Given that 95% of search engine traffic goes all to the first page of search results, maintaining high site rankings is key to promoting awareness to your brand, establishing credibility, and generating more leads and customers for your business.

However, there are instances when you’ll see your site rankings begin to drop. When that happens, so too will your ability to reach your business goals.

In this article, you’ll learn 15 different reasons why your site rankings are dropping and tips on boosting them – by improving your SEO.

1. Monitor Changes in Google’s Algorithm

Google released its latest core algorithm update in November 2024. This update will affect how Google will rank websites based on safe-browsing, HTTPS, mobile-friendliness, site loading speed, interactivity, and most importantly, whether their content is up-to-date.

Updates like these are meant to ensure Google lives up to its mission of providing its users with relevant and useful information.

However, this also means that some SEO techniques that helped improve your site rankings in the past may no longer work. In some cases, it may even cause your rankings to drop.

Conducting an SEO Analysis on your website can help prevent this from happening. WebCEO’s SEO Analysis tool, for instance, is regularly updating its system each time that Google updates its algorithm.

That way, you can find the areas that you’ll need to address and promptly fix them.

A perfect example of how SEO can help your business is Agnew Group, a leading European motor group in Northern Ireland. By adjusting how they optimized their website and content, the Irish motor company achieved a record month of website visits, users, and customer inquiries in January 2019, which led to a 65% boost in leads.

2. Double-Check the Keywords You Are Targeting

It’s not enough that you target long-tail keyword phrases that match your products and services. You also need to check the competition level of each keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for.

If all the keywords you’re trying to rank for are incredibly competitive, it’s going to be more challenging to boost your site rankings.

When choosing the keywords to optimize your content and website, you’d want to make sure that you choose those with a high Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI. That’s because these are keyword phrases that have a high volume of traffic and low competition level.

Find the most effective keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

3. Fill Out Your Meta Information

Meta tags matter because they provide more context to a web page and give you extra opportunity to improve keywords rankings.

To prevent your site rankings from dropping, make sure that you fill out the following essential meta tags and include your targeted keyword in them:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Image ALT text
• Heading tags (H1-H4)

There is a way to quickly find all pages where the meta information is lacking: scan your site with the On-Site Issues Overview tool. And then just add the necessary bits of information.

4. Find Your Broken and Inactive Links

Since the quality of your inbound and outbound links are among those that Google considers when ranking websites, it pays to regularly check if any of your links are broken and fix them.

WebCEO’s Technical Audit allows you to run an audit of your internal links so that you can find which ones are broken and fix them.

5. Give Public Relations a Try

Building quality backlinks is not as simple as sending out pitches and landing guest posts to random sites. They have to be established websites, preferably with high domain authority.

Publishing a press release is an effective way to build quality backlinks to your website on highly-reputable websites. In turn, you’ll prevent your site rankings from dropping and may even help improve them.

This is precisely what happened to Shane Barker. By delving into various PR techniques, he was able to generate quality backlinks that drove more traffic and boost his site’s rankings and establish him as a reputable resource in his industry.

6. Purge Backlinks From Poor Quality Sites

Writing guest blogs will help you build backlinks. But that doesn’t mean that you just submit a guest post to any website.

The reason is that Google and other search engines also consider the quality of the sites your backlinks are located. Backlinks coming from low-quality websites can cause your site rankings to drop.

One way to make sure that you’re submitting a guest post to a quality site is by checking its Domain Authority (DA) and Spam scores. Targeting sites with a high DA score and a low Spam score increase the likelihood you’re submitting your guest post and create a backlink in a high-quality site.

What about the backlinks you’ve already collected? Sniff out the low-quality ones with WebCEO’s Backlink Profile tools. All the potentially harmful backlinks will be in the Toxic Pages report where you can decide what to do with them.

7. Know How Your Target Customers Search for Content

Another reason why your site rankings are dropping is because your content is not matching your customers’ search intent.

You see, people go online for three specific reasons. They’re looking to:

• Find solutions to the problem they’re currently facing.
• Learn more about a specific brand, product or service.
• Make a purchase.

That said, the best way to improve your site’s rankings is to update—even revise—blog posts and guides you’ve previously published so that they match any of these purposes.

This is what Brian Dean of Backlinko did. By revising a case study he previously published into an in-depth SEO strategy guide, he successfully boosted its rankings from the second page of Google’s SERP to number three on the first page.

8. Get Rid of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is harmful to SEO because Google views it as an attempt to manipulate its search algorithms so that your website can rank higher.

The best to prevent this from happening is by organizing your website’s content using the Topic Cluster model.

It’ll be easier for you to find and eliminate duplicate content on your website by organizing content into clusters. 

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9. Double Down on Privacy and Security

Keeping your business’ website safe and secure from cyberattacks is vital to prevent your site rankings from dropping and avoid legal trouble and revenue loss.

While most brands have taken steps to that traffic visiting their website using their desktops or laptops safe and secure, the same can’t be said about those visiting their website using their mobile devices.

One study reports that 40% of website data breaches because their websites were accessed using a mobile device.

This is perplexing, especially since over half of the website traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.

Investing in biometric authentication technology like face ID and fingerprint recognition is one way to keep your website visitors’ data secure and minimize—if not eliminate—vulnerabilities to your website while they’re accessing it on their mobile devices.

10. Monitor Your Competitors

If your competitors’ site rankings keep going up, then it’s a good idea to find out what they’re doing so that you can replicate it for your site.

Conducting a competitor analysis will give you vital information like the keywords they’re targeting, what types of content they’re publishing, where they’re promoting their content, and what sites they’re building their backlinks.

More importantly, a competitor analysis can also show you the areas where your competitors are struggling or falling short. You can then take this information and use it to optimize and improve your site rankings.

11. Check the Manual Actions Done By Google

If you violate one or more of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, your website will be slapped with a Manual Action report, and you’ll be promptly notified on your Google’s Search Console or via email.

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Websites that receive this notification won’t just see their site rankings drop. They can also have their content—or even their website—taken out from Google’s search results.

Google’s Search Advocate, Daniel Waisberg, has explained in-depth the steps you can take to discover that your website was penalized.

12. Refine Your Website UX

Even if you publish quality content and your website looks attractive, if your visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they’ll opt-out and go elsewhere.

Implementing website UX best practices can help prevent this from happening. Here are some suggestions:

• Simplify your website’s navigation
• Utilize a responsive website design
• Create and upload a sitemap
• Make your headers and labels easy to understand
• Conduct usability testing when you update your website

IWillTeachYouToBeRich is an excellent example of a website that observes these best practices.

As you can see, the call-to-action buttons are a different color than the rest of the website, which instantly draws the user’s attention. The navigation has short, descriptive menu titles. The minimal color palette, especially the white background, enables the user to focus more on the copy than the design.

13. Check How Long Your Visitors Stay

If you want to boost your site rankings, you need to ensure that you get your visitors to stay as long as possible.

That’s because the length of time people spend on your website affects its bounce rate: the higher your bounce rate, the lower your site rankings.

Publishing quality long-form content is one way to get your visitors to stay longer on your site and lower your bounce rate.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can just ramble on and on in your article. It needs to be carefully written, especially since 8 of 10 readers only read headlines and most site visitors only consume 20% of content on a page.

More importantly, it should provide practical solutions to your readers and promises to deliver what you’ve written in your title.

This SEO Optimization Guide by WebCEO is a perfect example. It teaches you the steps on how to write a blog post that will rank on Google’s SERPs.

14. Check for Issues With Your Web Hosting Server 

If your website goes down quite frequently, this can cause your site rankings to drop. Not only does this increase your site’s bounce rate, but it also prevents Google bots from crawling and fetching your content each time someone searches for information online.

Switching to a more reliable web hosting provider can help solve this.

One of the most important things to check when choosing a new web hosting provider is carefully checking reviews about the web hosting company you’re considering. Sites like TechRadar are great resources for this.

15. After Redesigning, Evaluate Your Website

Whether you’ve updated some parts of your website or gave it a total makeover, this can cause your site rankings to drop if you’re not careful.

For starters, redesigning your website could cause it to partially or entirely go offline.

Another reason is that redesigning your website can affect the way how your content’s organized. How your website was coded will be altered during the process, especially if the web developer redesigning your website is different from the one who initially created it.

Setting up a staging site is the most effective way to prevent all of these from happening.

That’s because a staging site is a clone of your website, except that it’s not yet live. As such, any changes that can be made to the design and structure of your website won’t affect your current site rankings.

It also allows you to test every single update made to your website to ensure it’s free from errors and bugs before it goes live.

Key Takeaways

In this article, I’ve listed 15 of the easiest ways to improve your SEO and give your rankings a boost. Review each point and see which ones resonate with you the most. Then, apply the strategies and tips shared here to bring your ranking back up.

