a company that we’re good friends with, so we wanted to make sure all was good with them. I’m happy to see they were supportive of her joining our ranks and want to thank them for that.

Welcome Francesca!

With that, please join me in welcoming Francesca Marano to team Yoast. Let’s have some fun together while working on a better web!

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Yoast SEO 15.0: Support for Arabic, plus a new table of contents block

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 07:23:36 GMT

Today, we’re launching Yoast SEO 15.0. This release features some awesome new additions and enhancements. We’ve added full support for Arabic, made a new block for the block editor and made the Yoast SEO block editor sidebar fully-featured. So, high time to take a look at Yoast SEO 15.0!

What to expect in Yoast SEO 15.0?

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we have three main focal points:

Full readability (free and Premium) and word form support (Premium) for the Arabic language;
A new table of contents block with jump link support (Premium);
An improved sidebar in the block editor with new screens (free and Premium).

Of course, this release also comes with a round of fixes and enhancements. Short on time? Simply check the changelog (free or Premium) for this release to see what’s new.

Readability and word form support for Arabic

In Yoast SEO 14.8, we started our journey in the world of right-to-left-languages with Arabic keyphrase recognition. This is an essential first step in getting to fully understand a language so we can bring support for our advanced language features. In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding readability support for Arabic in free. Also, Premium users get to enjoy full word form support in Arabic starting today.

With the readability analysis, Yoast SEO helps you produce a powerful piece of content. We help you keep your content focused and easy to read. Plus, Yoast SEO gives you feedback on what you can improve to make it even better. All of this is now available for anyone writing in Arabic.

Of course, that’s not all! In Yoast SEO Premium, we have something called word form support. This is an advanced analysis that makes our language tools a lot smarter. For instance, it takes grammatical forms of your focus keyphrase in account. This makes the process of optimizing a text a lot more natural and flexible. After English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Russian and Polish, we’re now introducing word forms support for Arabic!

Interested to see how that works? Check out the video below.

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $89 USD (ex VAT)

Find out more about the language analyses and the languages Yoast SEO supports at the moment.

Table of contents block in Premium

We’re always looking for ways to make your work easier to find and understand by both users and search engines. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about how to structure text to make it more readable and attractive. One of the tools that can help you improve the scanability of an article is a table of contents at the top of the page. For longer articles, these are a must-have but even shorter articles can benefit from them.

In Yoast SEO 15.0, we’re adding a simple table of contents block for our Premium users.

An example of a table of contents generated by Yoast SEO 15.0 for our Image SEO article

It is a simple block for the WordPress block editor that automatically renders a table of contents for the current page and it takes into account all headers and hierarchy. The block is very easy to use and you can edit the results of the table of contents block as you see fit. The table of content block automatically updates whenever you make changes to your text.

A chance at getting jump links in Google search

There’s a second reason for adding this block, namely jump links. The way we built the table of contents block encourages Google to include ‘jump links’ in the search results. You can see these links underneath a search result and these allow you to see the sections of a page from within the SERP, and to click directly to the relevant section. This also ties in neatly with Googles work on linking to specific text fragments straight from the search results.

Jump links, as seen in Google

It works like magic: we simply add an ID attribute to every header and use those to automatically fill the table of contents. Now, Google can use these anchors to show them in search.

Here’s a quick overview of how the block works:

For some time, we’ve been gradually improving the Yoast SEO experience in the block editor. Today, we’re adding a big one: a much improved sidebar with expandable modals. In this new sidebar, you can now find all the post settings, including the advanced settings, the Schema tab and internal linking suggestions (Premium). Finally, everything is in one place! The sidebar is now on par with the good-old meta box.

Simply click on the tabs to expand them. The one with a down arrow expands in the sidebar itself, while a click on the pencil icon will open a new overlay screen.

The new block editor sidebar in Yoast SEO 15.0

For some time, you could find the Google preview in the block editor sidebar. Today, we’re also adding the social previews to the sidebar. Clicking on the Google preview, will open a new screen with additional settings, like the meta description and title. Premium users also get full-featured social previews in these modals. This is one of the cool features of Yoast SEO Premium, and you now get much quicker access to it — and it looks better as well.

