All posts by : Marcy Jones

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.

Search engines such as Google and Bing crawl billions of pages in order to discover and organise the content that appears on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). They exist to understand content in order to give users on their SERP the most relevant results to answer the questions that users are asking. Understanding how search engines work is crucial for SEO because if your website can not be found then it will not show up on the SERP and users will not be able to find your website. 

Customers are increasingly searching online for products and services and it is now more common for users to access a website through a search engine rather than just searching for a web address. It is therefore important to be ranking highly on the search engine results pages and in order to do this it is important to understand how search engines work so that you can optimise your website for SEO and get ranking on SERPs so that you can increase the amount of visitors to your site. 

What Are Search Engines?

So firstly, let’s look at what a search engine actually is. A search engine is a software program that allows users to find information that they are looking for based on keywords or phrases. They are able to return results extremely quickly by constantly crawling websites and indexing every page that they find. They will then rank these websites based on their algorithms so that when users search for keywords, the most relevant and helpful websites will come up first. 

Webmasters will need to optimise their SEO to help search engines recognise their website as helpful in order for it to rank when users are searching for a particular keyword. 

One of the most popular search engines is Google and it has over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm. The algorithms are an extremely complex system which are used to retrieve data from its search index and deliver the best results for a query instantly. Google uses a combination of algorithms and makes thousands of changes to these algorithms every year. Most of these changes are very small so will go unnoticed, however, Google occasionally rolls out major updates that will significantly impact the SERP, so companies will need to alter their website in order to keep ranking on the SERP. It is important to keep up with all of Google’s algorithm updates so that you can keep your website optimised at all times. Below you will find a list of search ranking updates that Google released in 2022:

Source: Google

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines go through three main stages so that the best search results will be shown on the SERP, these three stages are crawling, indexing and ranking. Unfortunately, not all web pages will make it through each stage. 

Search Engine Crawling:

Crawling is the process of finding out what web pages exist on the web. Google will use automated crawlers, known as spiders, to download text, images and videos from web pages that it has found on the internet. There is no registry of all web pages, so Google has to constantly look for new and updated pages and add them to it’s list of already known web pages, when Google finds a new web page, it is called URL discovery. Google will be able to discover new pages by following links from already known pages or they can be discovered if you submit a list of pages, known as a sitemap, for Google to crawl. 

Google will not only just crawl new URLs but they will also crawl pages that are already known by Google to check for any updates that have been made to the page since they last crawled it. If they detect a change on the page then they will update the page on their index so that search results are up to date when users are searching for information. Google will use their algorithms to determine how often they crawl a page and how many pages on the website will be indexed. It is likely that pages that are often updated and changed will be crawled more frequently than pages that are rarely updated. 

Search Engine Indexing:

After Google has crawled a page, it then tries to understand what the web page is actually about so that they are able to answer users’ queries. Google will analyse text, images and video files on the web page and then store that information in the Google index. The Google Index will contain billions of web pages on thousands of machines so that when a user searches for a query, the web pages are already indexed and they will be able to instantly return those web pages on the SERP. 

The index will include all of the URLs that Google has discovered and indexed, and all of the relevant information about the content of the URLs. This will include the keywords of the page, telling Google what the page is about, the type of content that is included on the page, the freshness of the page – when it was last updated, and the previous user engagement of the page. 

Google will not index all of the URLs that it finds and this can be due to a number of reasons:

• ➡️There could be signs on your web page telling Google not to index a particular page – this is where a noindex tag will be signalled on your web page – this is telling Google not to index this page even if there are links pointing towards it. 
• ➡️Google could deem the page to be of low quality and they will therefore not index the page.
• ➡️The URL could return an error page, for example 404 not found. If this occurs then Google will not index the page. 

If you want your web page to gain organic traffic, then it needs to be indexed by Google, so you need to make sure that you optimise your web page for SEO and ensure that none of the above things that we have talked about are happening. We will go into more detail about how to make your web pages more search engine friendly below. 

Search Engine Ranking:

When a user searches for a keyword on Google, Google will look through their index for content that is relevant to that keyword in the hope that they will answer the user’s query. They will rank the content with the content that they think is the most relevant at the top, so, it is likely that the higher a website is ranking, the more relevant Google thinks that website is in relation to the keyword/ query. 

