All posts by : Marcy Jones

When it comes to search engines, Google wants to return the most relevant pages for its users so that those users are getting the most relevant and accurate answers to their queries. This is especially apparent when it comes to YMYL and in this blog we are going to be discussing the concept of YMYL and why it is important that webmasters understand it for SEO purposes.

What is YMYL?

YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life” and it refers to web pages that cover any topics that have the potential to impact a user’s future happiness, health, financial stability or safety. Google introduced the YMYL category in 2014 to indicate how seriously it takes the importance of factual correctness on websites which have the ability to impact a person’s life.

Source: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

YMYL is extremely important when it comes to SEO because Google holds these websites to a higher standard when reviewing their quality. Optimising your YMYL content and making sure that it is accurate and up to date, in addition to backing it up with external linking, showcasing authoring and generally demonstrating the expertise of the article, will all help to ensure that you’re giving off the right signals to Google. As a result, Google may look more favourably on your website for matching user intent and purpose, therefore helping it to perform better in the search results. 

People are often using Google to research information on a wide range of topics including health queries and financial questions. It is important that the information they are finding on the SERP is accurate and up to date because if it is not then it could have extreme consequences for the user. This is why Google finds it so important to ensure these YMYL pages are of high quality.

Examples of YMYL pages: 

• ➡️Finance pages – eg. investing or banking pages 
• ➡️News and current events pages
• ➡️Health and safety pages 
• ➡️Legal pages
• ➡️Shopping pages that allow users to make online purchases 

How to know if your web page is a YMYL topic

Many topics do not come under the YMYL bracket but it is important to know whether the content on your website is a YMYL topic because if it is, Google will hold your website to a higher standard so that it is fully meeting the users needs and not causing any harm to their wellbeing. It is therefore important that you understand what YMYL topics are, to see if you are discussing them on your webpage. 

Google will not explicitly tell you if they are viewing your web page as a YMYL page so it is important that you ascertain whether or not it falls within any of the YMYL categories. 

When determining whether your website covers a YMYL topic, you need to think about whether you are creating content that can directly impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety or the welfare or well-being of society.

Source: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

If your web page contains YMYL topics, then it is important that your content will help and inform the user and, you need to ensure that there is no content on your web page that could cause the user any harm. 

Within the Quality Rater Guidelines, Google also gives us some clear examples of what does and doesn’t fall into the YMYL category, so if you aren’t sure it’s worth checking out the QRGs as they can give some helpful insight!

YMYL Guidelines

When it comes to YMYL content, it is ranked differently to content that is not YMYL. Google explained this in their ‘How Google Fights Disinformation’ blog: “For these “YMYL” pages, we assume that users expect us to operate with our strictest standards of trustworthiness and safety. As such, where our algorithms detect that a user’s query relates to a “YMYL” topic, we will give more weight in our ranking systems to factors like our understanding of the authoritativeness, expertise, or trustworthiness of the pages we present in response.”

In 2022, the YMYL guidance was updated by Google in order to give clarity on what they are looking for when it comes to quality on YMYL web pages:

• ➡️Content – the main content of the webpage is extremely important if you fall into the YMYL category, it is important that your webpage has a good amount of high quality content 
• ➡️E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust) signals – enhancing E-E-A-T signals for YMYL pages is especially important because the information needs to be completely accurate because any misinformation on these pages could potentially cause harm to the users.  
• ➡️Keep the user in mind – Google wants to ensure that you are creating a website that has the best intentions for the user, so that they are gaining the best user experience.

Best SEO practices for YMYL content 

Due to the fact that Google ranks YMYL pages differently, it is important that you understand the best SEO practices to take for your YMYL web pages:

1. Create user-focused content 

As we have seen, content is one of the most important factors for Google when they are ranking YMYL web pages and Google will often look at your content to make sure that it is accurate information and that it is of high quality. 

In order to rank well for YMYL content:

• ➡️Make sure that your content is always up to date
• ➡️Ensure the content is useful for the user
• ➡️Have organised content that is easy for the user to understand 
• ➡️Make sure there is enough content so that the web page fully covers the topic and satisfies the user intent

Content is extremely important for YMYL pages, you need to make sure that your content is fundamentally benefiting the users and not giving them any information that could have consequences for their future. 

When you are creating content, making sure that it is user-centred is of the utmost importance but this will also benefit you when ranking because Google wants content that is helpful to the user – matching user intent and purpose plays a key role across YMYL websites – and this doesn’t always mean adding large amounts of content either – make sure that you review the way that your website answers the user’s queries. 

2. Optimise your E-E-A-T signals 

As we have seen from Google, E-E-A-T plays an important role when Google is ranking YMYL web pages. 

Experience, Expertise, Authority & Trust are key signals for Google, especially when they are examining the quality of YMYL websites. Below, we will discuss the concepts of E-E-A-T and the diagram above also shows what each concept means. 

Experience – when it comes to experience, it is important to showcase that the author of the content has firsthand or real life experience for the topic and subject that they are discussing. 

Expertise – expertise refers to the amount of knowledge that exists behind the content and behind your website as a whole. Particularly for YMYL websites, Google wants to ensure that whoever is creating the content for your website is an expert in the field, so you need to ensure that you are showcasing this on your website. 

Authority – this focuses on making sure that your website is seen as an authoritative source, so instead of proving yourself to be an expert, authoritativeness focuses on others showcasing you as an expert. This can be done through gaining high quality backlinks and where Digital PR will be extremely valuable. 

Trust – according to Google, trust is the most important aspect of E-E-A-T: “Of these aspects, trust is most important.” Providing trust signals across your whole website is imperative so that Google can know that your website and the content that you are providing to users is trustworthy and it will be providing factual information to users. 

When optimising your YMYL web page, optimising all four aspects of E-E-A-T is highly important to prove to Google that your content is valuable to users and that it is providing accurate information that will not have the potential to harm users. 

You can optimise your E-E-A-T signals for YMYL pages by:

• ➡️Including the author’s basic information and credentials 
• ➡️Adding an About Us page on your website including information about the people behind the website, including achievements etc… – this also helps to provide “clear and satisfying information” that Google looks for on YMYL websites, mainly focusing on the About Us page and also the information that is available on a Contact Us page
• ➡️Including a reviews page from real customers 
• ➡️Gaining high quality backlinks from other credible websites linking to your webpage

3.  Add external links to your content 

Including external links to your content is very important, a link is a clickable object on your webpage that leads from one page to another, they can appear as text, images or buttons and they will link from your website to a different website. When including external links, ensure that they appear naturally throughout your website and make sure that they are going to another high quality, authoritative web page so that Google knows your resources are trusted and will give users the correct information. 

You should add in external links whenever you are quoting someone, using information from another website or making a big statement. When linking to a credible source, you are showing Google that your information is accurate and it will also back up your level of topical expertise.

4. Make sure your website is well built with a user-friendly design

It is important to make sure that your YMYL website has a user-friendly design, this includes optimising the page speed, making sure there are no broken links and making sure it is optimised well for both mobile and desktop browsers. This will show Google that you are keeping your website well maintained and making the site easy to use for your users. 

Using Google’s Page Speed Insights and other free online tools can help you to keep an eye on your page speed and see where improvements need to be made, it’s also worth being aware of Core Web Vitals and the impact this can have – so definitely two things to be keeping an eye on from a YMYL perspective.

Summary

YMYL refers to any topics on a website that can have real word effects for the user. When it comes to SEO, it is extremely important to understand what YMYL is because if you have content on your website that falls in to a YMYL category, Google will hold your website to a higher standard, therefore meaning that it will be harder to rank on the SERP and that you need to make sure that the quality of your website is extremely high. 

Google holds YMYL web pages to a higher standard because of the potential impact that they can have on a user’s life. If you have a website that sits within the YMYL category, as you will be held to a higher standard, it is highly important to optimise your website for SEO by following the above steps so that you can increase your visibility within the SERPs and ultimately increase conversions and sales to your website. 

If you have got YMYL content within your website then it is important that you optimise your content for SEO and hopefully this blog has helped you with ways in which you can optimise your website for YMYL. If you want any additional support when optimising your YMYL website for SEO, get in touch with us today and we can help!

In the fast paced digital landscape, staying ahead of your competition is a constant challenge when striving for organic online visibility. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plays a vital role when it comes to online visibility, and one effective strategy to increase your visibility and improve rankings is to conduct a competitor audit. Understanding what your competitors are doing can provide you with valuable insights and can help to inform your own SEO strategy. 

In this blog, we will be discussing the importance of competitor audits for SEO and we will also delve into how you are able to conduct one. 

What Is An SEO Competitor Audit? 

An SEO competitor audit is a strategic process that involves analysing and evaluating your competitor’s website and their online presence in order to gain valuable insights for your own SEO strategy. 

The Importance Of Competitor Audits In SEO

Staying ahead of the competition can be a difficult task in the online world, however conducting a competitor audit will allow you to have a clear understanding of the organic landscape so that you can know where you currently stand, and what you need to do to progress and improve rankings so that you see better SEO results. 

Understanding who your competitors are and analysing how they are performing organically is an integral part of any SEO strategy. You may be wondering why this needs to be part of your strategy. Well, there are likely many websites that have very similar content to the content that is on your website, and they too will be fighting for the top spots in Google. Conducting a competitor analysis will allow you to stay one step ahead of those competitors, and will allow you to know where you need to improve. 

Conducting a competitor audit will allow you to do many different things including: 

Benchmark Performance

When conducting a competitor audit, you will be able to benchmark your own website’s performance against others in your industry. By analysing your competitors website’s and their online presence, you can identify areas where you are excelling, but the really valuable information that this will provide you with is where you can improve. By seeing what your competitors are doing well and where they are ranking, you can uncover opportunities for your SEO strategy which you can then work on with the aim of improving your rankings and overall SEO results. This benchmarking process will help you to see where you currently are against your competitors, and will also allow you to set realistic goals for your SEO strategy. 

Identify Keywords and Content Gaps 

By analysing your competitors keywords and content, you can reveal valuable insights into what works in your industry. By looking into keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you are not, you can uncover keywords that can then be included in your SEO strategy. 

