Search industry news and trends: Best of 2018

It’s that time of the year again: reflecting on the year that’s past as we prepare for 2019 lurking around the corner. In this article, we have a roundup of some of our fan favorite pieces from 2018 on news and trends from the search industry.

From alternative search engines to future trends, best online courses to algorithm updates, these were some of our highlights from the past year.

We also have a roundup of our top articles on SEO tips and tricks here.

1. No need for Google: 12 alternative search engines in 2018

While many of us use “googling” synonymously with “searching,” there are indeed a number of viable alternatives out there. In this article, we try to give some love to 12 alternative search engines.

Most of us can name the next few: Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo.

But some on the list may surprise you — how about Ecosia, a Co2-neutral search engine? With every search made, the social business uses the revenue generated to plant trees. On average, 45 searches gets one more tree for our little planet.

2019 might be a year for a little more time spent with some G alternatives.

2. Which is the best search engine for finding images?

Human beings process visuals faster than they do text. So it makes sense that in the last decade, the number of images on the internet has ballooned.

In this post, we compare the best search engines for conducting three categories of image search on the web.

First, general / traditional image search, looking at Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Then, reverse image search, looking at TinEye, Google, and Pinterest.

Third, free-to-use image search, looking at EveryPixel, Librestock, and the Creative Commons.

3. The 2018 guide to free SEO training courses online

As all good SEOs know, this is a never-ending process. The SEO world seems to be constantly evolving, and nearly everyone in the field has learned their snuff largely through online material.

For anyone who’s new to the scene, this can be an encouraging thought. We all started mostly just poking around on the interwebs to see what to do next. And happily, a lot of the best SEO material is freely available for all.

In this article, we look at the best online, free SEO training courses. From Google to Moz to QuickSprout and more, these are fundamentals that anyone can start with.

We also highlight a number of individuals and businesses to follow in the industry.

4. Video and search: YouTube, Google, the alternatives and the future

One third of all time spent online is accounted for by watching video. And, it’s predicted that 80% of all internet traffic will come from video in 2019.

This year was further proof that videos engage growing numbers of users and consequently have an impact on the SERPs. In fact, video has been seen to boost traffic from organic listings by as much as 157%.

In this article, we explore how the ways in which we search for video are changing. From YouTube to Google Search, Facebook to Vimeo, video — and how we interact with video content online — has seen some interesting changes.

5. Are keywords still relevant to SEO in 2018?

Sneak peak: this one starts out with, “What a useless article! Anyone worth their salt in the SEO industry knows that a blinkered focus on keywords in 2018 is a recipe for disaster.”

We go on to explore why focusing on just keywords is outdated, how various algorithm updates have changed the game, and what we should do now instead.

Ps: the snarky take sticks throughout the read, along with the quality overview.

6. Google’s core algorithm update: Who benefited, who lost out, and what can we learn?

This was an interesting piece following an algorithm update from back in March. There were suspicions, Google SearchLiason tweeted a confirmation, and everyone had to reassess.

Via a simple query, “What’s the best toothpaste?” and the results Google outputted over the course of half a dozen weeks, we can trace certain changes.

What pages benefitted, what can those insights tell us about the update, and how do we handle when our content visibility nosedives?

7. A cheat sheet to Google algorithm updates from 2011 to 2018

Who couldn’t use one of these hanging around?

Google makes changes to its ranking algorithm almost every day. Sometimes (most times) we don’t know about them, sometimes they turn the SERPs upside down.

This cheat sheet gives the most important algorithm updates of the recent years, along with some handy tips for how to optimize for each of the updates.

Well, that’s it for SEW in 2018. See you next year!

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SEO tips, tools, and how to’s: Best of 2018

It’s that time of the year again: reflecting on the year that’s past as we prepare for 2019 lurking around the corner. In this article, we have a roundup of some of our fan favorite pieces from 2018 on SEO.

From how to’s to tips to tools, these were some of our highlights from the past year. SEW spark notes, if you will.

If you missed these pieces throughout the year, they’ll be worth a read. And if you’ve already read them, never hurts to refresh!

On Monday, we’ll have a roundup of our top articles on search industry news and trends.

1. How to force Google to recrawl your website

If you have launched a new website, updated a single page on your existing domain, or altered many pages and/or the structure of your site, you will likely want Google to display your latest content in its SERPs.

While Google’s crawlers are obviously pretty good at their job — indexing countless new pages simply from natural traffic and links from around the web — it never hurts to give Googlebot a little assistance.

In this article, we look at a few ways to alert Google’s crawlers to new URLs on your site.

2. How to set up event tracking in Google Analytics

Because one can never have enough Google Analytics insight, right?

One of the most useful features in GA, event tracking lets you capture all kinds of information about how people behave on your site.

In this article, we go step by step through two different ways you can set up event tracking: first, by adding the code manually, and second, by using Google Tag Manager.

This is a great tutorial for anyone looking to familiarize themselves with the task.

3. A quick and easy guide to meta tags in SEO

Meta tags help search engines and website visitors determine what the content of your page is about. 

They’re placed in the <head> section of a HTML document and need to be coded into your CMS. Depending on the platform you use, this can be quite less intense than it sounds.

Many “out of the box” solutions provide extremely user-friendly, labelled sections such as “meta description” calling your attention to exactly what goes where.

In this article, we take a look at why meta tags are important, along with the six main types of meta tags to focus on for SEO.

4. An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)

For anyone who’s ever had questions about what SEOs should do with Single Page Applications (SPAs), this article is for you. Long, thorough, entertaining, and full of resources.

We start out looking at how the popularity of SPAs, Angular, and React have spiked in the last several years. Many developers eagerly embrace JavaScript for website development — and while that may have been rather inconsiderate of SEO ease (what else is new), it seems JS really is here to stay.

This article is bit of a coming to terms with that reality, accepting SPAs as part of our SEO future, and even dipping our toes in, if you will.

We look at what developers like about JS, how it was never intended for web page content delivery, common SEO problems of SPAs, and a host of other questions you might be asking.

Finally, we end with eleven recommendations for further reading — really, this could become the whole rest of your holiday break — on how Google treats SPAs, core principles of SEO for JS and for SPAs, and more information than you could want.

5. How to check your Domain Authority: 4 tools to use

Domain Authority (DA) serves as a handy heuristic in the SEO industry. It helps tell us how likely a site is to rank for specific keywords, based on the SEO authority it holds.

Many SEOs use Domain Authority to sense-check the quality of their inbound links and to understand how these are affecting their own’s site’s SEO health.

In this article, we round up some of the best ways to check out domain authority. We look at what factors go into DA, and how these tools go about calculating it.

‘Domain Authority’ was devised by Moz and they have naturally taken ownership of this name. Their suite of tools (some of which are discussed in this article) will reveal the authority of particular domains, but dozens of other free tools use Moz’s API to show these scores too.

6. 15 actionable SEO tips to improve your search rankings

This is another quite popular deep dive into SEO tips. We know “improving search rankings” gets a lot of fluff, but this is not that.

Here, we look closely at what makes RankBrain tick, and 15 ways to use that to your fancy.

Sections cover tips around optimizing keywords, optimizing title tags, optimizing descriptions, and reducing bounce rates and dwell times. Fun fact: research by HubSpot and Outbrain found that titles with brackets performed 33 percent better than titles without.

Questions about how to add LSI keywords? How long should long-form content really be? Benefits of long-tail vs medium size keywords? How much difference in clicks will a few characters too long in a headline actually make? All of that and much more (along with lots of screenshots) here.

7. 30 ways to market your online business for free

This article is a roundup of exactly what it sounds like — 30 ways to market your online business for free. It covers everything from emails to social media, from Google Analytics to Search Console, from forums to guest posting, from metadata to Schema.org.

While a few of the ways could be updated — posting to Google+, for instance, might be less helpful anymore — the list still provides some hefty inspiration to anyone needing a little boost of ideas for what to do online.

8. Four tools to discover and optimize for related keywords

This was a quite recent article that has soared. As we know, for SEO these days we need content that includes related concepts, satisfies intent, and provides value. The days of exact keyword matching are far behind us.

