Digital marketing

By SEO for boring products, we mean SEO for products that are impossible to write exciting content for. Products that need a thousand words to describe all tiny details and small print, but are, in the end, just car insurances, paper clips or emergency exit signs. We have all had or have been that customer that just could not come up with the right, engaging content. Sometimes it’s just hard to write something that makes sense about a product, from your own perspective. In this article, we’ll explain how to approach SEO for boring products! Want to learn practical SEO skills to rank higher in Google? Our Basic SEO training is just what you need! » $199 - Buy now » Info First: get the basics right Regardless of what product you’re selling, you always need to make sure that the basics of SEO for your site are right. That means that you’ll have to put some decent effort into: keyword research site structure technical SEO You’re in luck. At Yoast, we offer SEO courses for ...

Search in 2018 has become much more diverse than it was a few years ago, with new features such as voice search adding an entirely new dimension to how people explore search engines for answers to their queries. With AI Assistants like Google Assistant becoming more commonplace, search can now be conducted even without having to type a single letter. Along with voice search , another new method on conducting a search is now being used as well in the form of visual search. If voice search is done through the human voice, visual search is done by simply opening your camera and taking a picture. This new way of conducting search through images might be a relatively new technology, but it has seen a good amount of development, with various apps and services testing the technology out. With this in mind, this is another new feature that aims to impact SEO in the future, and here’s what you need to know so far. How Visual Search Works Like voice search and standard search, visual search ...

For fans of the long-running SEO Death series , this isn’t really a new issue. About two years ago I posited Is Your Adwords Campaign Hijacking Your SEO Traffic? The answer of course was “yes.” Here’s the graph that illustrated the problem: I am re-upping this because we just got a new client that hired us because their organic traffic had started tanking, but when you looked at the data in Google Search Console, it only showed brand queries were tanking. And said tanking started pretty much when the paid traffic started increasing. We did some back of the envelope calculations on SEMRush CPC data available for their brand queries and we calculated this client is spending an additional $20,000/day to buy $50,000 in revenue*. This isn’t such a bad deal until one considers that until the increase in paid search traffic, the client was spending ~$0 to achieve that revenue. So their margins just took a 40% haircut. So, next time your organic traffic tanks, before you panic try this: ...

Augmentation Queries In general, the subject matter of this specification relates to identifying or generating augmentation queries, storing the augmentation queries, and identifying stored augmentation queries for use in augmenting user searches. An augmentation query can be a query that performs well in locating desirable documents identified in the search results. The performance of the query can be determined by user interactions. For example, if many users that enter the same query often select one or more of the search results relevant to the query, that query may be designated an augmentation query. In addition to actual queries submitted by users, augmentation queries can also include synthetic queries that are machine generated. For example, an augmentation query can be identified by mining a corpus of documents and identifying search terms for which popular documents are relevant. These popular documents can, for example, include documents that are often selected when pres...

As your site grows, you’ll have more and more posts. Some of these posts are going to be about a similar topic. Even if you’ve always categorized it well, your content might be competing with itself: you’re suffering from keyword cannibalization . At the same time, some of your articles might get out of date, and not be entirely correct anymore. To prevent all of this, you need to perform content maintenance. Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training » $199 - Buy now » Info In a lot of cases, content maintenance is going to mean deleting and merging content. I’m going to run you through some of that maintenance work as we did it at Yoast, to show you how to do this. In particular, I’m going to show you my thinking around a cluster of keywords around keyword research. Step 1: Audit your content The first step in my process was finding all the content we had around keyword research. Now, most of that was simple: we have a keyword research...

SEO Power BI Data Cleaning & Preparation Checklist for URLs Getting into data visualization for finding new opportunities and accelerating analysis? Me too! But there’s a few best practices I’ve learned along the way when connecting datasets by URLs. When might you want to connect by URL?  … https://ift.tt/2M0eOeT

We have a client site whose SEO often defies description, along with canonicalization. We often have to check Google’s cache of various URLs to see what in fact Google is getting, but sometimes when you view the Full Version of the cache it just rapidly reloads like a blinking strobe light. Kind of like this: And there’s no way to get to the Text-Only or View Source versions of the cached URL as the links don’t stay in place long enough for your cursor to recognize the link and make it clickable. The good news is there’s a simple way to get the desired view of a cached URL in Google – add text strings to the end of the URL in your browser’s address bar. And here they are in their full Instant Answer/Featured Snippet glory: How To View The Text-Only Version Of A URL In Google’s Cache Replace the text string at the end of the Full Version of the cache URL with &num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0. For example, here’s the Full Version cache URL for our homepage using a Safari browser...