Analysing your competitors keywords will also allow you to see any gaps in their content strategy and will allow you to create unique, valuable content that will set your website apart. This can improve your chances of ranking higher, but will also enhance the overall user experience on your website by providing your users with the most valuable and relevant information. 

Understand Your Competitors Backlink Profiles 

Backlinks are a crucial aspect of SEO and can influence your rankings as Google will use backlinks as a key signal of trust. During a competitor audit, you should definitely be analysing your competitor’s backlink profiles as it will help you to identify any high-quality backlinks that you might be missing and where your competitors are performing highly. By understanding competitors’ link building strategies, you can understand where you have any link gaps and then develop your own approach to acquiring authoritative and relevant backlinks.

Evaluate User Experience (UX)

Evaluating your competitors user experience is important because it will allow you to determine how top performing competitors are using on page elements to provide the best experience for their users. This will allow you to adjust your on page elements so that you are providing the most helpful user experience, which in turn can increase engagement rate and potentially conversion rate. Google openly states that user experience is vital: “You should build a website to benefit your users, and gear any optimization toward making the user experience better.” This therefore shows how important it is to keep up to date with what is working well in terms of UX and how to improve the user experience on your own website. 

Stay Informed About Industry Trends 

SEO is a dynamic and ever changing field, with search engines constantly updating their algorithms. By regularly conducting competitor audits, you can stay informed about the latest trends and innovations; you will be able to see what Google is returning and adapt your website accordingly. This knowledge will ensure that your SEO strategy remains adaptive, therefore keeping you ahead of the curve. 

How To Conduct An SEO Competitor Audit

Now that we know how important a competitor audit is for your SEO strategy, we need to know how to actually do it. Below are the steps needed to conduct a thorough and successful SEO competitor audit: 

• Identify your competitors – firstly, you need to identify your main competitors in the online organic space. These are the businesses that are competing for the same target audience. Ahrefs is one of the many tools that can be used to identify your organic competitors by heading to the “Organic Competitors” section. This will show you who your main competitors are and how you are performing in comparison to them which will give you a good overview before diving deeper into the particular sections which we have discussed. 

• Keyword analysis – you will then need to conduct thorough keyword research for both your website and your competitors which can be done in many different tools such as Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner. Identify the keywords that they are targeting and compare them with your own to see how you can improve your SEO strategy. Conducting a content gap analysis in ahrefs will allow you to see any keywords that you are not currently ranking for and what your competitors are ranking well for, and this can be a great starting point to inform your future content strategy. 

• Content evaluation – you should analyse the content on your competitors’ websites. Look into the type of content they are producing, the quality, length, and how it is engaging users. Then look into how you can improve your content strategy based on what your competitors are doing. Also, identify any gaps in their content strategy based on previous keyword research and you can then provide valuable content on your website that your competitors are not offering. 

• Backlink analysis – evaluate the backlink profiles of your competitors. Identify the websites that are linking to them, the DR and quality of those backlinks. Then perform a link gap analysis for your own website and in your new strategy, be sure to target those backlinks for your website. To look at competitors’ backlink profiles, head to the Ahrefs backlinks profile which will give you all of the information needed to analyse your competitors including the referring domains, amount of referring domains and the DR of each one. This will give you valuable insight to then perform a link gap analysis. 

• User experience evaluation – you should evaluate the user experience of your competitors by assessing factors such as navigation, formatting and overall design. A positive user experience can have huge impacts on SEO performance so it is important to monitor how your competitors are providing a good user experience so that you can implement better UX strategies throughout your site. 

• Monitor changes over time – competitor audits or not a one off task, they should be conducted regularly and you should keep track of changes in your competitor’s websites to see what effects the changes are having on their overall SEO performance so that you can adapt your website accordingly. 

By following these steps, you should be able to conduct a successful SEO competitor audit and inform your SEO strategy to gain organic visibility, which in turn can lead to more organic traffic and conversions (which is every SEOs dream). 

Summary Of SEO Competitor Audits 

In the ever-changing world of SEO, competitor audits are indispensable for gaining that competitive edge. By understanding what is working for your competitors, and where you can surpass them, you can adapt and improve your SEO strategy in order to achieve higher rankings, increased online visibility and in turn more organic traffic and conversions. But, it is important to remember that when you are conducting an analysis of your competitors, it is important not to imitate and copy, but to innovate and set your website apart in the SERPs. Use what your competitors are doing well as a base, and then improve upon this for your own website. 

Regularly conducting competitor audits will help to position your website and business as a leader in the SERPs and will allow you to be ready to adapt to changing trends and emerging opportunities in the SEO landscape. If you require any additional support when conducting a competitor analysis, don’t hesitate to contact us and our team of SEO specialists will be happy to assist in order to help with your organic visibility.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a fundamental aspect of your digital marketing strategy, it involves many different techniques and strategies that are aiming to improve your visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). However, implementing these strategies is only half of the battle. To successfully implement an SEO strategy, you need to constantly monitor and track your SEO performance. 

In this blog we will be discussing the most important aspects to track, how to track and monitor them over time and why it is so important to track and monitor your SEO performance. 

Why Is Monitoring Your SEO Performance So Important? 

Tracking and monitoring your SEO performance can be important for many reasons: 

1. It allows you to monitor your progress 

Monitoring your SEO performance will allow you to assess the impact of your SEO strategies and efforts. Are you moving in the right direction, increasing your rankings and organic traffic? Or, have you regressed and you need to adjust your strategy? Either way, it is important to know what is working and what isn’t so that you can plan for the future of your SEO performance. 

2. It allows you to identify opportunities 

By analysing and monitoring your organic performance data, you will be able to identify new opportunities, keywords to target and areas that need improvement. 

3. It allows you to benchmark against your competitors 

When analysing your performance, it will allow you to see how you are performing against your competitors and understand where you sit in the market. You will then be able to analyse what your competitors are doing better than you and where you can improve to compete with them in the SERPs. 

4. It allows you to see the effects from algorithm updates 

As SEOs, we know that search engines, like Google, frequently release algorithm updates and these can affect the performance of your website, and can therefore affect organic traffic. Monitoring your SEO performance will allow you to see if you have been hit by an update, and you can then see what you need to improve based on the update that has affected your site. 

Now that we understand why tracking and monitoring SEO performance is so important, let’s get into how you can do it.

Monitoring and Tracking Your SEO Performance 

When you are tracking your SEO performance, there are many different metrics which you can look into, and it is important that you look at a combination of metrics so that you are getting an overall picture of your SEO performance. In this blog, we will be discussing the 6 metrics that are extremely important to constantly monitor in order to stay on the top of your SEO game! 

Keyword Rankings 

One of the first things to consider when tracking your SEO performance is keyword rankings, where is your website ranking in the SERPs for the keywords that you are targeting? 

A keyword ranking is where your website is positioned in the SERPs for a specific keyword. However, rankings can often change for a number of reasons. This could be due to an algorithm update, a change in user intent, a competitor updating or publishing new content or many other reasons. It is therefore essential to track your keyword rankings. 

Monitoring your rankings is extremely important because the position of your website in the SERPs can have a significant impact on your organic traffic. According to Backlinko, the lower you are in the SERPs, the lower your Click-Through Rate will be. 

Source: Backlinko 

The graph above shows the full Click-Through Rate for Google’s organic results, it shows that if your website is organically ranking in position 1, it will get a 10x higher CTR compared to if your website was in position 10, therefore showing the importance of ranking in those higher positions. 

It is extremely likely that your keyword rankings will significantly affect your CTR and organic traffic, it is therefore vital to keep track of these rankings so that if you do lose rankings and drop down to a lower position in the SERPs, you can figure out why and put your efforts into regaining those rankings. 

So, how do you actually monitor your rankings in the SERPs? Well, there are many different tools to use including SEMRush, Moz and Google Search Console, but the tool we will be looking at today is Ahrefs. Ahrefs is a tool that easily allows you to track your rankings for all of your targeted keywords. 

Above is an example of how Ahrefs displays their keyword rankings. When you first start tracking your website in Ahrefs, you will enter all of the keywords you wish to track for your website. Ahrefs will then display all of your targeted keywords alongside the position that your website is ranking in for that particular keyword. It will give you a thorough overview of the volume, traffic and keyword difficulty of the keyword, alongside this will be the particular URL of your website that is ranking for that keyword. It will give you information about whether your rankings have improved or declined, what the SERP is currently returning for that keyword and how you have ranked for that keyword over the past 12 months.

All of this information is truly vital when you are monitoring your SEO performance as it will give you insights into the history of your rankings, therefore allowing you to further look into what has caused your website to either gain or drop rankings. This can then help to inform your future SEO strategy and how you can maximise your organic traffic. 

Monitoring and tracking your keyword rankings should be a daily occurrence due to the volatility of the SERPs. The SERPs are constantly changing and it is important that you are staying up to date with this so you can focus your SEO efforts effectively. 

Organic Traffic 

Another key metric to track for your SEO performance is organic traffic. Organic traffic refers to the number of users that are visiting your website from the search engines organically (without clicking on an ad).  

Organic traffic can be one of the main ways to monitor and track your SEO performance as you will be able to see exactly how many users are landing on your website organically. 

In order to measure your organic traffic, you can use Google Analytics 4. 

By navigating to the User Acquisition Report within GA4, you will be able to see how many new organic users have visited your website and which particular page they have landed on. In GA4, you are able to change the date range, compare time periods and add filters so you can thoroughly see how your website is performing organically. 

This will give you a clear overview of how your overall website is performing in the SERPs, which pages are performing well, which pages need improvement and how your organic traffic has changed over time. This can be extremely insightful for informing your SEO strategy and seasonal changes in data will also allow you to spot trends and how you can cater to your users. 

Impressions and Click-Through Rate

Impressions and Click-Through Rate (CTR) are also two metrics that are important to measure when you are monitoring your SEO performance. 

An impression is counted every time you show up in the SERP for a keyword or search query. 

Click-Through Rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. 

To track the amount of impressions and clicks your website is getting, you can use Google Search Console (GSC) which is a free tool which lets you monitor your sites total clicks and total impressions and will give you a percentage of your website’s average CTR.