In this article, we have four great tools to use when optimizing for related keywords — and of course, how to use them.

For instance, the first tool in the list is TextOptimizer. It takes a term you give it, looks at the Google search results page, extracts snippets, and applies semantic analysis.

With that, it ouputs a list of all the related topics, terms, and concepts that form your topic cluster. From that cluster, it recommends you choose 15-25 of the words for a higher rank.

9. How to optimize your Google My Business listing

Lest we forget: local search.

For those looking to rank higher in searches tied to a user’s location — i.e. users that might be quite near your store and itching to buy something — a Google My Business listing is an essential first step.

This article gives a how to guide for first setting up your listing, claiming and verifying your business, filling out the information, and adding photos. From there, we go over gathering reviews, posting updates, monitoring your profile, and tracking data from Insights.

Of all the many, many things to do in SEO, optimizing a Google My Business listing is very straightforward. It can have a profoundly positive effect on your SEO — a whole wealth of ranking opportunity up for grabs.

The post SEO tips, tools, and how to’s: Best of 2018 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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The SEO Elevator Pitch - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

What is it you do again?

It's a question every SEO has had to answer at some point, whether to your family members over the holidays or to the developer who will eventually implement your suggestions. If you don't have a solid elevator pitch for describing your job, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you! Learn how to craft a concise, succinct description of life as an SEO without jargon, policing, or acting like a superhero.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. Today we're going to be talking about creating an SEO elevator pitch, what is it, why we need one, and what kind of prompted this whole idea for an SEO elevator pitch.

So essentially, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Twitter and I saw John Mueller. He tweeted, "Hey, I meet with a lot of developers, and a lot of times they don't really know what SEOs do." He was genuinely asking. He was asking, "Hey, SEO community, how do you describe what you do?" I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing a lot of different answers, and all of them I'm resonating with.

They're all things that I would probably say myself. But it's just interesting how many different answers there were to the question, "What do SEOs do and what value do they provide?" So I kind of thought to myself, "Why is that? Why do we have so many different explanations for what SEO is and what we do?" So I thought about it, and I thought that it might be a good idea for myself and maybe other SEOs if you don't already have an elevator pitch ready.

What is an SEO elevator pitch?

Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of an elevator pitch, it's basically — I have a definition here — a succinct and persuasive speech that communicates your unique value as an SEO. It's called an elevator pitch essentially because it should take about the length of time it takes to ride the elevator with someone. So you want to be able to quickly and concisely answer someone's question when they ask you, "Oh, SEO, what is that?I think I've heard of that before. What do you do?"

Why is this so hard?

So let's dive right in. So I mentioned, in the beginning, how there are so many different answers to this "what do you say you do here" type question. I think it's hard to kind of come up with a concise explanation for a few different reasons. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit first.

1. Lots of specialties within SEO

So number one, there are lots of specialties within SEO.

As the industry has advanced over the last two plus decades, it has become very diverse, and there are lots of different facets in SEO. I found myself on quite a rabbit trail. I was on LinkedIn and I was kind of browsing SEO job descriptions. I wanted to see basically: What is it that people are looking for in an SEO?

How do they describe it? What are the characteristics? So basically, I found a lot of different things, but I found a few themes that emerged. So there are your content-focused SEOs, and those are people that are your keyword research aficionados. There are the people that write search engine optimized content to drive traffic to your website. You have your link builders, people that focus almost exclusively on that.

You have your local SEOs, and you have your analysts. You have your tech SEOs, people that either work on a dev team or closely with a dev team. So I think that's okay though. There are lots of different facets within SEO, and I think that's awesome. That's, to me, a sign of maturity in our industry. So when there are a lot of different specialties within SEO, I think it's right and good for all of our elevator pitches to differ.

So if you have a specialty within SEO, it can be different. It should kind of cater toward the unique brand of SEO that you do, and that's okay.

2. Different audiences

Number two, there are different audiences. We're not always going to be talking to the same kind of person. So maybe you're talking to your boss or a client. To me, those are more revenue-focused conversations.

They want to know: What's the value of what you do? How does it affect my bottom line? How does it help me run my business and stay afloat and stay profitable? If you're talking to a developer, that's going to be a slightly different conversation. So I think it's okay if we kind of tweak our elevator pitch to make it a little bit more palatable for the people that we're talking to.

3. Algorithm maturity

Three, why this is hard is there's been, obviously, a lot of changes all the time in the algorithm, and as it matures, it's going to look like the SEO's job is completely different than last year just because the algorithm keeps maturing and it looks like our jobs are changing all the time. So I think that's a reality that we have to live with, but I still think it's important, even though things are changing all the time, to have a baseline kind of pitch that we give people when they ask us what it is we do.

So that's why it's hard. That's what your elevator pitch is.

My elevator pitch: SEO is marketing, with search engines

Then, by way of example, I thought I'd just give you my SEO elevator pitch. Maybe it will spark your creativity. Maybe it will give you some ideas. Maybe you already have one, and that's okay. But the point is not to use mine.

The point is essentially to kind of take you through what mine looks like, hopefully get your creative juices flowing, and you can create your own. So let's dive right into my pitch.

So my pitch is SEO is marketing, just with search engines. So we have the funnel here — awareness, consideration, and decision.

Awareness: Rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

First of all, I think it's important to note that SEO can help you rank and attract clicks for informational queries.

Consideration: Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries.

So when your audience is searching for information, they want to solve their pain points, they're not ready to buy, they're just searching, we're meeting them there with content that brings them to the site, informs them, and now they're familiar with our brand. Those are great assisted conversions. Rank and attract clicks for evaluation queries. When your audience is starting to compare their options, you want to be there. You want to meet them there, and we can do that with SEO.

Decision: Rank, attract clicks, and promote conversion for bottom-funnel queries

At the decision phase, you can rank and attract clicks and kind of promote conversions for bottom of funnel queries. When people are in their "I want to buy" stage, SEO can meet them there. So I think it's important to realize that SEO isn't kind of like a cost center and not a profit center. It's not like a bottom of funnel thing. I've heard that in a lot of places, and I think it's just important to kind of draw attention to the fact that SEO is integrated throughout your marketing funnel. It's not relegated to one stage or another.

But how?

We talked about rank and attract clicks and promote conversions. But how do we do that? That's the what it does.

But how do we do it? So this is how I explain it. I think really, for me, there are two sides to the SEO's coin. We have driving, and we have supporting.

1. Driving

So on the driving side, I would say something like this. When someone searches a phrase or a keyword in Google, I make sure the business' website shows up in the non-ad results. That's important because a lot of people are like, "Oh, do you bid on keywords?"

We're like, "No, no, that's PPC." So I always just throw in "non-ad" because people understand that. So I do that through content that answers people's questions, links that help search engines find my content and show signs of authority and popularity of my content, and accessibility. So that's kind of your technical foundation.

You're making sure that your website is crawlable and it that it's index the way that you want it to be indexed. When people get there, it works. It works on mobile and on desktop. It's fast. So I think these are really the three big pillars of driving SEO — content, links, and making sure your website is technically sound. So that's how I describe the driving, the proactive side of SEO.

2. Supporting

Then two, we have supporting, and I think this is kind of an underrated or maybe it's often seen as kind of an interruption to our jobs.

But I think it's important to actually call it what it is. It's a big part of what we do. So I think we should embrace it as SEOs.

A. Be the Google Magic 8-ball

For one, we can serve as the Google Magic 8-Ball. When people come to us in our organization and they say, "Hey, I'm going to make this change, or I'm thinking about making this change.Is this going to be good or bad for SEO?"

I think it's great that people are asking that question. Always be available and always make yourself ready to answer those types of questions for people. So I think on the reactionary side we can be that kind of person that helps guide people and understand what is going to affect your organic search presence.

B. Assist marketing

Two, we can assist marketing. So on this side of the coin, we're driving.

We can drive our own marketing strategies. As SEOs, we can see how SEO can drive all phases of the funnel. But I think it's important to note that we're not the only people in our organization. Often SEOs maybe they don't even live in the marketing department. Maybe they do and they report to a marketing lead. There are other initiatives that your marketing lead could be investigating.

