Why research your audience?

Els: “Let’s be honest, you probably assume you know your audience quite well. There’s no shame in admitting it, a lot of companies do. That’s because you might know socio-demographic information such as their age, gender, and location. But, does this actually tell us who these people are?”

Get to know your customer like never before

Els stresses that socio-demographics are valuable, but the age of your customers does not tell you why they’re interested in your service. Or what problem your product solves for them. It also doesn’t give you insight into their objections or concerns. Or what might be holding them back from buying (more) from you. She states: “If you want to connect with your audience, you need to know a whole lot more about them. And proper audience research can help you with that.”

Where to start with your audience research?

Before you start your research, Els advises to ask yourself this question: What problem do I want to solve? The answer will help you determine what type of research to conduct. And, who among your audience is able to give you relevant insights into this issue. Often enough, this will help you shape your questions and what part of your audience to reach out to. For example, don’t send a survey about your onboarding process to people that have been your customer for over three years. These people don’t remember what your onboarding was like and can’t help you optimize this specific process.

Choose your method wisely

Els: “When you’ve determined what part of your audience to research, it’s time to choose a method. Of course, this is dependent on a few factors, such as the problem you want to solve, your product or service, and the size of your audience. But for most businesses, a cheap and easy way to get started is an online survey. There are loads of tools that can help you set up an online survey at a very low price (or for free, yay!). You can post a survey on your website or in your app, by using a tool such as Hotjar or Zoho Page Sense. Or you can send it to people via email or social channels with a tool such as SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo.”

When you need to dig deeper, she suggests conducting personal interviews and user testing: “These one-on-one interactions provide you with context and a more profound understanding of your customers. Interviews are also the way to go if you haven’t got that many customers yet. Mainly because an online survey might not provide you with enough input when the number of participants is limited. In that case, you can collect valuable information about your audience through personal interviews.”

Let’s formulate some questions

The next step is formulating the right questions to ask your audience. And you probably have tons of questions you would love to ask them. How to select which ones to ask? Els advises taking a moment to think back to the question you asked yourself before starting your research: What problem do you want to solve? 

“If there are any problem areas you want to address, focus on those first. For example, if you have a problem with churn rate, research your existing customers. If the acquisition is the issue, reach out to potential customers in your audience. Your problem area will guide you in who you should approach and what questions you should ask.”

There’s no such thing as a stupid question, right?

Unfortunately, although always aiming to help, Els can’t provide you with a ready-made list of questions to ask your audience. She can, however, tell you what questions will not get you the results you’re looking for:

• Leave out any questions in which you ask people to predict the future. An example: “would you use our app more regularly if we introduced feature x, y or z?” Asking your audience to predict their future behavior is asking to be lied to. 
• Don’t ask questions about a too distant past. Human memory can be unreliable at times. And, even if people can’t really remember something correctly, they want to be helpful. So they might make stuff up, which in fact, doesn’t help you at all. 
• Get rid of all questions in which you’re asking someone’s opinion. An example: “How attractive do you think our design is, on a scale from 1 to 10?”. What will you do if your design scores a 7? And how is that different from an 8 or 6? Ask yourself how this information will help your business. 
• Try to avoid framing or phrasing your questions in a way that leads to biased answers. An example: “How fast would you say our customer service response time is on a scale from 1 to 10?” It might seem a perfectly neutral question, but by using the word fast you’re pretty much suggesting it as an answer. Either use both the positive and negative versions of an adjective in your question or leave it out altogether. 

Summary: how to set up your audience research

Proper audience research is essential in growing and maintaining your customer base. So, how do you make sure the research you conduct gets you the answers you need? Always start by asking yourself the question: what problem do I want to solve? This will help you choose the right audience and research method. An online survey is a cheap and easy way to get started, but if you want to dive deeper Els recommends doing personal interviews or user testing. To formulate your questions, keep the problem you want to solve in mind. And, try not to include any questions in which you ask people to predict their future behavior, questions about a distant past, questions in which you ask their opinion or questions that can lead to biased answers. 

You’re all caught up now, and ready to start your audience research. We wish you lots of luck and plenty of valuable input on all your future surveys and interviews. Thank you, Els, for sharing your knowledge and experience in this interview!

About Els Aerts: Els has been creating better online experiences based on user research since 2001. She’s the co-founder of AGConsult, a Belgium-based usability, and conversion optimization company. She loves helping companies understand their customers better. Because knowing what makes your customers tick, drives growth. 

Read more: An introduction to user research »

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An easier, more flexible text analysis

Since Yoast SEO 9.0, we’ve been making our keyphrase analysis smarter to make the process of editing a text with Yoast SEO more natural. More invisible, so to say, so you can focus on creating that epic piece of content. 

Thanks to the innovative way of working with language, the plugin is now much less restrictive in finding your focus keyphrase. It has become smarter. In the past, you often found yourself working according to the rules of the plugin, but not anymore. Now, you don’t have to try to fit your focus keyphrase awkwardly in a sentence to make the plugin happy. No, since Yoast SEO 9.0 the plugin recognizes all parts of your focus keyphrase automatically — and the words don’t even have to be in the same order.

That’s all happening in the free version of Yoast SEO, but Premium analysis ups the ante. Here, word form support comes into play. 

Yoast SEO 13.5: Premium analysis in Spanish

The Yoast SEO Premium analysis not only picks out your focus keyphrases flawlessly inside a sentence, but it also looks at words forms of your keyphrase. Word forms can be anything, from plurals (e.g., perro – perros), verb forms (e.g., aplicar – apliques) to adverbs (e.g., actual – actualmente). In Yoast SEO Premium 13.5, Spanish language users can also benefit from this.

Now, if you write naturally your focus keyphrase will become much easier to find because it looks at different forms as well. All these instances count towards the correct keyphrase density of your text. 

That’s not all, because Yoast SEO Premium offers something else that you can use in conjuncture with word forms: support for synonyms and related keyphrases. By adding different related keyphrases, you can write a text that fully covers your specific topic. This includes all relevant terms users use to talk about this subject.

¿Ya estás convencido? Are you convinced yet?

Need a recap? Check out this video that explains it perfectly:

Word forms are now supported in:

• English (since Yoast SEO 9.0)
• German (since Yoast SEO 10.1)
• Dutch (since Yoast SEO 13.4)
• Spanish (since Yoast SEO 13.5)

Of course, we have more language on the way. We collected all the supported languages in our SEO analysis on our features per language page.

Help us improve Spanish support

Today, we introduce word form support for our Spanish language users. This version is fully functional and works really well, but it might still be a little rough around the edges. Please test it thoroughly and report back your findings.

In addition, we’d like your help adding word form support for other languages. Each language is different, so you need a new word form recognition mechanisms in each language. Up to now, our in-house team of linguists refined and adapted the word form recognition mechanism in each language until it delivered the best possible quality.

This process has a major advantage: you get the best quality right in the first release. But it also has a downside, as it takes a while before a word form mechanism can cope with all the intricacies and irregularities in a language. As we want to provide word form recognition in more and more languages, this process will take longer. To speed up the process, we are changing things for the upcoming languages.

In the future, we’re building on existing word form recognition mechanisms. We need your help, though. To improve these existing mechanisms, we’d like native speakers — or experts — in that language to give us feedback. We’re working on a new feedback system to allow you to send your suggestions or improvements from within the plugin. For now, if you encounter strange things or want to help out, you can send us an email, comment on this post or make an issue on our GitHub repository. Thanks!

Update to Yoast SEO 13.5

Yoast SEO 13.5 is out. In it, you’ll find a great enhancement for our Spanish language users: word form support! Word forms help you to write a better article while spending less time on making Yoast SEO happy, we hope. If not, please let us know so we can improve it.

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1. Improve your site’s structure

A relatively quick way to boost your site is by working on your internal linking structure. If you make sure your most important pages get relevant internal links, they have a much better chance of ranking in the search engines. That’s because a good internal linking structure helps Google understand your site and figure out which pages are most prominent.

The best way to do this depends on the kind of site you have. As an online shop, you probably want to boost your category pages, but as a restaurant, you may want your brand new ‘delivery’ page ranked ASAP. Check out our ultimate guide to site structure for some tips that fit your site best. 