GSC will also give you a breakdown of the queries that users are searching for and how many clicks and impressions those particular queries are getting. You are then able to look into your average click-through rate for your overall website and individual click-through rates to see how well you’re performing in the SERPs. This will give you an insight of how many users are seeing your website on the SERPs and then actually clicking through. 

It is a good idea to monitor your CTR as part of your SEO performance because when users are seeing your website on the SERPs, they will be looking at your Title Tag and Meta Description for that page. This will be the only thing enticing users onto your page and if your CTR is low for certain pages, it can show that you may need to edit these in order to improve the amount of clicks to your website.

Engagement rate 

Engagement rate is also extremely important to monitor, this measures the percentage of users that are interacting with your website and this will be based on whether they have stayed on your website for more than 10 seconds, clicked on a link within your website or submitted a form. 

Engagement rate is extremely important as it shows whether users are interacting with your website and finding it helpful, or if they are just clicking off your website as soon as they land on the page. If there is a low engagement rate, it shows that the users have not found your website helpful, and they did not feel as though their intent was satisfied. 

A low engagement rate can potentially affect your position in the SERPs and is therefore an extremely important metric when you are measuring your SEO performance. If you have a low engagement rate, it is important to analyse your website and see how you can improve the experience so that user engagement improves. One of the ways to do this would be to review your website against competitors who are performing well and update your website to better match the user intent and increase the engagement rate. 

To monitor your engagement rate, you can again use the User Acquisition Report in Google Analytics 4. This will provide you with the amount of engaged sessions that have occurred and the engagement rate for your overall website and also individual pages. This will provide you with a great insight for which pages need improving.  

Conversion rate 

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, this can include subscribing to a newsletter, completing a form, adding a product to the basket, or making a purchase. 

Monitoring the conversion rate for your website can give you valuable insights into the behaviour of your users. It can tell you which pages are performing well and driving conversions, the demographics of the users which are converting and what you can do to better serve your users and improve the amount of conversions. 

Conversion tracking also ensures that you know where conversions originated from, which pages your users landed on in order to complete the user journey, this will help you to determine the quality of your landing pages, and which ones need optimising in order to help the user journey lead to conversions. 

In order to track the amount of conversions you are receiving organically, you can go to the User Acquisitions Report in GA4 and filter by ‘Organic Search’ and ‘Landing page + query string’. This will then give you the amount of conversions that each landing page has received. You can also compare this to different time periods in order to see whether your conversion rate has increased or declined, this will then help you to inform your future SEO strategy. 

Key Takeaways 

Tracking and monitoring your SEO performance using the above is an ongoing process. It is important to regularly review your metrics and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. Remember that SEO is not a one-off project, it is an ever evolving process that will need adapting regularly. By following the steps outlined throughout this blog and utilising the right tools, you can ensure that your website remains competitive and visible in the ever changing landscape of the SERPs. 

By consistently monitoring your SEO performance and staying committed to improvement, you will see the long term benefits of tracking your SEO. If you require any assistance with monitoring your website for SEO and coming up with a suitable SEO strategy, get in touch with us today and our team of SEO experts will be able to help.

In January 2023, I entered the world of SEO when I became a Junior SEO Executive at Cedarwood Digital, and it’s safe to say that I have learnt a lot. In this blog, I will be sharing all of the valuable things that I have learnt in the exciting world of Search Engine Optimisation, ways to learn and how I will move forwards. 

What I Have Learnt: 

SEO Takes Time

One of the most important things that I have learnt is that SEO is a long-term process. Building organic visibility and improving search rankings will take time, it will not happen overnight. SEO takes time, patience and consistent effort, and it is crucial to set realistic expectations. By focusing on longer term strategies, producing high quality content, optimising your website structure and gaining authoritative backlinks, you can steadily improve your website’s performance in the SERPs and establish a solid foundation for long term success. 

Keeping Up To Date Is Vital 

Staying up to date with any SEO news is extremely important for SEO professionals. SEO is constantly evolving and search engines like Google frequently release algorithm updates which can significantly impact website rankings and visibility. By staying informed about the latest updates and news, you are able to adapt your strategies accordingly and anticipate any potential changes. Having a good understanding of algorithm updates and what they mean for SEO allows you to make necessary adjustments to your website and content and ensure that your website is aligning with the current ranking factors and guidelines. Failing to keep up with the latest SEO news and updates can result in missed opportunities and potentially a decline in the SERPs, therefore resulting in a loss of organic traffic. Ultimately, staying up to date is extremely important as it allows SEO professionals to stay ahead of the curve and achieve long term success.

Keyword Research 

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO and without it, you can not expect to gain organic visibility. SEO is about finding opportunities online and gaining relevant traffic to your website through visibility in the SERPs. Keyword research is at the heart of helping you to capitalise on any relevant traffic. 

Keyword research is the process of finding words and phrases that users are searching for. This is so that you can then optimise your website according to keywords that are relevant to your service/ product. By optimising your website and including the correct keywords, Google will be able to understand what your website is about and that it is related to the keywords users are searching for. If your website is matching user intent for those keywords, Google will then rank your website accordingly. 

One of the first things I learnt was that effective keyword research is essential for all SEO strategies. Without it, it will be extremely difficult to know what your users are searching for and it also plays a key role in ensuring that you are not targeting keywords that users are not searching for. By conducting keyword research, and then optimising your website accordingly, you are more likely to rank for relevant keywords and gain the right type of organic traffic to your website. 

Content Optimisations 

Content is key. Content optimisation plays a vital role in SEO as it can directly impact a website’s visibility, relevance and user experience. Without content, search engines like Google, will not be able to understand what your website is about, and therefore will not be able to rank your website on the SERPs. This means that your website will not be seen organically. By optimising the content on your website, you can ensure that all of your web pages align with what users are looking for. When done effectively, content optimisation can help search engines understand the context of your website, and this can help lead to improved rankings. Additionally, having optimised content will likely increase the engagement of your users; providing them with valuable information will increase the likelihood of them staying on your website for longer. It can also help Google to draw links between different themes on your website and different pieces of content, which helps to establish and showcase your E-E-A-T signals which is one of the most important elements of trust for Google. Fundamentally, content optimisation ensures that your website is providing valuable and helpful content for users and search engines, with the hope of increasing rankings and organic traffic.

On-Page Optimisations

On-page optimisations are a crucial part of SEO as they can also directly impact a website’s visibility and overall ranking potential. On-page optimisation refers to the process of optimising various different elements on a webpage in order to improve the user experience. This includes optimising title tags, URL structures, page structure and internal linking, as well as optimising the content on the web page. By implementing effective on-page optimisations, websites can provide search engines with clear signals about the content’s relevance and importance, therefore, potentially increasing the likelihood of higher rankings in the SERPs. Plus, these optimisations will also enhance the user experience by making the content more accessible, readable and engaging, which is also important for rankings as Google prioritises websites that are made for the user first. Overall, on-page optimisations are fundamental to SEO strategies; ensuring that your website is well structured, user friendly and easily discoverable will likely result in improved organic visibility and an overall better SEO performance. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a fundamental part of any SEO strategy and it involves focusing on the technical aspects of a website that can affect the visibility and performance in the SERPs. By optimising the technical elements of your website such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, and indexing, you can ensure that search engines are crawling your website effectively and ranking it accordingly. Technical SEO plays a crucial role in improving website usability and user experience. Ignoring technical SEO can result in poor website performance and decreased visibility, and in some instances, great content optimisation and link building approaches can be lost because there is a fundamental crawl issue on the website, therefore meaning that Google isn’t seeing the content it needs to return – in most cases, a simple fix can have substantial consequences for the website. It is extremely important to have the fundamentals in place and have your website working properly in order for the on page optimisations to be effective. It is therefore extremely important to prioritise technical SEO in order to maximise your website’s potential for ranking highly in the SERPs, and for improving the overall user experience. 

How You Can Learn About SEO 

Learning new things about SEO is an ongoing process that requires a continuous effort. I have learnt a lot of things in my first 6 months in SEO but there is still so much more to learn. There are so many ways to expand your knowledge and stay updated in the ever evolving industry. One of the ways that I have learnt is through reading various different blogs. There are many websites that regularly publish valuable information and updates on SEO practices and it is a great way to find out new information. Following reputable SEO experts on social media platforms can also provide you with a wealth of information and keep you informed about all of the latest trends. Participating in webinars and online courses that are led by experts can also deepen your understanding of SEO and help you to acquire new skills. Attending SEO conferences and networking events will help you to deepen your knowledge and it enables you to connect with other SEO professionals and gain outsider insights that can broaden your knowledge.Listening to podcasts can also be extremely beneficial and there are quite a few across the SEO sector, these podcasts can be extremely handy for SEO professionals who are commuting to work. Finally, experimenting with different SEO techniques and conducting your own research can massively contribute to learning new things.

I have used all of the above methods to expand my SEO knowledge and I can safely say that they all work. By combining all of these approaches, you can continuously learn and improve your skills and stay up to date in the dynamic world of SEO. 

Moving Forwards

6 months on from when I first entered the world of SEO, I have learnt an enormous amount of different SEO techniques and stayed up to date with all of the latest algorithm updates. I have delved into many different SEO projects including both on-page optimisations and technical SEO. Overall, my journey in SEO has been an invaluable learning experience which has equipped me with a diverse set of skills and the ability to optimise websites for better search engine visibility and organic growth. SEO is a very wide topic and I am excited to continuously learn more and more every day by staying up to date and learning new skills.  

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google and it can help anyone who has a website understand how they are performing on Google Search. There are many different features and reports that can be used to monitor performance and it also provides valuable insights into how you can improve your appearance on Google search in order to bring more relevant traffic to your website. Using Google Search Console provides invaluable information for SEO performance and in this blog we will be discussing how you can use the reports featured in Search Console to improve your SEO strategy. 

What is Google Search Console? 

According to Google, “Search Console is a tool from Google that can help anyone with a website to understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to improve their appearance on search to bring more relevant traffic to their websites.” It is a free tool that all website owners/ SEO professionals can use to monitor and optimise their website’s performance. There are a wide range of tools and reports available in Google Search Console that users can utilise to understand how their website is perceived and indexed by Google. It offers valuable insights into how Google crawls, indexes and displays web pages and by utilising the reports provided by Search Console, users are able to identify and resolve any issues that are potentially hindering their websites performance in Google search results. 