Maybe they say, "Hey, we've just done some market research, and here's this plan." It could be our job as SEOs to take that plan, take that strategy and translate it into something digital. I think that's a really important value that SEOs can add. We can actually assist marketing as well as drive our own efforts.

C. Fix mistakes

Then number three here, I know this is another one that kind of makes people cringe, but we are here to fix mistakes when they happen and train people so that they don't happen again. So maybe we come in on a Monday morning and we're ready to face the week, and we see that traffic has taken a nosedive or something. We go, "Oh, no," and we dive in.

We try to see what happened. But I think that's really important. It's our job or it's part of our job to kind of dive in, diagnose what happened, and not only that but support and be there to help fix it or guide the fixes, and then train and educate and make sure that people know what it is that happened and how it shouldn't happen again.

You're there to help train them and guide them. I think that's another really important way that we can support as SEOs. So that's essentially how I describe it.

3 tips for coming up with your own pitch

Before I go, I just wanted to mention some tips when you're coming up with your own SEO elevator pitch. I think it's really important to just kind of stay away from certain language when you're crafting your own "this is what I do" speech.

So the three tips I have are:

1. Stay away from jargon.

If you're giving an SEO elevator pitch, it's to people that don't know what SEO is. So try to avoid jargon. I know it's really easy as SEOs. I find myself doing it all the time. There are things that I don't think are jargon.

But then I take a couple steps back and I realize, oh yeah, that's not layman's terms. So stay away from jargon if at all possible. You're not going to benefit anyone by confusing them.

2. Avoid policing.

It can be easy as SEOs I've found and I've found myself in this trap a couple of times where we kind of act as these traffic cops that are waiting around the corner, and when people make a mistake, we're there to wag our finger at them.

So avoid any language that makes it sound like the SEOs are just the police waiting to kind of punish people for wrongdoing. We are there to help fix mistakes, but it's in a guiding and educating and supporting, kind of collaborative manner and not like a policing type of manner. Number three, I would say is kind of similar, but a little different.

3. Avoid Supermanning.

I call this Supermanning because it's the type of language that makes it sound like SEOs are here to swoop in and save the day when something goes wrong. We do. We're superheroes a lot of times. There are things that happen and thank goodness there was an SEO there to help diagnose and fix that.

But I would avoid any kind of pitch that makes it sound like your entire job is just to kind of save people. There are other people in your organization that are super smart and talented at what they do. They probably wouldn't like it if you made it sound like you were there to help them all the time. So I just think that's important to keep in mind. Don't make it seem like you're the police waiting to wag your finger at them or you're the superhero that needs to save everyone from their mistakes.

So yeah, that's my SEO elevator pitch. That's why I think it's important to have one. If you've kind of crafted your own SEO elevator pitch, I would love to hear it, and I'm sure it would be great for other SEOs to hear it as well. It's great to information share. So drop that in the comments if you feel comfortable doing that. If you don't have one, hopefully this helps. So yeah, that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday, and come back again next week for another one.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to start your freelance SEO career

To be honest, Search Engine Optimization is not everyone’s cup of tea. To help our websites scale better in terms of their search engine rankings, we often end up hiring expert SEO professionals or agencies that do the deed for us.

Even if we begin to take on the SEO tasks all by ourselves, there is always a time for seeking professional help when we are stuck at difficult points in our SEO journey. This further implies the importance of SEO professionals in the life of website owners. Now, that brings us to the relevance of the career as an SEO professional.

If you have substantial SEO knowledge and had always wanted to be an SEO professional, it’s worth considering going the freelance way. We bet you might have even given this a thought, at least once.

A freelance SEO career can be a fulfilling experience in terms of the kind of work contribution and finance as well. Hence, it is a great way to take charge of your career in your hands and be a professional success, working on your own terms.

So, how do you exactly start a freelancing career as a Search Engine Optimization expert? Let’s find out.

Gauge the understanding of your SEO expertise

If you choose to impart your services in SEO as a freelancer, you will have to be equipped with all that is about SEO. Once you have gauged that understanding of your skill level, you must then ensure that you are in possession of proper resources, tools, and software that would be needed to meet the SEO needs of your clients.

You must be skilled to handle the SEO of all kind of websites, regardless of the website builders they are built on. This understanding will help you reach out for the right projects that fall under your skill set and perform better.

Get a website and list your services

Before establishing yourself as a freelance SEO professional, you will need a website to market your skills and your services. Having a website puts your credibility on the right front and brings you forward as a reliable candidate for potential clients.

Again, listing your services is beneficial in terms of staying clear about what SEO services you offer. This will save time off your grid as well as that of the clients who might get in touch with you to get their project started.

List yourself on freelancing portals and start bidding

Once you have made up your mind regarding your career as an SEO freelancer, you will have to look for leads for getting hired on projects. Very similar to putting out your business on an ecommerce platform, you can sell your freelance SEO service as well.

Finding the right leads can be an overwhelming job for many new freelancers in situations where they are not aware of the sources of these leads. Here are a few Freelance bidding platforms that can help you get hired easily.

• Upwork
• Freelancer
• Guru
• Toptal
• People per hour
• Simply Hired
• Fiverr

Look at what the leading SEO freelancers are doing

In order to be able to perform well as a freelance SEO professional, you are obligated to work like one. Studying the professional work ethics of successful or in-demand freelancers will help you create better job cover letters, make better bids, and seal in on great project deals.

You can even try being an active part of Freelance communities so that you can stay aware of the changes in freelancing trends and even create a strong union of like-minded professionals who can help you in dicey situations such as an event where your payment gets clogged by a client.

Commit to a work schedule and stick to it

Freelancing is not always all fun. It requires commitment like no other daily profession.

Being a freelance SEO, you will be expected to quickly churn rankings for your clients. This means that you will have to put in all your efforts into that direction. All these efforts require you to timely deliver work as per the client’s expectations and work on a schedule.

Begin with a small budget and garner reviews

Starting out on your freelance SEO career, you might not always catch the bigger fish. But in order to land up with bigger projects, good work recommendations, and client reviews can come to your rescue.

These reviews are really important in building your credibility as a reliable freelancer. You can start taking up smaller projects and as you finish them, you can request the client to provide you with feedback as well as reviews.

The feedback will be helpful in enhancing the quality of your work, whereas the reviews will help you get more projects.

Sell your freelance services with complete dedication

By asking you to sell your services with complete dedication, we mean that you should build a very strong cover letter strategy so that you can increase your chances of getting hired for a project or a job that you have applied for.

As an SEO freelancer, your cover letter will be quite different from that of the other freelancers. Your cover letter should talk about Online content strategy, Keyword development, Website analytics, Organic and paid traffic, Web traffic management, and growth, ROI analysis, SEO best practices, Social media platforms etc.

Keep adding a new set of skills

Once you have started your freelancing career, you will gain a lot of working experience. However, since all your working time will be involved in completing and working on projects for your clients, you might run out of new skills/technical knowledge that has just happened to brace the market.

Hence, it is important for you to stay informed and work on adding new skills to your existing skills set and expand your knowledge of SEO. This will help you be competent enough to expand your work horizon and take on new projects that you might have earlier not even thought about.

Know your worth

All of us go for the freelance life only because of two beneficial factors: the freedom to work at one’s own will and financial gain.

It is true that an established freelancer is capable of making more money than other regular work professionals. But, that will only be possible for you when you know your real worth and are able to gauge the pricing of your projects as per them.

SEO is a flourishing industry, thanks to its growing digital prominence. This also brings about the fact that there are more professionals involved in the competition than ever. This competition has a negative effect on the pricing on the projects because a lot of SEO professionals are ready to work at real low rates than average. This affects the pricing in the SEO industry overall and the clients tend to go for cheaper SEO professionals.

This makes it an obligation for you to work on stipulated rates as per your skills and not accept projects at any rate lower than that. This will also be a great way to freelance for you as only credible clients will associate with you, assuring absolute timely payment.

