For many brands, optimizing for voice search is uncharted territory. I’m here to give you a high-level overview of what to consider and how to get it done. Start competing for your share of visibility in the growing trend that is voice search. In this article:

• How does voice impact search?
• What are voice search ranking factors?
• How do you optimize for voice search?

How Does Voice Impact Search?

Google once said that voice search represented 20% of queries on its app and Android devices. That was 2016. Since then, research suggests that the percentage has grown much higher. It’s obvious that this is an area that Google will continue to invest in.

Let’s look at a couple of ways voice is impacting how the search engine works …

In 2015, Google launched RankBrain, an artificial intelligence system applied to the search results that better understands the meaning of a searcher’s words.

Mobile usage and voice search were primary drivers of this, as voice queries are typically more conversational than typed queries. RankBrain deals well with those longer, unique queries (often three or more words).

The second concept to know is that voice assistants like Google Assistant make decisions for searchers on which result is the most relevant to answer a question. This is unlike the traditional way of letting the searcher choose a result from the search results page.

Voice search could mean more complexity for brands with local brick-and-mortar locations, too.

For example, someone who has a broken water pipe might simply tell their Google Home device “my plumbing is broken” versus a more traditional voice search like “show me plumbers near me” or “who are the best plumbers in my area?”

What Are Voice Search Ranking Factors?

There are different ways a voice assistant retrieves answers. For example, if it’s on a smart speaker like Google Home, the assistant relies on apps built for the device (via Google Actions) or uses the web.

SEMrush conducted a study that looked at the ranking factors for a voice search. Their goals:

1. To understand the parameters that Google Assistant uses to select answers to voice search queries.
2. To compare and understand differences in answers obtained from different devices.

Out of the many data points from that study, here are a few to highlight:

• About 80 percent of the answers Google Assistant chose were from the top three organic results across all devices (Google Home, Google Home Mini and Android phone).
• Sixty percent of all answers returned from a voice search were from featured snippets.
• Seventy percent of all answers occupied one of the features in the search engine results page (SERP) … for more on SERP features, see this.
• Page speed was an important factor across all devices.

From our own experience, it is worth mentioning that the expertise, authority and trust of the site that the answer is coming from (and the content itself) are vital. Google cannot afford to give the wrong answer to queries as that undermines its reputation and can potentially mislead the user.

How Do You Optimize for Voice Search?

Strategically, here are a few things to keep in mind when adapting your SEO strategy to voice search.

Know Your Audience

Research how someone would search using voice for your brand, product or service. Remember that voice queries generally take one of two formats:

• Conversational and question-based, starting with who, what, when, why and how
• Declarative statements, such as the “my plumbing is broken” example earlier

Create a list of voice searches you believe your audience might use. As a starting point, look at the queries in your Google Search Console for real examples — chances are good that the longer, more conversational queries came from voice searches.

It can be useful to map these questions to your audience’s journey as they engage with you on different levels. For example, what do people search for during the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the buying stage?

Know the Results

With your newfound keyword research, try the queries yourself. Search for your brand, products and services using voice search to find out if and how they show up in the results.

If your website isn’t showing up, your webpages aren’t doing a good job of satisfying the ranking factors for voice search.

You can study things like the ranking factors from the SEMrush study and optimize for them.

Know Your Competition

First, find out which websites are showing up on Page 1 for the voice search queries you want to be found for.

Then analyze the top pages to better understand the logistics of the top-ranking results. You can use software like our SEOToolSet^® to help you figure this out. And then to help you create content that is on par with the competition.

Be Everywhere

Consider building Actions on Google or Amazon Skills to insert your brand into more things that your audience is trying to do on their smart speaker.

For many brands, this is a newer concept. But marketers are beginning to think about how they can adopt this into their programs.

Be Trusted

The expertise, authority and trust of your site and its content are vital. Start working to improve E-A-T now, or your site will never come up as a voice answer.

In summary, optimizing for voice search is just another way that you can be sure your brand, its products and its services are there when your audience searches for them. As a growing trend, it’s something to understand and adopt ahead of your competition.

Key Definitions and Facts

Voice search is a voice-enabled way to search or complete a task on the web or an app. A person speaks their query into a microphone (on their phone or a home assistant device). The queries are usually in the form of a question (such as “What is …”) or a command (“Do this …”).

Voice assistants are the programs on digital devices that facilitate the queries. Examples of voice assistants include Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Voice assistants can be found on many devices. For example, Google Assistant is on smartphones and a ton of other devices for the home.

Smart speakers are devices like home assistants that are powered by voice assistants. Think Google Home (powered by Google Assistant) or Amazon Echo (powered by Amazon Alexa).

Actions (Google) or Skills (Alexa) are the terms used for voice-enabled capabilities on your voice-assisted device, which are akin to apps on a smartphone. They allow the user to do something. These capabilities can be developed by Amazon itself, for example, or by third-party developers. For example, Actions on Google might help you with food delivery: “OK Google, order Chinese food.”

Voice assistants work by selecting what they believe is the best answer to a searcher’s voice query through features on the search engine results page, for example.

Or they can help a searcher facilitate a task on a voice assisted-device through a Skill or Action. In both cases, the interaction between the voice assistant and the user is conversational.

It’s also important to understand that different search engines power different voice assistants. For example, Google, of course, powers Google Assistant and all its enabled devices. But Bing powers Amazon Alexa and devices like Echo (when something is not covered by a Skill).

Key Trends and Stats

Back in 2016, Google stated that 20% of searches (one in five) on Google’s mobile app and Android devices were voice queries. Newer data from Adobe shows that 48% of consumers are using voice assistants for general web search.

eMarketer predicts that by 2021, U.S. voice assistant users will reach about 123 million, and the number is growing each year.

Amazon Alexa is a leader. It’s supported by the highest number of devices (an estimated 60,000 according to Statista), including Echo, with a rapidly growing set of Skills.

Internet Trends 2019, Bond Capital

But Google Assistant is also widely used, as outlined here.