In any case, you can use the Yoast SEO text link counter to check how many internal links a post or page already has to it. That’ll quickly give you an idea of which posts need a more prominent place in your site structure. Need more help? Yoast SEO Premium includes an internal linking tool that gives you linking suggestions for posts or pages to link to. It’ll help you improve your site structure and save a lot of valuable time!

2. Work on your most important pages

Quality content remains crucial for every website. So, think about how you can improve your important existing pages. Perhaps you didn’t have the time yet to give them the attention they deserve. If you can, invest time and effort to demonstrate your expertise on those important pages; that means research into your topic, your audience and what they’re looking for. 

A quicker way to improve your (most important) pages is to look through your post overview and work on the content that has an orange or red bullet for either the SEO score or readability score. Getting that green bullet will give you the edge, as it means your content is well-optimized and readable for a wide audience. Take a look at how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool, or more specifically, how to use the readability analysis.  

Another tip: Don’t forget to keep the information on your informational pages and contact pages accurate and up to date, so your visitors have the latest details. In times like these, communication is important, so people know where they stand! 

3. Upgrade your site speed

Site speed plays an important part in SEO, so if you want to boost your site that’s definitely an aspect to focus on. There are several things you can do to improve your site’s speed relatively easily. Firstly, you could install a caching plugin. A caching plugin keeps static parts of your site saved on your server and serves users these lighter HTML pages instead of processing the relatively resource-intensive WordPress PHP scripts. There are both free and paid caching plugins available and they can significantly speed up your site, check out our post on improving site speed for more information. 

If you don’t feel comfortable making changes like that right now: optimizing your images is also a quick win when it comes to speed. Odds are you’ve uploaded big, high definition images here and there on your site. These take a long time to load, while most of the time, a lower resolution image will do just fine. Time to resize your images! You can do that using an image optimization tool, such as jpeg.io.

Read on: Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines »

4. Add some structured data!

Structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand your website. What’s more, certain types of structured data can get you a featured snippet in the search results, and that’s a great way to stand out! 

If you use Yoast SEO (version 11.0 or higher), relevant structured data is already added for your site. But, there’s more you can do! For instance, use Yoast’s FAQ blocks to answer questions that might come up for your users. As mentioned before, clear communication is more important than ever. Also, Yoast’s HowTo blocks come in handy to easily explain to people at home the steps of how to do something. Whether you explain how to bake a nice loaf of bread, make a craft project for your children’s schoolwork or how to stay fit during quarantine with bodyweight workouts: don’t forget to use Yoast’s HowTo blocks for a shot at a featured snippet!

If you’ve had to reschedule events and are comfortable adding structured data yourself, you could also add schema for rescheduled events. 

Bonus tip: Focus on social media 

While not strictly SEO, in these times, it’s a good idea to pay extra attention to social media. Many people are using it (again) to stay connected and find the latest information. So, make sure you’re active on your social media profiles to stay in contact with people. Keep them informed about your activities, about how you can help, or about how people can help you. I’m seeing a lot of creativity on social media, such as online dance classes, or a ‘sew-along’ through video calls. Whatever your niche might be, there are many ways to stay in touch and connect with your audience in a positive way, so give that some thought!

Keep on reading: Social media strategy: Where to begin? »

Do what you can to quickly improve your website

There we have it, four ways to quickly improve your website, for both content-related and technical aspects. These are uncertain times; it may be hard for you to do all the things mentioned above, and that’s OK. But hopefully, these tips will help you boost your online presence and get your business through the situation. If you’re eager to learn more about SEO, have a look at our All-around SEO training, which is currently available for free, to help you improve your site even further!

The post 4 tips to quickly improve your website in the current situation appeared first on Yoast.

If you want to test, head on to this developer announcement post, test instructions are in there. For now, enjoy the comic:

The post Yoast SEO 14.0: The Indexables appeared first on Yoast.

Thinking outside the box

At times like these, we all need to step outside our comfort zone and do things differently. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so to say. In this post, I’ll take a look at what a restaurant can do, but many of these things apply to other local businesses as well. 

All restaurants are closed for eating in, but if you try to get creative, there are still ways to keep the business going. For one, that would be offering gift cards for your restaurant to be cashed when you open again. Or, you could keep serving menus to customers and having them come pick it up at your location.

What do you need?

Of course, you would need a site for your restaurant. If you have a WordPress site, it’s quite easy to add a shop of sorts using WooCommerce. You wouldn’t even need a very complex setup with a thousand payment options and user account management or something. Keep it simple, you just want people to select a menu, pick it up and pay for it on the spot using contactless payment. If you wish to extend these options, feel free to do so. 

Besides a WordPress site with a WooCommerce shop, you can improve how these two work together by installing our Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO plugins. These not only enhance your site in a technical sense but also improve the chance of it showing up properly in the search engines.

How to start an online store for local pickup

In this post, you won’t find how to set up a WordPress site. I’ll assume you have a WordPress site. If not, there are a lot of guides on how to make a WordPress website out there that describe how to build one. We have a free WordPress for Beginners course that helps you get going quickly.

Whenever you are working on your site, it’s a good idea to set up a test site that mirrors the real one. This way, you can experiment to your heart’s content without breaking the actual site. Here’s how to set up a test environment for WordPress.

It goes without saying that your hosting plan should be able to facilitate WooCommerce. You should also serve your site over HTTPS (check the green lock icon in the browser bar), this is essential now that you are going to handle customer data.

Install WooCommerce

Go to the Plugin section of your WordPress site and click add new. Here, you can look for the WooCommerce plugin. This is the number one e-commerce solution for WordPress. It powers online stores in all shapes and sizes, including the one on our site. After downloading, the plugin installs and asks you to activate it. WooCommerce is now ready to set up. 

Set up WooCommerce

WooCommerce has an awesome wizard that guides you through the setup process. If you follow these steps, you’ll have most of the essential things in place. If you want to do it by hand, you need to go to the settings in WooCommerce and go over the screens by yourself.

Even if you’ve done the wizard, it’s a good idea to go over the settings to get acquainted with everything. Need to rerun the Wizard? Click the Help button in WooCommerce to find it on the left-hand side.

Go to the WooCommerce settings and set up or check the following settings: 

• On the General tab:
  • Make sure your store address is correct and that you’ve limited selling to your country and location
  • Enable or disable tax calculation if needed
  • Enable or disable the use of coupon codes if needed
  • Pick the correct currency
• On the Product tab:
  • Select the page where you want the shop to appear
  • Want users to leave reviews on your product? Activate that option here
  • On Inventory: Disable stock management unless you need it
• On the Payments tab:
  • Pick an easy payment option, like cash on delivery or bank transfer
  • If needed, you can add more complex payment providers like PayPal
• On the Accounts tab:
  • Allow guest checkout
  • Allow account creation if needed
  • Select the Privacy policy
  • Review the other options on this page carefully, you may need them
• On the Emails tab:
  • Check the different email templates and activate the ones you want to use. For every email, change the text to match what you want to say
  • Scroll down to check the sender options
  • Also adapt the email template to fit your brand
• Skip the Integrations tab
• On the Advanced tab:
  • Map the essential pages for your shop, i.e. the cart, checkout, account page and terms and conditions. You can make these pages in WordPress:
    • Add the `[woocommerce_cart]` shortcode to the cart page
    • Add the `[woocommerce_checkout]` shortcode to the checkout page
    • Place the `[woocommerce_my_account]` shortcode to the account page

These are the settings that get you up-and-running quickly. WooCommerce is a solid piece of software with loads of options and it can be used to power tiny webshops selling one item to megastores carrying millions. Go over the settings to see if you need to set something that fits your goal.

Install Local SEO by Yoast SEO

The Local SEO plugin by Yoast is a great addition if you want your business to rank locally. It comes with a lot of cool options, like managing multiple locations, getting your correct business details to Google easily and creating an awesome map where customers can find your business.

One of the coolest options of the Local SEO plugin is the local store pickup option it adds to WooCommerce shops. As WooCommerce doesn’t offer this natively, the Local SEO plugin makes it much easier to offer this important option to your customers. Simply activate and customize it, that is all. It truly is a must-have addition!