Reports Within Google Search Console

Google Search Console offers a wide range of reports that can help you to monitor and optimise your website’s performance on Google search. The most helpful reports will depend on the focus of your work but below are some reports that can help to inform your SEO strategy.

Page Indexing Report

The page indexing report within Google Search Console allows you to see which pages Google is able to find and index on your site, you can also learn about any indexing issues that have been encountered. When you open the index report, you will see a chart that displays the number of pages that are indexed, highlighted in green, and the number of pages that are not indexed, highlighted in grey. 

By analysing the data within the page indexing report, you can clearly identify any potential problems that may prevent your pages from appearing in the search results. However, it is important to remember that not all no indexed pages are a problem, but it is important to determine why the pages are not indexed to understand whether or not there is a problem. Google Search Console will provide the reasons why pages have not been included in the index in the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section. 

This section of the report will provide you with valuable insight into why pages are not appearing in Google search results and why they may not be getting organic search results. Some of these reasons could be due to: 

• ➡️ Redirect errors – if Google experiences a redirect error, they will not index the page.

• ➡️ URL blocked by robots.txt – if a page was blocked by your website’s robots.txt file, Google may not index the page.

• ➡️ Not found (404) – if Google discovers a page that returns a 404 error, it may not be indexed.

• ➡️ Crawled – currently not indexed – this means that the page was crawled by Google but they have not indexed it. This does not mean that it will never be indexed, Google may recrawl this and index the page in the future. 

• ➡️ Discovered – currently not indexed – this means that the page was found by Google but it was not crawled yet and therefore not indexed.

• ➡️ Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user – this occurs when Google thinks that another URL makes a better canonical than the one that you have provided. Google will index the page that they consider canonical instead.

By analysing this report, you can ensure that all necessary and relevant pages are indexed correctly and you can solve any indexing errors. This will allow you to maximise the visibility of all of your webpages in the search results, ultimately driving more organic traffic to your website. 

Mobile Usability Report 

The mobile usability report shows which pages in your website have any usability problems when they are viewed on mobile devices. The top report will show how many pages within your property have usability issues.

Google Search Console will then provide you with specific issues that are affecting the mobile usability. 

When clicking on the specific issues, you will be able to see which pages are affected, specific issue details, and information about how you can fix these issues. By rectifying these mobile usability issues, you can enhance your website’s mobile experience and deliver a seamless experience to mobile users. This can in turn help to improve your rankings for these pages. 

Core Web Vitals Report 

The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console will show you how your pages are performing based on real world data. Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that are used to measure the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a webpage. The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console will be based on the following four metrics:

• ➡️ Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how quickly the main content of the web page loads. The optimal LCP measurement is under 2.5 seconds. 

• ➡️ Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – this is a measure of how much a webpage unexpectedly shifts during the loading phase. A layout shift occurs when a visible element shifts position from one rendered frame to the next. CLS is extremely important because if a page element shifts when a user is trying to interact, it creates a bad user experience. The optimal CLS measurement is a score under 0.1.

• ➡️ First Input Delay (FID) –  this measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site (when they click a link/ tap a button) to the time when the browser is able to respond to that interaction. The optimal measurement for FID is under 100ms.

• ➡️ Interaction To Next Paint (INP) – this metric assesses a page’s overall responsiveness to user’s actions. It will observe the time that it takes for the page to respond to interactions that occur throughout the user’s visit to a page.

The report will show the URL performance and they will be grouped by status, either poor, need improvement or good:

The core web vitals report will show you a chart of general trends and you can also look at both mobile and desktop platforms in detail by clicking on ‘open report’. The report will show you how all of the URLs on your website are performing based on historical user data and it will provide you with information about why the URLs are either poor or need improvement. By using this report, you can understand why your website is not performing well and how you can improve the speed and responsiveness of your website. 

Sitemaps Report 

Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console is a fundamental step to ensure that your website’s structure and content are properly understood by Google. A sitemap is a file that you provide to Google and it will include information about the pages and files that are on your website, and the relationships between these pages. This is important so that Google can read your file and crawl your website efficiently. 

The sitemaps report in Google Search Console will provide you with information about how many pages from your sitemap are indexed and by reviewing this data you will be able to confirm that the pages you have included in the sitemap are indexed correctly and, you can detect any potential issues with your sitemap, such as broken links. Regularly monitoring the sitemaps report will help you to be informed about the pages in your sitemap and therefore, you will be able to optimise your web pages in order to maintain a good website structure and improve your website’s discoverability in the search results. 

Search Performance Report

The performance report in Google Search Console shows important metrics about how your website performs in Google search. Examples of what you can see in the performance report include: 

• ➡️ Looking at how your traffic changes over time 
  
• ➡️ Seeing which pages have the highest and lowest click through rates 
  
• ➡️ Looking at impressions for top search queries 

The search performance report provides a wealth of data, including impressions, clicks, click-through rates and average positions. All of this data allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and how well it is working in Google search. By analysing and understanding this report, you will be able to identify high-performing keywords, understand your users behaviours and then optimise your SEO strategy accordingly. Additionally, this performance allows you to compare your organic performance over time, therefore meaning you can track the impact of any SEO changes that you have made on your website and further identify any areas for improvement. 

Summary 

Google Search Console is an extremely valuable tool for anyone who owns a website and any SEO professionals who are looking to optimise their websites’ performance in Google search results. It allows you to gain valuable insights into how your website is perceived by Google, and you can therefore adapt your SEO strategy accordingly. The reports allow you to make data driven decisions, address issues promptly and drive more organic traffic to your website. From monitoring your page indexing and mobile usability to managing sitemaps and analysing your search performance, Google Search Console provides you with the tools and insights that you need in order to refine your SEO strategy, drive organic traffic and improve overall SEO performance. 

Over the past few years, AI has been a big topic of conversation and in May 2023, Google announced that they are bringing a cutting-edge generative AI to Google Search. Google are starting to experiment with Search Generative Experience (SGE) which, according to Google, is “an early step in transforming the Search experience with generative AI.” In this blog, we will be discussing what SGE is and what it means for SEO.   

What Is SGE?

Google has recently announced a new feature that is coming to the SERPs, this is called Search Generative Experience (SGE) and it uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to organise web results in a new way in order to help users to get more from their search. With SGE, users on Google will be able to: 

• ➡️Ask new, more in depth questions that search could not answer before 
• ➡️Ask follow up questions to Google in a conversational mode 
• ➡️Gain information about a topic quickly with links to relevant results in order to explore the topic further 
• ➡️Get more done easily, for example generate creative ideas in Search
• ➡️Shop for products more easily

Google’s generative AI is designed to to simplify complex search tasks and provide overview snapshots of search queries. SGE will be able to answer more detailed search queries and will also enhance the online shopping experience for users. 

What Will The Google Search Generative Experience Look Like? 

The new Google SGE will likely display an AI generated answer above the search results. The answer will be labelled as generative AI and it will provide an answer to the search query. 

The answer will be in a box and it will provide links to the websites that it has used to generate the answer, users will then be able to click on these sites in order to find out more about the topic. Below the AI answer, there will also be an option to ask a follow up question to gain more information. 

Source: Google

How SGE Works 

Google will be using generative AI which is an extremely powerful tool that can generate human-like content. In Google’s search, they will be using generative AI in order to provide useful information to users more easily and it will provide a more comprehensive overview to complex queries. 

1. Firstly, Google will analyse the user’s search query; they will understand the intent of the query and use keywords to understand what the user wants to find out. 
2. When appropriate, Google will then use its AI to scan the web for relevant websites that will help to answer the query. When it is scanning the web, it will be looking at the content on websites and the number of high quality links that are pointing towards the website. 
3. Google’s AI will then generate a summary of the websites, this will help users get an overview and will serve as a “jumping-off point”, Google will also include links to the websites that it has used to gain the information so that users are able to find out more information if they wish. The summary will be displayed in a conversational format, making it easier for users to gain information and they will also be able to ask follow up questions which Google’s AI will answer.

Search Generative Experience is designed to help users search more easily; it can help to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and get things done more easily. Instead of asking Google a few different questions to get the answer you are looking for, you will now be able to ask one long question and it should provide you with all the information that you need in one place. 

Generative AI Shopping Experience

Google is also using AI to help users shop. According to Google, “With generative AI in Search, we can help you understand the full picture when you’re shopping, making even the most considered and complex purchase decisions faster and much easier.” 

The new generative AI shopping experience is built on Google’s shopping graph, which is a machine learning powered, real time data set of the world’s products and sellers. It stores billions of product listings and specific information about those products. 

With the AI shopping experience, when you are searching for a product on Google, you will be provided with a snapshot of noteworthy factors that you should consider when purchasing the product and it will also provide you with product descriptions that include relevant and up to date reviews, prices and product images. 

For example, if you are searching “Bluetooth speaker for a pool party”, Google’s generative AI will provide you with important considerations for that product, like, is it water resistant or does it have a good battery life. It will also provide you with a range of products to choose from with product descriptions, prices and reviews, making it extremely easy to find the perfect product that you are looking for!

Source: Google

Known Limitations Of SGE 

Google’s Search Generative Experience is currently in the experimental stage, and whilst it is built with a range of protections, there are some known limitations. Whilst Google have been testing SGE, they have noticed some of the following limitations, however they have said that in many cases they have already made improvements and they expect to make further progress as SGE develops. Some of the limitations currently are: 

• ➡️Misinterpretation during corroboration – there have been some instances where SGE has identified the correct information in order to form its snapshot, however there has been a slight misinterpretation of the language which has, in turn, changed the meaning of the output.
• ➡️Hallucination – SGE may sometimes misinterpret facts or identify insights inaccurately. 
• ➡️Bias – SGE is trained to corroborate responses with high quality resources, these high quality resources are results that are highly ranked, and it may therefore show a snapshot that reflects a smaller range of perspectives than what is available on the internet. Therefore, potentially reflecting biases in the results.
• ➡️Opinionated content implying persona – SGE is designed to reflect a neutral tone when it is generating output, however there may be instances where the output that it is providing reflects opinions that exist on the internet, potentially giving the impression that the model is displaying a persona.
• ➡️Duplication or contradiction with existing search features – SGE is integrated into search alongside other results, and because of this, it is possible for the output of SGE to contradict the information from other results. This is because SGE is representing a perspective that it has gained from a range of results, whereas featured snippets, for example, will only be highlighting the perspective from one single source. 