Remember that Google’s primary objective is to ensure it provides the most relevant and useful information to its users. By ensuring each content you publish matches your target audience’s search intent and present it on an easy-to-navigate website, you’ll not only prevent your site rankings from dropping, but even cause your site to rank higher.

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The post 15 Quick Ways to Improve Your SEO & Rankings appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s no shortage of how beneficial content marketing can be for a brand and business. Up to 96% of surveyed marketers claim that creating content has been successful at building their credibility and trust among their customers, especially when they prioritized creating high-value informational content over promotional ones.

Regardless, there’s no denying that not every content marketing effort pays off. Many types of content—like long form pillar blog posts—may stand the test of time and get great results. These are often the types of content we invest the most in because if top-performing content can get us more traffic, that also helps us gain more leads, and eventually more sales endlessly at no extra cost.

Is your content underperforming?

It’s great if your brand is able to churn out high-performing content every single time, but we know that that’s not always a realistic goal. So what can you do if you constantly have underperforming content on your blog?

One option is to keep going at it and hope your next published blog posts will perform better. But we know this option can be costly to marketers and doesn’t make the most of any existing content.

There are better ways. Keep reading because we’ll show you 10 effective tips that will actually help you get better results from your underperforming content. Soon, you’ll see better search results and traffic coming from even your older posts.

1. Ensure That Your Site Can Be Searched and Indexed

First of all, one reason you might not be seeing any results from your content is because of a site indexing issue. There can be a few reasons your site hasn’t been indexed, i.e. can be discovered and read by search engine crawlers, or the special agents Google and other search engines use to discover, browse, and understand your content.

Having a website that isn’t indexed means you’re invisible to Google—and that means you’re invisible to potential customers too.

Make sure all your content stands a chance to perform by ensuring your site is indexed. There are quick ways to check this too. Here’s the simplest way to make sure your site is actually indexed, especially on Google:

1. Go to Google and type in site:yourwebsite.com.
2. You’ll see how many pages on your site Google has actually indexed.
3. To search for a specific blog post, type in site:yourwebsite.com/slug where the slug is the actual slug of the content you’re checking.
4. Don’t get any search results? That means this specific page or content is not currently indexed by Google.

An easy fix for ensuring your site is indexed is by submitting an indexing request via Google Search Console. You simply need to log in to the app, navigate to the URL Inspection Tool and hit the “Request indexing” button.

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2. Improve Your Content’s Headline

The power of an effective headline can do wonders for boosting content performance. Among all of the factors Google uses as a basis for ranking content, one of them is your click-through rate (CTR).

This refers to how often people are clicking through to your blog post or page after seeing it as a search query result. The higher you can raise your CTR, the higher your content will rank.

To apply this to underperforming content, change up your posts’ or pages’ headlines. Optimize for SEO as best as you can, but experiment with different headline formulas that might drastically improve those click-throughs.

Of course, give your headline tests enough time to gather data. You may only notice changes weeks and months down the line, so make it a habit to do regular SEO audits on your content to see how new headlines are performing or not performing.

3. Match Your Keywords and Your Content with Search Intent

Another tip to get better results from underperforming content is to see how the search engine result pages of your chosen keywords look like. By understanding what users were looking for when making their search—or search intent—you can edit your content or adjust your keywords accordingly.

When a user finds your page from a search result page then clicks through and finds that your content doesn’t help them with their search, they’re most likely to bounce right away. This can hurt your page’s performance. So a quick remedy to save your content ranking is adjusting your content to match users’ search intent.

You might do a quick skim of the top-performing content for your keywords and see what search engines are picking up from their content. Are they answering your users’ questions better? Is there a section that would help match your content to people’s search intent?

Small tweaks can bring great results, so review top performers to see how you can be the go-to post or page for your users.

4. Implement the Topic Cluster Model

The topic cluster model might be one of the best content marketing strategies you can use to boost the SEO performance of all your content overall. A topic cluster is essentially a group of blog posts centered around a broad topic, then tied together with a comprehensive pillar page that links between these cluster posts.

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Boost your underperforming content by linking them to an existing pillar page you might have about the topic. If you don’t have one yet, this is the perfect opportunity to write one. Make sure your main pillar content is broad enough to create several sub-sections and cluster content but without being too general.

If you have several blog posts on your site as is, using the topic cluster model can be a great way to get these posts organized. Plus, they play a big role in boosting your SEO since they help organize and prioritize your most important content pieces.

5. Incorporate Videos into Your Existing Content

When Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it slowly began introducing subtle changes to its search engine result pages. You might notice that many search queries render video results as well—this is no coincidence.

Some users do Google searches while being agnostic about the delivery of their query. So whether it’s a long blog post or a video, your content might just be able to perform better if you explore another medium of delivery.

See which of your underperforming content might fare better if supplemented with a valuable video. To make the video creation process faster than it might otherwise be, use a tool like Boosted to create better videos faster, especially with templates and a stock library for footage and music.

6. Don’t Discount Your Content’s Meta Data

Metadata can go a long way for improving those underperforming posts. After all, title tags are still a valuable ranking factor to search engines, so make sure those headings contain your chosen keywords.

On the other hand, meta descriptions might not necessarily bear any weight for on-page ranking anymore. However, many users read the meta descriptions to get a taste of what to expect from your content. Optimize this copy accordingly; convince your users that your page has the information they’re looking for so that your CTR gets better too.

Because you have limited room to optimize your metadata copy, use a robust keyword research tool so you can cover them in your blog posts and headings as needed.

7. Make Your Content More Comprehensive

Finally, one way to really make those underperforming content pieces shine is by updating these old blogs and making them more valuable to readers. If your blog post is looking a little thin and doesn’t contain enough information, readers might bounce and look for another site that could help.

It’s a little-known strategy for promoting your content but it works so well because of how easy it can be to refresh an old post with new or more information. Use more updated examples and sources, look for better modern photos and images, and remove any information that might now be outdated.

Try to check what the top performers in your search query have, then aim to make your blog post better than theirs. Fill in the gaps of their content, then use all the other tips you’ve learned above to really pack a powerful punch.

This step is helpful in that you don’t need to constantly create new posts about the same topic from scratch. You can simply repurpose old and underperforming content and make it better than it was before.

8. Get Rid of Low-Quality Backlinks

There can be no SEO content strategy without backlinks. But they are like food: more isn’t always better. Do your link building right, and you will have sites with authority vouching for yours and boosting your rankings. But if you collect backlinks with no care about where they come from, Google will have a hard time seeing value in your site.

Run a check of your website’s backlink profile with WebCEO’s My Backlinks tool.

Specifically, look inside the Toxic Pages report. It will have a list of potentially harmful backlinks from sites of low authority – and if you disagree with how the tool defines “low authority”, you can tweak the settings to your own liking.

Find the backlinks coming from web pages that are not relevant to your content at all – those are the ones hurting your rankings. Get rid of those backlinks by any means you prefer (by changing the linking pages directly or through Google Disavow).

9. Fix the Technical Issues on Your Site

Perhaps the most obvious reason behind your content’s poor performance could be its, well, poor performance. In a technical sense. Maybe something on the page doesn’t load. Have you checked?

Site errors can be really sneaky if you neglect tracking them with SEO tools. If you haven’t scanned your site for errors lately, now is the best time to do it.

This is what you will see after scanning your site with WebCEO’s Website Audit tool: a list of issues currently present on your site with tips for fixing them. Tend to everything you can, then see later if it helped your rankings rise. Unfortunately, Google offers no fixed time frame for when it takes effect.

10. Strengthen Your Internal Linking Structure

When a page links to another page, it shares some of its authority. Does it mean that pages with high authority have more of it to share? Correct.

It applies both to pages from other sites and to your own site’s pages. So what happens to a page when no high-authority pages link to it? Its own authority stays low and it doesn’t rank high. There you have another potential reason why your SEO content strategy suffers.

Scan your site’s internal linking structure with WebCEO and see how you can improve it.

Specifically, here’s what you can do:

• Check the Page Authority Analysis report to find out which of your site’s pages have the most authority. Try linking from those to your content (but only when such links make sense).
• See the Landing Page Analysis report to analyze individual pages. In this report, you can check which pages link to your content and which do not.

Key Takeaways

Getting better results from underperforming content is one of the best ways to boost your engagement and get more meaningful conversions from existing pages on your site.

Remember that perfecting your SEO strategy is an ongoing process and can be tedious—however, what sets the best SEO players apart is how they’re able to play the long game of ranking content, and that includes putting in the work to make even underperforming content on their site perform better.

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The post 10 Ways You Could Improve Your SEO Content Strategy Right Now appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It feels like featured snippets have been with us forever. Depending on when you became an Internet user, it may very well be true for you: Google introduced them back in 2014. Believe it or not, many would like to return to the times before featured snippets, when the top of Google’s first page was occupied by the best organic results. You know – where you want to place your site by doing SEO.