The same goes for the WooCommerce SEO plugin. This is optional, of course, but it is a great help if you want to get serious with WooCommerce. The plugin improves the product structured data WooCommerce generates, it cleans up the XML sitemap making it faster to load and it makes products stand out more on social media platforms by adding specific code.

Adding a shop to your theme 

You might use a WordPress theme that your developer built especially for you. Adding a WooCommerce store shouldn’t be too difficult. Often, it works out of the box or with limited edits. Look, you are not trying to build the world’s most beautiful restaurant website with a fully functioning online shop with all bells and whistles. You are looking for something quick and dirty to get you started.

For most instances, you could simply add a special shop page to your site and accept the design it comes with. Or, you could override your own theme with a WooCommerce enabled restaurant/shop theme from the WordPress repository. Please see what works for you.

Payment options

Like you don’t have to have an astonishing design, for your shop, you don’t need to offer a gazillion payment options. Please pick the bare necessities. Simply offer contactless payment on the spot, or a low-cost payment method like we have in the Netherlands called Tikkie. This lets you easily send payment requests via a link that your customers can use to pay the invoice using their own bank. Big payment providers often charge big money and you want to save as much as you can, right? Plus, these can be a pain to implement and maintain.

Also, it might be a good idea to offer gift cards. In that case, you also need to turn on those settings in WooCommerce.

Add your products

Once you’ve set up a store for your restaurant, you can add products. Again, do this as you see fit. You might offer all dishes separately, but you can also offer complete menus. Or maybe you have a different idea on how you would go about this. There’s no wrong way, pick what works best for you.

Adding a product consists of giving it a strong product name, plus a description and images. You should also give the product a price. There are a lot of options here, but you probably won’t need most of them. Do take a look, though. To help you write great product texts that also do well SEO-wise, you can always have Yoast SEO take a look at them.

Publish your online store

After you’ve filled your store, it’s time to do a test run. Open your store, click all the buttons and make a test order. See if everything works. Check if all the order emails come in. Fulfil the order and celebrate! Now, if you haven’t run into too many errors, you should be good to go. Publish your store and communicate it to your customers. Hopefully the orders for your tasty food will come in quickly.

In WooCommerce, you can easily track the orders that come in and you can do all kinds of analysis to see how the money comes in. Click to your Dashboard to get an overview of what’s happening at the moment. There’s so much more you can do in WooCommerce, it’s silly. Read the WooCommerce documentation to see what else you can do to run and improve your shop. 

Communicate your new store

Now’s the time to start marketing your store. These are not exhaustive and you can probably think of a few good channels for your business. If nothing else, think about your social media and your email newsletters. Also, there might be a collection of other local restaurants that are in the same boat as you are. It might be a good idea to build a platform together?

Another important thing is your Google My Business account. Please update it with the latest information! Google is adding COVID-19/Coronacrisis management options as we speak. Restaurants can now pick special attributes if your restaurant is available for take out or delivery. This will show up in Google Maps. You can also use the Posts features in My Business to communicate with your customers.

WooCommerce and Local SEO help arrange local pickup

This post was meant to give you an idea of the steps you need to take to run a small-scale, WooCommerce-powered online store. Even a local shop, a restaurant or a cafe can run one just like it. The technology is there, and most of it is free to use. Of course, paying for a couple of premium plugins will greatly enhance the experience and save precious time as well. WooCommerce alone has a ton of purposely extensions for improving parts of a store for specific industries.

We hope you enjoy building your own online store. 

Stay safe!

The post Shops & restaurants: easy curbside pickup with WooCommerce and Local SEO appeared first on Yoast.

What is a crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site on any given day. This number varies slightly from day to day, but overall, it’s relatively stable. Google might crawl 6 pages on your site each day, it might crawl 5,000 pages, it might even crawl 4,000,000 pages every single day. The number of pages Google crawls, your ‘budget’, is generally determined by the size of your site, the ‘health’ of your site (how many errors Google encounters) and the number of links to your site. Some of these factors are things you can influence, we’ll get to that in a bit.

How does a crawler work?

A crawler like Googlebot gets a list of URLs to crawl on a site. It goes through that list systematically. It grabs your robots.txt file every once in a while to make sure it’s still allowed to crawl each URL and then crawls the URLs one by one. Once a spider has crawled a URL and it has parsed the contents, it adds new URLs it has found on that page that it has to crawl back on the to-do list.

Several events can make Google feel a URL has to be crawled. It might have found new links pointing at content, or someone has tweeted it, or it might have been updated in the XML sitemap, etc, etc… There’s no way to make a list of all the reasons why Google would crawl a URL, but when it determines it has to, it adds it to the to-do list.

When is crawl budget an issue?

Crawl budget is not a problem if Google has to crawl a lot of URLs on your site and it has allotted a lot of crawls. But, say your site has 250,000 pages and Google crawls 2,500 pages on this particular site each day. It will crawl some (like the homepage) more than others. It could take up to 200 days before Google notices particular changes to your pages if you don’t act. Crawl budget is an issue now. On the other hand, if it crawls 50,000 a day, there’s no issue at all.

To quickly determine whether your site has a crawl budget issue, follow the steps below. This does assume your site has a relatively small number of URLs that Google crawls but doesn’t index (for instance because you added meta noindex).

1. Determine how many pages you have on your site, the number of your URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
2. Go into Google Search Console.
3. Go to “Legacy Tools” -> “Crawl stats” and take note of the average pages crawled per day.
4. Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
5. If you end up with a number higher than ~10 (so you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls each day), you should optimize your crawl budget. If you end up with a number lower than 3, you can go read something else.

What URLs is Google crawling?

You really should know which URLs Google is crawling on your site. The only ‘real’ way of knowing that is looking at your site’s server logs. For larger sites, I personally prefer using Logstash + Kibana. For smaller sites, the guys at Screaming Frog have released quite a nice little tool, aptly called SEO Log File Analyser (note the S, they’re Brits).

Get your server logs and look at them

Depending on your type of hosting, you might not always be able to grab your log files. However, if you even so much as think you need to work on crawl budget optimization because your site is big, you should get them. If your host doesn’t allow you to get them, it’s time to change hosts.

Fixing your site’s crawl budget is a lot like fixing a car. You can’t fix it by looking at the outside, you’ll have to open up that engine. Looking at logs is going to be scary at first. You’ll quickly find that there is a lot of noise in logs. You’ll find a lot of commonly occurring 404s that you think are nonsense. But you have to fix them. You have to get through the noise and make sure your site is not drowned in tons of old 404s.

Read on: Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages »

Increase your crawl budget

Let’s look at the things that actually improve how many pages Google can crawl on your site.

Website maintenance: reduce errors

Step one in getting more pages crawled is making sure that the pages that are crawled return one of two possible return codes: 200 (for “OK”) or 301 (for “Go here instead”). All other return codes are not OK. To figure this out, you have to look at your site’s server logs. Google Analytics and most other analytics packages will only track pages that served a 200. So you won’t find many of the errors on your site in there.

Once you’ve got your server logs, try to find common errors, and fix them. The most simple way of doing that is by grabbing all the URLs that didn’t return 200 or 301 and then order by how often they were accessed. Fixing an error might mean that you have to fix code. Or you might have to redirect a URL elsewhere. If you know what caused the error, you can try to fix the source too.

Another good source to find errors is Google Search Console. Read this post by Michiel for more info on that. If you’ve got Yoast SEO Premium, you can even redirect them away easily using the redirects manager.

Block parts of your site

If you have sections of your site that really don’t need to be in Google, block them using robots.txt. Only do this if you know what you’re doing, of course. One of the common problems we see on larger eCommerce sites is when they have a gazillion way to filter products. Every filter might add new URLs for Google. In cases like these, you really want to make sure that you’re letting Google spider only one or two of those filters and not all of them.

Reduce redirect chains

When you 301 redirect a URL, something weird happens. Google will see that new URL and add that URL to the to-do list. It doesn’t always follow it immediately, it adds it to its to-do list and just goes on. When you chain redirects, for instance, when you redirect non-www to www, then http to https, you have two redirects everywhere, so everything takes longer to crawl.