How SGE Will Impact SEO

The integration of generative AI in Google’s search is a significant change that has the potential to impact SEO in a number of ways. SGE will take the top position in the SERPs which can be unnerving to hear if you work in SEO, however, Google’s generative AI, SGE, will be using information from websites to provide the snapshot of information and Google will be providing links to relevant websites. So, if Google provides a link to your website in their SGE snapshot, this could be great for your website and could even provide you with more organic traffic. 

So, how do you get SGE to provide a link to your website? Well, it is important that your website is optimised for SGE, below are some of the considerations that you need to consider:

• ➡️Content – with generative AI, Google will likely be favouring websites that have high quality and in depth content. SGE will be using websites to provide information to users and it will more than likely use websites that provide high quality content that provides in depth information that it will then be able to synthesise into a snapshot on the search results. This means that websites that offer in depth, valuable content will likely be favoured and thin content, which Google already doesn’t like, will likely get penalised even further! In terms of SEO, it is therefore extremely important to provide high quality content across your website so that Google can use it for SGE. Plus, if Google is using the content on your website, they may include a link to your website, and this will be great for SEO if it is sitting at the very top of the SERPs. 
• ➡️User experience – user experience will also be key. As SGE will offer the ability to ask follow up questions, it is important that your site offers an excellent user experience with easy navigation. If Google is providing a link to your website, it is important that the user experience, when they land on your website, is optimal as this could lead to users spending more time on your website. Another reason as to why it is important to have great user experience is for Google; if users are asking a follow up question and your site has the answer and it is easily accessible for Google to find, they may suggest viewing your site to gain more information on a related topic and this will provide more traffic to your website.   
• ➡️Relevance – making sure that the information on your website is relevant and up to date is crucial. Google’s generative AI will be providing users with useful information and they will want to ensure that the information is correct. By updating the content on your website, it will help to ensure that your website is being seen as relevant and up to date. 

Google’s Search Generative Experience is a very different search experience from what we have seen before, however Google is going to be linking to websites with the goal of driving traffic to websites. Google stated “As we bring generative AI into Search, we’re committed to continue sending valuable traffic to sites across the web.” 

Whilst these generative AI changes that are coming to Google search may seem daunting, it is important to remember that SGE is in the early stages of development and it is expected that Google will listen to all feedback and recommendations and adjust SGE accordingly before fully launching it on Google. 

As an SEO professional, it is important to keep up to date with any developments that arise with SGE, as with any other updates in SEO (we all know that there are a lot), it is important to understand the implications that will come with generative AI and be prepared to adapt your SEO strategy accordingly. With the introduction of generative AI into Google Search, it is important to remember that a successful SEO strategy will still be about providing useful information and content to users, and this will not be changing any time soon. 

Recently, Universal Analytics has been transitioning into GA4 and from 1st July 2023, you will no longer be able to collect data with Universal Analytics. If you work in SEO, then I’m sure you are aware that Universal Analytics uses goals to track conversions, whereas GA4 uses events which can be marked as conversions. In this blog, we will be discussing how to set up conversion tracking in GA4 and the different types of conversion tracking that you can set up in GA4. 

About GA4 Conversions 

According to Google “A conversion is any user action that’s valuable to your business; for example, a user purchasing from your store or subscribing to your newsletter are examples of common conversions.” 

A conversion in GA4 is what you consider to be an important action that you want your users to complete on your website. Any action or engagement that happens on your website can be tracked in GA4 as a conversion event. Examples of these events can include: 

• ➡️Scroll depth 
• ➡️Form submissions 
• ➡️Clicks 

You are also able to custom create events in your GA4 account to ensure that you are tracking any conversions that are important for your business. 

In GA4, conversion tracking is achieved by setting up conversion events; these are automatically collected, recommended, or custom events and any of these can be marked as a conversion. By setting up conversions in your GA4 account, you will be able to see the actions that are most important to your business by using the Acquisition, Engagement, and Advertising reports. This will allow you to then optimise your website for SEO purposes. 

Tracking your conversions will let you see the total number of times that important actions have taken place on your website, and with custom events, you are able to track whatever is important specifically for your website. GA4 uses a flexible data model and this will allow you to send a wide variety of information to your reports. And once you have your events in GA4, you can easily track these events as conversions. 

How Is Conversion Tracking In GA4 Different From Universal Analytics? 

Google states that “In Universal Analytics, you measure conversions by setting up goals and e-commerce transactions. In Google Analytics 4, there is no distinction between goals and ecommerce; you measure all conversions via GA4 events.” The events in GA4 will be triggered when a user interacts with your website. 

Conversions were known as goals in Universal Analytics and both are ways of tracking user interactions that are very valuable to your business, however, there is alot to like about conversion events in GA4; they are easy to set up, you are allowed up to 30 conversion events per property and they offer a lot of flexibility in what you are able to track as a conversion event. 

Below, we will discuss the different ways to set up conversions within GA4. 

Toggling Existing Events As Conversions 

In order to mark an existing event as a conversion, go to the Events page and this will list all of the existing events that are being collected on your site, to mark these events as conversions, you can simply click on the toggle on the right hand side of the page under ‘Mark as conversion’. 

Once you have clicked this toggle, you can go to the Conversions page and your new conversions will be listed there. 

Creating Custom Events To Use As Conversions 

If you want to create a custom event to use as a conversion, you will firstly need to make sure you have administrator permission for the GA4 property, otherwise, you will not be able to create new events or mark any conversions. If you do have administrator permissions, you can follow the below steps in order to create custom events to use as conversions: 

1. Go to Configure – Events and click Create Event 
2. Click create 
3. Enter a custom event name (for example sign_up, page_view or generate_lead)

4. You then need to add some conditions, when the conditions have all been met, your event will then trigger. The first condition is “event_name equals page_view” (the value can be changed depending on the condition, for example, if it was based on a click, it would be “event_name equals click”

5. Click Add Condition, the second condition will indicate that the event should only trigger for a specific page. This condition should be “page_location – contains – part of the URL” for example “page_location contains /contact/thank-you”

6. Select ‘Copy parameters from the source event’

7. Click Create in the top right-hand corner 

You have now created your custom event, however it may take up to 24 hours for it to appear on your events page meaning you will not be able to toggle it as a conversion yet, however there is another way to add this new event to your conversions. 

1. Go to Configure – Conversions 
2. Click New conversion event 
3. In the New event name box, enter the name of the custom event that you created earlier, for example “generate_lead” 
4. Click Save 

Your custom event will now be tracking any conversions in your GA4 property!

Different Types Of Conversions You Can Track In GA4 

In Google Analytics 4, there are many conversions that can be tracked in order to gain valuable insights into user behaviour and website performance. GA4 uses a flexible model with a wide range of tracking capabilities, therefore allowing businesses and websites to measure and track many different types of conversions across both websites and apps. 

Within GA4, there are micro and macro conversions – micro conversions measure the important steps that lead to completing a macro conversion. A macro conversion measures important interactions that will directly impact the success of your business. 

Examples of micro conversions: 

• ➡️Subscribing to a newsletter 
• ➡️Scrolling to 90% of a blog post or article 
• ➡️Completing a registration form 

Examples of macro conversions: 

• ➡️Registering for a service 
• ➡️Purchasing a product

As already discussed, GA4 is extremely flexible and allows businesses to track conversions that are valuable to their business. By providing the ability to track automatically collected, recommended and custom events as conversions, it is giving businesses and websites the ability to track and measure conversions that align with specific goals and objectives and therefore giving insight into how to improve their website. GA4 provides comprehensive tracking capabilities allowing businesses to gain deep insights into its customers’ user journey. 

Why Is Conversion Tracking Important For SEO?

Now that you have set up your conversions, you will be able to look at your conversion data in GA4 reports. By going to Reports – Engagement – Conversions, you will be able to see your conversion data over time. 

The Conversions report in GA4 will show you which conversion actions that you have are most common, how many users are performing each action and how much revenue is associated with each action. 

By tracking conversions in GA4, it can help you to gather meaningful data and insights into how your users are behaving on your website. By tracking the actions that are most valuable to your business, you will be able to then optimise your website for SEO purposes which can help to improve user experience and engagement. Conversions are very valuable to your business and tracking your conversions will help you to connect your SEO and sales processes. 

In GA4, you will be able to customise your conversion report and this will give you more insight into what your organic visitors are doing on your website and what is driving sales. By seeing the users conversions, you are able to determine the user journey and see which areas of your website need optimising for SEO. 

Summary 

Conversion tracking in GA4 can be extremely useful for SEO purposes, by tracking actions that are important to your business such as scroll tracking, page views and clicks, you are able to see how users are interacting with your website and this will then help to understand where to optimise the website and create a better user experience. By tracking these actions, you are able to better support SEO performance. 

In this blog, we have discussed how to mark events as conversions and how to create custom events and mark those as conversions. By following these steps in your GA4 property, you will be able to start tracking the actions that are important to your business and optimise your website accordingly. 

On-page SEO, sometimes referred to as on-site SEO, refers to the practice of optimising your website in order for it to improve your user’s experience, rank higher in the SERPs and to gain more organic traffic. On-page SEO can include many different aspects including updating content, updating the structure of your page, using internal links and many more. When you are optimising your on-page SEO, you are aiming to improve the user experience by providing valuable and relevant content to your visitors, in addition to improving the page’s relevance and salience and showcasing your expertise on a given topic. By improving your on-page SEO, it will help to improve your visibility and traffic. In this blog, we will be discussing tips that you can use to improve your on-page SEO. 

What Is On-Page SEO?  