Conclusion

Beginning your career as a freelance SEO specialist will be full of challenges and opportunities. Before you make the move and sacrifice a significant amount of time and effort into making the transition, it is important for you to assess if you are the right fit for this kind of work opportunity. Search Engine Optimization is a task that requires dedication and time.

Make sure that you are able to deliver that. Be aware of your self-learning process and determine if you can adapt to Algorithm changes quickly. If all the answers are in positive, you can definitely get started with your SEO freelancing career in a jiffy.

The post How to start your freelance SEO career appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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SEO 2019: Nine tips for beginners

Interested in learning more about SEO in 2019? Here are the key trends you need to follow to improve your search optimization skills.

It’s easy to get confused by the information overload when you’re just starting with SEO. Too many tactics can discourage you from practicing your skills. However, it doesn’t have to be scary to learn more about search engine optimization.

That’s why we’ve analysed the key SEO trends for 2019 and what they mean to someone who’s just getting started with search engine optimization.

1. Start with optimizing your site for mobile devices

Mobile optimization is critical when you’re getting started with SEO. Start by testing your site’s performance and load speed across all devices.

Every delay in browsing may be a missed opportunity to engage a new visitor.

People are spending more time on their phones every year, which means that a new SEO strategy cannot ignore mobile optimization. Moreover, it goes beyond improving e.g. the site speed on your site. SEO in 2019 is about understanding the ‘mobile consumers’ and how their searching habits differ when they are on the go comparing to a desktop user.

Think of your own searching habits when you’re in a rush and you’re looking for a fast answer. Or think of the search result that grabs your attention. Chances are, it’s mobile optimized and it takes into consideration that you’re looking for a clear and quick answer without further delays.

2. Understand how users search 

We tend to assume which keywords will perform better over others. Keyword testing is always a good idea but SEO nowadays is focusing more on understanding the search intent. It’s not enough to find an effective keyword that leads traffic to your site.

A long-term SEO strategy relies on search intent and the reasoning behind every search. Once you start understanding how your target audience is using search engines, then you’re able to optimize your site more successfully.

Searches are becoming more dynamic and it’s not enough to rely on assumptions. Start testing how your optimization can affect your search traffic and start applying more conversational queries to your keyword mix.

3. Write for humans, optimize for search engines

A successful SEO strategy does not ignore the human element when optimizing a site. We are not just picking good keywords to improve our site’s rankings. The goal is to pick the right keywords that your audience would use in a way that the content remains relevant and engaging.

Always start by thinking of your audience when creating your content. Your content should be both interesting and relevant to them so that they want to read more about it. Once you start understanding the content that your readers want from you, it’s time to focus more on its optimization.

It’s not enough to create good content if you don’t get people to read it. That’s why you want to optimize your content to reach higher in the SERPs.

There’s no need to start adding keywords in your content simply to appeal to search engines. Google and the rest have become way too sophisticated to reward such techniques.

On the contrary, the quality of your content and its relevance, for example, can help you increase your search traffic. Find the right balance between quality content and search optimization for the best results.

4. Analyse your existing search traffic

If you’re not sure how to get started and what to test then start by having a closer look at your current search traffic.

What are the best-performing pages? Which keywords is your audience using to access your content?

Analyse your top 10 posts and what they all have in common. Is it the quality of your content? The length of each post? Did you follow the best practices of on-site optimization?

Find the posts that work well as evergreen content and think of new ways to update them. A closer look at your search traffic and current SEO performance can even help you update your content calendar with topics that your audience would appreciate.

5. Stay up-to-date with the latest changes in SEO

If you want to master SEO, you need to follow the latest trends and the algorithm updates that might affect your tactics. As with every new skill, it’s useful to keep reading about it to stay informed about any recent changes.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced professional, it’s still important to keep reading about the latest SEO updates and what they mean to your strategy.

6. Learn the most important ranking factors

As we’ve just mentioned in the previous tip, it’s useful to dedicate some time every month to catch up with the latest SEO updates.

A great starting point is to read more about all the ranking factors that affect your position in the SERPs.

From the relevance and the use of the right keywords to the page speed and the use of backlinks, it’s good to learn how each ranking factor can affect your optimization tactics.

The list may be long, but here are some important ranking factors to help you optimize your page in 2019.

7. Never underestimate UX

User experience is becoming more important for SEO year over year. As Google is evolving, search results are becoming more personalized and the goal is to offer the best experience to the users.

The quality and the relevance of your content are very significant, but you also need to ensure that your site’s UX is appealing enough to encourage people to keep reading.

A good post cannot be engaging if your page is not, for example, optimized for mobile or if it doesn’t facilitate longer reads.

What you need is the right balance between great content and even better user experience. None of the two alone can lead to great SEO success.

Start analyzing your current bounce rate and the time spent on site and see how these compare with your site’s load speed.

Test your site’s performance across different browsers and devices and start improving all the issues that may risk you losing your readers.

8. Discover the link between social media and SEO

Social signals may not be among the ranking factors, but it’s still useful to understand how your social presence can affect your search results.

As social media becomes a bigger part of our lives, it can define a big part of our online presence and authority. The same occurs to all brands with an existing social presence.

Google has started integrating social results to the search answers in an attempt to present a more holistic idea of an online presence. By indexing more content to the search results, users are able to find the right answer to their questions as fast as possible. Thus, it’s good to keep in mind that your online presence and authority are not limited to your search results.

Similarly, social networks are turning into their own search engines where users are still looking for an answer to their questions. YouTube and Pinterest have become very popular visual search engines, while Twitter and Facebook can be helpful for finding more information about a person or a news event.

This means that our searching habits are changing and it’s useful to understand all the different ways someone can find your content on various channels.

9. Understand how voice search works

Voice search will be the biggest trend to shape SEO in 2019 and 2020. It is already seeing a growing adoption rate and more consumers are expected to use voice commands in 2019.

This means that search optimization should change to understand the new kind of search intent. People tend to use longer questions and more conversational queries in voice search. The challenge is to understand which keywords will be more relevant to your audience and how to measure the success of your strategy.

Although the measurement is still at an early stage, it’s still useful to understand the difference between text and voice commands. 

The more we think as consumers, the higher the chances of answering their questions in the most relevant way.

Overview

SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. You can start the new year by boosting your skills to try out new ideas.

One step at a time can help you improve your site’s optimization. The best way to get started is to pay attention to your readers’ online habits.

• How do they behave on your site?
• What are your best-performing pages?
• Which keywords do they use?
• What can you improve today to boost your SEO strategy?

The post SEO 2019: Nine tips for beginners appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms

We all know Google Analytics is a powerful tool for serving up actionable data. And one of the quickest ways to get that data is to be clear about what all those terms mean.

What does bounce rate mean and is it connected in anyway to exit rate? And how about sessions and page views?

If those questions sounds familiar but you’re not sure of the answers, read on…

Because as soon as you understand all the Google Analytics terms, you can begin to get closer to the actionable data you need, the kind of data you can use to increase visitors, sales, and sign-ups.

Google Analytics can show what pages you need to improve in order to rank higher in organic search. It shows you if your copy needs tweaking, keywords need updating, or meta-descriptions re-writing. It also tells you if your call to action button is converting or not.

See also: A guide to setting up Google Analytics for your WordPress site.

Bounce rate

What Google Says:

“A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”

A user could leave a site because they lost interest, were confused, didn’t find the answer to their query, or did already found the information they were looking for.

The right kind of thinking here is this: What was the person expecting to find after searching for a keyword or key phrase. And does my site provide it?

If the bounce rate is very high, this is an indicator the site has a significant problem. Here are some helpful tips on ways to reduce bounce rate.

Alternatively, if the content is awesome and people spend a long time interacting with it, then that is known as “sticky” content.

If you’re just starting out with GA, here’s something to help get you started:

Clicks

The number of times people click on your link from the search results page is the number of clicks that appears on Google’s SEO report.

Clickthrough-Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks to your site divided by the number of impressions. Impressions are the amount of times your search link is shown to a searcher. So if CTR is high, the meta description is doing its job and converting searchers to visitors. However, if CTR rate is low then it’s worth testing different headlines.