The social media previews in Yoast SEO Premium let you improve your post before sharing it

Other fixes and enhancements

As always, we do a lot of behind the scenes work to improve the plugin. In this release, we made some fixes in our Schema implementation, including one where in some instances the value of the Schema type @type could contain null. Thanks to Joseph Paul, we added a wpseo_sitemap_index_links filter to enable adding links to the sitemap index.

We’ve also improved our handling of languages. For one, we’ve expanded our list of English transition words, to make the transition word assessment more accurate. In addition, we can better find keyphrases and prominent words from words in the text that have specific Arabic or Urdu punctuation marks.

Yoast SEO 15.0

That’s it for Yoast SEO 15.0! In this release, we have three major enhancements: Arabic language support, a new and improved block editor sidebar and a new table of contents block. We hope you enjoy this release.

The post Yoast SEO 15.0: Support for Arabic, plus a new table of contents block appeared first on Yoast.

Keyword research for your online store

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 12:00:00 GMT

When you start an ecommerce site, having a keyword strategy might seem less important. You’re selling products, right? So the product names are your keywords. While that might be true in a few cases, in most cases you need to focus on the keywords that describe the problem you or your products are solving for your customer. Selling sun protection? The problems you’re solving (or rather preventing) are, among others, sunburn and skin cancer, so these are your keywords as well. In this post, I’ll give you a practical approach on how to perform keyword research for your online store.

After you’ve defined your position and found your niche, you must have a pretty good idea of the main keywords for your website. By putting some real effort in positioning your website, you unconsciously were thinking about what we like to call ‘long-tail keywords’. You were thinking about how you could refine your product or better: product description to match a certain target market.

What is keyword research for online stores?

Let’s first explain the concept of keyword research. Keyword research can be defined as:

The activity you undertake in order to come up with an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for.

Your keyword strategy follows that definition, as it consists of all the decisions you make based on that keyword research for your ecommerce site. This is where your search marketing starts: what do you do, explained in the language of your target market. It will help you come up with an extensive list of (long tail) keywords you’d like to rank for.

Keyword research for your online store consists of three steps:

Write down the mission of your business.
Make a list of all the keywords you want to be found for.
Create landing pages for all keywords.

Where we say keywords, we also mean keyphrases (more than one keyword in a search query, as in ‘search engine optimization’).

Our ultimate guide to keyword research has more on this important topic.

Step 1: What is your mission?

We have talked about this before. The mission of your online store consists of the ideas you have about your website and your company. For the moment, let’s not focus on if that mission statement will prove to be genius enough to sell to people. This also largely depends on the market you are in.

Some markets are highly competitive, with large companies dominating the search results. For instance, an ecommerce store with illustrations for children would even have to compete with online giants like Disney. Did you know Disney is an online publisher as well? Blogs like Disney Family attract hundreds of thousands of readers per day. I can assure you that these companies have a bit more budget for marketing (and SEO) than a starting online store like yours might be. Competing in these markets is hard, ranking in these markets is hard. All the more reason to make a good decision on niches and positioning. And keywords, obviously.

Please note that if you decide on a specific long-tail keyword, that doesn’t mean you can forget about the competitive keywords altogether. These need to be mentioned, or better need to have a role in your website as well. You can’t optimize for [gluten-free vegan chocolate cupcakes] without focusing on [cupcakes] and [chocolate cupcakes] as well.

Step 2: Making a list of keywords

Try to focus on what benefits you bring to the customer, not on what you are selling from your own point of view. Normally, that will give you keywords they will most likely to use in their Google searches as well. Ask yourself: What will these people be looking for? What kind of search terms could they be using while looking for your amazing service or product? Ask yourself these questions and write down as many answers as you possibly can.

Keep your unique selling point, or your customer’s unique buying reasons in mind when drafting your list of keywords. Make sure these keywords fit your ecommerce site. To get there, start with search intent.

Uncover search intent

Search intent is all about the why behind a search. There are four types of search intent, but only three are valuable for online stores:

Informational intent: People are looking for information;
Commercial intent: People are looking to buy something but they are not yet willing;
Transactional intent: People are willing to buy and are looking for the best place to do that.