Get more links

This is easy to say, but hard to do. Getting more links is not just a matter of being awesome, it’s also a matter of making sure others know that you’re awesome. It’s a matter of good PR and good engagement on Social. We’ve written extensively about link building, I’d suggest reading these 3 posts:

1. Link building from a holistic SEO perspective
2. Link building: what not to do?
3. 6 steps to a successful link building strategy

When you have an acute indexation problem, you should definitely look at your crawl errors, blocking parts of your site and at fixing redirect chains first. Link building is a very slow method to increase your crawl budget. On the other hand: if you intend to build a large site, link building needs to be part of your process.

TL;DR: crawl budget optimization is hard

Crawl budget optimization is not for the faint of heart. If you’re doing your site’s maintenance well, or your site is relatively small, it’s probably not needed. If your site is medium-sized and well maintained, it’s fairly easy to do based on the above tricks.

Keep on reading: Robots.txt: the ultimate guide »

The post How to optimize your crawl budget appeared first on Yoast.

• Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console
• Setting up an account
• Features in Google Search Console
  • Performance tab
  • Index coverage
  • URL Inspection
  • Enhancement tabs
  • Sitemaps
  • Links
  • Mobile usability
  • Manual Actions
  • Security issues

  Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console

  Google Search Console has been created to easily track the performance of your website. You can get valuable insights out of your Google Search Console account which means that you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also be giving a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.

  Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get mail notifications when new errors are noticed by Google Search Console. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix.

  Setting up an account

  To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to create an account. Within the new Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:

  

  Clicking on the ‘Add a property’ button, you can insert the website you want to add. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name — so without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option you have to add the right URL, so with ‘https’ if you have an https website and with or without ‘www’. For collecting the right data, it’s important to add the right version:

  

  When you’ve added a website, you need to verify that you’re the owner. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can find out more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership.

  For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method:

  

  You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO plugin:

  

  After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.

  Features in Google Search Console

  Now you’ve set up your account what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.

  Performance tab

  Within the Performance tab, you can see what pages and what keywords your website ranks for in Google. In the old version of GSC you could see the data of a maximum of the last 90 days but in the current version, it’s possible to see the data up to 16 months. Keep in mind that the data is available from the moment you set up your account.

  If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or what pages need some more attention and optimization. So where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’ or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. Each of those sections can be sorted by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’ or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:

  

  1. Clicks

  The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number can tell something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It could be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see what can be optimized for your snippet.

  The position of the search result also has an impact on the number of clicks of course. If your page is in the top 3 of Google’s first result page it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.

  2. Impressions

  The impressions tell you how often your website in general or how often a specific page is shown in the search results. For example, in the GSC account of our own website, Yoast SEO is one of the keywords our website ranks for. The number of impressions shown after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in the search results of Google. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.

  To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for the keyword [Yoast SEO], the keyword is added as a filter:

  

  After that, you could navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages exactly rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.

  3. Average CTR

  The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.

  However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stands out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result and your CTR will increase. Keep in mind that this will not have a big impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.

  4. Average position

  The last one in this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still gives you an idea if the clicks, impressions and the average CTR are explainable.

  Index coverage

  A more technical but very valuable tab within Google Search Console is the ‘Index coverage’ tab. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages properly.

  

  We recommend checking this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.

  You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google is finding broken code or error pages in your theme.

  Clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:

  

  There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your coverage reports:

  • If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
  • Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
  • Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.

  We recommend that you monitor these types of situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google.

  URL Inspection

  The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. On this page, you can also find more technical info, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked when it was crawled. Sometimes, you’ll also notice a number of errors. This might be in regards to Google not being able to crawl your page properly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.

  

  Enhancement tabs

  Below the ‘Index coverage,’ you can find the Enhancement tab. Here, you’ll find everything you need to improve how your site performs. It has insights in site speed, mobile usability, AMP usage, and structured data enhancements that might lead to rich results in the SERPs.

  Speed

  The new speed report is still in its experimental stages, but already an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from loading quickly. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so real data of real users. Site speed is a difficult topic containing many moving part, so it’s good to learn how you should think about site speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.

  

  AMP

  One of the tabs is for all things ‘AMP’. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: lightning fast mobile pages. If you’ve set up AMP for your website you can check for errors in Google Search Console. Within this section you can see the valid AMP pages, the valid ones with warnings and errors:

  

  Below the chart, the issues are listed. If you click on one of the issues, you can see the affected URLs. Just as in the index section of GSC you can validate your fix if you’ve fixed an issue.

  Rich results enhancement tab

  If you have structured data on your site, provided by Yoast SEO for instance, it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab is the place where all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results are collected. There’s an ever-expanding list of support rich results. As of writing, that list contains:

  • breadcrumbs
  • events
  • faqs
  • how-tos
  • jobs
  • logos
  • products
  • reviews
  • sitelinks searchboxes
  • videos

  All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have, or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.

  

  The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder your performance in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.

  Sitemaps

  An XML sitemap is like a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. We think every website would benefit from having one. Is our Yoast SEO plugin running on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to make sure Google can find your most important pages and posts easily.

  Within the XML sitemap tab of Google Search Console you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:

  

  We recommend everyone entering the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition to that, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.

  We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you’re including in your sitemaps!

  Links

  Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain to your site and lastly, what anchor texts are used most linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are very important for SEO.

  

  Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get most internal links. Doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.

  

  Mobile usability

  The mobile usability tab within this section shows you usability issues with your mobile website or with specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising all over the world, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, lots of visitors will leave it quickly.

  

  Manual Actions

  The manual actions tab is the one you don’t want to see anything in. If your site is penalized by Google, you’ll get more information in here. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.

  There are a number of scenarios which can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:

  • You have unnatural/bought links
    Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
  • Your site has been hacked
    A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
  • You’re hiding something from Google
    If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different to content than to users, for the purposes of decieving either of them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
  • Plain Spam
    Automatically generated content, scraped content and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blacklist your site.
  • Spammy structured markup
    If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.

  Security issues

  Last but not least: within the security issues tab you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.

  Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool

  Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, we definitely recommend creating an account so you can start collecting data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!

  Read on: How to make your site stand out in the search results »

  The post The beginner’s guide to Google Search Console appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/feed/ 38 add-property-search-console select-property-type-search-console gsc-ownership gsc-verification performance-overview-google-search-console performance-for-query-search-console search-console-coverage-report-march-2020 search-console-validate-fix-redirect-error url-inspection speed-report-search-console AMP error howto-enhancement-report-gsc Add a new sitemap links-overview-google-search-console top-link-wordpress-seo mobile-usability-issues https://yoast.com/how-to-transition-to-the-block-editor-wordpress/ https://yoast.com/how-to-transition-to-the-block-editor-wordpress/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:31:12 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2429309 Are you considering switching from the classic editor to the block editor? That’s great, as the block editor will give you lots of possibilities to create awesome, high-quality and high-ranking content! Not sure how to go about this though? Don’t look any further. Here, we’ll guide you through the process of making the switch to […]

  The post How to make the transition to the block editor (from the classic editor) in WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> Are you considering switching from the classic editor to the block editor? That’s great, as the block editor will give you lots of possibilities to create awesome, high-quality and high-ranking content! Not sure how to go about this though? Don’t look any further. Here, we’ll guide you through the process of making the switch to the block editor step-by-step.

  Did you know we just released a free online course about the WordPress block editor? If you want to learn all about creating awesome content with the block editor, you should definitely check it out!

  Get started with the new & free Block editor training »

  Why should you transition to the block editor?

  Before we explain how to make the switch to the block editor, let’s see why we think you should make the transition to the block editor. Using the block editor has quite a lot of benefits. For example, the block editor makes it easy to:

  • create user-friendly, high-quality content;
  • give your content a great structure, look, and feel;
  • add structured data to your posts and pages, so your content might show up as a rich result in the Google search results.

  Read more: The block editor: Why you should be using it

  How to switch to the block editor

  Switching to the block editor should go smoothly. Especially, if you follow the steps below.

  In this video, which is part of our new and free Block editor training, we explain the steps you should take when transitioning to the block editor. And of course, we’ll also describe them in this article!