Voice Search Benefits & Concerns

So what is the force behind the trend — why do people use voice search?

Voice search is about convenience. People say voice assistants improve their quality of life and save them time (according to Adobe data linked to earlier).

This happens whether they are using voice assistants on their smartphones (85% of the time) or in their car (31% of the time).

Adobe research via Search Engine Land

But privacy concerns could potentially hinder the adoption of voice technology. The Adobe data supports that as well as research from NPR and Microsoft.

• Eighty-one percent said their issue with voice technology was privacy concerns. (Adobe)
• Sixty-six percent say they don’t own a smart speaker because it’s always listening. (NPR)
• Forty-one percent of users reported concerns around trust, privacy and passive listening. (Microsoft)

Even with concerns about privacy, adoption is not expected to slow. Especially as the newer generations use technology on their terms.

Brands can position themselves to be more useful in a voice-search world by optimizing for voice queries.

Many of us already knew by the time Google confirmed it: Content is one of the top three ranking signals (out of hundreds). If you do nothing else, your content strategy is an essential part of your online success.

1. Target Audience Research
This is a biggie: Know your target audience, the questions they have, and their pain points. Knowing what questions they ask and what types of queries they might ask Google helps inform your keyword research.

This, in turn, will help you create content that answers those questions and solves their pain points. (You’ll use keywords you select as a basis for this content — one main keyword topic per webpage — but more on that shortly.)

Understanding searcher intent is an important step in crafting content. Answering typical questions your target audience might have also helps your page be found for voice search queries.

2. Keyword Strategy and Research
Keyword research needs to be an ongoing process. It starts by identifying a focus phrase or two for the topic you want to write about (using your preferred tools — there are dozens of good ones out there).

When you have a keyword phrase in mind for a page or a section of your site, check it in Google search. View the top results, the “People also ask” questions, and the rest of the search engine results page. This SERP provides your best clues to what is actually the searcher intent for this query. Make sure your content fulfills what searchers want when looking for this keyword, or look for a more appropriate keyword phrase.

I could write volumes about this topic; just know that keyword research is part of any solid SEO checklist. Our SEO Tutorial will get you started and includes a free version of the SEOToolSet Keyword Suggestion Tool.

3. Word Count
The amount of content you need on a webpage varies by topic, keyword, competition and the intent of the query (read about the three types of search queries to the right).

How many words is enough? There’s no black and white rule. To determine an approximate minimum page length, look at the top-ranked URLs for a keyword you’re targeting. How long are those pages? (Note: A tool like our SEOToolSet Multi Page Analyzer comes in handy for this kind of analysis.)

Averaging the top competitors gives you a ballpark for what a search engine probably considers the normal word count for that topic. It’s safe to say that informational webpages almost always warrant more text, at least 450 words.

Quality content is key. Google’s Panda algorithm detects low-quality content and demotes its rankings. So avoid thin content and focus on robust coverage of your website topics that proves your subject matter expertise.

4. Call to Action (CTA)
For each of your pages, ask yourself what the user would need/want to do from here. Then make it easy to do!

Your key pages should make it clear what primary action a visitor can take next. On a product page, the CTA to “add to cart” or “start a free trial” should be prominent. On a service page, the CTA might be “call” or “get a quote.” Make the CTA clear and easy to select. On the homepage, help the visitor to take the next step in your conversion funnel.

The actual language of a CTA should be active (usually an imperative verb). The placement and design of the CTA should draw the visitor’s attention. But test variations to see what works best for you.

A page doesn’t have to be transactional in nature to warrant a call to action. If an informational page is a top-performing traffic driver, such as a blog post that answers a common question or an FAQ page, the call to action might encourage the visitor to “find out more” or enter the conversion funnel.

5. Content Freshness
Make sure to periodically review your content (webpages and blog posts) to make sure that the information is up to date.

For example, this very checklist is regularly refreshed. SEO best practices have to evolve as search engine guidelines and technology do. If your industry also moves quickly, your content needs to keep up.

From Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (PDF):

“… unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low E-A-T [expertise, authority and trustworthiness] rating.”

What’s on your site that needs a refresh? Update it!

6. Static Content on Homepage
Your homepage acts as a central hub to pass authority to top pages on your site through internal links. It’s probably also where people land most often when they search for your brand or main products/services.

It’s important to have static text that talks about your brand and top theme(s) on the homepage.
If you have a homepage with content that constantly changes, such as nothing but headlines, it can dilute the theme of your site. This results in poor rankings for key terms. So try to maintain sections of consistent text on the homepage.

7. Duplicate Content
Do a search to see if your content exists elsewhere on the web. You may want to check out CopyScape.com and use it regularly. If your site appears to have copied content from another source, that’s a low-quality signal to search engines and may cause your site to rank lower. Similarly, if other sites have copied your content, it could be a problem from an SEO standpoint.

If you have duplicate content within your site, such as three URLs with the same content, a search engine will filter out the dupes. Only one will display in results for relevant queries — and the page that Google chooses might not be the page that you want to rank.

Example #1: AI

We’ve just begun to see the impact of artificial intelligence on marketing and the world.

AI is ramping up with businesses in general, but surveys vary widely on how many organizations have implemented AI in their operations so far. Statista found 5 percent while Narrative Science reported a whopping 61 percent of survey respondents saying that they were using AI in 2017.

AI is impacting search much faster.

Search engines have been driving AI at full throttle for years. Google’s complex algorithms can now improve on their own, thanks to machine learning powered by artificial intelligence.

With AI, the search engines — and eventually businesses in general — can evolve at a superhuman pace.

Only by keeping our eyes on the horizon can SEOs keep up. The horizon gives you the long-range view, the big picture. To see that, I look through two lenses:

• What’s good for the user.
• What’s good for Google.

To See the Future of SEO, Follow the Money

When I try to anticipate where SEO is going, the most important question I ask is: How will Google make money?

Remember when we saw Google move ads out of the sidebar? That was in February 2016, and Bing followed suit in March 2018.