Why do some people have a problem with featured snippets? As with everything, there’s good and slightly not as good.

Pros of featured snippets:

• Your search result is placed in the most visible spot.
• A featured snippet can show more content than a regular search result, even one enhanced by schema markup.
• They are voice search-friendly.

Cons of featured snippets:

• As mentioned before, even the top organic results are shown lower.
• Users often don’t click on them because the content they want is shown directly in the snippet.
• Sometimes Google shows snippets which do not display accurate or relevant information.

Do featured snippets make SEO worthless? Of course not. Even though organic results get roughly 11% more clicks than featured snippets, the latter still generate 8.6% of clicks. What snippets do is make SEO more complex. If you want to maximize your click-through rates, you want to optimize your site both for Position 1 and Position 0.

Mind you, not everything you see above the organic results is actually a featured snippet! Clearing it up first is going to help us later, so let’s start with…

What featured snippets AREN’T

Google strives to be as helpful as possible and places many different things above the organic search results. Many of them are not actually featured snippets. The difference is that you have very little control over those things, and it’s mostly up to Google whether or not to display your site in those entities.

Here’s what featured snippets aren’t:

• OneBox. If you’ve ever Googled things like “today’s weather”, that’s where the search engine shows you the forecast. The same OneBox can display many other kinds of information, such as sports news, stocks, flights etc. Here’s an example:

• Knowledge Panel (or Knowledge Graph). To display information in these panels, Google collects information from multiple websites it considers authoritative. You may often see a Wikipedia link in those. You can get a Knowledge Panel for your business by creating a Google Business Profile listing.

• Google Discover (or Top Stories). This is a personalized news feed Google generates for users based on their search queries.

• Rich snippets. Since both terms have the word “snippets” in them, it can be easy to confuse the two. A rich snippet is not a search result placed by Google above the organic results. It’s an ordinary search result with extra fluff (e.g. a review score). A simple way to check: if you see a pretty-looking snippet below Position 0, it’s a rich snippet.

You can get rich snippets by using Schema markup on your pages. On the other hand, you don’t need Schema to get featured snippets (although it certainly won’t hurt).

Of course, you can still get all these things for your site. But Google tends to reserve some of them (Knowledge Panel in particular) for well-known brands with a large online presence. If you aren’t at that level yet, then consider expanding and making yourself known on the Web until Google can’t ignore you anymore.

Now that we’ve made that clear, we can proceed to what you really want: actual featured snippets and how to get them.

What featured snippets ARE (and how to get them)

1. Definition box

There’s no official name for this type of snippets (nor any other type, for that matter). They are also sometimes called definition paragraphs. If you want to see what it looks like, just type “what is (something)” in Google. If the answer exists somewhere, Google will present it to you in this form:

Often, though not always, it will be an excerpt from Wikipedia. It’s hard to compete with the number one go-to online encyclopedia, but other websites manage – and so can you. If you have a site page that you want to appear in search with a definition snippet, the obvious first step is putting a definition on that page. It’s the easiest way to anticipate and respond to a curious user’s query.

Pages with Frequently Asked Questions are often picked up to serve as definition snippets. After all, FAQs are made to be packed with various questions and answers. Questions which closely match user queries act like long-tail keywords – and that’s where SEO finally comes in. The best way to find out what queries your users type in Google is to use a keyword finder.

For instance, let’s say you have a page about changing the oil in your car. Open WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool, type in “how to change oil in my car” and press Search.

Then look for keywords similar to what you need. Ideally, you want the ones with the highest global monthly searches, but you never know when the ones with a lower number of searches will help somebody find your site. Use them on your page just in case, too.

Alternatively, you could use the Keywords from Search Console report to see the keywords which already generate clicks for you. Sort the table by the CTR column to see the most effective keywords.

2. Ordered and unordered lists

Lists are probably the easiest way to land a page into Position 0. All you need to do is predict a user’s question and phrase your text as an answer – or, easier yet, as the question. Then just follow it up with a list of steps or answers. You will end up with something like this:

And it doesn’t even matter if your list is ordered or bulleted. The result will be the same.

If your list is long enough, there won’t be enough room in the snippet to display everything. But that’s a good thing: it all but guarantees the users will click on the link and visit your site to read the rest.

Just like definition boxes, list featured snippets require relevant long-tail keywords to catch users. So just like before, use the Keyword Suggestions tool to find the best keywords for the task.

3. Table

Table featured snippets are slightly harder to get than the lists, and it’s only because creating a table requires a bit more effort. Only tables made with HTML code are picked up for table snippets!

But other than the HTML requirement, the procedure is the same:

1. Anticipate a user’s question;
2. Phrase your text to address the question;
3. Follow it up with the answer;
4. And be generous with keywords.

Same as long lists, a table will likely not fit in the featured snippet. So the users will pay you a visit only if they really want to see your data. It needs to be unique, very interesting or very useful – or all those things at once.

4. YouTube suggested clip

Some Google searches give you a YouTube video as the top result. If you have a YouTube channel, you too can make Google pick up your own videos and put them in a featured snippet.

Note that it won’t send any users directly to your site, not even if you have a link to it in your video’s description or comments. The video itself will act as an additional barrier that not everyone will want to cross, and it’s not helped by the fact that a video featured snippet can be watched directly in the Google SERP.

So the best you can do is make interesting videos that will make users want to see more, explore your YouTube channel and your brand.

In order to get a featured snippet with your YouTube video, here’s what you need:

1. Make your video address one question, relevant to the user’s query.
2. Optimize your video for Google. A video’s YouTube rank isn’t as important for a featured snippet as its Google rank.
3. Have relevant keywords in the video’s title, filename, description. Your description should be detailed, and having timestamps helps a lot, too.
4. Add a transcript to your video. YouTube’s automated captions may be improving, but they are still losing to what you can write yourself.
5. Make a clickable thumbnail for your video.

Afterword

And don’t forget that featured snippets aren’t just there to look pretty. They are supposed to bring users to your site – which means you must have high-quality content prepared in advance. Make sure your content and your SEO are top-notch at all times if you want users to keep clicking and your snippets to keep being featured.

Now then, those snippets won’t make themselves. Get out there and create something awesome!

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The post What’s in SEO: How to Get Featured Snippets for Your Site appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Business owners and bloggers, veteran marketers and greenhorns – everyone is eventually overcome with the desire to step outside of their boundaries. Sometimes the step they make is larger than usual, and they decide to go global. They look at another country on the map and think to themselves, “Look at all those people who don’t know yet that they love what I have to offer!” And then they start working on earning that admiration.

Can you relate? If you are an ambitious Internet marketer and are interested in global SEO, then this post is for you. In order to give you a helping hand, we have prepared a number of dos and don’ts to heed for a successful international SEO strategy.

What benefits does international SEO have?

Obvious rewards for expanding over to other countries include:

• New customers
• Greater profits
• More backlinks and traffic
• Higher rankings for your site

Then there are more interesting upsides that might not be as obvious.

• You can find less costly opportunities for your business. Prices aren’t the same in different countries; you may stumble upon a cheaper and less competitive market. Your competitors may never have thought of even trying to compete in another market such as for those who expect a product or at least its packaging to appear in their language. In fact, this could be the main factor in how you choose a country to target.
• More customers mean more feedback. A pool of new ideas for improving your business could be waiting for you.

There are two ways to approach international SEO:

1. Launch a campaign aimed at another country and
2. Launch a campaign aimed at an audience speaking a different language in your own country.

These ideas are similar in many ways, but there’s less work to do with the latter. Once you’ve finished reading the list below, it will become apparent which steps you can skip (and which you can’t do without). Let’s begin. 

1. Choose the right URL structure for you

It shouldn’t be a secret to you that country-specific top-level domains (like .uk, .de, .fr) are a thing. This should be enough of a clue that a site’s URL can be a significant part of an international SEO strategy. And indeed it is. There are several different URL structures to choose from, and not all of them may be helpful to you, so choose wisely!

Here are your options:

• A country code top-level domain, or ccTLD (e.g. example.de). It’s the easiest way to rank locally, and you won’t have to worry about a strain on your crawl budget, but it’s a separate domain that will have to compete for rankings with your primary site. It can also be costly. Recommended for brands which already have a strong online presence and will easily attract a new audience.
• A different domain (e.g. examplede.com). It may be cheaper than a ccTLD, but it won’t rank locally as well and it will compete with your primary site. On the other hand, your crawl budget won’t complain.
• A subdomain (e.g. de.example.com). It’s easier to maintain than a ccTLD, but the flow of link equity to and from the root domain might not go smoothly.
• A subdirectory (e.g. example.com/de). All internationalized content is placed in a subfolder on your domain. This is the most balanced option with no major strengths or weaknesses.
• NOT RECOMMENDED! A generic top-level domain (gTLD) with language parameters (e.g. example.com/?lang=de). A parameter at the end of the URL will direct visitors to a translated version of your content. However, pages with parameters aren’t always indexed, which may be the reason why Google advises against this option.