In general, people don’t go from thinking they need something to buying it the next second. Especially for larger purchases that buying process goes through a few steps. It goes from awareness to researching and all the way to find out where and how to buy it. This is called search intent.

In all these phases, customers use different terms to find the products they need. To make your online store a success you need to know how the buying process or user journey of your customer works. All these insights help you reach them with awesome products and relevant content.

Here’s how you can use the search results to create intent-based content.

We all know the valuable insights a tool like Google Adwords Keyword Planner can give you. It’s one of the many tools that can give you an idea of the words you might want to rank for. If you need any help with finding the right keywords, please go read this post by Marieke about keyword tools you can use.

For your ecommerce site, there are other ways to get to know the language and terms around a specific product or service. Professional SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs have more in-depth data about your proposed keyphrases, including how difficult it might be to target those terms. Taking the difficulty into account, prevents you from trying to target impossible head terms that are probably dominated by big brands anyway.

Tools like Ahrefs give detailed information about possible keyphrases

For products, it also makes sense to take a look at that other huge search engine: Amazon. Amazon is a goldmine for product-related keyphrases and related terms. You can also use Amazon’s information architecture to learn how to classify your product. Search for your product (category) and see related — or long-tail — keyphrases pop up.

Also, take a good look at the titles and product descriptions to gather more information about the products. Here, you’ll often find valuable keywords that your customers use to describe/search for the product. So it might not simply be a streaming microphone they are looking for, but a streaming microphone with a built-in pop filter and a tap-to-mute feature that’s compatible with all gaming systems and other computers.

Amazon is a goldmine for product-related keyword research

Eyeing your competitor

There are probably many companies in your niche trying to woe the same customer. It’s good to keep a close eye on these. The ones that rank well for your keyphrases or products tend to have done their research. They found the terms needed to reach your customer and built content around these terms to stand out in the search results. Good for them! But you want that spot, right?

Be sure to check out what they are doing and how they are doing it. Run their domain through an SEO tool like the aforementioned ones to uncover which terms the site is ranking for. This can give you enough ideas for awesome content that can steal their rankings! Don’t steal their content though.

Step 3: Start create landing pages

Now that you have found your main keywords, you need to make sure these are represented in the right way on your website. A commonly used way is to create a landing page per keyword.

A landing page is a page where your visitors “land” (arrive) from other sources, such as search engines or social media. So basically it’s a page that’s optimized to evoke a certain reaction from the visitor, such as buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter.

We did an article on this subject, which will help you understand how to set up a proper landing page. We’ve also listed five things you can do to improve your product pages.

Don’t forget to structure your pages!

You should create collections of pages that work together in Google. Creating one page containing all the keywords you came up with won’t get you visitors. There’s just too much competition for most keywords. You should create multiple landing pages and embed them in a structure that tells Google how those pages relate to each other. Joost wrote an excellent post on how to achieve that by creating cornerstone content and internal linking.

By the way, feel free to perform an exit-intent survey to ask your visitors what keyword they used to find your site, and if they found sufficient information about the topic. Oxfam uses a form like that:

This will give you great insights in what keywords you still have to improve for.

TL;DR: Keyword research for online stores

Want your store’s pages to rank? Then you should carry out keyword research for your online store! You can do keyword research in three steps:

Determine the mission of your business.
Write down the ideas you have about your company, your website, your products, and your customers. Narrowing down your business automatically forces you to think about (long tail) keywords.
Write down the keywords you want to be found for.
Focus on keywords that your customers would use. Try to find out what their unique buying reason is. What problem does your product solve?
Create landing pages for all of these keywords.
Write awesome content about your keywords, use nice imagery and a design that supports the message of that page.

To finish things off, create nice collections of pages and give these pages a logical place within your site structure.

So go and determine a keywords strategy for your online store!

The post Keyword research for your online store appeared first on Yoast.

Increase blog engagement: 8 tips to boost shares and comments

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 10:20:00 GMT

Do you want your readers to engage with your blog? Want them to comment and share your post on social media? Want them to come back to your blog and read your next post? Then you want to increase your blog engagement. In this post, I’ll explain what this is, why it’s important for SEO and I’ll give you 8 tips on how to increase the engagement of the audience to your blog!