Organic listings felt the pinch as the space at the top of a SERP opened up to allow up to four paid ads.

But the disappearance of organic results above the fold had just begun.

Example #2: Local Listings

A “local pack” complete with map entered the SERP picture. It gave local businesses a chance to show up organically on Page 1 when the searcher was physically nearby.

The local pack did push other top organic results (such as national brands) farther down the page for certain queries. On the upside, it also created a whole new field of competition that many SEOs welcomed.

But Google needed to make money … enter local search ads. These ads often appear above organic listings in the Local Pack and map results, especially for mobile users.

More ads directed at local businesses arrived. Google Home Services, now expanded and rebranded as Local Services ads, feature many types of local businesses vetted by Google.

LSAs play to both priorities, helping users and profiting Google. And they appear right at the top of the SERP — filling the above-the-fold space with non-organic listings.

For many queries, the space given to local listings offers mostly ads.

The Disappearing Organic Space

A slew of other changes have arisen in the same way … first as an organic feature, and then converted to a space for revenue-producing ads for Google.

Today, organic web listings may be crowded down the page by many features:

• PPC ads (paid)
• Shopping ads (paid)
• Local Services ads (paid)
• Local pack entries (may be paid)
• Featured snippets (may be paid in the future — expect it)
• News
• Images
• Videos

Folks, organic listings will soon disappear above the fold.

What’s an SEO to Do?

Sites need to take advantage of the organic SEO opportunities that do exist today, among them:

• Use structured data elements and structured data markup.Doing so will help you grab featured snippets. In turn, your content becomes more likely to come up in text and voice search results.
• Answer questions in your content. This can help you rank for long-tail queries and show up as the answer under “People also ask” questions.
• Be optimized for local search, if applicable to your business.
• Serve site visitors well, with great content and a positive experience. Give visitors what they want pain-free, and they may come back on their own.
• Don’t forget any of the normal SEO to-dos, from optimizing on-page content to making sure your site is crawlable. (See our SEO Checklist for the essentials.)

Looking at the future of SEO, I have one more piece of advice to add to this list.

Videos Are Crucial for Winning Back the SERP

Videos appear prominently in Google search results, especially for queries with a “how to” intent.

Videos can even take the featured snippet (aka Position 0). Take a look at the examples below:

All these video links fill the space above the fold. They count as “organic” results. However, when you click a YouTube video result, what do you see first? You see an ad.

Since video results create ad revenue for Google/YouTube/Alphabet, organic has ads!

Videos are crucial for winning back the SERP and preparing for the near-future of SEO.CLICK TO TWEET

“How To” Will Rule Organic Results

Videos often answer questions more efficiently than any other format.

From how to use a staple gun to how to grow your business, you’d probably rather watch someone tell you how, in living color, than read an article looking for the answer. And you’re not alone.

In one year, YouTube viewers spent over a billion hours watching just videos with “how-to” in the title. That’s according to YouTube executive Malik Ducard.

YouTube sees more than an ad opportunity here. It’s launching a new YouTube Learning channel with a $20 million investment. In addition to supporting independent content by “Edu Tubers,” the channel plans to showcase original educational programs made by YouTube, as well.

Why Video Is a Best Play for SEO

Video search results can make the Google family of companies more money than ever. Recently, YouTube started counting an ad “view” at only 10 seconds, not 30.

With Google making money indirectly through “organic” video results, I predict that videos will rank more and more prominently in search results. That’s especially true for how-to types of queries.

Any business or organization would be wise to invest in video. I recommend that you collect your niche’s most-asked questions and start filming answers. One of an SEO’s best plays today is to create videos that answer how-to questions.CLICK TO TWEET

Case in point: We produce our Ask Us Anything series as a playlist on our YouTube channel. Each video answers a specific question about SEO, PPC, content or social in a short video. People can submit their digital marketing questions.

Our Ask Us Anything playlist is growing, now at 64 videos and counting.

Last Thoughts

At what point does Google become all ads, and “free” organic results become a billable premium service?

With voice search, AI will make the spoken results better — and Google will need to charge for answers since nobody will see the SERP ads.

The way Google implements changes over time is seen as evolutionary, not revolutionary. The result? People will not know that all that appears above the fold is ads.

Ads will always be needed for search engine revenue. Organic results will be pushed down, or become something people pay for.

This means organic results will disappear above the fold.

And yet, although the personal data of their visitors and customers is at risk, many businesses still aren’t making website security a priority.

Enter Google.

The folks over at Google are known for paving the way for Internet behavior. Last month, they took a monumental step forward in helping protect people from getting their personal data hacked. The update they released to their popular Chrome browser now warns users if a website is not secure – right inside that user’s browser.

While this change is meant to help protect users’ personal data, it’s also a big kick in the pants for businesses to get moving on making their websites more secure.

Google’s Chrome update: What you need to know

On October 17, 2017, Google’s latest Chrome update (version 62) began flagging websites and webpages that contain a form but don’t have a basic security feature called SSL. SSL, which stands for “Secure Sockets Layer,” is the standard technology that ensures all the data that passes between a web server and a browser – passwords, credit card information, and other personal data – stays private and ensures protection against hackers.

In Chrome, sites lacking SSL are now marked with the warning “Not Secure” in eye-catching red, right inside the URL bar:

Google started doing this back in January 2017 for pages that asked for sensitive information, like credit cards. The update released in October expands the warning to all websites that have a form, even if it’s just one field that asks for something like an email address.

What’s the impact on businesses?

Because Chrome has 47% of market share, this change is likely noticed by millions of people using Chrome. And get this: 82% of respondents to a recent consumer survey said they would leave a site that is not secure, according to HubSpot Research.

In other words, if your business’ website isn’t secured with SSL, then more than 8 out of 10 Chrome users said they would leave your website.

Ouch.

What’s more, Google has publically stated that SSL is now a ranking signal in Google’s search algorithm. This means that a website with SSL enabled may outrank another site without SSL.