This is where Google’s algorithms come into play. Search algorithms are systems that are used to rank data from the search index and deliver the most relevant web pages for a query. Google uses many ranking factors in its algorithms to ensure the most relevant web pages will be ranking highest on the SERPs:

• ➡️Backlinks – Backlinks are links from one web page to another and they are a very strong ranking factor. Having quality backlinks will tell Google that your web page is trustworthy and will give users accurate information. When it comes to backlinks it’s important to remember that quality always wins over quantity – one super relevant backlink which really showcases your expertise will be far more beneficial to the authority of your website than a number of backlinks from irrelevant sources
• ➡️Relevance of content – Google will analyse the content of a web page to assess whether it will contain the information that a user is searching for.  One of the basic ways in which Google does this is by looking whether the content and the search term contain the same keywords. Beyond keywords, Google will analyse the content in other ways such as using aggregated and anonymised interaction data to see whether or not the content is relevant to the search term and whether other users have found it useful. 
• ➡️Usability of web pages – Google will consider the usability of the web page and how easy it is to navigate. Aspects that they will look at include page speed, whether it is mobile and desktop friendly, and how quickly the content loads. The Core Web Vitals algorithm also plays into this and further reinforces how important on-page user experience is to Google. 

When ranking web pages, Google will also use the user’s location, language, previous search history and what device they are using to personalise the results and make them more relevant to individual users. 

How To Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

From the above, you can see that Google prioritises certain factors in order to provide users with the best overall experience when they are using their search engine. This is great, as it means that you can optimise your website in order to allow Google to, firstly, crawl your web page, secondly, index your web page and thirdly, rank your web page. So, here are some points to make sure your website is search engine friendly:

• ➡️Create and submit a sitemap – submitting a sitemap will ensure Google crawls all of your web pages.
• ➡️Ensure your website is indexable 
• ➡️Target the relevant keywords – when choosing your keywords, you should make sure that it is what users are searching for, you can find this out by looking at the volume of any keywords on AHrefs.
• ➡️Include your keywords in your content, headers and URLs – once you have chosen a keyword to target, you need to make sure that you include it in your website, use the keyword as part of your sentences but make sure you avoid keyword stuffing. You can also use semantics – look at keywords that are related to the keywords you are trying to focus on to add value and expertise
• ➡️Ensure your content is useful  
• ➡️Ensure your website includes internal and external links
• ➡️Ensure your site loads fast
• ➡️Ensure your website is optimised for mobile and desktop browsers

Summary

To summarise, search engines exist to give users the most relevant information when they are searching for a query. Search engines will crawl and index your web pages and then rank them based on the key ranking factors.   

By optimising the SEO on your web page, you will ensure that Google and other search engines can easily crawl your website, make sure that your content will be indexed for the right keywords, and finally it will help you to rank higher on search engine results pages and therefore gain more organic visitors to your site.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google considers important in a website’s overall user experience, it is an extremely important aspect of SEO because it ensures a great user experience, which in turn helps to improve overall page quality. The Core Web Vitals algorithm update was rolled out in 2021 by Google and it is used to measure and evaluate the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of websites. This was then incorporated into a broader Page Experience update which rolled out in 2022.

There are three main metrics of Core Web Vitals: 

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – this is how quickly the main content of your web page loads. 
2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – this is a measure of how much your webpage will unexpectedly shift during the loading phase. A layout shift occurs when a visible element shifts position from one rendered frame to another.
3. First Input Delay (FID) – this will measure the time from when a user first interacts with your website to the time when the browser is able to respond to that interaction.

Source: AHrefs

There are also some non-Core Web Vitals that are included:

• ➡️First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• ➡️Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
• ➡️Time to First Byte (TTFB)

It is important that all of these metrics are optimised for your website in order to improve the user’s experience and increase organic rankings. In particular, optimising TTFB plays a key role in ensuring that you have a good page load speed – if TTFB is slow then it slows down the entire loading process which can cover LCP and FID – causing issues for your Core Web Vitals performance, optimising this from the start can help to put your Core Web Vitals on a strong standing.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the Core Web Vitals metrics and it is a measurement of how long it takes for the main content of a web page to load. The largest image or textblock that is visible to the user is what is measured. 

In order to provide a good user experience, the LCP should have a measurement of under 2.5 seconds. 

Typical elements that are considered for LCP are:

• ➡️Images
• ➡️Video poster images
• ➡️Background images 
• ➡️Block level text

LCP is one of the key metrics for the Core Web Vitals because it can accurately measure how fast your website can be used by users. The speed of a website is very important to users so Google wants to make sure that web pages are loading fast enough for the users. Google states that 53% of visits are abandoned if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, as such having a good load time across both mobile and desktop is very important. 