Updating ‘big’ things on your site can have quite an impact. You may well be facing (slightly) lower rankings or traffic for a while after changing things like your URL structure , or switching to a different TLD , for example. Sometimes, there’s little you can do to avoid that, other than properly implementing the changes and redirecting when necessary. So, how about when you update and improve images on your site? Especially if some of your images are ranking well, you want to avoid losing those positions when updating images. How do you do that? You’ll find the answer in today’s Ask Yoast! Bryan Fly sent us his question about updating images: We want to make some improvements to the images on our site. The last time we did that we lost a lot of image rankings. My question is how do we update our images without losing organic positions on them? Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer! Updating images without losing rankings “Well, Bryan, if ...

If you’re serious about your WordPress website, you have run a page speed test at some point. There are many variations of these tests out there. Some more convenient and true to your target audience than others. But they all will give you a pretty decent idea of where you can still improve your site.  Certain speed optimizations may come across as “technically challenging” for some of you. Luckily, you have set up a WordPress website. And one of the things that make WordPress so awesome is the availability of WordPress plugins. Some free, some paid, but they all will help you to simplify difficult tasks. In this article, we’ll first show you a couple of page speed tests so you can check your page speed yourself. After that, we’ll go into a number of speed optimization recommendations. And show you how to solve these using just plugins. Running a page speed test Running a page speed test is as simple as inserting your website’s URL into a form on a website. That we...

Google is a search engine that always finds ways to innovate and optimize their services to improve the overall user experience and provide the best search results. This 2018, we have already seen numerous updates, from Google Images removing the ‘View Image’ option to Google launching an algorithm update last March that caused a fluctuation in rankings. This past month, Google has once again launched a new set of algorithm updates that continue to optimize search. One of the latest updates is the Google Speed Update, which aims to implement mobile loading speed as a search ranking factor. Mobile SEO has been gaining more traction over the past year, which is in line with the growing number of mobile users using search on their devices. We have covered mobile optimization in detail previously, and with the updates rolling in, it is time to re-open the discussion. Here are some of the most important updates during June and July 2018, and how to optimize your website to comply to the...

Keyword cannibalization means that you have various blog posts or articles on your site that can rank for the same search query in Google. If you optimize posts or articles for similar search queries, they’re eating away each other’s chances to rank. Here, I’ll explain why keyword cannibalism is bad for your SEO , how you can recognize keyword cannibalization and how to solve it. Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training » $199 - Buy now » Info What is keyword cannibalization? If you optimize your articles for similar terms, you might suffer from keyword cannibalization: you’ll be devouring your own chances to rank in Google. Google will only show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search results for any specific query. If you’re a high authority domain, you might get away with 3. Why is keyword cannibalism bad for SEO? If you cannibalize your own keywords, you’re competing with yourself for ranking in Google. Let’s say you have...

Say hi to a brand new version of Yoast SEO! As it’s summertime, our hard-working developers went out on a collective bug hunt. Together with the community – we’re so happy to be part of – they’re giving their all to make our plugin work better for everyone using it. For instance, to make the various sections of all Search Appearance tabs collapsible, so they’re easier to scan and edit. On top of that, we’re preparing for exciting times to come! What about Gutenberg? And further development of our best-known feature, the content analysis?  Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » $89 - Buy now » Info Less scrolling in Search Appearance The Search Appearance section of Yoast SEO is a true power tool. It allows you to control which sections of your site should appear in the search results and what they will look like. For instance, you can choose to hide certain archives from the search results or to set a template for...

Like any service-based industry, it’s easy to have an “hours-in, deliverables-out” mentality. We all have goals to hit with limited time, and marketing consultants often default to measuring through channel-specific clicks, traffic, and keywords. But here’s the problem—users don’t care about channels and keywords (and neither do CEOs, to be honest).… https://ift.tt/2uZHgGl

With Google constantly updating their search algorithms and services on a monthly basis, it is only fitting that their Google affiliate YouTube also launch their own set of updates as well. Being the second biggest search engine in the world, YouTube also has the largest online video database in the world, with billions of hours’ worth of videos to watch. Along with being the largest video platform, it is also one of the highest earning websites as well, with a huge number of users earning through their monetized videos. With the overwhelmingly large amount of videos in the site, YouTube also has its own ways to optimize search and improve visibility. One of the newest ways to search videos on YouTube is through the use of hashtags. The use of hashtags has already been seen on social media sites like Facebook , Twitter, and Instagram , and has helped create some of the most successful and viral social media posts and campaigns. With this new feature, let’s see how hashtags help expa...