That’s exactly why anyone who owns or operates a website should start taking the steps to secure their website with an SSL certificate, in addition to a few other security measures. Businesses that don’t take care to protect visitors’ information might see significant issues, garner unwanted attention, and dilute customer trust.

“In my opinion, I think security is undervalued by a lot of marketers,” says Jeffrey Vocell, my colleague at HubSpot and go-to website guru. “Almost daily, we hear news about a new hacking incident or about personal data that has been compromised. The saying ‘there’s no such thing as bad press’ clearly isn’t true here; or, at the very least, the marketer that believes it has never had to live with the fallout of a data breach.”

With Google’s Chrome update, those visitors will see a warning right inside their browsers – even before they’ve entered any information. This means businesses face the potential of losing website visitors’ trust, regardless of whether a cybersecurity incident has actually occurred.

If you’re ready to join the movement toward a more secure web, the first step is to see whether your website currently has an SSL certificate.

Do you know whether your site has SSL?

There are a few ways to tell whether your website (or any website) has SSL.

If you don’t use Google Chrome:

All you have to do is look at a website’s URL once you’ve entered it into the URL bar. Does it contain “https://” with that added “s,” or does it contain “http://” without an “s”? Websites that have SSL contain that extra “s.” You can also enter any URL into this SSL Checker from HubSpot and it’ll tell you whether it’s secure without having to actually visit that site.

If you do have Chrome:

It’s easy to see whether a website is secured with an SSL certificate, thanks to the recent update. After entering a URL into the URL bar, you’ll see the red “Not Secure” warning next to websites that aren’t certified with SSL:

For websites that are certified with SSL, you’ll see “Secure” in green, alongside a padlock icon:

You can click on the padlock to read more about the website and the company that provided the SSL certificate.

Using one of the methods above, go ahead and check to see if your business’ website is secure.

Yes, it does have SSL! Woohoo!

Your site visitors already feel better about browsing and entering sensitive information into your website. You’re not quite done, though – there’s still more you can do to make your website even more secure. We’ll get to that in a second.

Shoot, it doesn’t have SSL yet.

You’re not alone – even a few well-known sites, like IMDB and StarWars.com, weren’t ready for Google’s update. But it’s time to knock on your webmasters’ doors and have them follow the steps outlined below.

How to make your website more secure

Ready to protect your visitors from data theft and get rid of that big, red warning signal staring every Chrome user in the face in the process? Below, you’ll find instructions and resources to help you secure your website and reduce the chances of getting hacked.

Securing your site with SSL

The first step is to determine which type of certificate you need – and how many. You might need different SSL certificates if you host content on multiple platforms, such as separate domains or subdomains.

As for cost, an SSL certificate will cost you anywhere from nothing (Let’s Encrypt offers free SSL certificates) to a few hundred dollars per month. It usually averages around $50 per month per domain. Some CMS providers (like HubSpot) have SSL included, so check with them before making any moves.

(Read this post for more detailed instructions and considerations for SSL.)

Securing your site with additional measures

Even if you already have SSL, there are four other things you can do to make your website significantly more secure, according to Vocell.

1) Update any plugins or extensions/apps you use on your site.

Hackers look for security vulnerabilities in old versions of plugins, so it’s better to take on the challenges of keeping your plugins updated than make yourself an easy target.

2) Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

One trick hackers use to take down websites is through a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is when a hacker floods your server with traffic until it stops responding altogether, at which point the hacker can gain access to sensitive data stored in your CMS. A CDN will detect traffic increases and scale up to handle it, preventing a DDoS attack from debilitating your site.

3) Make sure your CDN has data centers in multiple locations.

That way, if something goes awry with one server, your website won’t stop working all of a sudden, leaving it vulnerable to attack.

4) Use a password manager.

One simple way of protecting against cyberattacks is by using a password manager – or, at the very least, using a secure password. A secure password contains upper and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers.

Suffering a hack is a frustrating experience for users and businesses alike. I hope this article inspires you to double down on your website security. With SSL and the other security measures outlined in this post, you’ll help protect your visitors and your business, and make visitors feel safe browsing and entering information on your site.

In May, Google announced that it was doing away with last-click attribution. In its place, Google will now be offering a new reporting product, known as Google Attribution. The goal of this new product is to provide more sophisticated insights into overall campaign performance. Yet, the removal of last-click attribution is giving many marketers a bit of a complex. Before diving into how Google Attribution works, it’s worth reviewing why marketers are anxious over this latest change.

Last-Click Attribution and Why Marketers Love It

Every time someone performs an action on your website, that action is attributed to a particular campaign. AdWords, DoubleClick, etc. determines which campaign gets credit for a lead, sale, asset download, etc. For most of Google’s and many other analytics platforms’ history, the credit was always given to the last touchpoint. This is known as last-click attribution.

Despite these different channels working together to finally make the sale, with last click, only the email campaign would get the credit for the sale. Yet, the other two channels clearly assisted with the conversion. The visitor probably wasn’t ready to buy when he first saw the ad, which resulted in additional research. The email was simply the final trigger in the decision-making process. All these channels were important in the sales process, but email was given the credit because it was last.

With the current models, marketers would assume that the email campaign was the sole reason for the conversion. You’d have to dig into the Assisted Conversions or Top Conversion Paths sections of Google Analytics to see that your other campaigns were performing well and how they were assisting with converting visitors.

Assisted Conversions

Top Conversion Paths

Why Marketers Love Last Click

Many marketers see last-click attribution as the sole reason why a visitor decided to take an action. Honestly, it makes judging campaigns simpler. If you can say that a particular ad from a particular campaign resulted in the conversion, then you can create similar ads/campaigns/messaging to increase your conversions.

It makes reporting easier, especially in terms of successes and failures. That way of thinking, however, isn’t taking into account the supporting players that might have actually had more of an influence on the success of the campaign than the final act.

Why Did Google Decide to Move Away from Last Click?