So, what is blog engagement exactly?

We define blog engagement by all the ways people can interact with your post. This could be leaving a comment, sharing your post on their Facebook timeline or mentioning your blog post in a newsletter, tweet or blog post. Besides those, it’s a form of engagement to return to your website to read your next post or subscribe to your newsletter.

Engaged readers are those readers that are active on your blog. And you want your visitors to be active. These active users are the people that buy your stuff, read your newsletter and become regular visitors of your website. These people are your most loyal customers, and can also be your brand ambassadors who will help you reach other people.

Why is blog engagement important for SEO?

Blog engagement can contribute to SEO. If your audience shares your post and leave comments on your blog (and you respond to these comments), Google will notice that your blog is very much alive and active. And of course, mentions on social media will also help with your blog’s ranking. If people share your post on social media or talk about it online, this will definitely lead to more traffic.

But how do you increase the engagement of your audience? How do you make sure that people comment on your blog post and share it on social media? I’ll give you 8 tips to increase the engagement on your blog!

Tips to increase blog engagement

1. Be relatable

Always put yourself in your readers’ shoes. What “problems” do they experience? And what questions are they asking online? Make sure to focus on the needs of your audience, because this is what they will recognize and what they’re searching for. This may sound simple enough, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating content about your products or services without considering what your customers really want to read about. Write in a way that’s relatable for your reader and focus on their needs.

2. Create high-quality content

Your content should be awesome. Your content should be so informative, funny, or relevant, that your site visitors want to share it with the world. Of course, this can be challenging. But if you take a few steps in preparation you’ll be able to create quality content that your readers and Google will love. Also, make your content readable and appealing with these 10 tips for an awesome blog post.

3. Be consistent

In order to get people to engage with your blog, you should blog on a regular basis. Let people know what to expect. You don’t have to blog every day to create engagement, but make sure the intervals are predictable. If people know that you always publish posts on Thursdays, people might swing by your website on these Thursdays on their own initiative. Think about setting up a content planning to make this easier for yourself or your team.

4. Be original

Make sure your content is worth sharing. The most effective way to make sure that people want to share your content is to write original stuff. If your story is one of a kind, people will be more prone to sharing. Don’t be afraid to share your own unique knowledge about a subject. And because I know that finding inspiration isn’t always easy, I have a few tips to find new blog post ideas.

5. Be (a bit) controversial

People tend to respond to something when they disagree. So, if you want to provoke people to share their point of view on a certain issue, or you want to start an interesting discussion: don’t be afraid to be controversial. Make your statements a little bit bolder and a little less nuanced. Don’t go overboard, though, or you’ll have to deal with a lot of negative comments.

6. Ask for engagement

If you want people to respond to your post, ask them to do so! If visitors are actually invited to comment, chances are much higher they decide to do so. Ask people to share their thoughts on the matter at the end of a blog post, or encourage people to like or share your post on social media.

7. Respond to the engagement

If you do invite people to comment on your blog, be polite and respond to their comments. When your audience notices that you pay attention to their reactions, they’ll be more inclined to come back and visit your website yet another time. Don’t worry too much about having to deal with negative or off-topic comments, as opening the discussion can bring you so much closer to your readers. We also discuss the different types of comments in our article on how to handle comments on your blog.

8. Engage on other blogs

Make sure to be visible on other blogs related to your area of expertise. Comment on posts that have similar subjects as your own posts. If people see you engage on other blogs, they’ll be curious to see what you’ve written about the matter. Do be careful not to use these comments as a way to just promote your products or services, as this can lead to more annoyance than people visiting your site.

Conclusion on blog engagement

In order to collect an engaging audience for your blog you should be a little bold. Make sure to post awesome and original content and add just a little bit of controversy. And, do not forget to invite people to respond! While we’re on the matter… how do you create engagement with your readers? Do you have a hot tip I haven’t discussed here? I’d love to hear your view on this!

The post Increase blog engagement: 8 tips to boost shares and comments appeared first on Yoast.