On-page SEO is an extremely important aspect of search engine optimisation and it involves optimising your web pages in order to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) so that you can attract more traffic to your website. Unlike off-page SEO, which involves external factors such as gaining backlinks into your website, on-page SEO is about making improvements directly on your website. There are many elements of on-page SEO that can help you to improve your rankings by creating a better user experience. 

Why Is On-Page SEO So Important?

Improving your on-page SEO is incredibly important because it will help to improve search visibility and increase the amount of traffic to your website. According to a study by Backlinko who analysed the click through rate data across 1,312,881 pages and 12,166,560 search queries, it found that the website in position 1 in Google’s organic search results has an average click through rate of 27.6%, this was the highest click through rate by far, a sharp drop off then started on the 2nd page of the results. 

Source: Backlinko

This shows that being on the first page of the SERPs will help you to gain more traffic. Another statistic that further implies this, is that only 0.63% of Google searchers clicked on a link from the second page of the SERPs.

Source: Backlinko

The figures and statistics above show the importance of improving your website’s rankings, and improving your on-page SEO will play a key role in helping Google to recognise what your website is about and the value of it, therefore putting you in a better position to rank. So, now that we know the importance of improving on-page SEO for your website, let’s dive into how you can do this. 

1. Review the salience and relevance of the content on your website

In the world of SEO, the content that is on your website is extremely important. The content is what drives traffic to your website, what engages your users and what can also convert users into customers. It is therefore essential to regularly review the salience and relevance of the content on your website. 

Salience refers to how relevant the content on your website is, relating to your target audience. If the content on your website is not relevant to your users, they will be unlikely to engage with it or even visit your website in the first place. It is therefore important to regularly ensure that the salience of your content is to a high level to ensure you are providing users with the most relevant helpful content. It is also important to make sure that your content aligns with what users are searching for because, if your content is not relevant to keywords that users are searching for in Google, it is unlikely that your website will appear in the SERPs, therefore meaning that you could be missing out on a significant amount of organic traffic. 

By regularly reviewing the salience and relevance of the content on your website, you will be able to identify gaps that you have within your content and then make any necessary changes and amendments. By updating your content, you will be able to improve the salience of your content and make it more useful to users, and more visible in the SERPs.

In order to review the salience of the content on your website, you can either do it manually or with a range of tools that are available on the web. These tools use machine learning powered Natural Language Understanding technology and they will measure the relevance of your content. They can also see how relevant your landing pages are for your target keywords and you can measure the impact of any content changes by using a text comparison tool to understand how any changes that you have made to your content have impacted its relevance. 

Using salience tools will allow you to see how relevant your content is, and because they use machine learning, they will also be able to show the way that search engines are understanding your content. By seeing the relevance of your content, you are able to know, as a website owner, if the content on your website is relevant to your target audience, you will then be able to improve your content and see how the salience has improved. Once you have reviewed the content, you will be able to come up with a content strategy which will help to improve user experience, improve rankings and increase the traffic to your website. 

2. Optimise your on-site content for SEO

Once you have reviewed the salience and relevance of your content, it is now time to improve the content on your website. Updating the content on your website can have many benefits, it can improve the users overall experience, by creating high quality content, you will be providing users with the information that they want. Another benefit is that you will be able to target your specific keywords by including them in your content, meaning that you will increase your likelihood of being featured highly in the SERPs and therefore will likely increase your organic traffic, therefore also increasing your online visibility. If you are creating high quality content for your users, it is more likely that Google will place your website higher up on the SERP. So, how do you create this high quality content? 

Firstly, you need to make sure that you are targeting your keywords, it is important to carry out keyword research so that you know what users are searching for, you then need to include these keywords naturally within your content so that Google knows what your web page is about. It is also important to include words that are semantically related to your targeted keywords to improve the salience of your page. You also need to ensure that the content is valuable and engaging for your users, this can be done by using subheadings, bullet points, short paragraphs and other formatting techniques to make sure that the content is easily readable for the users. 

Overall, your content should be helpful for your users, Google’s helpful content update states that if content doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations, it will not perform as well. It is therefore extremely important that your content is predominantly made for your users, as this is the best way to improve your rankings and therefore increase your visibility. According to Google “People-first content creators focus on creating satisfying content, while also utilising SEO best practices to bring searchers additional value.” 

3. Review the structure of your webpage 

Reviewing the structure and layout of your webpage is crucial for user experience, and therefore is crucial for SEO. The structure of your webpage refers to how your content is organised and presented on your page. Having a well structured web page can improve your user’s experience and can make it easier for those users to navigate through your website and find the information that they are looking for. This can also be beneficial for search engines, as having a well structured website will make it easier to crawl your web pages and find the important information. The layout of your website therefore matters if you want to ensure that you are gaining a high level of traffic from organic searches. 

When you are reviewing the structure of your web pages there are certain things you can do to improve user experience and engagement: 

• ➡️Use headings and subheadings 
• ➡️Put the most important information at the top of the page 
• ➡️Include features such as bullet points and infographics 
• ➡️Include images throughout the page 
• ➡️Include internal links and a call to action if relevant
• ➡️Include reviews to promote E-E-A-T signals 

By ensuring that you are including these bullet points, it will make sure that your website is user friendly, by providing clear headings and subheadings, it will indicate to users what they are going to find on the page. By optimising your website so that it is user friendly, it is likely that your user engagement will increase, you can boost your traffic and potentially convert more leads. Additionally, by creating a better user experience on your website, you can create a positive brand image and create return users. Making sure that you are reviewing the structure of your webpage is therefore extremely important and should be an integral part of your SEO strategy. 

4. Create a strong internal linking profile

Another aspect of improving your on-page SEO is to create a strong internal linking profile. An internal link is any link that is pointing from one page on your website to another page on your website. Internal linking can help to improve the user experience as it can make it easier for users to navigate through your website and find the information that they are looking for. Additionally, it also helps to distribute link equity throughout your website and establish the importance of particular pages. 

As well as improving the user experience, having a strong internal linking profile can help improve the crawlability and indexability of your website. By linking from one page to another page, you are creating a clear path for search engines to follow when they are crawling and navigating your website. This is extremely important as it will help to ensure that all of your pages are getting crawled, and they are easily discoverable. If search engines can not crawl your pages, they will not be indexed and will therefore not end up in the search results. By having a strong internal linking profile, your pages are more likely to be crawled and indexed so that they can then rank. 

Another benefit of having a strong internal linking profile is that it can help to establish the importance of your web pages. By linking from lower level pages, such as blogs, to higher level pages, you can signal to search engines which pages are the most important and which pages you want to be returning in the SERPs. By sending internal links to the more important pages of your website, you can improve the ranking potential of these pages.  

Overall, internal linking can be extremely impactful for SEO purposes, it can help search engines to crawl and index your pages, and it can help to improve the user experience by making it easier for users to navigate your website. Also, by linking to related pages and content, you are more likely to keep your users engaged and spend more time on your website. 

5. Undertake a competitor analysis 

Undertaking a competitor analysis can be a valuable way to improve your on-page SEO, by researching your main competitors, you will be able to gain inspiration and leverage the competitive landscape to your advantage. 

To conduct a competitor analysis, you should start by identifying your main competitors in the market (ideally ones that are ranking relatively well), you can then analyse their website structure, their content and the keywords that they are targeting. If they are incorporating things into their website that you do not have, this could be something that you can then improve. For example, if they are including related articles and reviews on their page and you are not, this could show that they are portraying better E-E-A-T signals than you and could be a reason as to why they are ranking higher. Or, if they have a lot more useful content and information for their users, it could mean that you need to include more helpful content relating to your topic on your website. 

You can then use NLP tools to evaluate your content against your competitors to understand where they might be outperforming you and where you might need to improve the content on your website.

By undertaking a competitor analysis, you are able to continuously improve your on-page SEO and stay ahead of your competitors. But keep in mind that whilst it is important to learn from your competitors, it is just as important to keep your brand values and USPs at the forefront of your SEO strategy. You should use the insights that you have gained from the competitor analysis to improve your on-page SEO whilst ensuring that your website is remaining authentic to your brand. 

Summary 

When improving your on-page SEO, you will be optimising your web pages in order to improve user experience, and to increase your visibility and traffic. Improving your on-page SEO can involve various elements including optimising your page structure, internal linking profile and content, all of these improvements will help to make your website more user friendly and will therefore have an impact on the websites rankings and visibility. 

To find out more about how you can improve your on-page SEO or for help with implementing these improvements, get in touch today!

If you are working within the world of SEO then you are probably very familiar with Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform. It was first introduced in October 2022 and on 1st July 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer process data, all new data will be processed through GA4.

Google states that “GA4 is a new kind of property designed for the future of measurement” and it has several new features and improvements compared to Universal Analytics. GA4 is an essential tool for monitoring website traffic and user behaviour and provides valuable insights that can help businesses to optimise their online presence. In this blog, we will be discussing and exploring five great features of GA4 that can benefit Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

1. Enhanced Measurement

Enhanced measurement is one of the many great features of GA4 that allows you to collect more out of the box data. It automatically tracks events and lets you measure interactions with your content by enabling events in the Google Analytics interface, and you do not have to make any changes to your code, as soon as you enable the options in your GA4 interface, your Google Analytics tag will start sending these events straight away. 

If you go to Admin, then Data Streams and select the web data stream, you will be able to see a section called Enhanced measurement and this will show you all of the events that you have set up for your website. You can then filter these based on your specific website needs. 

Enhanced measurement is a great feature of GA4 that can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes. By using the enhanced measurement feature, website owners can effectively track user engagement, such as video engagement and scroll tracking, this feature can then help businesses to optimise their website and create a better user experience, which is therefore supporting SEO performance. 