Note that these clicks are not related to Google Ads clicks. These appear in Google Ads reports.

Entrances

If your site has more than one page then it has different entrance points, and Google records those separate entries.

Perhaps a blog post is performing well and bringing in traffic. Great. It might also show pages you want to be traffic-heavy are not performing properly.

Events

Events are certain user actions that happen on the site, and are created in line with KPIs.

For example, a site might offer a free download after pressing a button. So an event gets recorded each time the button is pressed. Now we have an event, we can extract actionable data. We know how many visitors the page had, and we know how many of those people we converted into button pressers.

Exit page

If an entrance page is where people arrive at your site, an exit page is where they leave.

A visitor may click through from the SERP, read the article, click on an internal link to read another article, then leave. Are there weaknesses on the exit page? This is easy to spot if one page stands out with a high leave rate.

Exit rate (% Exit)

The exit rate is calculated by dividing the number of ‘exits’ made from the page by the number of page views. However, a page with a high % exit rate may not necessarily have a high bounce rate.

But — and we said front and center these terms are confusing — a page with low exit rate is more likely to have a low bounce rate. That’s because users are probably heading to other pages on the site rather than exiting.

Hits

A hit is a request made to a web server to show a certain file. This could be a web page, an image or other things.

An event is considered a hit. A page view is a hit. All of these hits are grouped together in what Google calls a session. A session is a group of hits from one user. Google uses hits to determine the interaction between the user and the web page.

If the user takes no action for 30 minutes then Google ends the session.

Impressions

We first spoke of impression when looking at clicks. Impressions occur when your link is served up in the search results.

According to Google’s SEO Reports, impressions do not include impressions by paid Google Ads campaigns, which are recorded separately.

In short, when the user can see your link in the search results, that’s counted as an impression. And as you know, we use impressions and clicks to calculate the CTR.

Landing or entrance page

Both of these terms are used by Google to indicate the very first page a user lands on at the beginning of each session. This means in GA you can check which pages users most arrive at your site.

Page views

Page views are the number of times a visitor lands on any page of your website – these are called screen views on mobile.

Within page views, we first have unique page views. Google does not count multiple views of the same page by the same person in the same session as individual views. Instead, it counts them all as one unique view.

Then we have pages per session, also called ‘Average Page Depth’.

APD is the average number of pages viewed by a each user in one session and inside the analytics it includes repeated views of a single page.

Sessions

We encountered sessions earlier on. You already know that a session is the complete amount of time a visitor spends on your website.

You also know that each action a visitor takes is recorded as a hit. And all those hits are recorded within the session. This means in a 24 hour period you might have 100 sessions and 300 hits. The hits figure is equal to or higher than the sessions number.

There is a time limit on sessions. With standard GA settings, a session is ended after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Average session duration is the average time of a user’s session and the calculation to get this is to divide the session duration by the number of sessions.

Time on page

Time on page is the average amount of time that particular visitor spent on the page. If a page is text-heavy then there’s much more chance of each session producing a greater amount of time on page.

Google records average time on page. This is a simple calculation of dividing time on page by the number of page views, minus the exit number.

Users, visitors, or traffic — which one do you need to know?

Each of these terms describes visitors who access your site. Google uses these terms as and when they want.

There is, of course, a self-evident distinction between a new visitor and a returning visitor. Traffic generally expresses the total volume of people visiting the website. But traffic is split down into categories…

Direct traffic is when someone sends you the full URL to a website and you click on that link to go directly to the site. No search has has taken place. Direct traffic is common when sending out a link to your email list. Each person would directly access the site.

Next, we have organic search traffic. Organic traffic is free and targeted, and comes about from SEO efforts to rank the site as high as possible in those all-important Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If the site is showing little to no organic search, then go back to the drawing board on the keywords in use.

Paid search traffic means the number of people who visited the site via Google Ads.

Lastly we have referral traffic. This means a search engine, another website or social media site has placed a link to your web page on their site and is referring traffic to you.

Further reading

Overview

• Google Analytics: Misunderstandings that hold marketers back
• A guide to setting up Google Analytics for your WordPress site.
• 12 add-ons when setting up Google Analytics

Reports

• A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics: Real-time reports
• A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics: Audience reports
• Back to basics – Goal reports in Google Analytics
• 8 key Google Analytics reports for SEO

Tracking

• How to set up event tracking in Google Analytics
• 10 Google Analytics custom events that track the untrackable
• How to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics

Analysis

• Four easy calculated metrics you can implement in Google Analytics
• Google Analytics for SEO – Basic Cohort Analysis

Custom segments

• How to create custom segments in Google Analytics

Error pages

• Fixing 404 error pages with Google Analytics

Beyond GA

• Beyond Google Analytics: 10 SEO analytics and reporting tools

The post An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Understanding 14 types of backlinks – ideal SEO boosters + those to avoid

For better or worse, search engines judge your website by the company it keeps.

This is why establishing backlinks with popular and authoritative sites plays an outsized role in whether your SEO sinks or swims: your placement on search engine results pages (SERPs) is heavily, heavily influenced by the quantity and quality of backlinks to your site. And while most types of backlinks bolster a site’s reputation and rankings (albeit to varying degrees), others can hamper your SEO efforts.

Three key variables determine the value that a backlink contributes to your site: 1) the recognized quality and authority of the linking site, 2) whether the linking site encodes the link with “do follow” status (providing full SEO value to the link), and 3) the link’s location on the website. In short, links from respected websites, set to “do follow” status, and posted within the site’s main body content will deliver the greatest value from an SEO perspective.

Here are 14 different types of backlinks, ranging from the most beneficial to those you’re better off steering clear from:

Backlinks Most Advantageous to SEO

1) Editorial backlinks

Editorial mentions that refer to your site – and include a link placed within relevant, high-quality content – make for the ideal backlink. Commonly, editorial backlinks are created when your own content is cited as the source of specific information (such as an article or infographic), when a company representative is quoted or interviewed, or when your site is included in a link roundup on a particular topic.

To attract editorial backlinks, create evergreen content that demonstrates your status as a thought leader, such that your site and your brand earn acclaim as a go-to resource for interviews and industry insight. Create engaging, shareable content that has the legs to go viral. To build out your content strategy, leverage SEO tools capable of recognizing popular keywords and topics that competitors have been successful with – but your site has yet to cover.

2) Guest blogging backlinks

When providing well-established sites with guest posts, it’s often possible to include an editorial backlink to your own site. Practicing guest blogging outreach to solicit valuable sites for these opportunities should be a key piece of just about any SEO strategy.

3) Backlinks in business profiles

Creating digital profiles for your brand on business listing sites, social media, industry directories, and review sites most often comes with the opportunity to post a backlink (or a few). Search engines view these entries as evidence that a site is well established.

4) Backlinks from webinars

Webinars (and recordings of them) offer particularly valuable content for sites to link to. Sites will often embed webinars in their own pages along with a link and mention of your brand as well. Use tactics similar to blog promotion to achieve these backlinks: sites you target for guest blogging may also want to add your webinar as a resource.

5) Free-tool backlinks

Offering a valuable tool – for free – is another strong method of earning both attention and backlinks that have a deep and long-lasting impact on SEO. This can mean creating a simple-but-useful asset, such as a cost calculator valuable to those in your industry, or providing a lite version of a paid tool you offer. To encourage backlinks, promote the tool with sites that have a similar audience to your own (using SEO tools to uncover them), as well as your guest blogging site targets.

Other SEO-Boosting Backlinks

6) Acknowledgment backlinks

Sites often publish acknowledgements when a brand makes a donation, or has a representative speaking at or sponsoring an industry event, etc. SEO tools that recognize where your competitors earn their backlinks can help you identify and strategize around potential opportunities for earning your own acknowledgements as well.

7) Guest post bio backlinks

If a site that accepts guest blogging doesn’t allow backlinks within the content, it usually will do so within the author’s bio. Even when outside of editorial content, these backlinks still have a positive impact on SEO.