How to turn your online customer into a brand ambassador

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 12:10:00 GMT

Right after a customer does an online purchase on your site, an important marketing opportunity arises. At that moment, someone chose to buy a product from your business, linking them to your brand. So make sure to seize that moment! In this article, we’ll go over a number of things you can do to turn these online customers into brand ambassadors.

Ask customers to promote you

As the introduction suggested, a perfect moment to turn customers into ambassadors is right after their purchase. Strike while the iron is hot! You can simply ask your customer, who obviously just had an awesome experience shopping on your eCommerce site to promote your site for you. Here are a few suggestions on how to get customers to promote you:

Testimonials

A great way to turn your customers into ambassadors is by asking them to write a testimonial. A testimonial, or review, gives site visitors an idea of the experiences of others and why what you’re offering is so awesome. Besides adding testimonials on your website, you could also ask your customer to leave a product review on larger review sites. Think along the lines of TripAdvisor (hotels and restaurants), GoodReads (books), and Yelp (any local business). A while ago I went camping in Denmark, and there were TripAdvisor signs everywhere telling me about the (obviously) good rating they had, asking me to leave my own review.

When someone has purchased something on your site, I think it’s totally okay to ask them to leave their two cents. For example, in the confirmation email you send or shortly after they’ve actually received the product. Not only will this help your brand by getting positive reviews, which new customers will see as social proof of your reliability. These reviews also help you monitor things you can still improve upon and grow your business.

Reviews on Google and Facebook

In addition to reviews on your site or larger review sites, why not ask your customer to leave a review on your Google Business page or Facebook page as well? Google and Facebook are probably the starting points for any search your potential customer does.

Regardless of whether a customer decides to click on the link to your site or Yelp, your Google reviews will be shown next to your listing in both Maps and Search. Which will increase the trust people have in your business. The same goes for your Facebook reviews, these reviews tell potential customers about the experiences others have with your business. An example of a review on Facebook:

Another way for customers to promote your site online is through social sharing. It’s important to make this as easy as possible for your customers and other followers. For example, you can choose to add social sharing buttons to your Thank You page that people land on when they’ve completed their purchase. Clicking the tweet or share button will open a box with a predefined text about your site and a link to your site. Personalize it by adding the product name (“I just bought Product X on yourshop.com – it’s awesome!”). If the text is predefined, it will literally take two clicks for a customer to share your site and become a brand ambassador.

When you have a blog on your eCommerce site, you could also add these social sharing buttons to your blog. Making it easy for people to share an interesting blog post online, endorsing your brand through sharing your content. Also make sure to share your blog posts on social media yourself. This makes it possible for your social media followers to share this content with one or two clicks, for example by retweeting on Twitter.

When your eCommerce site doesn’t have a blog, you could share a category page when you have a sale or a product page of a long-awaited new product on your site! Whether it’s a post or page you’re sharing, make sure that your content looks good when it gets shared. This makes it way more attractive for your customers and fans to share this content as well. You can use the social previews in Yoast SEO Premium to check and optimize what your social post will look like before you share it.

Appreciate your customers

Even online, you must strive to be that nice neighborhood shop, where you know your customers by name. Perhaps not all of them in the case of thousands of customers, but at least the largest or most loyal 10% of them. That means investing back in these customers. Sending them a birthday present, adding extra incentives or discounts, things like that. Show them you appreciate them as your customer.

Keep in touch

But that’s not all. It’s important to provide great after-sales services that will lead your customers back to you. This could just be a flexible return policy. Or, for example, if you own a guitar shop and you sell a cheap Spanish guitar, chances are that the buyer is a beginner. Surprise him or her with a short tutorial video for simple chords a week after purchase. Send an email six months after purchase with a discount for new guitar strings. It’s all so obvious, right? In this case, you just have to keep in mind that the obvious probably works.

Some final thoughts on brand ambassadors

In this article, we discussed turning your online customers into ambassadors for your brand. Which you can do by asking them for testimonials for your site, larger review sites, Facebook and Google. But also by making it possible for them to share your site and products through social media. To keep these brand ambassadors, always remember to appreciate your customers by investing in them and keeping in touch. Make sure that they don’t forget you.