Google has consistently tried to improve metrics to make them more useful to marketers. As mentioned previously, last click only gave credit to the final channel. Previous channels, however, may have assisted top-of-the-funnel activities like research, brand awareness, etc. A recent articleindicated that it can take 30 or more touchpoints before a visitor makes a transaction. This means that the first interaction might have been just as – or more – important that the final one.

Google wants to ensure that marketers are seeing the full picture of how their marketing dollars are being spent – and help them understand which clicks have the most impact on results.

How Google Attribution Works

The new Google Attribution model leverages machine learning to give a weighted value to each of the different touchpoints. This is a data-driven model designed to provide better insights in overall channel campaign performance. Data-driven models review all converting and non-converting paths, and give credit to the different touchpoints.

While multi-channel funnel attribution has been around for years, the new product – according to Google – will be faster and provide more in-depth details.

“It creates a prediction model that learns by weighting a set of touchpoints on how likely a user is to purchase something,” Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management for analytics measurement at Google, said. “The presence and absence of marketing touchpoints across channels and across campaigns will either decrease or increase the likelihood of a conversion.”

The Google Attribution model uses the following machine-learning data to determine touchpoint value:

• Order of exposure
• Total ad interactions
• Ad creative
• Best-performing clicks and keywords

How to Leverage the New Model

It will take some time to understand how Google weighs each conversion. You might find it helpful to add secondary dimensions, including AdWords keywords, landing page, source, etc., to get more granular detail into what assets contributed to the conversion path. Google can pull in a variety of dimensions, adding more granular data to the overall metrics.

Conclusion

Google Attribution makes it easier to justify the effectiveness of specific campaigns to stakeholders. In the past, a particular channel may have looked like it was failing, but it might have been supporting other campaigns. It was difficult to dig into this data even though multi-channel funnel reports have been available for a while now.

Before using Google Attribution, however, think about how you’re going to report on these new insights. If you’ve only ever reported on last-click attribution, your stakeholders will more than likely need a bit of training to understand the shift. Set up your reporting template with the new data, and be prepared to make changes as needed based on stakeholder feedback.

Also, experiment with the product. Since it’s extremely new, there are bound to be quirks and potentially data that you might not fully understand. Spend some time reviewing and thinking about what’s being reported. It will not only help your own learning, but also help you justify your reports when the inevitable questions arise.

What is a Progressive Web App?

It’s an all-in-one solution for web developers to create a single version website/app that can be delivered across all devices and works like an app but without the hassle of distribution through an app store.

A progressive web app, or PWA, combines the best of a website and the best of a native application. It’s a type of hybrid app. If a user comes to your PWA-run site, they’ll get the mobile version of your site but faster.

With a traditional hybrid app, like the Amazon app, the user’s interactions with it are built into the phone as an app, but the data collected is from the web. Here’s where a PWA is different. A PWA launches a browser to do the same thing. With the introduction of service workers (the scripts running in the background of your browser) and other technological advancements, browsers are more sophisticated than ever. They can do things on your phone that previously could only be done through a native app. This means you don’t have to publish the app in the app store. The barrier to entry of downloading an app is no longer an issue for your users.

As a developer, you no longer have to program different apps for different devices, nor deal with special screen sizes. You can invest your time and resources into designing a PWA. If you have to make a mobile website, you might as well just use a PWA. It’s well worth it.

Talking PWAs

Cindy Krum, the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, is a PWA guru. Here’s what she had to say:

Lots of big companies are already testing PWA code and integrations on their sites. Lyft, Mic, Washington Post, Flipboard, The Weather Channel and more have already launched beta PWA sites for testing. Google has already published some PWA development guidelines for SEO, but I think the update may depend on how aggressively Google and other influential companies promote PWAs.

Google has also been hinting at cross-over between AMP and PWAs, using AMP to make PWA’s work in Safari, so there may be some new iteration of AMP that makes AMP enabled content available in PWA format. The PWA news viewer already behaves a lot like a PWA. My guess is that in the next year, we will see some of the more agile and cutting edge companies take their PWAs out of beta, and making them their main sites, with or without the influence of AMP.

It will be interesting to watch more widespread adoption of PWAs unfold. As with anything new, of course, it can sometimes be hard to get clients to adopt bleeding edge technology. Here’s how Cindy is getting her clients on board.

Cindy: The main recommendation is to try it out. You can add a service worker and an app manifest to any existing website. It is not enough to get the full benefits of a PWA, but it is enough to learn how easy or difficult the integration will be for your company. In our case, we developed an app manifest in five minutes, and a service worker in 90 minutes.

Making web-apps indexable tends to be the harder part of the equation, but that is true with or without the PWA elements. Web apps are hard to index because developers don’t always include URLs for state-changes in the web app.

For the immediate future, PWAs are something to be aware of, and if you’re able to, start working into your testing and planning cycles. There are no guarantees it’ll be the go-forward structure and remain supported by Google forever, but you don’t want to be left behind. There are practical upsides to PWAs that are worth considering regardless of how long it takes this to be a mainstream approach.

Whether or not you know what went wrong, here are a whole bunch of steps you can take to counteract the decline and recover your lost traffic. You won’t always be able to do all of them, but you should be able to do most of them, and that will give you quite a bit of search benefit even if you aren’t suffering from a decline.

1. Combine Similar Posts

Google doesn’t really like when a site has too many posts covering the same topic. It’s one thing if they’re spread out over a couple years, chronicling a changing industry. It’s another if they’re all evergreen content that largely doesn’t change. It starts to look like the content was spun, either by a sophisticated piece of software or by hand.

From a user standpoint, it’s reasonable to understand why too-similar content is unhelpful. When you’re presented with two pieces of content covering the same topic by the same writer, which one do you choose to read? The most recent one would be the best guess, but what if there’s no publication date listed? If they’re of similar length, it’s even worse. This indecision splits your traffic into less enthused segments.