8) Badge backlinks

One clever technique for establishing backlinks is to come up with a badge to award to other brands as recognition for their status or achievement in some capacity. When those sites proudly post the badge on their sites, you get a link back to your own. Again, you’ll want to make deft use of SEO tools to recognize sites with similar audiences to yours, in order to determine targets for your badge program.

9) Backlinks derived from press releases (on topics worthy of media interest)

When your brand has a newsworthy announcement to make, putting out a press release can serve as a foundation for your PR and marketing tactics, while also producing backlinks from publications that cover the announcement and the published release itself.

10) Comment backlinks

Posting genuine and relevant commentary on content – and including a backlink – is usually acceptable if it adds value to the conversation. However, if executed in a spammy manner, this technique can end up having negative effect on your reputation with search engines. Be careful not to overdo it.

Types of Backlinks to Avoid

11) Paid Links

Search engines are built to assess your site’s value based on its genuine, earned popularity with other sites. Google warns that buying and selling links can negatively affect a site’s placements in search rankings. When you buy links in pursuit of an SEO advantage, you don’t get what you pay for.

12) Backlinks in press releases that are not newsworthy

Creating press releases solely for the sake of producing backlinks is a spammy practice, which may have a negative effect on SEO.

13) Low-quality or irrelevant directory links

Creating profiles in directories that aren’t trustworthy and respected (or in those that simply aren’t related to your brand) can be viewed as spam and harm your SEO efforts.

14) Low-quality forum backlinks

Forum posts by your brand – and especially any that include backlinks – should be limited to high-quality forums and genuine discussions. Attempts to spam links on these venues may have an effect opposite to what is intended.

Kim Kosaka is Director of Marketing at Alexa.com, whose tools provide insight into digital behavior that marketers use to better understand and win over their audience.

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Year in Search: the top Google Search trends for 2018

Whether you’re working in marketing, SEO or content, it’s useful to know the top search trends for 2018 to learn more about your audience.

2018 is almost over and Google has compiled a list of the most popular search trends for the year.

Google search has turned 20 years old in September and it’s interesting to think how our searching habits have changed in these two decades.

That’s why their annual Year in Search is a good reflection on the changing search trends, the latest cultural moments or events that shaped the most popular searches, but also what we can learn from all of these.

Here are the most popular search trends of 2018.

People search for good

According to Google, the world was searching for “good” in 2018 in a higher frequency than the previous years. The trend was popular enough to inspire their video’s story for the year.

People searched for different kinds of queries, from “how to be a good dancer” to “what makes a good role model.”

It has been a busy year full of unexpected and sad stories but it’s interesting to notice that people are searching for good news, inspiring stories and positive ideas.

There are many brands that already benefit from this trend by focusing on social good and how they can make an impact while increasing their brand awareness.

What it’s useful to remember is that ‘good stories’ cannot be forced. If your brand is trying too hard to inspire its audience, then the result might not be successful.

What are the most popular searches of 2018?

The most popular search queries have to do with:

• big events
• people who were in the spotlight
• practical ‘how to’ questions
• help to find a location
• bigger questions answered briefly

It’s common every year to see on the top searches popular actors, singers, movies, sudden losses, or sports events so the most popular searches are not always really surprising. However, they can still give us an idea of what makes a ‘popular search’ or how one search term is more popular than another at a global level.

Search is direct and simple

What we can also notice is that the ‘how-to’ and ‘what is’ search queries are simple and direct. People are not typing complicated queries when looking for an answer. They want to find the result as fast as possible and it’s useful to keep it in mind when updating your SEO strategy.

Even if you’re not aiming for a popular and general keyword, it’s still a good way to understand how to simplify your keywords.

We search for answers to all kinds of questions

We have reached a point in our online habits that we use online searches to find the answer to any question. Whether it’s a practical question or a query to find a specific location, Google search is what comes to our minds first. Our mobile-first world makes us seek answers to all our questions as fast as possible.

Location-based marketing is becoming more popular every year and it’s useful to notice how people use the ‘where’ search queries to find either practical answers to a location or just to satisfy their curiosity about something that they’ve come across. Croatia’s popularity as a location, for example, had probably to do with the national team’s success in the recent World Cup.

Moreover, people also search locally to find their polling place, which is part of the trend of increasing local searches. Searches are not always general but they can be very specific and it’s useful for a marketer to consider all the opportunities that come along with local search marketing.

In a year of ups and downs, the world searched for “good” more than ever before. Here’s to all the good moments from 2018 and all the people who searched for them. #YearInSearch https://t.co/hj2FnX4mR4

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 12, 2018

Overview

A closer look at this year’s search trends show that the queries are becoming more direct, specific, personal and even conversational.

People are using Google Search in a functional way and they need to find an answer to their question as fast as possible.

Marketing is pushing us to predict the search trends before they even happen or simply to act faster than our competitors.

These trends can help us plan better campaigns, content, or ads by understanding what people search for, how the search queries are changing and how we can predict their search journey.

You can explore the trends in more detail here.

If you want to keep up with what people search for, here are the right tools to try out.

The post Year in Search: the top Google Search trends for 2018 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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5 schema markup values to use in local SEO

Local SEO has never been more important for marketing because of Google’s continued algorithm updates aimed at helping small businesses attract more customers. A local SEO strategy should be a proper mix of factors like:

• Google My Business profile
• Consistent NAP across Internet (name, address, and phone)
• Local citations
• Social media
• Local link building
• Google reviews
• On-page optimization

All these methods, trust me, are being used by all your competitors to good effect. Where webmasters tend to relax, that’s where your opportunity waits. And one method that is making waves right now is schema markup. Add it to your website and let your business reap the SEO benefits. Here’s a guide to help you out in your local SEO schema markup execution.

Understand schema markup

Put the schema markup code on your site, and help customers find more descriptive and informative results from the search engines. Consider the competitive and saturated state of the market, and you’ll figure out how schema markup helps your business gain an edge over the competition, bridging the link between browsing and converting customers.

Check out a schema markup in action below:

Enter the search query ‘SEO services’ and you immediately get a list of SEO companies in and around your location. This is one type of schema markup you are able to deploy on your site for helping visitors find a specific product or service. Let’s look at some of the different schema markup values for local businesses and how they are capable of improving the visibility of your company.

Learn how to implement local business schema markup

Read Google’s guidelines before you tinker with schema markups so you have a better idea about what to do and how to do it. Try to learn as much about coding as possible as some languages tend to be problematic, like Microdata. But simpler and more comprehensible options like JSON-LD are also available. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be a pro coder to work with schema markup. Simply follow all the instructions carefully.

Choose the correct template and adhere to it while creating code. But don’t reject the opportunity to be more descriptive and add value. Use elements, like Google Maps location, website URL, and social profiles for the best results.

Find the best schema markups for local business SEO

Use the following five schema markup values across a variety of website types to achieve the desired results:

1. Organization schema markup

Harness the power of organization schema markup to produce brand signals capable of improving your website snippet presence and Knowledge Graph entry in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Do not forget to signify your corporate contact details, social profile links, and logo.

Example (with JSON-LD)

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “Organization”,
“legalName” : “Over The Top SEO”,
“url” : “https://ift.tt/2EAoVXR;,
“contactPoint” : [{
“@type” : “ContactPoint”,
“telephone” : “+1-800-550-3101”,
“contactType” : “customer service”
}]
“logo” : “https://ift.tt/2Ew5hvk;,
“sameAs” : [ “https://ift.tt/2ECsVa1;,
“https://twitter.com/overthetopseo”,
“https://ift.tt/2EryyXY;,
“https://www.youtube.com/c/overthetopseo”,
“https://ift.tt/2EC1wFp;,
}
</script>

2. Website schema markup

Use website schema markup to view the Sitelinks Search Box feature for company SERPs. Help your website name get featured in the search results. Of course, you need to have an existing site search for enabling the Sitelinks Search Box element.