And here’s something else you absolutely must not mess up. When you interlink your pages, do not accidentally link to another page in a different language (unless necessary). For example, if a user is visiting your German page, you don’t want them to end up on a French page by mistake.

To find these wrong links, run your domain through WebCEO’s Internal Links Analysis tool and check the report called My External Links. Click on the link representing a different version of your domain…

And find the pages from your primary domain. If you see any pages that shouldn’t be linking to your translated domain, pay them a visit and remove those links.

2. Use the hreflang attribute in your code

Once you have translated pages on your site, you can easily let search engines know what languages you are using by implementing the hreflang attribute in your HTML code. Here’s an example:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/de” hreflang=”de” />

This tag is recommended for use regardless of how much content on your site is translated (all of it or just the navigation, while the rest might be user-generated). The value of the hreflang attribute identifies the language and optionally the region of an alternate URL, so make sure to get it right! Our example has “de”, which means German content independent of region, but if you want to target a German-speaking audience in Spain, you’ll need to use “de-ES” instead. Refer to the list of language codes and the list of region codes to pick what suits your situation and then double-check to make sure your combination is valid.

3. Find keywords through local search

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. When you translate your content, the keywords will inevitably be translated, too. Otherwise you might find yourself trying to rank in China for English keywords – an attempt guaranteed to put a smile or two on people’s faces.

If keywords are what you need, WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool is always ready to serve! Simply go to the Settings and select your Target region.

4. Build links from and to local resources

Link building is another major aspect of SEO. If you manage to earn links to your internationalized content from local resources, you’ll become more visible to your new audience and more trustworthy (especially if you link back to local resources, too). Also, search engines like to see a diverse link profile on a website.

Take a look at your competitors’ backlink profiles – they are the best place to find new sites for link building.

5. Research ways to rank in local search engines

Not all search engines have the same ranking algorithms as Google. When targeting a country, do your research on its own search engines and what kind of SEO strategy they approve of the most. For instance, China’s Baidu requires websites to have an Internet Content Publishing license before they even get a shot at ranking high, and there are many more recommendations. Other search engines will have their own rules.

6. Take culture, customs and currency into consideration

Our Earth is a beautiful place thanks to all the different people and various cultures around the globe. But when you aren’t considerate of the differences between us, it can lead to all sorts of unpleasant situations. Invest some time in researching your target countries’ customs and culture. It might just save your business from a catastrophe!

Also, if you sell products or services, consider using the target countries’ currency in your translated content. It will make doing purchases for visitors from other countries so much easier.

7. Don’t use flags as a substitute for languages

It is wise to separate languages from countries. For starters, many countries share the same language. English is the official or primary language in over 50 countries; is it really okay to use the Union Jack or the Stars & Stripes if you want to target an English-speaking audience in, say, Jamaica? In addition, many countries have multilingual populations; do you mean English or French when you put up a picture of the Canadian flag?

The best way to avoid this confusion is to simply use languages. Write English, Deutsch, Français in the language selection menu – and every person speaking those languages will understand what to do. I like this particular example from Flags Are Not Languages:

Use flags when they are meant to represent countries specifically. Do not use them when you are aiming at an audience speaking a certain language.

8. Don’t use the “one site layout and UX for all” strategy

What one audience prefers may not be received so well by a different one. This is true when language is involved, as well. Here’s the simplest thought experiment. Would your website look as good as it does at the moment if you translated it into Arabic or Hebrew and all text became right-to-left? On certain website layouts, it might become uncomfortable to read. The user experience is an important SEO factor; remember to include it in your international SEO strategy, too.

Take your site’s layout into account before you release a translated version. Consider researching other sites in the language you need as references. Your visitors will be grateful.

9. Don’t auto-redirect to a translated version of your site

Some websites detect their visitors’ IP address, use it to determine their location and automatically redirect them to a page translated into the language spoken there. This practice is flawed in many aspects, which is why you shouldn’t use it.

What is wrong with auto-redirects?

• IP detection and determining the location can both be inaccurate.
• Even if they are accurate, the user might not be able to speak the automatically chosen language.
• Some countries are multilingual (leading to the same problems as “flag instead of language”).
• Redirecting makes it difficult for search engine crawlers to index your site’s pages.
• Redirecting adds to the page loading time.

Don’t decide for users. If your site needs to have the country detection function, give them an option to switch languages instead. For example, an unobtrusive interstitial that is easy to dismiss will accomplish the task just fine.

10. Don’t use machine translations

Automatic translations have been improving, but they are still too far from “good enough”. They can neither satisfy visitors, nor are they safe enough to use on your site. Google easily spots automatically translated content and promptly marks it as spammy.

Leave translating to humans. A real, competent translator is an invaluable asset in any global SEO strategy (bonus points if they are a native speaker). Hire as many of them as you need, it’s an investment worth its weight in gold. Keep in mind that your foreign customers and resellers will often translate your content for free, especially if a discount or more business incentivizes them.

Wrapping up

The Internet is truly one of mankind’s greatest inventions. It allows you to conquer the world without any violence. To make it happen, don’t forget to keep track of your progress.

Monitoring incoming traffic is an unquestionable necessity in every SEO campaign, and when it arrives from several countries at once, it must be analyzed separately. That way, you’ll be able to notice and tend to issues no matter where they find you. The above are simple solutions for global scale problems!

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The post 10 Tips for Planning a Winning International SEO Strategy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is technical SEO? It’s really simple. All it means is fixing issues that are present on your site, ruin the user experience and cause you to lose rankings. Finding those issues is done through a technical SEO audit, which always prefaces the task of solving them.

This technical SEO checklist will cover the most damaging problems with SEO, as well as the best practices in treating them – usually with the help of specialized SEO tools.

1. Rethink your website structure

Some webmasters don’t put enough thought into connecting their site’s pages between each other. When they haven’t planned a structure, it’s not just the users who are rubbed the wrong way. Look at these reasons why every site needs an organized structure:

1. It helps users browse your site without getting lost.

2. It helps search engines crawl your site and index its pages.

3. It helps link juice flow across your site and direct authority to important pages.

It makes everybody happy! Most importantly, users are pleased and motivated to visit again.

So how do you know your site’s structure is organized?

• It follows this pattern: home page -> category -> user’s destination. The destination could be a product page, a blog post or anything else; what matters is that it’s not too deep. You can have subcategories precede it, but the fewer they are, the better.
• It has breadcrumbs. You can see an example of site breadcrumbs in the above point (home page -> category -> user’s destination). When it’s shown on the page with a link to each level, users always know where on the website they are and can instantly go back without taking any excessive steps.
• Every page has a link to the home page. The link is usually built in the site’s logo. This rule doesn’t need to apply to pages such as the sitemap and robots.txt and pages with restricted access.
• You can travel quickly (in three clicks or less) between any two pages.
• It has site navigation and a footer. A few links to important pages at the top and at the bottom will ensure users can find all they need to know.
• It has no orphaned or dead-end pages. Orphaned pages are difficult to access when nothing links to them, and they don’t receive any link juice from your site. Dead-end pages are the opposite: they don’t link to your other pages and don’t pass on link juice. Avoid having both, with the exception of “technical” pages such as robots.txt.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Internal Links. In particular, the Site Structure report can show you how your site’s pages are arranged.

2. Optimize your internal links

Internal links are the foundation of your site’s structure. It’s how users browse your site and link juice travels between pages. You can make your internal links contribute even more to your SEO by optimizing them. Here’s how you do it:

• Give them anchor texts. A few words inside the link will help users understand where they are about to go. Additionally, this counts towards optimizing linked pages for keywords inside the anchor texts.
• Make them dofollow. Don’t mark links to your own pages as nofollow. You may preserve some link juice on the page you think needs it more, but search engines will be unable to crawl the linked page.
• Write your links in HTML. Search engines can crawl HTML links without any problems, but links made in other languages (such as JavaScript) are uncrawlable.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Internal Links. See all the anchor texts on your site in the Link Text Analysis report.

3. Fix broken links

Links can point to either internal or external pages. Both of these types of links break for the same reasons. It can be a typo in the URL, or the linked page was moved or taken down altogether. Of the two, a broken internal link is worse for you, since users who click on it want to keep browsing your site but can’t. Fortunately, broken links are a simple problem with a simple solution.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

Use this tool to run an audit on your site. The tool will find all links that return an error, the 404 being but one of them. Once you have your list of pages with broken links, edit those pages. You can replace links with working ones or just remove them if they can’t be fixed. With broken outbound links, you have an extra option: put up a link to another resource with similar content.