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a website, it is the unexpected shift of webpage elements while the webpage is loading. The metric will measure how often users of a website are experiencing an unexpected layout shift. 

In order to provide a good user experience, the CLS should have a score of 0.1 or under.

Minimising CLS is extremely important because if a user experiences a lot of pages shifting around the page, it will lead to a bad user experience. 

If your website has a poor CLS score, it is likely due to a coding issue that can be solved by your web developer.  

According to Google, the main reasons that your website has a poor CLS will be due to: 

• ➡️Images that do not have dimensions 
• ➡️Ads, embeds, and iframes that do not have dimensions
• ➡️Dynamically injected content
• ➡️Web Fonts causing FIOT/ FOUT
• ➡️Actions waiting for a network response before updating DOM

CLS is one of the key metrics for the Core Web Vitals because having poor CLS will mean that your users are having a bad experience on your website which could lead to users leaving your webpage and not returning. It could also lead to frustration among users who might not be able to find what they are looking for.

First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) is the measurement of how long it takes for your browser to respond to your user’s first interaction with the page. An example of an interaction can be clicking on a link in the website’s navigation, choosing an option from a menu or entering your email into a field. FID is important because it is taking into account how real-life users are interacting with your website. 

In order to provide a good user experience for your website, the FID should have a measurement of under 100ms. 

One of the main reasons for having a poor FID score is due to your browser’s main thread being busy parsing and executing JavaScript code. This causes a poor FID score because the main thread is unable to respond to users’ interactions if it is busy.  

FID is one of the key metrics for the Core Web Vitals because speed is one of the main aspects Google considers when they are ranking your website because they know that it is a top priority for their users. So, having a good FID score will improve the overall user experience of your website. 

Why are Core Web Vitals Important for SEO? 

Google has over 200 ranking factors, with page experience and page speed both being in the top eight, so this probably tells you that Core Web Vitals are extremely important when it comes to SEO. The first impression of your website could be the difference between a user becoming loyal or never returning to your website again, it is important that this first impression is a good one so that you are gaining loyal users that will return to your website over and over. This first impression starts with all 3 Core Web Vitals because the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a website will likely be the first things that your users will notice when clicking onto your site. 

Research conducted by Google shows that users prefer to use websites that have a great page experience. So, Google sees the page experience as a priority when they are ranking websites. 

Optimising your Core Web Vitals will inevitably improve the user’s experience of your website and it is likely that you will have fewer users returning to the SERP because they are satisfied and happy with your website. If you improve the user experience, you will likely have happier users and this could lead to more conversions for your website. 

How Do I Measure My Website’s Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals show how your website performs based on a set of real-world, user centered metrics that will quantify key aspects of your user’s experience. 

In order to pass your Core Web Vitals assessment, you need to score ‘Good’ in all three metrics. So, how do you find out if you have passed?

PageSpeed Insights:

In order to find out if you have passed your Core Web Vitals assessment, you need to go to PageSpeed Insights and enter the URL for your web page:

PageSpeed Insights will then show what your real users are experiencing. You will receive an  assessment for your webpage and it will look something like this, showing whether or not your website has passed or failed the assessment:

From this report, you will be able to see if you have passed or failed each metric, in order to pass your Core Web Vitals assessment, LCP, FID and CLS must all score ‘Good’. As you can see in the above example, this webpage has failed the assessment because the only section that is currently good is the FID. 

You will receive an assessment for both mobile and desktop browsers and these will have different results based on the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of each browser.

PageSpeed Insights will also suggest improvements that you can make on your website in order to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment. These improvement suggestions can be found under ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Diagnostics’:

Using PageSpeed Insights will allow you to see if you have passed or failed the Core Web Vitals assessment for your website for both mobile and desktop. This will then allow you to investigate the main factors that could be causing the Core Web Vitals to fail and how they can be improved. PageSpeed Insights will give you recommendations on how to improve all three metrics, even if you pass one or two of the metrics, there will still be suggested improvements to help you improve your score, therefore improving the overall page experience even further. 

Looker Studio:

If you want a more in depth and visual review of your Core Web Vitals, Looker Studio is great. Looker Studio will give you a detailed and visual report of your website’s Core Web Vitals and it makes it very easy to see how your website is performing. You will clearly be able to see if your website is doing well for a particular metric. 