Example (with JSON-LD)

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context” : “http://schema.org”,
“@type” : “WebSite”,
“name” : “Over The Top SEO”,
“url” : “https://ift.tt/2EAoVXR;,
“potentialAction” : {
“@type” : “SearchAction”,
“target” : “https://ift.tt/2ExBFNM;,
“query-input” : “required name=search_term”
}
}
</script>

3. Breadcrumbs markup

Experience the power of breadcrumb rich snippets when you generate them for your pages in the SERPs using the Breadcrumb schema.

4. Site navigation schema markup

Use the SiteNavigationElement markup to improve the way search engines understand the structure of your website and boost navigation. Also, use this to influence organic sitelinks.

5. Video schema markup

Every serious marketer knows how important videos are to business SEO. This medium can prove useful when you’re trying to rank in search engines. In fact, for certain search queries, video content often outranks sites, especially when it comes to “how to” type of content.

Hosted or embedded video content can be leveraged through VideoObject schema. Just as Google mainly displays video rich snippets for streaming platforms like YouTube, this schema markup can help rich snippets from your online website show up in the Google Video Search. 

What properties are necessary?

• name
• description
• thumbnailUrl
• uploadDate

Find the most useful elements of schema to describe your video to search engines below:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “VideoObject”,
“name”: “Name of the Video (title you gave it on YouTube/Vimeo/Website)”,
“caption”: “whatever caption you’d like this video to have – this isn’t a mandatory field but i would recommend it”,
“description”: “A short description of your video: keep it concise (like your Video Meta Description in YouTube and Vimeo, so approximately 150 characters).”,
“thumbnailUrl”: “https://ift.tt/2Ez0REN;,
“embedUrl”: “A URL pointing to a player for the specific video. Usually this is the information in the src element of an <embed> tag”,
“uploadDate”: “2017-04-05T08:00:00+02:00”,
“duration”: “PT1M33S – this section has to be in ISO8601 formatting”,
“contentUrl”: “https://ift.tt/2Ew5oae;,
“embedUrl”: “https://ift.tt/2EC1yNx;,
“interactionCount”: “2347”,
“transcript”: “A transcript of your video is helpful for SEO – it’s also great for adding more detail about the video for search engines to understand given that the description above is so short”
}
</script>

Implement video schema markup

Visit Google Tag Manager and create a custom HTML Video Schema tag. Copy the format given above and alter the fields to reflect your video details. Ensure that it runs on the page containing the video by turning on the preview and debug mode. Once you’ve verified that it is firing, publish the video and give it a try in the Google Structured Data testing tool.

Maximize the potential of schema markup values

Get richer results and greater benefits from schema by sticking to a few rules. First, list all the schemas that are commonly used. Second, find all the schema types that you think will come in handy to achieve your local SEO goals. There are lots of different categories out there, so be sure to explore the full list and see which markup type fits your business better. Third, always mark up. There is a huge range of item types available, and the more content you mark up, the greater the rewards. But ensure that you mark only that content which is visible to your website visitors; marking up content hidden in page element like hidden div’s will not yield any results.

Validate the schema markup

Take your time to perfect the code and when you finally think that it is ready to be deployed, run it through the Structured Data Tool from Google. Chances are that you will find this tool to be immensely helpful and it can be a great resource when you’re quickly trying to validate the code prior to uploading it onto your site. Keep in mind that you are likely to come across numerous tools that exist solely to help you create the necessary code. But the problem is, most of them are not high quality and can feel highly dated. So, it is best if you develop a code that is entirely reliable, like the ones mentioned above, and then alter the elements to fit your requirements as and when you must.

Upload your schema markup

To simplify the process of uploading your code, always stick to the custom HTML tag from Google Tag Manager. If your business is situated across various location, it is recommended that you devise codes for each of them and then implement them on your location pages to get the desired results. As soon as the code is set up and ready in the container, all you have to do is hit the publish button and then complete the verification process via the structured data tool from Google by drawing upon the URL of your website. Now, you will notice that the Local business markup is being noticed by search engines.

Concluding remarks

Despite the impact of schema markups on local SEO, not many websites and businesses have taken advantage of it. So, pull ahead of the competition by learning and implementing the relevant microdata to enhance your search results. They may seem like a lot of work, but if you follow all the instructions mentioned above carefully, you should have no trouble putting your business on the map and attracting more people to your company.

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Six most common travel SEO mistakes to get right in 2019

Here’s a bold statement: “SEO in the travel industry is immensely challenging.”

The sheer number of pages to manage, complexities of properties, flights, accommodation, availability, occupancy, destinations, not to mention the crazy amount of APIs and databases to make a travel site function, can all make life tricky for an SEO, particularly when it comes to the development queue…

Having said that, there are still common mistakes and missed opportunities out there that have the potential to be really impactful and believe it or not, they don’t actually require a huge amount of resource to put right.

So, here’s a list of the six most common travel SEO mistakes to get right for 2019:

1. Forgetting about index bloat

There are a LOT of facets and filters when it comes to commercial travel category pages, arguably the most of any industry.

Typically with every facet or filter, be it; availability, location, facilities, amenities nearby, occupancy etc. A URL is created with the associated parameters selected by the user.

If not handled correctly, this can produce thousands of indexable pages that have no unique organic value to users.

This is a problem for a number of reasons:

• It can be confusing for search engines because they can find it tricky to identify the best and most relevant URL to rank and show users depending on their query
• It can dilute domain level ranking signals drastically
• It can cause a huge amount of duplicate content issues
• It can waste crawl budget which for big travel sites is super important

Combined, this can cause big losses in rankings, traffic and subsequently conversion!

How to identify index bloat

Go to Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) and check your ‘Index Coverage’ report or, in the old version, check ‘Index Status’ to see if you can see any spikes or growth in ‘Total Indexed’ pages. If you notice something like the graph below and it’s not expected, then there may be a problem:

If you find there is a big increase and you can’t explain why, conduct some ‘Site:’ operator searches and spot check areas of your site where this may be commonplace to see what you can find.

Here’s an example of index bloat from the page speed tool ‘Pingdom’. It seems as though every input a user executes produces an indexable URL:

Once you’ve found a problem like this, review the extent of it with a Screaming Frog crawl. This way you can see how many URLs are affected and distinguish between whether they are actually indexable or not.

For example, there may be a few hundred pages that are indexable but have not yet been found and indexed by Google.

How to fix index bloat:

• Noindex – Use a page level meta ‘noindex’ directive on the culprit pages
• Where possible redirect – index bloat can happen as a result of mountains of historical 404 pages too, 301 redirect them into the most appropriate page to consolidate
• Canonicalisation – apply an absolute canonical tag to the culprit pages to indicate that they are duplicate
• Pagination – where possible use rel=”next” & rel=”prev” markup to show that pages are part of a series
• URL parameter tool – By far the easiest but arguably the most risky method is using Google’s parameter handling tool to indicate the purpose of the culprit pages, be careful though, this can cause bigger problems if implemented incorrectly

Expert tip

If any of the above are difficult to get implemented in your dev queue and you don’t trust yourself using the parameter handling tool, you can actually noindex web pages & directories in your robots.txt file. You can actually add lines reading:

Noindex: /directory/

Noindex: /page/

This could save you a lot of time and is fully reversible, so less risky if you have control over your robots file. If you’ve never heard of this, don’t worry it is supported and it does work!

2. Unemotive meta titles

It’s pretty staggering but in the UK, there’s a lot going on in January for travel — it is certainly the biggest spike in the year for many brands, followed by ‘holiday blues’ peaks after summer.

Here’s the trend of interest over time for the query ‘tenerife holidays’ (a destination famed for its good weather all year round) to show you what I mean:

January might be a bad time to experiment because of the higher interest but, the rest of the year presents a great opportunity to get creative with your titles.

Why would you?

Simply, keyword heavy titles don’t inspire high click-through rates.

Creative titles entice users into your landing pages, give your brand a personality and increase your click-through rate. This sends strong positive relevancy signals to Google which helps towards highlighting that your website is the best for the initial user query.