In addition to all the things mentioned earlier, it’s absolutely necessary that you do your best to deliver the best customer experience possible. Deliver on time, or if that’s not always possible, communicate on time. Treat your customer as you’d like to be treated yourself. Make the customer feel welcome in your online brand family! Read more about how to deliver the best customer experience possible in our ultimate guide to eCommerce usability.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a brand ambassador?

Typically, a brand ambassador is someone hired by a business to represent their brand and increase brand awareness and sales. However, there is second type of ambassadors, people who talk about your brand without you paying them. Who are your actual customers and who have genuine experiences with the products or services you offer.

What does a brand ambassador do?

A brand ambassador talks about your business in a positive way, online and/or offline. By posting about your business or products on social media, or recommending your services to others any other way. Brand ambassadors can help you build trust, establish a great reputation, boost sales, and even increase customer loyalty.

How do you choose a brand ambassador?

When you’re hiring someone to be your brand ambassador, make sure that person reflects your brand and company values. However, we do recommend asking your customers to become brand ambassadors instead of paying someone to promote your brand. This will be more genuine and increases trust in your business.

Is there a difference between a brand ambassador and influencer?

Yes, there is a difference. Where a brand ambassador talks about your brand, influencers promote your products or services by showing people how to use it. Another difference is that businesses often have a short-term collaboration with an influencer and a more long-term relationship with a brand ambassador.

The post How to turn your online customer into a brand ambassador appeared first on Yoast.

How to get great looking Google results

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:16:59 GMT

You probably know the feeling. You’re Googling for a term you’d (like to) rank for and you see a competitor that has a search result that looks incredible. It has star ratings or an image, or both. Or it might have a video, or some other thing. These are so-called rich results. They stand out in a way that makes them impossible to ignore for users. There are a lot of them and Google is continuing to add new ones. So, what types of rich results are there and how do you get your own great looking Google results? Let’s go over the list!

Rich results and how to get them
The big rich result examples FAQ
An overview of great looking Google results

Rich results and how to get them

If you compare search results over the last ten years, you’ll probably notice something: there’s an ever-increasing number of highlighted search results or “special” search features. Search engines use these so-called rich results to make the search results more insightful for users. This way, complex information can be presented in more friendly ways.

For many, getting a rich result for a specific piece of content can be an important goal. The results stand out and tend to generate quite a few clicks. Also, getting your content shown as a rich result is something like a stamp of approval by Google. In a sea of content, your content was selected for a rich result.

Getting a rich result depends on a lot of things. For one, you need to know where they appear in your niche. Find out who has them now for your specific keyphrases and see if you can beat them, if that makes sense. To do that, you need to target your content at the correct audience using their language. Your content has to be well-written and of high quality. Also, in many cases, search engines like Google need additional insights to be sure they can award you a rich result. These insights come from structured data in the form of Schema.

The big rich result examples FAQ

In this post, we’ll highlight some of the most common great looking rich results you’ll notice in Google. We’ll also add links to additional information about them on our site. In addition, there’s plenty to find on all this rich results in the Google Developer portal. You can start by exploring the Google Search Gallery.

How do I get star ratings in Google?

Ratings in search results are always based on real ratings or reviews, which have to be tied to a “thing” Google understands. There are several types of results that have ratings on them, most importantly products. We have a full article on how to get those ratings and reviews showing for your site.

How do I get a video / movie result in Google?

Videos show up in search results in several different ways these days. Your videos can show up in the regular search results, the video results or the images results. In addition, Google also has various rich results with video like the one for home activities. If you describe your videos with Schema using the VideoObject, you can get Google to understand important facts about the video which helps them show it properly. If video plays an important role on your site, our Video SEO plugin can help get all the information ready for Google.

How do I get those questions and answers underneath a result?

These are the result of using FAQ Schema, for which you can use the free FAQ content block in Yoast SEO. Simply add the block, fill in the questions and corresponding answers. Make sure they are relevant and valuable for the user.

How can I highlight my event in Google?

There are loads of highlighted events in Google. Also, there are several different rich results appointed to them. There’s a panel on the right-hand side of the screen that’s hard to miss. In addition, you can get your event on Google Maps for additional exposure and an even more interactive experience for your users. All this uses the Events Schema. You can even manage how your event appears and handle things like cancellations or date changes.