Below are the events that can be measured in GA4:

• ➡️Page views – this event is triggered each time the page loads of the browser history state is changed by the active site. This event is collected automatically and cannot be turned off in GA4. 
• ➡️Scrolls – this event is triggered when a user scrolls down more than 90% of the page for the first time.
• ➡️Outbound clicks – this event is triggered each time a user clicks a link that is leading away from the current domain.
• ➡️Site search – this event is triggered each time a user is presented with a search results page, as indicated by the presence of a URL query parameter, this enables you to see how users are searching your site. It lets you understand the extent to which users are using your site’s search function, which search terms they entered and how effectively the search results gave the user a deeper site engagement. 
• ➡️Video engagement – for videos that are embedded within your website that have JS API support enabled, when the video starts playing, when the video progresses past 10%, 25%, 50% and 75% duration time and when the video ends will all be triggered in GA4. 
• ➡️File downloads – this event will be triggered when a user clicks to a file which contains a common file extension (these include documents, text, executable, presentation, compressed file, video and audio). 
• ➡️Form interactions – this event will be triggered for two occasions – form_start will be triggered the first time a user interacts with a form in a session and form_submit will be triggered when the user submits a form.  

One of the great benefits of enhanced measurement is the ability to track scroll tracking, which can give website owners insights into how users are engaging with their content. By measuring if a user is scrolling to over 90% of their web page, website owners can use this data to understand which sections of the content on their website are more engaging and therefore optimise their content accordingly. This data can be used to see how many users are scrolling to the bottom of the page and can therefore identify any areas where content needs improvement and can help businesses create content that is providing a better user experience. This can also help to ensure that users are not missing any key information on the page and can help to inform the placement of conversion actions. 

Another great feature of enhanced measurement is video engagement tracking, this feature allows website owners and businesses to measure how users are engaging with the video content that is embedded within their site. By tracking play rate, engagement rate and completion rate, you are able to determine which videos on your website are most engaging for users and then optimise your video content to improve user engagement and retention on your site. 

Overall, the enhanced measurement feature in GA4 provides website owners with a better understanding of user engagement across their site which will therefore allow you to devise a stronger SEO strategy by optimising your website based on data from your real users. By tracking user behaviour more accurately and precisely, you are able to make informed decisions about your content and web page and create an overall better user experience for your visitors. This can ultimately lead to more traffic, better engagement and therefore, better SEO results.  

2. Better cross-device tracking  

In GA4, cross-device tracking is a feature that allows you to track your users’ interactions with your website across different devices. This means that as website owners, you are able to better understand how users are interacting with your website and what devices they are using. This feature provides website owners with data that gives valuable insights that can help to optimise website design and content for different devices. 

GA4 can measure activity across platforms with User-ID and this feature lets you provide your users with your own identifiers so that you can connect their behaviour across different sessions and on multiple devices and platforms. GA4 will then interpret each user ID as a separate user and can provide you with more accurate user counts and a more holistic story about a user’s relationship with your business. When a user logs into your website, for example, GA4 will track and combine the user’s behaviour across all of their devices, therefore giving website owners a more complete picture of how individual users are interacting with their website. 

Another feature that GA4 uses for cross-device tracking is Google signals, Google signals are session data from sites and apps that Google associates with users who have signed into their Google account. This data that is provided from GA4 enables cross-device reporting, remarketing and conversion export. For example, if a user started their buying process on their laptop and then completed their purchase on their mobile device logged into the same Google account, GA4 tracking would see this as one user. 

For SEO purposes, better cross-device tracking can provide website owners with valuable insights into how users are interacting with their website, regardless of the device that they are using. This is providing you with a more complete picture of your user’s behaviour and by tracking the types of devices that they are using and how they move between them will allow you to see the full picture rather than just the interactions on one device. This can then help you to understand your users’ behaviour and optimise your website accordingly. 

As well as understanding your users’ behaviours, cross-device tracking can also help website owners identify any areas of their website that are not performing well on different devices. By seeing how users are engaging with your website on different devices, you are able to optimise your website to provide a better user experience based on what devices users are using your website through. For example, if most of your users are converting on mobile devices rather than desktop, it is extremely important to optimise your website so that it is mobile friendly. 

Overall, cross-device tracking is an extremely important feature in GA4 for SEO because by understanding how users interact with your website across different devices, website owners can optimise their website design and content to provide a better user experience on all devices and this could potentially lead to more traffic and better engagement which will in turn help your website rank highly. 

3. Creating custom reports 

Another of the many great features of GA4 is that you can customise detail reports to make them more relevant to your business. 

To create a new detail report, from the left hand menu click Reports, then Library (if you don’t see Library, it means that you do not have permission to create a report as you have to be an editor or an administrator), then click Create new report, Create detail report. You can then either create a blank report or start from a template, then click save. 

When you are customising a detail report, you are able to: 

• ➡️Change the metrics
• ➡️Change the charts
• ➡️Save a filter to the report 
• ➡️Create a summary card
• ➡️Link or unlink the report 
• ➡️Delete the report   

Each property in GA4 can have up to 150 custom reports and these can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes. By customising a detail report in GA4, businesses are able to focus on the metrics that are most important and most impactful for their business. They are then easily able to gain accurate insights into their users’ behaviours and identify where the website needs improving in order to boost their SEO. 

Creating a customised report can also help website owners to measure and track the success of their SEO efforts, by tracking specific metrics in one report, it will be very clear to see any changes that have occurred in user behaviour and this will show the impact that their SEO practices have been having over time. This also allows you to drill down to align your reporting with your client’s business goals, which is important to proving a strong ROI on your SEO campaigns.  

4. Behavioural modelling for consent mode

Another great feature of Google Analytics 4 is that it is able to interpret data without solely relying on cookies. Cookies are small text files that are sent to your browser by the website that you visit in order to collect information about their website behaviour. However, with increasing privacy concerns, there are more users that are now blocking cookies and this is making it difficult for website owners to collect data about their users. 

GA4 has incorporated a feature called behavioural modelling for consent mode and this uses machine learning to model the behaviour of any users who have declined cookies. This data will be based on the behaviour of any similar users who have accepted analytics cookies. This modelled data allows you to gain useful insights about how your users are interacting with your website while still respecting their privacy. 

There are many benefits of behavioural modelling for consent mode for SEO, firstly, by predicting how users would behave if they had given their consent, website owners are able to gain insights into their users’ behaviour that would have otherwise been lost due to data protection regulations. This means that you are able to get a complete overview of user behaviour and then tailor your SEO strategy accordingly. 

The insights that you will be able to gain from GA4 due to behaviour modelling can be used to optimise your website based on your customers as a whole. By gaining insight on all of your customers, you are able to understand more accurate insights which can then be used to create a website that has improved user experience. 

5. Advanced Analysis reports 

The final feature of GA4 that we will be discussing is explorations. Explorations is a collection of advanced techniques that are much more detailed than standard reports and they will help you to uncover deeper insights regarding your customers behaviour. 

To access explorations, click Explore on the left hand navigation of your GA4 property. 

The default reports in Google Analytics will help you to monitor your key business metrics, however explorations will give you access to data and analytical techniques that are not available in those standard reports. You can use explorations as a tool that will allow you to explore your data in depth and answer complex questions about it. Once you have created an exploration there are many aspects that you can add/ change to provide in depth insights:

• ➡️Add techniques – techniques will control the way in which the data is analysed, you are able to add tabs with many different techniques 
• ➡️Add dimensions, metrics and segments to variables – the term variable refers to the dimensions, metrics and segments that come from your Google Analytics account. You are able to add more variables to make them available for use and to preload the data for faster visualisation 
• ➡️Adjust the time frame – by default GA4 properties retain 2 months of data, you are able to adjust this so that you can see either a wider or smaller time frame
• ➡️Share and export your exploration – when you create an exploration, you are able to share your insights with colleagues so that they can also view the insights

The explorations feature is an extremely powerful tool that can have great benefits for allowing you to improve your website’s SEO. One of the main benefits of using this feature is that it allows you to perform ad-hoc analysis on your website data. This means that you are able to quickly and easily explore your data and answer specific questions or identify patterns and trends in your users’ behaviours. 

Another benefit of explorations is that you are able to create custom metrics and dimensions which can be extremely useful for tracking your organic traffic for SEO. For example, you can create a custom metric that measures the engagement level of your users or you can create a custom dimension that tracks the organic performance of specific landing pages on your website. By creating custom dimensions and metrics that are specific to your website, you are able to more easily and accurately gain insights into your website’s performance and from this you can identify any opportunities to improve your SEO performance. 

Summary 

Universal Analytics changing to GA4 may be daunting however, there are many great new features that are coming with this change. By utilising GA4, you will be able to track and monitor your website and users and specifically for SEO, it will give great insights into your users’ behaviours. This will then allow you to optimise your website for SEO purposes which can help to improve user experience for your visitors and therefore increase your traffic, improve website visibility and lead to higher rankings in the search engine. It is therefore very important to understand GA4 and how it can help you to monitor and form your SEO strategy. 

On Wednesday 19th April, the SEO team from Cedarwood Digital travelled down south to attend BrightonSEO – the world’s largest search marketing conference, and we had a great time learning all things SEO. One of the sentences that I found extremely interesting was by Claudia Higgins who said that SEO is like “looking through a dark house with a torch”. SEO is an extremely vast field and it encompasses a wide range of topics, techniques and strategies. 

Here are the biggest takeaways that I took from the 2 days at BrightonSEO: 

The Value of Featured Snippets 

Featured snippets, also known as “Position #0” results, are a type of search result that appear at the top of the SERP and they provide a response to certain queries. Niki Mosier did a talk on the value of featured snippets and there are many benefits that can come by having featured snippets on the SERP:

• ➡️Click through rate increases
• ➡️It is a quick win 
• ➡️Increased share of voice
• ➡️Increased authority 
• ➡️Brand awareness 
• ➡️Increased direct traffic – users are more familiar with the brand 

During the talk, Niki shared some data surrounding featured snippets which show just how much of an impact they can have:

• ➡️19% of the SERPs include featured snippets 
• ➡️If there is a featured snippet, 50% of the mobile screen will be covered with that featured snippet 
• ➡️70% of featured snippets were published no longer than 2-3 years ago

She also shared how you should build a featured snippet strategy which is extremely important as the value for your business is so high. 