4. Fix broken images

The only positive of broken images is that pages load faster thanks to them. Still, it’s hardly worth making users miss out on the content or leaving pages to look like a mess. An image that doesn’t work properly has no place on your website.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Technical Audit.

This same tool can also pick up images that aren’t displaying. Similar to links, this error can be caused by a typo in the image’s URL or being removed from its server. Fix the URL, or find a replacement, or just remove the image from your page if you decide you don’t need it.

5. Have your site’s pages indexed

All the pages you can find in Google exist in its index. If a page isn’t indexed, users can’t find it, no matter how well it’s optimized. Make sure you index all the important pages on your site!

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation.

Create a sitemap of your site and submit it to Google. You won’t need to create a new one when you add or remove pages from your site, but you should pay a visit to Google Search Console when you want a page de-indexed.

6. Check your on-page SEO

On-page SEO is more than just content. SEO is full of secret joys, so it’s no surprise that you can’t prepare an excellent, keyword-rich piece of content and call it a day. It might make users happy, but search engines are starving for affection, too.

What are the technical aspects of on-page SEO?

Page titles

• Give your site’s pages titles. Some people actually forget this part. The result is nameless pages that confuse visitors and aren’t easily picked up by Google search.
• Make sure titles aren’t too long. Otherwise they’ll be truncated in search results, which makes them look uncool and doesn’t motivate users to click on them. When making a new page, always double-check the title’s length in a Google search result preview tool.
• Make sure no two pages on your site have the same title. Duplicate titles only serve to confuse both users and search engines.

Meta descriptions

Page descriptions in the <META> tag are a little less critical than titles, but you can still use them in SEO – and therefore, you should. They require the same treatment as titles: fill them out, mind their length, avoid duplicates, double-check in a preview tool.

Here’s an extra detail. If you leave the <META> description tag blank, Google will fill the search result’s description with the first few sentences from the page. You can try to save a little time by optimizing those first sentences to work as your description. This is a bit risky, though: Google occasionally tweaks the descriptions’ character limit, which could lead to more headaches for you in the long run.

H1 tags

The big, pretty title shown on the page in large bold letters? It’s usually done by using an H1 tag. Some pages can do just fine without one, but it’s better to have an H1 tag on a page than not. Also, you need exactly one: no more, no less.

Images’ ALT attributes

Images can be given an ALT attribute which serves a double purpose. First, it will substitute images with some text of your choice when the images aren’t displaying for any reason. This is especially helpful for people with vision problems. And second, it helps Google pick them up in its image search. This is good for you because users may find your site that way.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO. Use it to detect on-page SEO issues on your site.

7. Fix duplicate content issues

Duplicate content comes in more forms than just plagiarized text. The other faces it wears are:

• Pages with the same content on your domain. This issue can be solved by using 301 redirects (redirecting users from copies to the original) and the rel=”canonical” attribute (denoting the original in the <LINK> tag). Note that in both cases, only the original page will be indexed and ranked.
• Duplicate page titles, meta descriptions and URL slugs. All of these things should be unique to each page.
• URL parameters (for example: website.com/library and website.com/library?page=2), which may cause search engines to index the same page multiple times and view its “copies” as duplicate content. In this case, the use of rel=”canonical” is recommended. You can use Google Search Console to make Google’s crawler ignore pages with URL parameters of your choice and not add them into the index.

8. Improve slow-loading pages

Everybody prefers a fast-loading website to a slow one. You can’t fall behind others or you’ll lose visitors and potentially profits. Who would want that? Consider doing everything you can to improve your page load time.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Speed Optimization (Desktop tab).

This tool will rate your site’s loading speed on a scale to 100; the higher the better. An orange number is a sign that there’s room for improvement, a red number screams you have problems. On the brighter side, the tool offers helping tips, too.

Here’s how you can raise loading speed:

Optimize your images

Reduce your images’ file size while preserving their quality. You can do it by choosing the best format for them, shrinking their height and width, and by compressing them.

Minimize page code

Every line of code adds to a page’s loading time. Help your site load faster by making your code as efficient as you can.

Merge elements

Certain elements (such as images, CSS files and Javascript files) can be merged into a single one, lowering the number of requests sent by the page to the server. Fewer requests mean less time to process them all, leading to a higher loading speed.

Compress elements

Enable Gzip to optimize website speed and cut down server response time by 70%. So simple, and yet it does wonders for site performance.

Minimize redirects

Getting from page A to page B without any other pages in-between them is a standard. There are situations when redirects can be necessary, but if you can avoid using them, by all means do.

Choose the best hosting for your site

The server is another major factor that affects your loading speed. It may cost a lot to host your site on a powerful server that processes requests quickly, but it’s a valid option when you are able to offset your expenses with profits.

Host big files on external platforms

Why burden your own server with big files when other sites can handle them for you? As an example, embed YouTube videos instead of hosting them on your site.

Use browser caching

Retrieving elements from cache is faster than loading them anew every time. Define the elements to cache and their expiration times in your .htaccess file.

9. Optimize your site for mobile

It so happens that a large chunk of mobile SEO consists of raising your site’s loading speed, the details of which were described in the previous step. If you’ve seen to that, you’ve already done most of your mobile optimization. Keep up the good work, captain!

Here are a few more steps to complete the process.

Responsive design

Pop quiz: what do mobile-responsive websites and cats have in common? Answer: they behave like liquids. They fit in any container you put them in, taking its shape. Cats, however, are born with this ability. Websites learn it through some extra code.

Once your website has that code, you can observe true beauty like on this picture.

Space between elements

Sites look better on mobile devices when they aren’t cluttered. Use negative space and leave some room between elements like buttons and checkboxes.

No Flash content

Flash is obsolete and has been replaced by the newer and better HTML 5. Flash is also outright mobile-unfriendly: it consumes too much power, and certain devices can’t even support it.

No annoying popups

Interstitials are a blow to user experience. Sometimes they are necessary – for example, to inform the visitors you are using cookies. Even then, don’t let them cover too much of the screen space.

Tool to use: WebCEO’s Speed Optimization (Mobile tab). Scan your site and see if you can make it work better on mobile devices.

Now that you’ve reached the end of this post, how are you feeling? With your newfound knowledge and high-quality SEO tools at your fingertips, technical SEO is going to be a walk in the park. Audit your site for issues, then look them in the eye and say, “I’ve solved worse than you on my way to real errors”. They’ll be too scared to talk back – a sign of a job well done.

The post Technical SEO Checklist: Issues to Audit and Fix Immediately appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Making websites is easy. You don’t even need to be a web designer for that. However, professionals have standards, and web designers certainly do as well. When you need a website made, you turn to somebody who is good at it – and not just because you care how it will look.

A good web designer does more than just create a pretty-looking website. While they don’t have control over the biggest Google ranking factors (such as content and backlinks), they can ensure the appearance and functionality are SEO-friendly, and thus contribute to site rankings.

Alright, enough throat clearing. Here’s the recipe for uniting SEO and web design.

1. Use keywords in the right places

Text is an integral part of any website, and not just because it’s the most convenient way to relay information. Search engines rely on text to understand and evaluate the websites’ content.

Of course, your content itself needs to be as high-quality as possible. Content quality is one of the major SEO factors, which puts a great responsibility on its maker. But to increase content’s visibility in search engines even further, you need to optimize it with keywords – words and phrases which people use to find whatever they want online.

You know, phrases like “SEO for web designers.” Chances are, you found this very article in Google by typing those words or something along those lines. And this article appears in Google because it has “SEO for web designers” in the title.

Are you starting to see the pattern?

Here’s how you find and use keywords.

1. Identify the topic of your page’s content.
2. Use an SEO tool to find keywords related to your topic. For example, this is what you can get with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool:



3. Pick specific, descriptive keywords from the table. Avoid using short, non-descriptive keywords since they are unlikely to be used by the people you want to visit your site.
4. Include your chosen keywords in your content. Prioritize the page’s <title> tag, <meta description> tag, <H1> to <H4> headings and, of course, the rest of the text on your page.

And a few more recommendations to make sure your keywords don’t backfire on you:

• Don’t optimize multiple pages for the same keywords.
• Likewise, avoid optimizing the same page for multiple unrelated keywords.
• Include keywords in your text naturally, like how you would use them in a real conversation.

Just remember: content comes first. As long as you dedicate a page to a specific topic, you will see how easy it is to use keywords without even trying.

2. Make your site’s architecture SEO-friendly

Web pages are connected with each other via links. And while there’s any number of ways to interlink your pages, most webmasters prefer not to experiment with it – and rightly so. There’s already a tried and tested method which is the most efficient and SEO-friendly:

1. Homepage;
2. A few other pages you can access directly from the homepage;
3. Each of those pages leads to the rest of content on the website.