Here are a few things you can try with supportive content and commercial landers:

• Get emotional, people buy holidays on the experiences they anticipate having. Play on that with your titles – how will products/content from this page make the user feel?
• Where possible use a numbered list to be as descriptive as possible
• Use strengthening words such as premium, secret, amazing, proven, guaranteed
• Tie in emotional hooks using words like; fun, adventure, seamless, safe, welcoming, luxury, relaxing
• Experiment with ‘price from’ and actually quote pricing in the title
• Switch up your ‘PHP’ generated title tags for property pages and experiment with more descriptive wording and not just PROPERTY NAME | LOCATION | BRAND – but don’t remove any keyword targeting, just improve those titles.

Expert Tip

Write five completely unique title tags for the same page and test each one with a Facebook or PPC ad to see whether they outperform your current iteration in terms of engagement.

3. Poor merchandising

As previously mentioned, the travel industry experiences peaks and troughs of consumer behavior trend throughout the year which causes the majority intent to switch dramatically across different months in the year.

So, having a deep understanding of what users are actually looking for is really important when merchandising high traffic pages to get the best conversion out of your audience.

In short, gaining an understanding of what works when, is huge.

Here’s some tips to help you make better merchandising decisions:

• Use last year’s email open rate data – what type of content/product worked?
• Use Google Search Console to find pages that peaked in organic traffic at different times
• Involve the social media team to get a better understanding of what your audience is engaging with and why
• Use Google Trend data to verify your hunches and find clearer answers
• Use UGC sites such as Quora to find questions users are asking during different months of the year. Use the following site operator and swap out ‘holiday’ for your topic: ‘site:quora.com inurl:holiday’ and then filter by custom date range on your search

Often consumers are exposed to the same offers, destinations and visuals on key landing pages all year round which is such a missed opportunity.

We now live in a world of immediacy and those in the industry know the challenges of users cross-shopping between brands, even those who are brand loyal. This often means that if users can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will bounce and find a site that serves them the content they are looking for.

For example, there’s an argument for promoting and focusing on media-based content, more so than product, later in the year, to cater to users that are in the ‘consideration’ part of the purchasing funnel.

Expert tip

Use number five in this list to pull even more clues to help inform merchandising

4. Holding back on the informational market share

I grant you, this is a tall order, travel advice, blogs and guides are a standalone business but, the opportunity for commercial travel sites to compete with the likes of TripAdvisor is massive.

An opportunity estimated from our recent Travel Sector Report at 232,057 monthly clicks from 22,040 keywords and only Thomas Cook is pushing into the top 10.

Commercial sites that don’t have a huge amount of authority might struggle to rank for informational queries because dedicated travel sites that aren’t directly commercial are usually deemed to provide better/unbiased content for users.

Having said that, you can see clearly from above that it IS possible!

So, here’s what you should do…

…focus on one thing and do it better than anyone else

Sounds pretty straightforward and you’re probably thinking ‘I’ve heard this before’ but, only a handful in the travel industry are actually doing this well.

Often you see the same information from one travel site to the next, average weather, flight times, the location of the country on a map, a little bit of fluff about the history of the destination and then straight into accommodation.

This is fine, it’s useful, but it’s not outstanding.

Let’s take Thomas Cook as an example.

Thomas Cook has built a network of weather pages that provide live forecasts, annual overviews as well as unique insights into when is best to go to different destinations. It even has a tool to shop for holidays by the weather (something very important to Brits) called ‘Where’s Hot When?’

The content is relevant, useful, concise, complete, easy to use, contemporary in design and, most importantly, better than anyone else’s.

In short, Thomas Cook is nailing it.

They have focused on weather and haven’t stopped until it’s as best as it can be.

Why did they bother with weather? Well it’s approximately a third of all travel-related informational searches that we found in our keyword set from the Travel Sector Report:

Apply Thomas Cook’s methodology to something that is relevant to your audience, it could be; family attractions, adult only tour guides, Michelin star eateries, international laws families should be concerned about, the list is plentiful!

Find something, nail it.

5. Ignoring the gold in on-site search

There are some big travel sites out there that don’t have an on-site search function which is a huge missed opportunity. Travel sites are inherently difficult to navigate with such a volume of pages, site search is quite often a great solution for users.

As well as this, it can give marketers some amazing insight into what users are looking for, not just generally in terms of the keywords users might be using but also the queries users are searching on a page by page level.

For example, you could drill down into the differences between queries searched on your homepage vs queries searched on specific landing pages to spot trends in behavior and fix the content gaps from these areas of the site.

You could also use the data to inform merchandising decisions to address number three on this list.

In doing this, users are actually telling you exactly what they are looking for, at what time, whether they are a repeat visitor or a new one and where they’ve come from to visit your site.

If you spend the time, this data is gold!

If you can’t get buy in for this, test the theory with an out of the box search function that plugs straight into your site like searchnode. Try it for six months, you might be surprised at how many users turn to it and you will get some really actionable data out of it.

It’s also super easy to track in Google Analytics and the reports are really straightforward:

1. Go to Admin

2. Click ‘View Settings’

3. Switch ‘Site search Tracking’ on

4. Strip the letter that appears in your site’s search URL before the search terms e.g. for wordpress this is usually the letter “s”: www.travelsite.co.uk/?s=search-term

5. Click ‘save’, boom you’re done.

Let Google collect data, extract it monthly and dig, dig furiously!

6. Ignoring custom 404 errors pages

Who doesn’t love a witty 404 page. More and more often you’ll find that when webmasters optimize a 404 error page they make them lighthearted. Here’s a great example from Broadway Travel:

There is a reason why webmasters aim for a giggle.

Think about it… when users hit a 404 error page, 100% of the time there’s a problem, which is a big inconvenience when you’re minding your own business and having a browse, so, something to make you laugh goes a long way at keeping you unfrustrated.

Time to name names, and show you some 404 error pages that need some work…

British Airways

TUI & Firstchoice

Expedia

Momondo

404 error pages happen over time, it’s totally normal.

It’s also normal to get traffic to your 404 error page. But it’s not just any old traffic, it’s traffic that you’ve worked hard to get hold of.

If, at this point, you’re thinking, ‘my site has recently been audited and internal links to 404 pages have been cleared up’.

Think again!

Users can misspell URLs, ancient external links can point to old pages, the product team can make mistakes, as meticulous as you may be, please don’t discount this one.

Losing quality users because of a bad 404 experience is an SEO’s idea of nails down a chalkboard.

Here are some tips to optimize your 404 pages:

• Hit them with something witty but don’t be controversial
• Feature the main site query forms prominently so users can conduct another ‘base’ search
• Feature a site search option as well – an error page is a perfect opportunity to get users to conduct a site search to give you some insight into what they are looking for (number five on this list)
• Include curated links to most popular top level pages such as destinations, guides, hotels, deals etc. This will allow users to start from at the top of each section and it will also allow search engines to continue crawling if they hit a 404 page
• Re-emphasize branding, USPs, value proposition and trust signals to subconsciously remind users of why they’re on your site in the first place

Even if you think your 404 is awesome don’t neglect them when they pop up:

• Review the 404 page data in Google Analytics behavior flow to find broken links you may not have known about and fix them
• Keep on top of your 404 pages in Google Search Console and redirect to appropriate pages where necessary

404’s are often the bane of an SEO’s life and you might think about ways to get out of keeping on top of them.

Sadly there aren’t any short cuts….

…Bonus SEO mistake

Creating a global 301 redirect rule for every 404 page and direct them to your homepage.

This is surprisingly common but is poor SEO practice for a number of reasons, firstly you won’t be able to identify where users are having issues on your site when 404 pages pop up.

You may also be redirecting a page that could have originally had content on it that was totally irrelevant to your homepage. It’s likely in this situation that Google will actually override your redirect and classify it as a soft 404, not to mention the links that may have originally pointed to your 404’s.

Save your users, build a 404 page!

Final thoughts

No site is perfect, and although it might appear as though we’re pointing fingers, we want you to be able to overcome any challenges that come with SEO implementation — there’s always a bigger priority but keep your mind open and don’t neglect the small stuff to stay ahead of the game.

The post Six most common travel SEO mistakes to get right in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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