  Step 1: Test the block editor on your site

  When you’ve decided you want to make the switch to the block editor, the first thing you should do is test the block editor on your site. The best way to test the block editor is to use a so-called staging site. A staging site is a copy of your live website that allows you to implement and test changes without affecting your real site.

  How to create a staging site

  So, how do you create a staging environment for your site? There are two easy ways to get one:

  • Ask your hosting company.
    The first way is to ask your hosting company to create one for you. Most hosts should be able to do create a staging environment for your site.
    
  • Use a WordPress plugin.
    If, for some reason, your hosting company isn’t able to create a staging site for you, you can use a WordPress plugin and create one yourself. If you search for ‘staging’ in the WordPress plugin directory, you’ll find tons of plugins that can do the trick. However, make sure you pick a plugin that’s trustworthy. That means: check the reviews, active installations, the last time it was updated, and its compatibility with your version of WordPress.

  What to test in the staging environment

  Once you’ve sorted your staging site, you can update it to the latest version of WordPress, which automatically comes with the block editor. Alternatively, disable the classic editor plugin, if you have that installed. To test the block editor, simply check what effect this has on your site. While testing, it’s important to pay special attention to the following:

  • Plugins
    It’s essential to check whether your plugins work correctly with the block editor. Most plugins have already adapted to the block editor, so make sure you’ve updated all your plugins!
    
    If you encounter a plugin conflicting with the block editor, the easiest solution is to check for an alternative. Is there a similar plugin available that is compatible with the block editor? Sometimes blocks can even replace certain plugins, so you could check the available blocks and see if you can find what you need. It’s handy to make a list of all the plugins that conflict with the block editor, so you can remove them from your real site before you make the transition.
    
  • Shortcodes
    Before the block editor came, people used shortcodes to add various features to a website. Shortcodes are like shortcuts to a pre-created and pre-defined code on your website. If you’ve used shortcodes, make sure they display correctly with the block editor. This is especially important if you use plugins that insert shortcodes.

  Step 2: Switch to the block editor!

  Once you’ve tested everything, you’re ready to make the switch! Make a backup of your site and update it to the latest version of WordPress. This automatically comes with the new block editor. If you’re using the classic editor plugin, simply disable the plugin to enjoy your new block editor experience!

  What will happen to old posts and pages?

  A question we regularly hear is: will switching to the block editor affect my old posts and pages that were created using the classic editor? The short answer is: no. 

  However, the long answer is that the content of your posts and pages made in the classic editor will be converted into a single Classic block in the block editor. If you want the full block editor experience with your existing posts and pages as well, you can convert this Classic block into separate blocks.

  How to convert the content of old posts and pages

  To convert the content of your existing posts and pages into separate blocks, follow these steps:

  1. Select the Classic editor block in the post editing screen.

     By selecting the block, the top toolbar will appear.

  2. Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner.

     As shown in the image, a menu will appear.

  3. Click ‘Convert to Blocks’.

     WordPress will now scan your content for HTML tags to place every piece of your content into a corresponding block.

  Send us your awesome block editor content!

  Do you want to inspire others with the content you’ve created using the block editor? We want everyone to see the endless possibilities of the block editor, by featuring examples on our blog. Therefore, we’re asking you to send us the awesome content you have created using the block editor! Leave the URL in the comments below and spread that block editor love!

  The post How to make the transition to the block editor (from the classic editor) in WordPress appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/how-to-transition-to-the-block-editor-wordpress/feed/ 15 How to make the transition to the block editor (from the classic editor) in WordPress • Yoast Learn how to make the switch to the new WordPress block editor. Read how you can test it on your site and what you should pay attention to! Gutenberg,WordPress,transition to the block editor Converting old posts and pages menu item https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-4/ https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-4/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2020 07:22:17 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2439921 In Yoast SEO 9.0, we launched an innovative new way to analyze your English language text using word forms. In Yoast SEO 10.1, we added word form support for the German language. Today, we’re glad to announce word form support for Dutch. Here, you can read why this is such an awesome addition to Yoast […]

  The post Yoast SEO 13.4: Word form support for Dutch appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> In Yoast SEO 9.0, we launched an innovative new way to analyze your English language text using word forms. In Yoast SEO 10.1, we added word form support for the German language. Today, we’re glad to announce word form support for Dutch. Here, you can read why this is such an awesome addition to Yoast SEO 13.4.

  Word forms?

  Back in the day, Yoast SEO used to be rather picky — sometimes it had a hard time detecting the focus keyphrase in your text. For instance, if your focus keyphrase was [vegan pancakes], the plugin wouldn’t recognise instances of the word [vegan pancake] or [pancakes for a vegan friend]. Today, however, the WordPress plugin is so much smarter.

  Now, your focus keyphrase doesn’t even have to be in an identical order. The plugin finds all parts of the keyphrase even if the words are split over a sentence.

  Yoast SEO Premium takes it one step further. Using the Premium analysis, something like [How to make the fluffiest pancake that even the most critical vegans love] would count as well.

  One of the coolest parts of this is that Yoast SEO Premium recognises all word forms of your keyphrase: [vegan], [vegans], [veganism] and more. This way, you don’t have to keep trying to awkwardly fit your focus keyphrase in your text. Simply write naturally and let Yoast SEO take care of the rest. The goal? To write a better text, while spending less time optimizing!

  The same goes that other epic feature in Yoast SEO Premium, the possibility to add synonyms and related keyphrases to your post analysis. This too, makes it easier to write a rich, high-quality post that covers all aspects of your subject.

  Word forms: now available in Dutch

  As of Yoast SEO 13.4, users in the Dutch language can get in on the action too. For every language we add to the plugin, we need to adapt the analysis. Every language has its own sets of rules, you know? We have a team of linguists working on this and bringing you top notch language support.

  How does this work in Dutch? Well, here’s Marieke explain it all for you — in Dutch this time!

  Let’s take a look at an example! In the screenshot, you see the Premium analysis at work. The focus keyphrase for this example post is [spelen met katten]. If you look closely, Yoast SEO Premium won’t just find the exact match to that keyphrase, but also several variations.

  

  If we look at the word [kat], or cat in Dutch, the plugin now recognises variants on that word as well. So this means, [katten] and [katjes], among other things, are correct instances of that keyphrase as well.

  In the Premium analysis, you can add a number of related keyphrases to make the text analysis even richer. One of the outcomes of this, is that it helps to determine if you have distributed your keyphrases well across your text. All this helps you write the awesome your audience is looking for!

  More information about the Yoast SEO analysis

  We’ve written quite a few articles on word forms support and text analysis in Yoast SEO. Find why you need this super smart analysis in your daily life. Learn how synonyms and related keyphrases help enrich your articles. Marieke wrote an article on why you should go beyond exact keyword matching. Keen to learn more about the technology behind this? Read up on keyword stemming!

  To cap if off, here’s the Dutch version of our infographic that explains the differences between synonyms, word forms and related keyphrases.

  

  Update now to Yoast SEO 13.4

  Yoast SEO 13.4 brings a big feature for all you Dutchies: full word form support! This state of the art analysis helps you write better text with a lot less effort. Writing and editing a great piece of content has now become much more natural.

  Writing in English or German? But not familiar with the Premium analysis yet? Try it and tell us what you think!

  Get Yoast SEO Premium ▸Only $89 (ex VAT)

  Thanks for using Yoast SEO.

  The post Yoast SEO 13.4: Word form support for Dutch appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-4/feed/ 5 Yoast SEO 13.4: Word form support for Dutch • Yoast As of Yoast SEO 13.4, Dutch language users of the plugin can make use of complete word form support. It makes writing great content easier! Software Releases & Updates,Yoast SEO,Yoast SEO Premium,Yoast SEO 13.4 yoast-seo-13.4-analysis yoast_word_forms_nl https://yoast.com/building-a-brand-for-your-business/ https://yoast.com/building-a-brand-for-your-business/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2020 12:51:34 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2384806 At Yoast, we pride ourselves on our branding. I would go as far as saying that it has attributed a lot to our success. I also think that good and consistent branding needs to be talked about more, as it is one of the hallmarks of a great enterprise. Please let me explain why I […]

  The post Building a brand for your business appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> At Yoast, we pride ourselves on our branding. I would go as far as saying that it has attributed a lot to our success. I also think that good and consistent branding needs to be talked about more, as it is one of the hallmarks of a great enterprise. Please let me explain why I think it’s important for a business to think about their branding and give some examples of what we did. Hopefully, it’ll inspire you to do better branding for your company!