Together, the pages form a hierarchy of sorts, based on how users look for information and gradually narrow down their search. It can be displayed in a diagram like this:

What makes this structure so SEO-friendly? Because most of the time, people link to the homepage more often than to anything else. This advantage gives the homepage the highest authority score – and that can be passed down to the other pages on the domain.

What else can you do to give your site’s structure more SEO edge?

• Optimized page URLs. Avoid using random strings of letters and digits for your URLs. You want them to include keywords and be descriptive at a glance, like this: https://homepage.com/category-name/subcategory-name/page-topic.
• The rel=”canonical” attribute. You should avoid having pages with identical or even just too similar content, but if you can’t, then put rel=”canonical” in the copycat pages’ <link> tag like this: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://website.com/original-page” />.
• Site navigation at the top of the page.
• Footer at the bottom of the page.

And most importantly, every site structure needs working links to function properly. No 404 errors nor faulty redirects are allowed. Find broken links on your site and fix them.

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3. Index your pages and content correctly

Every single search result you see in Google is an indexed page. If a page hasn’t been added to Google’s index, it does not appear in search – and I assume you don’t want that to happen to you.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to index any website’s pages, no matter how many. All you need to do is create a sitemap (a list of all pages on your site) and help Google find it.

How and where?

1. Use a tool like WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation to create a sitemap.
2. Download it when prompted.
3. Upload the sitemap onto your site’s server.
4. Submit your sitemap to Google. (You can do this step in the same Sitemap Generation tool.)

That’s it! Takes about 5 minutes to do.

Note that certain pages should never be indexed, like robots.txt. To make a page invisible to search engines, add this line to its HTML code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Conversely, the pages you actually want to appear in search must never have this line.

One last indexing tip: search engines often struggle with detecting hidden content on pages – for example, if it’s put behind a collapsible tab.

4. Make your site mobile-friendly

Perhaps one of the most important steps designwise: making sure your site works perfectly on every kind of device. To do that, you need to make your site’s design responsive – i.e. make it automatically adapt to a screen of any size.

One way to do it is to install a plugin like WPTouch or JetPack. But plugins are a third-party resource, so a more reliable option is to do it yourself.

How do you do that? There’s a whole lot to making a responsive design, and chances are, you will not need to use every trick in that book. But the two absolute must-haves for SEO are the viewport and responsive images. Those are fairly easy.

1. Set the viewport for responsiveness.

The viewport is the user’s visible area on the screen. When your viewport isn’t responsive, it may look okay on a computer’s large screen, but turn into a jumbled mess on a smartphone. Like this:

I’m sure you don’t want your site to look like that.

Fortunately, the solution is unbelievably easy. Just add this line of HTML code to its pages’ <head> tag:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

And you will enjoy a much more natural view on your screen, like this:

• Make your images responsive.

There are two ways to do it: either use the max-width tag in your CSS file, like this:

img {

 max-width: 100%;

}

Or prepare multiple, differently sized versions of the same image and display whichever is appropriate for the device you are using to browse your site. It’s done using the srcset attribute, like this:

<img

  srcset=”image-480w.jpg 480w, image-800w.jpg 800w”

  sizes=”(max-width: 600px) 480px, 800px”

  src=”image-800w.jpg” />

Where image-480w.jpg and image-800w.jpg are the names of your images.

To see if your site is mobile-friendly, test it with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool.

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5. Optimize your images

Images are an important element of the majority of websites. Therefore, you must ensure your images make your site stronger and don’t drag it down.

How do you optimize the images on your site?

• ALT texts: they need to be descriptive and include keywords.
• Filenames: they also need to be descriptive and include keywords.
• File format: save your images in the format which yields the smallest size, but mind the quality.
• Height and width: an image’s dimensions directly affect its size, so they should never be larger than needed.
• Responsiveness: make your images automatically resize themselves to suit any device. (See the previous section about mobile friendliness.)
• Geodata: this data can be valuable for local businesses, helping the site rank higher in local search.

Check if your images are missing anything by scanning your site with WebCEO’s On-Page Issues tool.

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6. Improve your site’s loading speed

No web designer with an ounce of dignity wants to make a slow website. After all, it’s the best way to repel users and not get paid!

How do you make sure your site is a hare, not a tortoise?

1. Reduce your images’ file size. You can do it by making your images smaller, saving them as the most optimal format and compressing them.
2. Enable browser caching. You can use a plugin for that, or you can set the expiration times yourself in the .htaccess file.
3. Host your site on a fast server or a CDN (content delivery network).
4. Use lazy loading. With this, browsers will load only the parts of the page that are currently on screen instead of everything at once.
5. Minimize your page code (but only if you know how). Whether it’s HTML, CSS, Javascript or anything else, shortening and simplifying the code helps browsers process your pages faster.
6. Use asynchronous loading for your CSS and Javascript. Similar to lazy loading, it means your CSS and Javascript files will load only when it’s their turn.
7. Have as few redirects as possible (ideally zero). And if you use them, make sure they can be cached.
8. Have as few plugins as possible.

Run a speed check on your site right now to see what you can improve. WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool offers plenty of recommendations on increasing your site speed.

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7. Use heatmaps to analyze user activity

What is the absolute best way to make your site design more user-friendly? Listening to user feedback, of course!

Even if your users aren’t particularly vocal, don’t sweat it. There is a very reliable tool for finding the flaws in your site’s design: heatmaps.

What are heatmaps? They display user activity on your site: how users interact with it, which page elements they use (and how often), and which ones they ignore. Here’s an example:

Clearly, that one part with the faintest spots doesn’t get much action. Perhaps that part could be moved elsewhere, or the users don’t like how it looks, or they don’t need it at all – that’s for you, as a designer, to figure out.

To generate your own heatmaps, use a tool like CrazyEgg.

8. Make your content accessible

You shouldn’t forget about users who may have visual or hearing impairments. They are out there, they may come to your site, and you don’t want to alienate them. Your web design should be accessible – and that’s so important that Google actively encourages it.

How can you accommodate your website for users with disabilities?

• Write ALT texts and captions for your images.
• Use H1-H4 headings and make them descriptive.
• Make transcripts for any audio and video content you may have. Sign language interpretation is next level, but if you can provide it too, hats off to you.
• Write unique and descriptive anchor texts for your links. Avoid using vague anchors like “click here.”
• Make sure all your content can be accessed with just the keyboard.
• Be careful with color contrast. There are tools like TPGi Color Contrast Analyzer to optimize your site’s color scheme.
• Test your website in a tool like Accessibility Checker to see where you can make improvements.

And here’s a fun fact: CAPTCHA is not considered accessible. Just imagine how many users you will make happy by not having it.

Wrapping up

As you can see, the secret to making an SEO-friendly web design is keeping the users’ best interests in mind. See things from their perspective and use the right tools to fine-tune your creation, and your website’s design will never end up in the list of your SEO problems.

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The post SEO for Web Designers: How to Design a Site That Ranks appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What actions should you take if your clients begin to lose their rankings in search engines? There’s no simple answer because the reasons can be multifaceted—ranging from algorithm updates and site speed issues to the more insidious problem of toxic links. 

In particular, toxic links can stealthily undermine your hard-earned SEO results, making it essential to react promptly and effectively when they arise.

In this article, we will explore the nature of toxic links, guiding you through the process of identifying, managing, and mitigating their impact. 

We’ll also share an insightful use case from WebCEO, illustrating how we overcame the challenges posed by toxic links to restore our search engine visibility.

Why toxic links exist and who benefits from them

In the quest for quick results, some people turn to black hat SEO techniques, generating or purchasing low-quality backlinks to artificially inflate a site’s authority.

While this might yield short-term gains, it’s a ticking time bomb, as search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated in detecting such manipulative behavior. The fallout can be severe, leading to penalties that can dramatically reduce a site’s visibility.

The motives behind toxic link creation can be as varied as the sources. Here’s a closer look at the key players:

Competitors might use negative SEO tactics to sabotage your rankings. By creating toxic links to your site, they aim to trigger penalties from search engines, causing your site to lose visibility.

Spammers and Scammers might place links indiscriminately across the web, hoping for clicks or interactions that generate revenue, regardless of the quality or relevance.

Hackers and cybercriminals may exploit backlinks to spread malware or phishing schemes. These toxic links not only harm your clients’ SEO but can also compromise user safety and trust in their brand.

Who is Most Vulnerable to Toxic Links?

The sites that should be most concerned about toxic links are those that lead their niche and consistently rank at the top of Google.

Competitors desperate to climb to the top of the search results might resort to underhanded tactics, flooding your clients’ sites with toxic links to knock them off their perch and take their place in the SERPs. 

Traffic and money are powerful motivators.

The second category includes SEO “experts” who create numerous satellite sites that link indiscriminately, spamming the web with links. There’s a chance one of these links could end up pointing to one of the websites you’re responsible for.