The main overview page will give you a visual report of all three main metrics:

You can also go deeper into each metric to understand how your website is performing for each one, you can do this by going into the dashboard on the left hand side of the page: 

Another great feature of the Looker Studio report is being able to look at your Core Web Vitals for different months, this enables you to see whether or not your vitals are improving or not and whether you need to make any changes. You can do this by clicking on the dropdown in the top right hand corner: 

Summary

To summarise, Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google considers very important for a webpage’s overall experience. As I’m sure you can see, Core Web Vitals are a very important part of your website and improving them will improve the overall experience for your users. 

Google will determine whether or not you have passed or failed your Core Web Vitals assessment based on real-world data. You will be able to see this data in PageSpeed Insights, and it will provide suggested recommendations on how to improve the three main metrics for your website for both mobile and desktop. 

Understanding the Core Web Vitals for your website will allow you to create a more optimised web page for your users and will lead to happier users and increased organic traffic. 

On-site content is a crucial aspect of SEO, without content, users and search engines will not be able to understand what your website is about, meaning that your website will not rank on search engine results pages so it will not be seen organically. If your content is well optimised for your users, you will rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and your website will get more organic traffic. 

What is On-Site Content for SEO?

On-site content for SEO is any content that is created for your website with the goal of better matching your user’s intent and increasing your ranking on search engine results pages in order to gain traffic to your website and boost your website’s trust and authority. The content on your website needs to be user friendly content so that search engines can easily understand what it is about and so that it satisfies the users intent. 

There can be many different types of content that you include on your website: 

• ➡️Blog posts – sharing information through blogs 
• ➡️Guides – longer pieces of content that contain information about a particular topic
• ➡️Product pages – defines the products that you sell and allows customers to find out everything about that product
• ➡️Static pages – these pages will stay the same for all users of the website – for example an About Us page
• ➡️Landing pages – this is the first page that users land on when they go onto your website

The overall goal when optimising your on-site content for SEO is to write user friendly content that will fully answer your reader’s question or solve their problem – it should provide them with a specific answer but also it needs to be easily understandable by both the user and the search engine. 

How to Optimise your On-Site Content for SEO 

Keyword Research 

On-site content starts with carrying out keyword research as it will give you the direction of what content should be on your website – you can read our guide to keyword research to find out more about what this is and how to carry it out. Knowing what keywords your target audience are searching for will allow you to identify the specific things users are looking for relating to your website and you can then generate content for your website based on these keywords. 

Include Keywords in your Content

When you have found your keywords, it is important to include these keywords from your keyword research in your on-site content so that Google knows what your content is about so that they are able to rank you on search engine results pages. You should use your keywords and long-tail keywords in the title, headings and body of your content, it’s also worth using keywords and topics which are closely related to your key page topic, or semantically linked. When using your keywords, it is important for them to occur naturally throughout your content, do not use lots of keywords where they do not occur naturally as Google may peanalise you for this and it will not be optimised for the user. Always remember that Google wants you to create content that matches the user intent. 

Long-Type Content

When writing your content, it’s worth considering writing long-type content. There are many studies that show long-type content performs very well in search engine results pages. 

SerpIQ ran a study charting the top 10 results in a search engine results page by content length. The result in first position contained 2,416 words and the result in 10th position contained 2,032 words:

This study is showing that Google prefers longer content. However, this does not just mean that you should write over 2,000 words and think that you will rank higher. The content itself is a lot more significant than the quantity of the content. If your content completely matches the user’s needs and is not over 2,000 words then it will still rank even if there are other posts that are longer in length.

It’s important to consider user intent here and not just write content for content’s sake – while chances are that longer articles are more likely to answer any questions that a user has, short-form content can be equally as effective if it quickly matches user intent and answers their purpose in short, effective language – something to keep in mind.

Add Internal Links 

Including internal links in your on -site content will help to improve your SEO performance as it helps to identify which are the key focus areas on your website and to cluster topical content together to showcase your expertise on a particular vertical or topic.. An internal link is any link on your website that links to another page on your own website. Internal links are important because they will connect your website and make it a lot easier for users on your site to navigate and find the information that they are looking for. Internal links will also help when Google and other search engines are crawling your site because it will show them new pages that they can rank. They are always looking for new pages that they can rank for users but sometimes they will miss pages that you have on your site, internal linking will make sure that this doesn’t happen, because if Google is crawling one of your existing pages and they find an internal link, they will also crawl the linked page as well. 