  What is branding?

  First, let’s look at some definitions. The American Marketing Association on their site defines a brand as:

  A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.

  Lexico defines branding as:

  The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.

  On the scientific side, definitions range widely too. David Aaker, called the “Father of Modern Branding” by marketing text book writer Philip Kotler, defines branding as:

  “Far more than a name and logo, it is an organization’s promise to a customer to deliver what a brand stands for…in terms of functional benefits but also emotional, self-expressive, and social benefits”

  David Aaker in Aaker on Branding

  So, branding is the whole package: the name, the images, the advertising, the story. Good branding associates your company and/or product with positive feelings. Some major brands even go as far as only promoting the feelings in their advertisements, because we all know what the product is. If you’re in that stage, you’ve reached true “brand recognition”. If you succeed in making people feel certain feelings because they’ve bought something from you, the way I feel when I drink a Diet Coke, for instance, you’ve hit the jackpot.

  How do you measure branding?

  As digital marketers, we tend to want to measure everything and we think we can measure everything equally well. I don’t think that’s the case for branding. You might have the budget to do large scale brand research, but only truly big brands usually have that kind of money. And when you’re doing that research, the bigger question is: what do you want to do with the outcome of that research?

  To go one step deeper, we probably need to define better what we’d be measuring if we can measure anything. I find this brand knowledge pyramid in this article by P. Chandon from INSEAD very useful:

  

  So, if you see the above pyramid, brand awareness is a pre-requisite for everything else. If people don’t consider you when they’re making a purchase, everything else you do to “charge” your brand is useless. More people searching for you online, which you can see through, for instance, Google Trends, is a good measure of brand awareness. Note that it is always relative to your competition. Comparing searches for “Yoast” with searches for “Coca-Cola” is both non-sensical and mostly just self-flagellation. However, comparing searches for “Yoast SEO” with searches for “WordPress SEO” makes much more sense, and luckily, it shows that we won that battle 5 years ago.

  If you really want to measure the impact, I think the smartest thing to do for smaller businesses is just seeing whether more people search for your brand online.

  The brand “Yoast”

  Given our definitions above, the brand Yoast has two sides to it: the brand image and the “functional” aspects of the brand. The functional aspects are a result of the functionality of our product, the quality of our UX, the usefulness of our features. To be able to build a good brand, having at least one good product is a requirement. Of course, that product can be a news site, or information, or whatever you want it to be, but it has to be great. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that’s a given. The great product is there and exists.

  The brand name

  Some things get lost in history, and that’s kind of funny. Yoast is how you pronounce my first name (Joost) if you’d pronounce it in English. Basically, toast with a Y. These days, people at conferences who don’t know this, sometimes introduce me as “this is Juiced from Yoast”, which always cracks me up. What’s most important though is that Yoast is short, it’s easy to remember and it’s unique in our space.

  For a while, keyword domain names were all the rage in the SEO industry. If you want to include the most important keyword for your business, make sure you stick something on to it that makes it rememberable and unique. This will make it a lot easier for people to search specifically for you. Some examples of this are for instance SearchEngineLand and Search Engine Journal. While they both clearly have the keyword in their brand name, the addition does make it a lot easier to search for them. At the same time, they do have longer brand names because of that. If your company name is long, think of whether abbreviating it is a good idea. Some of the best brands in the world are abbreviations: KLM, IBM, H&M, AT&T. You might not even know the words behind some of those abbreviations!

  Building the brand image

  Mijke, our brand manager, was one of the very first people I hired when I started hiring people. Erwin, the illustrator behind all of our avatars and a lot of the other images you see on this site, followed soon after. From the very beginning, things like color schemes and logos were important. But, also our positioning on who we are in the world are things that we’ve deemed as very important.

  Even before he was a Yoast employee, Erwin drew my avatar. Paul Madden created my very first avatar as a doodle at a conference, and while very nice, Erwin improved upon it quite a bit. Later, when Yoast started growing, we asked Erwin to create an avatar for every new employee. We still endeavor to do this, but admittedly we’re running quite a bit behind at the moment.

  If you’re interested in our avatars, this infographic is quite interesting (click to enlarge as it’s rather big):

  

  Logos, but also: so much more

  In many ways, our avatars were more important at the beginning of Yoast than our logo was. Our avatars, with their recognizable style, immediately made clear that someone who responded somewhere was a Yoast employee. People remember our avatars while most people do not remember our older logo’s.

  

  You cannot just create a logo and then be done with it, you’ll have to give it some more thought, and depending on how big your company is, sometimes even a lot of thought.

  Our branding is in every post image we create. You won’t find a lot of stock photos on Yoast.com, we use custom made illustrations for every important aspect of our site. Illustrations that contain exactly what we want them to contain, and are examples for the world we want to live in. These illustrations also hang in our offices as decoration, and during the COVID-19 work from home episode, we allowed our employees to pick one and we sent them some of these illustrations to hang on their home walls. That’s when you know your branding does bring a sense of community, just as in the pyramid above.

  Branding in the search results

  One of the things that I’ve always been very keen on is doing proper branding in the search results. It’s really important that when someone is researching a topic and you rank for a lot of the terms in that topic, they see you rank. Even if they don’t click on the first result. This is why I’ve always said it’s very important to include your brand name in titles. This is another spot where a relatively short brand name will help you, as you’ve got just so much more space to add a meaningful title. Usually, it makes the most sense to add the brand name to the end of the title and make it easily distinguishable. This can be as simple as - Brand name, we chose to use • Yoast. I think it stands out just a bit more, but mostly because hardly anybody else uses it, so think about what works for you and pick something!

  Another opportunity for branding is the knowledge panel that might show up for your brand. Knowledge panels are a type of rich results in the search engines. They are a great asset to have. Be sure to optimize everything you can in that if you have one!

  Conclusion

  So, we’ve seen that branding is more than just having a logo. Branding needs to be consistent, as it is one of the hallmarks of a great enterprise. But, truly measuring and researching your brand is hard (and expensive). And, what exactly do you want to do with the outcome of that research? So, smaller businesses better just monitor searches for their brand to gauge if their branding efforts pay off. And, don’t forget: branding in the search results is something relatively simple, which can result in a lot of brand recognition. Which steps will you take to do better branding for your company?

  Read more: 5 tips to improve your branding »

  The post Building a brand for your business appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/building-a-brand-for-your-business/feed/ 2 brand-knowledge-pyramid-chandon Yoast_Evolution_infographic_x2 Logo_Yoast https://yoast.com/update-your-events-with-schema/ https://yoast.com/update-your-events-with-schema/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2020 13:33:18 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2432934 The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a wave of canceled or postponed events. Some events made the switch from an offline event to an online one. As everyone is scrambling to look up the latest information on events online, it is important to have all the latest details on your website. Search engines can pick […]

  The post Update your cancelled or postponed events with Schema appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a wave of canceled or postponed events. Some events made the switch from an offline event to an online one. As everyone is scrambling to look up the latest information on events online, it is important to have all the latest details on your website. Search engines can pick up these details and post the correct information in the search results. New Event Schema helps speed up this process.

  Events structured data expanded quickly

  In last week’s release of Schema.org 7.0, you can find several updates to the Events structured data. You can give your event an eventStatus of EventCancelled when it’s cancelled or an EventPostponed when it’s been postponed. In addition, you can also set a rescheduled event as EventRescheduled.

  A new option is available for events that moved online: you can now update the eventStatus to EventMovedOnline. Here, you can also mark events as online-only by setting the location to VirtualLocation and set the eventAttendenceMode to OnlineEventAttendanceMode.

  An example for YoastCon 2020

  We had a new edition of YoastCon planned for April, 2020. As everything else, we rescheduled that to a date later in the year. I thought I’d let you see how one of these additions could look in code.

  Below, you can find a part of the Schema code found on the YoastCon page. I’ve added the eventStatus, plus the corresponding EventRescheduled property. Also, I’ve added the old, plus the new date. Now, search engines know this event was rescheduled to a new date and can update the listing accordingly.