How do I get my job section to stand out in Google?

Google Jobs has been around for a while and recently even launched in the country where Yoast HQ is located: The Netherlands. We’ve made sure that our job postings follow Googles guidelines for adding structured data to jobs. Using JobPosting Schema helps Google make sense of the job offers and that makes it possible for them to show the result like the one you see below. Google has more information on how to add this for your jobs.

How can I get Google to show my navigation in a search result?

Those words above a post title form a breadcrumb path. This gives you an idea how the post your looking at fits into the site structure. Users love these, as well as search engines! To get these, simply activate them in Yoast SEO and add the necessary code to your theme — if your theme doesn’t have breadcrumb support as a default. You can find more information on breadcrumbs in our Help documentation.

How do I get Google to show my logo?

One of the things we ask you to set in Yoast SEO is your (business) name and your logo or photo. Google can use this information to feed the knowledge graph panel you see on the right-hand side of your screen. You can find these settings by going to our plugin in the backend and clicking on Search Appearance > Knowledge Graph & Schema.

Why do some sites get a search box in the Google search results?

This is called a sitelinks search box and you’ll see them pop up for huge sites. You simply need to have a search engine running on your site and add valid WebSite structured data. The code to get these is already found in Yoast SEO, but your site must be very authoritative will these appear in Google.

How can I get one of those recipe listings with images, cooking times and ingredients?

The recipe space is a battleground. While in theory, you might be able to get by without recipe structured data, in practice, you won’t stand a chance. Without Recipe structured data, Google will have a much harder time reading your pages to figure out what it needs to do with that. There are several WordPress plugins that can do this for you, and we’re working on our own implementation for Yoast SEO. For now, check out our article about Schema for recipes and the documentation on Google Developer.

How can I get in the Top Stories?

The Top Stories carousel is designated for news articles of news outlets that have been approved for the Google News program. You can participate in this if you have a news site. After that, you need something like our News SEO plugin to get your content ready for the Top Stories carousel, among other things.

I have a book and I want Google to recognize it. How do I do that?

Those panels are pretty great, right? Everything you need to know about a book in one place, including links to buy it. You need to jump through a few more hoops to get your book listed in there, but, like everything else mentioned here, it is powered by Schema. See Googles documentation for more information on how to get activate it.

On my smartphone, when I search for how to fix something I get a visual step-by-step guide. I want that for my how-tos!

You are right, for some how-to articles Google shows a list of steps on mobile. Often, these have images visualizing the steps as well. These are called how-to rich results and you can get these by building your how-to content in the free Yoast SEO How-to content block. It’s easy and fast!

How can I protect the licenses of my stock photos in Google?

Google recently launched a new badge visible in Google Images. This badge indicates that a particular image is licensable — this might be an open source license or a commercial license. In any case, you can add the necessary license structured data, including a link to your license page, to get this to show up in Google.

How can I get a panel in Google for my local business?

These panels play a big rol in your local SEO work. What’s in them, comes from all over. There’s input from your site, from Google My Business, Google Maps, third party sites and more. For one, you need localBusiness Schema on your site to help Google validate your listings. Our Local SEO plugin can help you get your data right for your site. Read about local business Schema and check the documentation on Google.

Why do some products stand out in Google?

Of course, this is one of the big money-making markets for Google. You can see it in the number of rich results, there are a ton of them. The product-related rich results range from relatively simple highlighted search results with star ratings and prices, to big knowledge panels and the like. In addition, you’ll find products in Images and Google Shopping — not to mention all the ads. Where Google gets its data depends on the type of listing, but you can bet on it that most of it depends on Product Schema. If your online store runs on WooCommerce, our WooCommerce SEO plugin automatically improves the code outputted by your site. We also have a post on products Schema, plus you can find more information in Googles documentation on Products.

An overview of great looking Google results

As you see, there are a great many rich results. The development of new rich results will speed up in the coming years as search engines will look at more and more interesting ways of getting information to users. Some result you can aim for, but others will be the playground of search engines themselves. Keep an eye on what’s happening in your space to find if you can capitalize on the popularity of rich results. Find out how to get those great looking Google search results!

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