One way to handle this is to pick one of the posts to make into the primary post. Read through both posts and edit the primary post to include any unique details or thoughts from the secondary post. Then remove the secondary post and redirect the URL to the primary post.

2. Expand Short Posts

Much has been written about the optimal length of content for various platforms. A tweet, obviously, has a limited amount of space. Did you know that the ideal Facebook post tends to be even shorter than a tweet? Buffer’s study up there showed that a 40-character post is ideal for Facebook engagement.

What about blogs? Google doesn’t like short posts, because they end up looking like thin content. Anything under 800 is really short and doesn’t have the space to have much value. Buffer’s study claims that the ideal blog post is closer to 1,600 words. Some successful blogs publish once per week, but their posts are closer to 5,000 words.

In any case, if your blog has a large number of posts under 1,500 words, you should consider going back and expanding them. You can typically add more content, more data, and more analysis to expand a post and give it more value. Google will see the change and give it a new lease on life.

Some short posts just don’t have anything you can do to expand them. That’s okay! You have options. You can leave them as they are. You can remove them entirely, if they’re not valuable. You can combine them with similar topics and make a larger post. The choice is yours. As long as the average length of posts on your site is going up, you’re improving.

3. Remove Copied Posts

If you have an old blog, or you purchased your content from freelancers or ghostwriters on a content mill, you might want to double check to see if any of your content is copied. You might have checked when you bought the content, or you might have trusted your writers when perhaps you shouldn’t have.

Copied content is, of course, bad for your site. There are two forms of copied content, however. The first is when another site published first, and the second is when you published first. We’ll cover the second a bit later.

When your site is not the originator of the content, Google knows. They don’t care about the upload date or publication date on your posts, because that can be changed. They only care about when they first indexed the content. If a piece of content on your site was indexed on another site first, it had better be properly syndicated if you want to avoid a penalty. Chances are you’re not a syndicator, so you should probably just remove the content.

How can you identify content that is published elsewhere on the web? There are a number of tools, but the simples is just CopyScape. CopyScape is a well known and widespread plagiarism scanner, and will see if excerpts from your site are found on other sites. This can also help you identify on-site duplicate content issues you might not know you have.

4. Remove Poorly Syndicated Content

Article syndication was a potent SEO technique for a few years, but it has grown much less effective for all but the biggest sites recently. Someone like Yahoo or a news site can get away with it; a professional blog, not so much.

There’s a right way to do article syndication. The key is to use Google’s canonical tags properly, so Google knows what the real source of the content is. If you have any content on your site that was syndicated from another source, regardless of how old it is or how broadly the text explains the original source, you need a canonical tag referencing the original source. Remember, Google is essentially a giant robot; you need to give it commands in a way it can interpret and follow.

If any of your content is syndicated externally, check in the code of the site to see if it has canonical tags implemented. If it does, leave it be. If it doesn’t, consider notifying the site owner to have them implemented. You might also consider removing the content from your site, so it looks more like a guest post than syndicated content. Which route you take is up to you.

5. Get Stolen Content Removed

I mentioned that I’d get to this later, and here it is. Any time you publish a piece of content, it can be stolen by other people online. Black hat spammers often steal content in pieces or wholesale, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. There’s no good way to protect your content from theft. You could embed it in Flash or as an image, but that prevents Google from indexing it, which is worse.

Identifying content stolen from your site is easy enough; CopyScape will do it for past posts, and setting up a Google Alert will do it for future thefts. The important thing is to realize that it’s probably not hurting you that much to have stolen content out there. The only reason removing it is on this checklist is that it’s good to do a little housekeeping. As I mentioned, Google knows you published first, and thus anyone else is probably stealing it.

The first step to removing the stolen content is to use a contact form on the offending website to notify them that it’s stolen and should be removed. Sometimes it’s an unscrupulous freelancer selling stolen content, and the site owner never knows. If that’s the case, it should be resolved easily.

If you need to take things one step further, you can contact the web host of the offending site. Usually, a web host has a clause in their terms of service explicitly banning content theft, and they will help take down the content. If all else fails, you can file a DMCA takedown.

6. Update Outdated Posts

Sometimes you have content on your site that’s perfectly fine in length and quality, it makes it through all of the other previous steps, and it’s still useless to you. It might have been valuable at one time, it might even have some traffic and links even now, but it’s out of date and it has faded from relevance.

The solution to this problem is to revamp the content. Keep the URL, keep the title, you can even keep the old content if you want. You can either add a lengthy update to the front or back of the content, or you can edit the whole thing and bring it up to date.

Make sure, if you’re updating your content, that you actually tell users you’ve updated it. A large heading at the top will serve the purpose, as will a ping to Google to let them know the content has been updated. A new wave of social shares is icing on the cake.

7. Implement Proper Redirects for Changed Content

Redirects are incredibly important if you’re changing anything dramatically enough. If you change your domain name, redirects are crucial. If you’re moving or merging posts, redirecting the old URL to the new one is very helpful to maintain link value.

8. Remove Links to Poor Sites

The first seven steps were all about content. You could consider them something of a comprehensive content audit. Now it’s time to move on, and deal with your links.

Links are the backbone of the Internet, and they’re very important to Google. You need to do them properly if you want to thrive. The first thing you should do is gather up a list of pages you link to throughout your site. You can do this with a tool like Ahrefs.

Take a look at the domains you link to throughout your site. How many of them are sites that no longer exist, sites that have changed, pages that no longer exist, or domains that have been parked? These are all valueless links. You should remove them and replace them with links to better content.

9. Remove or Change Links to Bad Content

The other thing to look for are domains that are low quality or spam. If they seem to have valuable content, maybe that content was stolen, and you can find the originator. If they don’t have valuable content, just remove the link.

Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether a particular site is spam or not. Honestly, most of the time you can just run with links to valid content and they won’t hurt you much. If you’re not sure you really want to keep the link, but you can’t find content to replace it, add the nofollow attribute to the link. This keeps Google from passing any link authority to the other site.