When Google is crawling your website, any page that has a high amount of internal linking will be seen as important. So, it is likely that your website will have a main page that will focus on a particular topic and then this will be surrounded with other shorter articles that will go into more detail, these shorter articles should all link back to the main page so that Google knows that is the main page. As this main page starts to improve, it will also improve the ranking of the other pages that are linking to that main page, therefore improving the overall performance of your content. 

Add External Links 

External links are links that are used to direct users to another website. External links can be inbound or outbound. Inbound links are the links that come from other websites and outbound links are the links that are included on your website that direct your users to another website. 

If you are correctly including outbound external links in your content, this can help to back up your expertise as well as linking your website to other credible sources – it will improve the credibility of your website. If you add relevant and trustworthy links to your website, Google will know that your content is trustworthy and credible so they are more likely to rank your site because they know that it will answer users’ queries correctly. 

When you are including external links in your content, it is important that the links are relevant to the topic that you are discussing on your page. If the content is relevant, then you are improving the overall experience for your users as you are allowing them to find out more information about their desired topic. 

Optimise Readability 

When writing content for your website, readability is extremely important, this refers to how easy it is to read and understand your content. If your content is easy to read and understand then you are improving the overall experience for the user and it is more likely that your users will be more engaged and potentially spend a longer amount of time on your website. This is an extremely positive sign for Google and other search engines because they will be tracking the behavior of your users and how long they spend on your website. If users are spending a long time on your website, it is indicating to Google that your website has high-quality content that users are interacting with easily so they are likely to rank your website higher, knowing that it will match the users intent. When considering the readability of your content, there are a few things to consider: 

• ➡️Use legible fonts 
• ➡️Ensure your font is big enough 
• ➡️Use short sentences 
• ➡️Use headings for your paragraphs 
• ➡️Use visual content such as images

Why is On-Site Content Important for SEO?

Google and other search engines want to rank websites that are valuable and relevant to what users are searching for. Google often updates their algorithms so that their users are receiving the most relevant and useful information, an example of this is the helpful content update that was designed to help users find high quality content. One of the main aspects that Google will be looking at when ranking websites is the on-site content and whether or not it is useful for the users that are searching for specific information, so it is important that your content is optimised for your users. Optimising your on-site content is extremely important for SEO: 

• ➡️It will improve your users overall experience – creating high quality content will provide your users with the information that they need and will be easy for those users to navigate your website. 
• ➡️Targeting keywords – when you are generating content for your website, this is the only way that you will be able to include your keywords onto your website and make sure that your site is found on search engine results pages when users are searching for your products/ services. 
• ➡️Improve online visibility – if you are creating content that is optimised for your users and it is useful content, it is likely that Google and other search engines will increase your rankings and your website is more likely to be found by potential customers.

Optimising your on-site content is crucial for SEO in order to create user-friendly content for your users and for search engines. By creating content that is providing a better user experience, you are showing Google that your website is optimised for your users and this will in turn allow you to rank higher on search engine results pages.

Keyword research is a vital part of creating an SEO campaign and it is one of the first steps that you should take. In order to rank well on search engine results pages and to attract organic traffic, you need to conduct thorough keyword research. If you do not conduct keyword research and no one is searching for what you’re writing about, you will not get the right type of organic traffic from Google or potentially any at all – and that means you won’t be driving customers who are looking to engage with your product or service, it’s that simple. 

What is Keyword Research? 

So, what actually is keyword research? Keyword research involves researching and selecting key words or phrases that relate to a specific topic that users will be searching for. The process of keyword research is done in order to optimise websites. By having an optimised website, and the correct keywords, Google will be able to understand the content on that website and they will understand that you have pages that focus specifically around the user query and you are therefore able to effectively match user intent, this will mean that the site will have more of an opportunity to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Why is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research has a vital impact to your business, here are some reasons why: 

• ➡️By doing targeted keyword research, it will enable you to know and understand what types of keywords and phrases people are searching for when trying to find your type of product or service. This will then allow you to create content that matches what the users are searching for. This will mean that your website is more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages and it will also help to attract more users to your site. 
• ➡️Keyword research can also give you valuable information about which keywords are easy to rank for, which keywords your competitors rank for, search volume of keywords and where your website is ranking for keywords. 
• ➡️Keyword research will tell you exactly what users are searching for, allowing you to optimise your website accordingly. 