  {
          "@type":"BusinessEvent",
          "@id":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#yoastcon",
          "mainEntityOfPage": {
              "@id": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#webpage"
          }
          ,
          "name":"YoastCon",
          "description":"Due to the recent COVID-19 health concerns both locally and among our (international) speakers, we're sad to announce that we're postponing YoastCon 2020.",
          "organizer": {
              "@id": "https://yoast.com/#organization"
          }
          ,
          "startDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",
          "endDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",
          "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",
          "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
        "previousStartDate": "2020-04-21T19:00",
          "url":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/",
          "image":"https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2019/10/YoastCon2020-600x338.png",
          "location": {
             "@type":"Place",
              "name":"Theater 't Moza\u00efek",
              "url":"https://www.mozaiekwijchen.nl/",
              "address": {
                  "@type": "PostalAddress", 
  		"addressLocality": "Wijchen", 	
  		"addressRegion": "Gelderland", 
  		"addressCountry": "The Netherlands", 
  		"postalCode": "6602 HX", 
  		"streetAddress": "Campuslaan 6"
              }
          }

  Moving the event online

  Many events now move to online-only, for the time being or completely. You can now let search engines know that the event has turned into an online event — or a mixed event with both an offline and an online component.

  In the YoastCon example, I could move the event by adding an EventMovedOnline property, combined with a new VirtualLocation property with a link to the page where the event is happening online. Code is truncated.

  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OnlineEventAttendanceMode",
        "eventStatus": [
          "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",
          "https://schema.org/EventMovedOnline"
          ],
        "previousStartDate": "2020-04-22T19:00",
        "location": {
          "@type": "VirtualLocation",
          "url": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/"

  Of course, you can combine both online and offline locations of the event. Simply add the MixedEventAttendanceMode to the eventAttendanceMode and set both a virtual as well as a real location for the event. This might look something like this:

    "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/MixedEventAttendanceMode",
    "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
    "location": [{
      "@type": "VirtualLocation",
      "url": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/"
    },
    {
      "@type":"Place",
          "name":"Theater 't Moza\u00efek",
          "url":"https://www.mozaiekwijchen.nl/",
          "address": {
              "@type": "PostalAddress", 
              "addressLocality": "Wijchen",   
              "addressRegion": "Gelderland", 
              "addressCountry": "The Netherlands", 
              "postalCode": "6602 HX", 
              "streetAddress": "Campuslaan 6"
  }
  }]

  Google has a special page in on its developer website describing how to get your event in the search results correctly.

  SpecialAnnouncement for broadcasting announcements

  The new SpecialAnnouncement type lets governments announce important happenings, like the closing of businesses and public recreation areas. While the initial offering is focused entirely on the spread special announcements during the Coronavirus pandemic, this will be extended at a further date. Both Bing and Google accept SpecialAnnouncement and will highlight these pages in the results how they see fit. You can find more information on SpecialAnnouncement on Schema.org/SpecialAnnouncement.

  We’re working on this as well

  As you see, it makes a lot of sense to add this to your event pages. Unfortunately, at the moment Yoast SEO doesn’t have to option to add this code automatically. We’re working on that, though! Our structured data content blocks already let you build great FAQ pages and how-to articles, but we’re also working on blocks for events and recipes, among other things. In a while, you can add events and mark these as online, offline or mixed, while the correct structured data will be applied automatically.

  Other things you can do to get provide accurate and up-to-date information

  In the current COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic, it is crucial to give people accurate information about your event or business. A lot things have changed, many people sit indoor and have to go online to find out which businesses they can still visit or which events take place when. So, please take a moment to bring all your listings up-to-date.

  Please check your listings on Google My Business, Bing Places, Yelp, TripAdvisor et cetera. Also update your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. In addition, it might be a good idea to put a COVID-19 related FAQ page on your website answering the most pressing questions on how your business or event is handling this crisis. The Yoast SEO FAQ content block helps you make such a page in an instant. It also automatically adds valid structured data that makes sure the FAQ shows up in Google. Use it to your advantage.

  Also, make sure to read Google’s documentation on how to pause your business online in search during this crisis.

  Stay indoors. Stay safe!

  The post Update your cancelled or postponed events with Schema appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/update-your-events-with-schema/feed/ 3 https://yoast.com/digital-story-creation-using-block-editor/ https://yoast.com/digital-story-creation-using-block-editor/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2020 13:31:00 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2238677 We write a lot of blog posts. And, not only about SEO topics, but also about our mission, company culture, and our broader vision. We hope that by writing those kinds of posts we can give you a glimpse into who we are as a company, and who we are as people. But, blog posts […]

  The post The creation of our first digital story using the block editor appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> We write a lot of blog posts. And, not only about SEO topics, but also about our mission, company culture, and our broader vision. We hope that by writing those kinds of posts we can give you a glimpse into who we are as a company, and who we are as people.

  But, blog posts are transient. We post them, and we might update them from time to time, but they’re part of an ongoing blog feed. You may miss them sometimes. And, that’s why we wanted to start documenting these values and ideals that power our company culture in a more permanent way. That’s where the idea for digital storytelling came in.

  In this post, we’ll talk about how we came to this idea, how we built our first storytelling page about diversity and prejudice, and how you could apply these principles to tell your own stories.

  Do you want to learn how to use the blocks in the block editor to their fullest potential? Look no further and check out our free WordPress block editor training! It’ll teach you how to create a well-designed blog post with the block editor. Let’s create some amazing content!

  Get your free Block editor training now

  Why storytelling

  Like I mentioned before, storytelling felt like a good fit to talk about our values because it gives context to what we do. It’s a different way of presenting information that is not meant for quick consumption or optimized for catching attention. It’s not just focused on the information, it also takes into consideration the experience of reading it.

  We chose the subject of diversity first because this subject touches one of our core values. When Marieke became CEO of Yoast at the beginning of 2019, there weren’t that many women in our upper management. So, Marieke started a project to coach and empower women at Yoast to reach those positions if they wanted to.

  In this process she also created a presentation about diversity and feminism that she could give in other places outside the company, such as WordCamps, to inspire others into action as well. Turning this presentation into a digital story then made sense to us as a way to reach an even bigger audience. It would become a more permanent location where people could go to learn more by themselves.

  The process of telling a digital story

  Concept

  Once the idea for this first storytelling project was born, Marieke wrote a draft based on her presentation script, and our design team got to work.

  The design team has designed tons of pages across all our products already, and these follow a style guide (or at least they should!). But, we could not achieve the way we wanted to visually present this story with only the elements we already had in our toolkit. It called for a bold, playful design that guides the reader through this experience.

  A central part of this experience would have to be our illustrations. Our illustrators have been experimenting with animation in Adobe After Effects recently, and we figured it would be great if we could use these animations in our digital stories.

  Based on the draft of the text, they started sketching and storyboarding. They wanted each section to have its own character, and our visual style tries to be pretty inclusive already so that matched well with this subject.

  

  Animation

  In addition to that, this time they wanted to add subtle animations too. But having good quality AND fast performant animations on the web is still sometimes a challenge. We considered GIF, of course, and MP4 with autoplay, but it turns out you can animate SVG images as well, with a little help from AirBnB’s JavaScript library Lottie.js.

  To do this, you create a vector-based animation in After Effects, then export as JSON. If you want to give this a try too, you can read how to create and export a Lottie-compatible animation from After Effects, and/or learn more about how we implemented Lottie-powered SVG animations in the WordPress block editor.

  

  

  Video

  We felt like the story would come alive more if some parts were video, and it would break up the layout of the page a bit, so the design team selected three sections to make an animation for. Together with EyesxEars, our in-house video production partner, we recorded Marieke presenting these short stories, then drew some supporting animations to explain the concepts visually.

  • 

  • 

  • 

  • 

  By now developers were also getting involved, setting up the page structure in code. They built the different elements of the page using WordPress blocks, so we can reuse them in future projects. You can read our (more technical) breakdown of how we built our digital storytelling framework in the WordPress block editor.