In essence, there are two primary objectives behind the creation of toxic links, both straightforward: to boost another site in the rankings and to demote the sites of the competitors.

The problem is that “toxic” SEO practitioners often fail to understand that links alone won’t deliver the desired results. They are wasting their own time and that of their victims.

SEO is a complex field where links play a role, but without quality content and a solid product, they won’t achieve much. Let’s strive for a deeper understanding and maintain control over this aspect of SEO. WebCEO’s Toxic Backlink Checker will be our ally in this endeavor.

Deal with Toxic Backlinks on Your Clients' Websites Learn More

When You Should Be Nervous About Toxic Links

Despite the damage toxic links can cause, there’s no need to lose sleep over them every night. Instead, set up an alert system in WebCEO that notifies you when the percentage of toxic links reaches a certain threshold.

To set up an alert using WebCEO, go to the Alert tool and create a new alert. 

Navigate to the backlinks section and choose the percentage of toxic links at which the alarm will trigger. We recommend setting it between 20-25%.

Once you’ve set up an alert, there’s no need to check toxic links unless your client’s rankings drop.

If you notice a drop in rankings, start diagnosing the issue. 

Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not. When you see a traffic drop, check the site step by step. 

Verify On-Page SEO, review the content, and rule out any other technical issues before finally examining the backlinks.

React to toxic links as they happen. They won’t cause an immediate drop in your rankings. 

Instead, if rankings fall, that’s the exact time when you need to inspect the backlinks.

With our Toxic Link Checker Tool, you can identify potential toxic links on a client’s project and quickly add them to your disavow list.

In the report, you can see the pages and sites that link to you and might be toxic. If you notice a traffic or ranking drop, address these links by cleaning them up. 

To do this, select the links you want to move to the Disavow Tool and click the Action button on the right. Here, you can move specific pages or entire domains to the disavow tool or mark links as non-toxic.

Ultimately, your task is to compile a disavow list with all the links you consider toxic for your clients and upload it via your Google Search Console connection to Google’s Disavow Tool.

Add Your Clients’ Domains and Deal With Toxic Links Try Now

How WebCEO Overcame Toxic Links and Regained Its Rankings

Our own site, WebCEO, wasn’t immune to toxic links either. We received an alert indicating a significant increase in toxic backlinks, which eventually led to a drop in our rankings.

Once we compiled a new disavow list and removed all the toxic links, our rankings began to improve within a few weeks.

However, as seasoned SEO professionals, we recognize that the rise in rankings could be attributed to a combination of factors. While removing toxic links likely played a significant role, we were also actively working on improving our site speed during this period.

This experience underscores the importance of a comprehensive SEO strategy, where addressing toxic links is just one piece of the puzzle.

Final Word

In SEO, everything works synergistically, so don’t expect that removing toxic links from your client’s site will immediately result in a flood of traffic. 

Success in SEO is the result of multiple factors working together, and the more factors you optimize, the better. 

The overall health of your client’s site will significantly influence growth in metrics. While the Disavow Tool can be a valuable asset, it won’t single-handedly drive traffic or profit.

Try our 14-day free trial (no credit card required) to always control your clients’ backlink profiles and deal with toxic links if they arise.

Experience the full spectrum of WebCEO’s features With an exclusive 14-day free trial! Sign Up Free

The post How to Deal with Toxic Backlinks on Your Clients’ Websites appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Knowledge is power! – says my favorite TV showman Adam Conover from ‘Adam Ruins Everything’. This guy does his best to ruin the most popular myths, such as the one that says undercover cops need to say they’re cops if you ask them directly. Let’s now bust some SEO myths, like the one that says a high bounce rate is bad.

How Google determines bounce rate and why it can be tricky

Before you evaluate your site’s bounce rate as ‘high’, ‘bad’ or ‘catastrophic’, let’s clear up what bounce rate actually is.

Google may have started using different terms since the switch to GA4, but the meaning stays the same:

• You have all sessions where users visit your site;
• You have engaged sessions where users interact with your site;
• And you have non-engaged sessions where users leave without doing anything.

A session counts as engaged if any of the three conditions are fulfilled:

• It’s over 10 seconds long;
• It has a conversion (or a key event);
• It has at least two pageviews or screenviews.

A non-engaged session doesn’t fulfil any of the above conditions. Therefore, your bounce rate is the percentage of your non-engaged sessions.

In plain words, if there were two sessions, say: a single-page session and a two-page session, one could expect bounce rate to be 50%.

It doesn’t seem to be difficult, unless you wonder what the last statement in Google’s interpretation of bounce rate means: “…single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session.”

How does Google calculate the session duration? And what are these ‘hits’? These questions bring us to ‘the truth is out there’ feeling.

Hits are the image requests sent to Google Analytics. Google uses the time between hits to calculate the session duration. Justin Curtoni has distilled the list of engagement data hits that Google uses:

• Pageview hits
• Interactive event hits
• Ecommerce transaction hits
• Ecommerce transaction item hits
• Social plugin hits

Pageview hits are automatically generated, whereas all the rest from the list should be manually implemented with a tracking code. For those who haven’t added any other hits to track, the classic definition of a single-page session remains intact: Google will count a bounce each time a visitor lands on a page and then exits without interacting with it.

Suppose you have a weather forecast site. If one lands on your page about the weather forecast in Detroit and then leaves, it will be counted as a bounce. Is that fair? The visitor may show up every day to get the weather on that page and it will seem like he kept bouncing away (because technically he did).

Now if your tracking code is enhanced with the ability to, say, send an event when one scrolls down a page, as soon as they scroll the weather forecast page, the code will send a request and this session will not have the “0 sec.” duration, even though the visitor technically bounced off.

Think thoroughly on what should be considered as a bounce for your site and take care to measure engagement data to purge your Google Analytics from the ‘false’ bounces.

Let’s assume your developers have already implemented all the necessary engagement hits tracking, so it’s high time to evaluate your bounce rate, right? Actually, no… and here’s why.

Set your own threshold for bounce rate

This may sound like a cliché, but everything is relative. The ‘normal’ bounce rate for sites is somewhere between 26% and 70%. The reason for such an enormous range is that the ‘normal’ bounce rate depends on your site’s theme and a user’s intent.

So, the first thing you should think about while analyzing your bounce rate data in Google Analytics is what’s the individual ‘normal’ bounce rate for your site. For instance, having a website devoted to local events, you shouldn’t expect visitors to wander through your pages when they plan to land on just one page to check the necessary date, time and place info. Most likely, they can leave quickly without even scrolling a page. Thus, a high bounce rate percentage for such sites won’t necessarily mean that something is wrong.

On the contrary, if you sell something online, you will want your visitors to hang around your store for a while to study the products you offer, so they will stay interested and buy from you.

You should set your individual bounce rate and only then perform an analysis. If the ‘real-to-ideal’ bounce rate comparison leaves you unhappy, keep your chin up – you can fix this!

What can cause your bounce rate to skyrocket?

Basically, there are three main causes of incremental bounce rate:

• disruptive UX,
• poor ad targeting,
• referral spam and low-quality backlinks.

It’s not so hard to see if your site provides a bad user experience. Just put yourself in your visitors’ shoes! It can help you notice things that may be frustrating, annoying and unsatisfying.

1. Slow page load time

Have you ever closed your browser’s tab when it took too long to load a page? Most certainly, yes. It’s a well-known fact that people are impatient creatures, so the faster your page loads the better.

A joint Google/SOASTA research confirms that slow pages increase the probability of bounce by 90%, moreover it spoils the first impression, so one hardly ever comes back to your page.

Check your Speed Optimization using WebCEO service. You will be provided with a list of issues with useful prompts on how to fix them.

2. Annoying pop-ups

Ads may be necessary. Cookie pop-ups are mandatory. But if I had to make a UX killer tier list, they’d be in top 3 for sure – and they’d be my first suspects for inflating your bounce rate.

The second most frustrating experience after a slow page speed load is getting bombarded with tons of intrusive interstitials and user-unfriendly pop-ups. If you overuse them, it not only worsens UX, but Google will notice and cause your rankings to drop.

Thus, you should probably avoid adding annoying pop-ups on your landing pages or at least weigh their pros and cons before using them. If you absolutely have to use pop-ups, make sure they are easy to dismiss and don’t obstruct too much of the screen.

3. Low-quality or under-optimized content

Your visitors search for a quick and clear answer to their question. If you don’t satisfy their intent, they will bounce. To create great content, you should:

• understand your customer’s problem,
• provide a solution and describe this in simple words,
• be as concise as possible (no one likes reading a litany).

Don’t forget to make your content easy-to-read: structure the info and use formatting. Use proper language and avoid making grammar mistakes. You could employ someone to review your texts or hire a copywriter. Also, there are many proofreading services to help you, like Wordy, ProofreadingPal, and Grammarly.