Keyword research is one of the first steps when it comes to an SEO campaign, however, you should not just leave it there. Keyword research should be an ongoing process to see how well your website is ranking for keywords compared to your competitors. This will allow you to see what you need to improve in order to better match the user intent and rank higher on search engine results pages to gain organic search traffic. 

According to AHrefs, 90.63% of websites get no organic search traffic from Google. Keyword research will help to ensure that there will be a search demand for whatever you are writing about in your website. So, if your website ends up ranking well in Google for a keyword, you are more likely to get a stream of targeted users landing on your website and not be part of that 90.63% of websites. 

How to Carry Out Keyword Research 

So now you know how important keyword research is for your website, you need to know how to actually do it. The first step that you need to take is to think about your business and what you are trying to sell, then start writing an initial list of ‘seed keywords’ that are related to your business. This would be a good time to think about what you want to be found for – what are your main products/ services and what is it that you want users to be searching for when they find your website to ensure they are the right kind of user to convert.  

Think about what users you want to be landing on your website and what would they be searching for when looking for your product/service. Your keywords will shape the direction of your content and ensure that the content you are producing is relevant and easily searchable on Google. Strong keyword research will enable you to optimise your website to ensure you are matching user intent and giving users exactly what they are looking for. 

Once you have compiled a list of seed keywords, it is time to use keyword research tools to refine your keywords. Using an online tool, type in one of your keywords from your list of seed keywords, the tool will generate specific keywords and tell you the search volumes for those keywords. This will allow you to see what users looking for your product/ service are searching for which will then allow you to form your content for your website based on these keywords. 

There are many tools you can use when conducting your keyword research but here are some free tools to use: 

• ➡️Google Trends 
• ➡️Keyword generator 
• ➡️Keyword sheeter
• ➡️Answer the public 

Or if you want to use a paid tool then here are some paid tools to use: 

• ➡️AHrefs 
• ➡️SEMrush 
• ➡️SEO profiler 

The tools above will help you to find high-traffic keywords that relate to your business and that have relatively low competition so that you have more chance ranking for them in search engine results pages. This will also allow you to make a decision over which keywords you want to prioritise first. You won’t be able to target them all in one go, so understanding the levels of competition around each keyword can help you to put priorities in place to ensure that your time is being most effectively spent. 

When you have found a few potential keywords, it is a good idea to do further research on these keywords to see if they will be a good fit for your website. A way of doing this is by searching for those keywords and looking at what type of websites rank on the results pages. This will allow you to see what types of websites are ranking for those keywords and if they would be suitable for your website. 

It is then a good idea to compile a list of keywords that you think will work for your website and that you will be able to rank for on search engine results pages. This will allow you to refer back to this list so you don’t forget those important keywords!

You should now have a useful list of keywords to use for your website in order to get your website ranking. Remember to regularly review these keywords as search patterns and search volumes do change and it is important to stay on top of your users search habits so that you can keep your website up to date and keep ranking. 

How to Use Your Keyword Research 

So, you have now carried out your keyword research, how do you use it in order to rank on search engine results pages? Well, once you have finalised your list of keywords, it is important to use them in your website so that Google knows what your content is about. Ensure that your keywords are in the following: 

• ➡️Meta title 
• ➡️Meta descriptions 
• ➡️Headings (H1) 
• ➡️The main content of your website 
• ➡️Images (alt text)

It is important to include your keywords in your website, however, don’t use too many and think that you will automatically rank! This is known as keyword stuffing and Google could penalise you for this. Only include your keywords where they will naturally occur in order to improve your visibility of the website. Remember that Google wants you to create content that is for the user and not for Google – as such it has implemented a number of algorithm updates including the recent Helpful Content Update which are designed to encourage websites to create content that leaves the user satisfied and provides a better overall user experience.  

Summary of Keyword Research

So we have now realised just how important keyword research is, it is an extremely valuable activity for your business. Ranking for the right keywords is imperative for your website, if you don’t rank, it can have a significant impact on your business as you may not get the right type of traffic to have an impact on your sales and leads. By researching your keyword demand and including those keywords strategically on your website, it will help you to firstly, rank on search engine results pages and secondly, bring the right kind of visitors to your website. In order to rank successfully on search engine results pages, keyword research is a must, it is a fundamental aspect of SEO. 

A guide to Google’s recent algorithm updates.