10. Remove or Disavow Bad Incoming Links

Links from your site out don’t necessarily hurt you unless you’re regularly participating in a black hat link scheme. The links that can hurt you are links coming in from poor quality sites. I’m not talking about sites with poor PageRank; I’m talking sites that are legitimately spam. This can happen because of a bad link exchange, a negative SEO attack, or stolen content with links to other pages on your site embedded in it.

Again, you’ll want to turn to a tool like Ahrefs to pull a backlink profile. This time, you’ll want to check over the links coming in to your site. Identify links coming from spam sites, parked domains, blog networks, paid posts, dead directories, and irrelevant sites. Even if some of these links are beneficial now, Google keeps updating Penguin, and they will eventually become toxic.

The process for dealing with them looks roughly like this:

• Identify which links should be removed and sort them by domain. Compile them into a list or table.
• Send a message to the owner of each domain with the explanation that you own your site, your site is under a Google penalty, and you have identified links you would like removed. Give them those links.
• Check back later and identify links that have not been removed. Compile a list of the worst, most harmful of them and submit them to Google’s Disavow tool. The rest can be largely ignored.

11. Trim Down Excess Keyword Usage

Keywords used to be in much greater focus for SEO than they are today. A lot of old posts – and I mean a ton, including basically everything written by a content mill for literal years – has a keyword density somewhere in the assignment or the mind of the person who wrote it.

Here’s the thing about keyword density: it generally doesn’t matter. There’s no magic formula, no specific density that helps you rank above the rest. However, any content more than a couple years old probably emphasized keywords more than is right to do today.

The problem that persists today, and that can escape a content audit like what we went through above, is the keyword usage in meta data. You need to analyze your meta titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords sections.

Meta titles are okay to use one keyword in, but should be a human-readable and valuable title for the post. Typically it’s a good idea to just use the title of the blog post. Meta descriptions can have two or so keywords, so long as they don’t stand out and are valuable. Think of it as an elevator pitch for the content. Or, realistically, the Google snippet. It’s what people judge the quality of your content by.

As for the meta keywords section, blank it out. That thing hasn’t been used in a non-spam way for half a decade. Scrap it, get rid of it, out with it. Forget it exists.

12. Speed up Site Loading Times

There’s some debate today over how much a fast site affects your SEO. One thing I can tell you is that if you had a fast site, and it’s suddenly slow, your traffic will drop. Your ranking might not drop, because it’s a minor change in the algorithm, but it’s important for actual users.

I recommend auditing the plugins and scripts running on your page. Broken scripts or too many scripts are the primary offenders in a slow site. The second biggest offender is loading media content upfront. Lazy load that content, or contract a third party CDN like Akamai to do the hosting and loading for you. There are other methods you can use, as well, but they have less of an impact.

13. Update to a Responsive Design

One of Google’s recent changes, and a reason many sites lost a lot of ranking and traffic, is their renewed focus on mobile compatibility. Ostensibly, it only affects the mobile search ranking for sites, which is distinct from the desktop search. However, it’s both a search engine factor and a user experience factor, so you should get it sorted out as quickly as possible.

While you can use a dedicated mobile site, I strongly recommend a responsive mobile design. They look a lot better on larger mobile devices like small tablets and phablets. They have a smoother scaling from desktop to phone. They work better, they look better, and they’re generally easier to maintain. Plus, they’re nowhere near as costly as they once were, so you can easily hire a web developer to implement a new design for you.

14. Remove Outdated Plugin Code

I covered this briefly in the site speed section, but plugins are a blessing and a curse for webmasters. They allow you to do all kinds of things, from heatmaps to analytics to widgets and comments and spam filtering. However, every plugin slows down your site, as minor as it may be. Every plugin is also a potential vulnerability in your site, which can lead to intrusion.

At least every six months, you should audit your plugins. Check for any that you don’t use and remove them. For those that remain, check for when they were last updated. If they haven’t been updated in over a year, get rid of them and get a new replacement. If they have updates, apply them. This helps keep your site safe, as well as fast.

15. Address Any Manual Google Penalties

Many of the penalties addressed by the above steps are algorithmic penalties, like Panda and Penguin. These aren’t really penalties; they’re just changes to the way things are sorted, forcing you to adapt. It’s like having a spreadsheet with 100 columns, and sometimes Google decides to sort the data by a different column. If you’ve been focusing on one set, and Google uses another, you need to buff up those other columns to compete.

Actual penalties, in Google parlance, are Manual Actions. These show up in Google Webmaster Tools, under the Manual Actions section, under Search Traffic. There are a bunch of possible penalties, ranging from unnatural links to cloaking to a hacked site or malware warning. Google will happily lift the penalty when you fix the issue, and they provide steps at the link above to help you deal with the issue.

If you’ve done all of the previous steps and still haven’t recovered, check your Webmaster Tools, look for manual actions, and get them taken care of as soon as possible.

• June 11, 2013: Google announced specific recommendations for developing mobile-friendly websites. It listed common configuration mistakes and explicitly called out faulty redirects and smartphone-specific errors (incorrectly served 404s, Googlebot Mobile and unplayable videos).
• September–October, 2014: Google tested several different mobile-specific indicators, using both mobile-friendly and non-mobile-friendly icons.
• November 18, 2014: Google officially launched mobile-friendly designations to results in mobile search.
• February 26, 2015: Google announced that, on April 21, it will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.

Google has gotten very serious about mobile search and is taking a primary role in improving the experience. In other words, we’re on notice to clean up our site(s). The good news is that Google is providing instructions and tools to help us do this. Here are the top three things that every website owner needs to do in anticipation of the April 21 deadline:

1)     Make use of Google’s guide to mobile-friendly websites. Google provides a 60+ page guide that discusses why and how to build a mobile-friendly website. There are dedicated guides for several open-source CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), as well as a specific guide to mobile SEO, with special emphasis on avoiding common mistakes.