4. Poor navigation and design

Keep things simple and intuitively understandable for a novice. Provide your user with a navigation menu across the top of the site and breadcrumbs, so that they can quickly dig through your site in the most convenient way.

Avoid overloading your pages with stuff and distracting a user from the main point. Design your pages to make any visitor understand what you offer at just a glance.

5. Your site is unusable on mobile devices

Are you making your mobile users scroll, pinch, and zoom around to fill out your opt in forms? If so, you’re doing it wrong. Google moved to an algorithm called the mobile-first index long ago, so optimizing a mobile UX is crucial these days.

Run WebCEO’s Mobile Speed Optimization report to see what you can do to improve your landing pages for mobile users.

6. Ensure your ‘call-to-action’ is relevant to a page

For organic searchers, your title and meta description tags can act like a call-to-action in the search engine results (SERPs) before they anyone clicks through to your website itself. Do not mislead your audience with the title tag and meta description that are detached from a page’s content.

Use WebCEO’s On-Page Issues report to check if your titles and meta descriptions are properly optimized.

For those who glance at the paid search results, the call to action can be in the form of the title and description of your ad copy. For example, if your banner ad offers ‘Free Pizza Each Friday’, but then on a click one just lands on the home page of your pizza-delivery site with no link to a more seducing proposition, you can leave new potential customers strongly disappointed (and hungry).

So mind your messages and give your users what they expect to find.

7. Technical errors

Make sure the pages of your site load properly and there are no 404’s left unnoticed. Let WebCEO perform a Technical Audit for your site and report about found issues.

While you’re fixing found broken links, why don’t you create a helpful and attractive 404? A good custom 404 can actually encourage visitors to explore your site further. You can either enhance your 404 with a search box, a site menu and a link to your homepage or just add some humor with a funny picture.

8. Referral spam and toxic backlinks

You may find that your site is being attacked by a referral spammer which attacks thousands of Google Analytic accounts with fake traffic in form of referrals, keywords and even with fake pages. This can dramatically skew your analytics data. If you’re a victim of a spammer like that, here’s a ‘life-buoy’ guide for removing referral spam by Optimize Smart.

Or a referring website is trying to sabotage you with some black-hat SEO tactics. For example, they may have linked to your culinary blog’s homepage with a link text ‘Weight Loss Pills’. Check your backlink quality profile carefully: analyze backlinks value and their texts, mark the unwanted ones as toxic. Then reach out to the owners of these domains and politely ask them to remove the link or you can send a disavow file to Google.

9. Targeting the wrong audience

If your website’s content or products do not match the interests or needs of its visitors, they are likely to leave quickly.

For example, if a site offers high-end luxury items but attracts visitors searching for affordable products, they may become disappointed and move on to another place. This can adversely affect the website’s SEO performance, as search engines interpret a high bounce rate as an indication that the site is not meeting users’ needs.

To target the right audience, it’s essential to do high-quality research into the target audience’s demographics, interests, and search behavior. This can help create relevant and engaging content for the intended audience and reduce the bounce rate on the site.

Conducting research can also help identify potential gaps in the market, which can be filled by introducing new products or services that meet users’ needs.

Summary

Before giving way to despair while looking at your bounce rate, take things under control: manually implement the tracking of other engagement signals in order to purge your GA data and set your own threshold for your bounce rate. Once done, carefully inspect your site regarding UX quality and spammy links and review your ad campaigns to ensure you are targeting the right audience.

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The post Is a High Bounce Rate Bad for Your SEO? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Let’s face it: SEO is a complicated and challenging universe. From keywords to backlinks, there are endless technical issues to consider, for example, how search engines crawl and index sites. 

Noindex, nofollow, and disallow directives can help manage these SEO aspects, but it’s crucial to understand the difference between them and how to use them effectively.

In this article, you will learn how to use each directive, set it up, and when to use it. Along the way, we’ll share real-world examples of how these directives impact SEO performance so that you can see the theory in action.

You’ll learn to use noindex, nofollow, and disallow directives to avoid critical mistakes that can ruin your clients’ search visibility. So buckle up, grab a coffee, and let’s dive in!

What is Noindex?

Definition and Function

Noindex is a meta tag that prevents search engines from indexing specific website pages. It means the pages won’t appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, they will be scanned, and Google will know about their existence and content. 

There are several ways to profit from the noindex directive:

• Prevent search engines from indexing pages that contain duplicate content, such as product pages with identical descriptions but different URLs. 
• To keep low-quality pages from appearing in search results and potentially harming a website’s overall SEO performance.
• When a website is under construction, it’s a good idea to use noindex to prevent search engines from indexing unfinished or incomplete pages.

How to set up a noindex directive?

You can use HTTP headers or meta robots tags to set up noindex on a web page. HTTP headers are used to communicate with the server and can be set up primarily by developers.

And meta robots tags are inserted into the HTML code of individual pages and can be added by content creators or website owners.

Setting up noindex correctly is essential, as mistakes can seriously affect a website’s search visibility. For example, accidentally applying the noindex directive to an entire website can remove all its pages from search results.

Using noindex strategically, website owners and marketers can ensure that their websites only display high-quality content to search engine users.

What is Disallow?

Definition and Function

Disallow is another effective tool for managing SEO performance that tells search engine crawlers not to access and crawl specific pages or sections of a website. 

To learn how to manipulate it, you need to know robots.txt. In short, it is a text document located in the root directory of a website that tells search engines which pages or sections of the site they should or should not crawl and index. 

How to Use Disallow in Robots.txt?

To use disallow in robots.txt, you will need to identify the URLs you want to exclude from crawling and add them to the .txt file. For example, if you want to exclude a folder called “private” on your clients’ website, you would add this line to robots.txt file: 

In this example, “User-agent: *” specifies that the rule applies to all web crawlers, and “Disallow: /private/” tells the crawlers not to crawl any URLs that contain “/private/” in the path.

NOTE! Using disallow in robots.txt does not guarantee that search engines won’t index the excluded pages. While most search engines will respect the directive, there is no guarantee that all of them will not index the excluded pages if they find links to your clients’ pages from other pages of site or external websites.

Therefore, we can conclude that the noindex directive will be more effective in removing the page of your clients’ site from the index.

When to use disallow?

You can use disallow when you want to block search engines from crawling specific parts of your clients’ website. For example, to block search engines from indexing low-quality pages, such as thank-you pages, login pages, or pages with thin content.

What is Nofollow? 

Definition and Function 

Nofollow is a link attribute that indicates the link should not pass on any ranking credit or authority to the destination URL, even if users click on it.

Using nofollow can be helpful in a few ways:

• Preventing the flow of link equity to low-quality or untrusted websites
• Reducing the risk of being penalized by search engines for participating in link schemes or buying links
• Avoiding the dilution of a website’s link juice by controlling the number of outgoing links from a page

Nofollow is the attribute that causes a lot of confusion among users. The key devilish detail is that nofollow doesn’t prevent search engines from indexing the linked page.

Some webmasters believe that nofollow can be used to remove pages from search results, but they are wrong. 

It does not affect whether the page is indexed or not.

To learn how to master nofollow and avoid common mistakes, check out our comprehensive guide: “How to Use Nofollow Links Effectively in Your Link Building Strategy.”

You will know when to use the nofollow tag, the impact of nofollow links on rankings, and the importance of achieving a natural link profile. 

The Problem with Using Disallow and Noindex Together

As we already know, disallow and noindex can be practical tools for managing search engine crawling and indexing. However, combining these two directives can create problems for SEO that website owners should be aware of.

Disallow is a directive used in robots.txt files to instruct search engine bots not to crawl (scan) certain pages or directories on a website.

However, the page can get into the search engine index if someone else links to it through external links or you have it in the sitemap. 

On the other hand, noindex prevents the page from indexing, which means it cannot appear in a Google search. But, the page will be scanned, and Google will know its existence and content. 

While these two directives may seem similar, they serve different purposes.

Let’s say your client have a website with a page containing low-quality content. You decide to use the noindex tag to prevent search engines from indexing the page, but you also want to ensure that the page is not crawled.

So you add the disallow directive for that page in the robots.txt file.

However, using noindex and disallow together can create confusion for search engines. The noindex tag tells search engines not to index the page, but the disallow directive tells them not to crawl it.

If search engines can’t crawl the page, they won’t see the noindex tag and may assume that the page should be indexed.

It can lead to a situation where the page gets indexed, even though you intended to prevent that from happening.

In addition, using disallow and noindex together can make it more difficult for search engines to understand your clients’ website structure and crawl it efficiently.

Therefore, using either noindex or disallow to achieve your desired result is generally recommended rather than using both together.

Best Practices for Using Noindex, Nofollow, and Disallow

Undoubtedly, noindex, nofollow, and disallow are handy tools to manage crawling and indexing of your website. Using them strategically can improve your clients’ website SEO performance and avoid penalties from search engines.