• ➡️Building a featured snippet starts with keyword research, you should be carrying out research for keywords that you are already ranking in positions 2-5 for and keywords that have a high search volume – if you are already ranking highly, you are more likely to have a featured snippet on the SERP
• ➡️You should be focussing on question searches as the majority of featured snippets start with the 6 W’s and 70% of featured snippets are “Why” questions
• ➡️You should always use SEO best practices, keeping the user intent as the most important aspect
• ➡️Use schema markup – 66% of featured snippets use schema markup 
• ➡️Engagement – make sure that there is high engagement surrounding the topic
• ➡️Format your content – use header tags and lists, and make sure it is easily readable 
• ➡️Ask and answer early within the content 
• ➡️Use images within your content as they do show up in featured snippets

The talk by Niki was extremely insightful and showed just how valuable featured snippets are – they can increase a website’s visibility, traffic and credibility. When a website’s content appears as a featured snippet, it can drive more clicks and traffic to the website. Additionally, it can establish the website as an authoritative source of information, which can help to build trust with the users and improve the website’s brand visibility. To optimise your website for featured snippets, it is important to follow Niki’s tips and to provide high-quality content that directly answers common queries,this can have many benefits for websites. 

Internal Linking 

Another great talk was by Kristina Azzarenko and she showcased all of the smart internal linking tricks that big brands are using and how these tricks can be used by all sized businesses and online stores and why they are so important. 

The role of internal links are to determine the importance of the page that the internal link is pointing to, they also help Googlebot discover and re-discover website pages and index them timely. Internal links also improve user experience and provide context about what your content is about via anchor text. Here are the steps that were recommended from the talk: 

• ➡️Break down your pages in templates 
• ➡️Build logical relationships between these page templates
• ➡️Create link blocks for scalability 
• ➡️Make sure your internal links are pointing to the canonical URLs 
• ➡️Make sure your internal links are pointing to the 200 HTTP pages 

Internal linking is an essential aspect of SEO and if implemented correctly throughout your website, it can help Google understand the structure of your website and the relationship between different pages. As discussed in this talk, this can help search engines determine which pages on your website are most important and this can help to boost visibility of these important pages in the SERPs. Overall, the talk showed just how important internal linking is for online businesses and that it should be incorporated into all effective SEO strategies. 

GA4

As we all know, Universal Analytics is soon changing to GA4 and the 1st July 2023 is creeping up on us quickly, so it was great to hear a talk by Nitesh Sharoff talking about hacking GA4 for SEO. Nitesh gave 8 great tips for using GA4 for SEO purposes: 

1. Enable search console report collections within GA4 
2. Customise your GA4 navigation to suit the needs of your business 
3. Enrich data with event parameters 
4. Setup custom alerts for traffic changes within GA4
5. Track speed metrics with Google Tag Manager 
6. Monitor your conversions in your content funnel with automated events 
7. Improve your channel groupings – this has improved for organic search 
8. Use free GA4 exports to play with your data 

GA4 is quite daunting for a lot of us, but the talk from Nitesh showed that there are alot of improvements coming with the new analytics platform that can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes and by utilising these eight tips, GA4 will enable you to create a successful SEO strategy and will help to inform you on how you can optimise your website to improve user experience.  

Shelter Hall

During our time in Brighton, we heard many insightful talks about SEO that were all extremely helpful and informative, we also visited a few places for some amazing food, one being Shelter Hall. If you are ever in Brighton, I would definitely recommend it, the food and drinks were amazing, and I would highly recommend the Pizza, it was extremely tasty! 

E-E-A-T contributes to a high quality web page, which is extremely important for Google and therefore extremely important for SEO. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust and in terms of Google, these are the elements that they think make a high quality web page and in order to rank and gain organic traffic, your web page needs to demonstrate all four of these factors. 

What is E-E-A-T?

If you have a website, then I’m sure you have heard of E-A-T, but in 2022, Google’s Search Quality Raters added an extra E for Experience. So E-A-T is now E-E-A-T which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. 

E-E-A-T is a set of guidelines used by Google’s Search Quality Raters to ensure search results are relevant, useful and trustworthy for the users. Updating E-A-T to E-E-A-T helps Google to maintain the quality of their search results. By demonstrating experience, expertise, authority and trust, you are improving the quality of your website which is extremely important for Google. So, by incorporating E-E-A-T and improving the quality of your website, you are creating a better user experience which is what Google is looking for so this could lead to higher rankings and a more engaged audience.  

Let’s take a closer look at what the acronym E-E-A-T actually means for SEO and how it will impact your web page. 

Experience 

As we have discussed. The new “E” that stands for experience was rolled out in 2022 and this means that Google wants to see if the content that has been written demonstrates that it was produced with some degree of experience. For example, having actually used a product, or having actually visited a place. Google realises that there are some situations when users are searching and the most valuable content is content that has been produced by someone who has first hand experience on the topic that they are writing about. Google wants valuable experience to be included in your content because it is making sure that the content on the search engine is reliable and useful so that the results on the search engine are providing searchers with what they are looking for. 

Expertise 

The second “E” stands for expertise and this refers to the level of knowledge and skills that the author of the website has in the subject matter they are presenting on the web page. The level of expertise can be demonstrated through the quality of the content that has been written by the author. The depth of the information that has been provided by the author, the use of authoritative sources and the author’s credentials and qualifications can all factor into the expertise of the web page. In order to establish expertise, the author and the website must demonstrate a high level of knowledge and understanding of the topic that they are presenting. This can help to build trust with the user and will establish the author or website as a credible source of information in their specific field. 

Authority 

The “A” in E-E-A-T stands for authority and this refers to the level of authority and reputation that the author or website has in the subject matter that they are presenting. The level of authoritativeness of a page can also be demonstrated by the quality and depth of the content and the author’s credentials but the amount of engagement and shares the content has received can also demonstrate authoritativeness. Any signals that indicate that the content is widely respected and trusted in the field will prove authoritativeness. For example, if a medical website is written by a team of qualified doctors and the content is cited from other reputable medical websites, it will be considered an authoritative web page. 

Trust 

The “T” in E-E-A-T stands for trust and it is key for Google to understand whether your website is trustworthy for its users. The trustworthiness of a page refers to the level of reliability, accuracy and transparency that the content on the website has. The level of trustworthiness on a website can be demonstrated through various factors such as the use of reputable sources, gaining great backlinks and reviews. By establishing trustworthiness, the author or website can build trust with the user and can establish themselves as a credible and reliable source in their specific field. 

Why is E-E-A-T important? 

When it comes to E-E-A-T, all areas are extremely important, but in the search quality rater guidelines, Google regards trust as the most important member of the E-E-A-T family.  

Source: Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines 

Google’s ultimate goal is to provide users with relevant, accurate and trustworthy information. By evaluating the E-E-A-T on your website, Google will be able to determine the quality and credibility of the content on your website and will therefore rank it accordingly. And although E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor for Google like page speed or mobile-friendliness, the concept of E-E-A-T will be used by Google to evaluate the quality and credibility of websites, which they consider to be an extremely important factor of your web page, so will in turn affect the ranking of your web pages because the if the quality of your website is high then it is making for a better overall user experience. 

Google’s quality rater guidelines explicitly state that evaluators should consider E-E-A-T when they are assessing the quality of websites. Pages with a low level of E-E-A-T will be regarded as a low quality page and pages with a high level of E-E-A-T will therefore be regarded as a high quality web page. Pages with high levels of E-E-A-T are more likely to rank well but it is important to remember that this is just one of the many factors that Google uses to determine their search rankings. 

As well as promoting a high quality web page to Google, optimising your E-E-A-T signals will help to improve the user experience on your website. Websites with a high level of E-E-A-T are more likely to engage users and encourage them to spend more time on their website. This can in turn lead to increased traffic, higher engagement and ultimately, a better SEO experience. 

It is therefore extremely important for website owners to focus on improving E-E-A-T signals by producing high-quality content that is based on experience and that is informative, accurate and trustworthy and, by establishing the author’s authoritativeness and trustworthiness in their specific field. 

How to improve E-E-A-T on your website 

Having now discussed the importance of E-E-A-T for SEO, you can see that improving your E-E-A-T can have a big impact on your web page’s rankings because it is directly linked to improving the user experience. So, here are some things you can do to improve the E-E-A-T of your website.

• ➡️ Write high quality content 
• ➡️ Provide accurate information that covers the topic in depth
• ➡️ Include the author’s first hand experience relating to the topic  
• ➡️ Include tips and hacks that demonstrate first hand experience of the subject
• ➡️ Review and update your content regularly 
• ➡️ Cite reputable sources 
• ➡️ Earn backlinks from other reputable sources in the same field 
• ➡️ Include reviews on your website 
• ➡️ Include the author’s credentials and qualifications 
• ➡️ Include an ‘About Us’ section on your website including credentials and qualifications 

By improving these areas, you can improve the E-E-A-T of your website and this can lead to a better user experience for your users, and therefore a higher ranking because Google will see your web pages as more valuable for the users. 

E-E-A-T for YMYL pages

E-E-A-T is especially important for YMYL (your money or your life) web pages, which include content that provides information that could significantly impact a person’s health, finances or safety. Google holds these web pages to a higher standard of quality and accuracy because the information that is included on these pages can have a significant impact on people’s lives. Therefore, Google uses E-E-A-T as a critical factor when they are evaluating these pages. YMYL pages that demonstrate high levels of E-E-A-T are more likely to rank higher in the SERPs because Google knows that the quality of these pages will be extremely high. 

For YMYL content, E-E-A-T is extremely important, Google will expect the authors of these pages to have relevant expertise, education and experience in the specific area that they are providing information on. Additionally, Google will look for authoritative sources to support the YMYL content and the websites must have a high level of trust throughout the website. 

YMYL websites that do not meet the E-E-A-T standards are less likely to rank for these types of queries so it is crucial for these websites to focus on E-E-A-T factors when creating YMYL content to ensure it meets the quality rater standards and provides accurate and reliable information to the users. 

Summary

To summarise, E-E-A-T is an important concept to understand when it comes to SEO. By demonstrating experience, expertise, authority and trust, you can improve the quality of your website and content, which will therefore provide users with helpful content, which in turn can help your website to rank better. 

It is extremely important to optimise your E-E-A-T signals when it comes to SEO because ultimately, providing high quality content is going to improve your users’ experience which is highly important for Google. Hopefully, this blog has helped you to understand E-E-A-T and how you can improve it for your website so that you can create that better user experience.