2)     Test your site using Google’s Tools. Users of Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) are already familiar with Google’s emphasis on mobile, as WMT has been alerting users to “fix mobile usability issues found on site xyz.” Clicking on “View details” brings users to a three-step process: 1) Inspect mobile issues, 2) Follow these guidelines and 3) Fix mobile usability issues. For those just starting out or who don’t have a WMT account, Google provides the ability to test a single page. This report groups all of the errors in one page and links on how to fix the errors, based on how the site was built (I built via CMS, I built myself, I had someone build the site).

3)     Fix your errors. Once your errors have been identified, build a plan to fix them. Some of these issues are systemic (affect many/all pages), while some are specific to a small number of pages. Some problems will be harder to fix than others, so the earlier you can begin working with your technology team/agency, the better. At this point, Google is telling you whether or not your site is mobile-friendly and if not, why not. Unless you’ve recently and intentionally built a site with this in mind, your site isn’t mobile-friendly. If you don’t fix these errors, you will see a negative impact for the most competitive (i.e., unbranded, high value) terms. Maybe you’ll even get the dreaded, red “slow” label.

Starting on April 21, Google’s changes will have significant impact on your mobile search rankings. If your site is mobile-friendly, expect to see an improvement. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will see a drop in rankings.

For now, Google is ranking pages on a page-by-page basis rather than site-wide, and it’s doing its part to improve the mobile experience by rewarding the best pages in search results. Google understands that redesigning a site will take a larger budget than most companies have, so it’s willing to accept page-by-page fixes.

To make sure this is possible, Google itself has invested a significant amount of its resources to provide testing tools and guides on how to fix your pages. It is up to us to take advantage of these resources and fix our sites. We may have finally reached the point where “mobile first” goes from popular buzzword to crucial business strategy.

It’s been common knowledge for quite some time that having a mobile site is highly beneficial. As every year passes, that benefit grows, as more and more people switch to browsing on mobile devices. Mobile devices continue to grow ever more sophisticated, but they aren’t potent enough to simulate a desktop experience. Moreover, they don’t try; mobile browsing is its own beast, and it needs to be catered to for best effect.

Still, many businesses hold out, thinking they do “well enough” without mobile, or believing that mobile is a fad that will soon die out. Mobile isn’t the pogs of our generation; it’s the next wave of technology, and it’s here to stay.

Thankfully, if you need to convince one of those stubborn business owners, you can now add yet another set of indicators from Google itself.

1. Favored Responsive Design

Responsive design is the most modern way to cater to mobile browsers, and it has a number of distinct advantages over the traditional subfolder or subdomain methods. For example:

• Both mobile and desktop searchers, when finding the site, will see the same URL with the same content. The only difference is in how much of it is displayed dynamically. Mobile browsers without certain capabilities will see a site that seems designed for what it can do, while more powerful desktop machines will be able to see all of the robust dynamic content. This is an SEO factor as well, because keeping both types of users on the same domain avoids splitting up the content. It also avoids potential canonicalization or duplicate content issues stemming from improperly implemented mobile sites.
• Mobile users come from a variety of different types of devices, but they tend to share one key feature; a low tolerance for sites they can’t use. A responsive site caters to these users and displays perfectly for them, which increases time spent on site and decreases bounce rate; both SEO factors.
• A responsive design doesn’t require code that implements redirects based on the user’s device. Instead, it relies only on screen size. In fact, desktop users can adjust the size of their browser to see what a responsive site looks like in a mobile device. A lack of redirects, particularly bad redirects, is also beneficial to SEO.

For obvious reasons, Google favors having a responsive design over having a dedicated mobile page. Likewise, Google favors a mobile page over not having any mobile display capability what so ever.

2. Mobile Error Penalties

Google’s developers center is a massive and robust resource for all things search and web development, and it has some very interesting things to say about mobile. Among other things, it will list out many common problems that sites have when trying – and failing – to work on mobile devices.

• Mobile devices frequently have issues with JavaScript, CSS and images that a desktop browser can power through and render one way or the other. Broken code displaying for mobile users can be cause for a decreased rank or removal from the rankings.
• Mobile devices occasionally can’t play certain types of multimedia. Apple’s historic issues with Flash, older devices having issues with HTML5, and other sorts of media errors make a webpage much less valuable, particularly when the primary content of that page is in the multimedia.
• Redirects are tricky, and sometimes the code can get hung up on certain types of devices. Faulty redirects can earn you a decreased rank, as certain types of users find your site unusable.

In every case, errors that appear on your site when a mobile browser tries to view it will cause a lowered rank in the search results. This is not a penalty; it’s simply an adjustment of your rank based on certain factors. Fix the issues and your rank will rise.

3. Mobile Friendly Flags

Starting any time now, Google has promised to begin rolling out a new indicator in their mobile search results. This indicator is a small line of gray text beneath the URL, next to the snippet, on search results. If a site qualifies, it will earn this indicator and a potentially higher rank in search. If the site is the only one in a list of results with this indicator, it’s a powerful signal for mobile users to click on that particular site. What is the indicator?

It’s a simple extension of everything that has been mentioned above, though the requirements to earn the flag are lighter than you might expect. Your site needs to:

• Avoid any software that causes issues on mobile devices, such as Flash media. This means any videos you post need to be in a mobile-friendly format, your navigation should not use Flash-based buttons and your site definitely should not be based entirely within Flash.
• Use text of a sufficient size to be readable without requiring a magnifier tool or a zoom. Mobile users who have tried to view desktop sites are well aware of the double-tap necessary to zoom in to read the tiny text on a typical site. A mobile site won’t require any such zoom and squint exercises.
• Size content for the screen. This is an extension of the text rule, but it also applies to layouts. Again, using a desktop site frequently requires horizontal scrolling, which has been an SEO no-no on desktop sites for years. This rule adds the side-scroll to the list of detrimental mobile factors as well.
• Position links in such a way that there is no chance of a typical user accidentally clicking the wrong one. This means your links need to be large enough to tap precisely without risking tapping the wrong one, due to their positioning.

Credits: John Boitnott