  Project management

  Managing all this work across multiple teams under a short timespan was no easy challenge. We wanted to launch by the time Marieke gave this talk at WordCamp Nijmegen. To get it done in time, everyone was working simultaneously, which isn’t ideal, you don’t want anyone getting bottlenecked. For instance, development was waiting on the final copy while it was still being tweaked to fit the flow of the animations, etc. So next time we’ll definitely set up a planning for each involved department separately. That way everyone will have enough time to iterate.

  This time it was our internal deadline – which was set well in advance of the launch – and great communication that saved the day. Having the team come together and work on a fun out-of-the-ordinary project like this was worth it. And Marieke was able to present it with pride during her presentation!

  

  Takeaways

  You may have already spotted a few learnings peppered throughout this article. This was our first substantial foray into digital storytelling, so there certainly were some areas we can improve in. And by reading this article, you can already benefit from those tips if you were planning to make your own digital story.

  1. Write about why you do what you do

  First of all, if you are thinking of making a digital story for you or your brand, consider this: don’t write about what your product is, or even how you make it. That’s marketing. Storytelling should be about why you do what you do. What motivates you to dedicate time to creating whatever it is that you create? Which values inspire you to pursue this career? This is what informs what you make and how you do that. Talking about that comes after the Why.

  2. Think about how you want to frame your story

  Secondly, take your time to write the story. A story has an arc to it. It should take the reader on a bit of a journey. Think about the best way to present what you want to talk about.

  One way could be to frame the story in a problem: is there something you felt personally held back by or saw an opportunity to solve something that other people struggle with? Describe why that problem exists, and how you felt compelled to do something about it, and see if you can inspire others to do something too. If you’re not entirely sure yet/anymore why you do what you do, thinking about this is also a good way to find out!

  Our first digital story is a variation of this. We talk about one of the values that underpin our company mission, “SEO for everyone”. We believe in equality for everyone, and diversity is, of course, one aspect of that.

  Another way could be to write is as more of a historical account. You can share when you got the idea for this company or product, and how you went about getting to where you are now. You’ll probably notice while writing though that you’ll automatically come across the ‘problem’ that sparked your idea, but here it will be part of a larger story.

  3. Make your story compelling

  Next, think about ways to make the story compelling and/or interactive. People are less likely to read a massive wall of text than they are to view some videos or play a little quiz. Stimulate their brains a little, reward them for taking the time to read something that’s important to you by making it fun for them.

  4. Involve your team in the entire process

  And lastly, if you’re making a digital story with a team, try to involve them in the entire process. You may be telling a personal story, but if you are writing about your company values, you’ll want to know that your team feels the same way about them. Plus, involving creatives in the planning stages can spark a lot more ideas. Just make sure to then plan out a good schedule for when everyone involved has to do their thing. It’s not super useful to have designers make animations or developers building page elements already for a story that is still being written.

  So, we hope you enjoyed this deep dive into our digital storytelling efforts! In the future we plan to use this framework more often to create unique and compelling experiences on our site that explain more about a certain subject, so keep an eye out!

  The post The creation of our first digital story using the block editor appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/digital-story-creation-using-block-editor/feed/ 4 2 1 3 4 5 6 7 https://yoast.com/7-keyword-research-mistakes-avoid/ https://yoast.com/7-keyword-research-mistakes-avoid/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2020 13:30:34 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=843706 Thinking about the keywords you want to rank for is really the first and foremost step you need to take for your SEO strategy. Still, keyword research can be quite daunting. So, which keyword research mistakes should you avoid at all times? In this post, I’ll take you through the most common keyword research mistakes […]

  The post 7 keyword research mistakes you should avoid appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> Thinking about the keywords you want to rank for is really the first and foremost step you need to take for your SEO strategy. Still, keyword research can be quite daunting. So, which keyword research mistakes should you avoid at all times? In this post, I’ll take you through the most common keyword research mistakes people are making. Being aware of these mistakes helps you set up a successful keyword research strategy and avoid practices that harm your rankings.

  Overwhelmed by all the intricacies of keyword research, and afraid you’ll still make these mistakes or others? Take a look at our keyword research training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription, and let us help you carry it out!

  1. Not executing your keyword research correctly

  Some people seem to think that they can forego keyword research, or that it’s no longer important. Doing proper keyword research can indeed be a tough, time-consuming process. And it’s true that ranking high isn’t just a matter of stuffing the right keyword in your text, and it hasn’t been for a long time. But skipping or winging your keyword research means you create content without a single idea of what your potential users are looking for. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’ll just instinctively know what your audience wants. 

  It’s still crucial you take some time to really dive into the language of your audience. Which words do they use? What terms do they search for? Which terms are competitive and which less so? The result of your keyword research should be an extensive list of keywords you would like to rank for. Make sure to update your keyword research list or sheet regularly. Your audience may change, as could your business focus and business needs. That has implications for your keyword strategy as well.

  Read on: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

  2. Aiming at unrealistic keywords

  Make sure you aim for realistic keywords. Some niches are very competitive. Ranking in competitive niches is hard, especially if you’re just starting your website or business. If you’re just starting out, you shouldn’t aim for the competitive ‘head’ keywords (yet). Instead, focus on long tail keywords (which are easier to rank for and have a higher chance to convert).

  For instance, if you have a fitness center and start a blog about fitness, it will be too hard to start ranking for the term [fitness]. Find out which aspects of your blog are unique and try ranking for those terms. Perhaps you write about fitness exercises for retired people. Aiming to rank for [fitness routines for retired people] could be a good strategy. In that case, you should also aim for [fitness tips for seniors], [fitness exercises for retirees] and so on. If you have been around in your niche for a little longer and you successfully rank for long-tail keywords, you could aim to rank for more head terms as well. Ranking for competitive keywords should be part of a long-term successful keyword research strategy.

  Keep on reading: Why focus on long tail keywords? »

  3. Not thinking about search intent

  More than ever, taking a good look at search intent is a crucial part of keyword research. You need to have a clear idea of the kind of intent that’s behind your keywords. People could be looking for information (informational intent), a specific website (navigational intent), or they might want to buy something (commercial or transactional intent). And that’s not all there is to it, as search engines aim to give users the exact answer they’re looking for. In other words, if your content doesn’t match searcher’s intent, it probably won’t make it to the results pages, no matter how great and well-optimized it is.

  So, it’s important to evaluate whether the content you plan to publish for a certain keyword is in line with what people are looking for. You can do that by looking at the search results. Do the types of intent match? What answers do people want? Is your content in the right form? For instance, if you wrote an extensive DIY post to rank for the term [wedding decorations] and all you see in the results pages is online stores selling wedding decorations, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Check out this post about writing intent-based content for your keywords for more information on how to do that!

  4. Using irrelevant keywords

  This mistake is partly related to the previous one. If you don’t look at search intent, you’re more likely to optimize for words that potential visitors or customers won’t use. Two things can happen: either you do offer something people are looking for, but these potential visitors simply use different keywords and therefore won’t find you. Or, your keywords are too long tail and don’t get any traffic.

  The keywords you aim to rank for should be the same words your customers use. Always try to use the language of your audience. Imagine yourself selling dresses for gala events. In your marketing, you refer to these dresses as ‘gala dresses’. However, most people do not search for [gala dress]. They search for [gown] or [evening dress]. You won’t get much traffic for the search term [gala dress] compared to the search terms [gown] or [evening dress].

  

  The second problem could occur when you focus on long tail keywords that are so obscure they simply don’t generate any traffic. Long tail keywords are a great way to start your keyword strategy. These words attract less traffic, but you’ll have a higher chance to convert your visitors into buyers or returning visitors. People that use specific terms, to search for exactly that thing you’re writing about, are just a very good match. However, if your keyword is too specific and doesn’t bring in any traffic, it won’t help your SEO. So make sure you aim for long tail keywords that actually generate some traffic!

  5. Focusing on only one keyword per post

  If you write a nice blog post, its ranking opportunity may not be limited to one exact keyphrase, but includes related terms as well. So, if you can optimize for related (long tail) keyphrases without stretching it, you should definitely do so. For example, we have a post about timeless SEO tips. It’s optimized for [timeless SEO tips], but also for the similar phrases [universal SEO tactics] and [universal SEO improvements], and it’s doing quite well for each of these keywords. 

  Not sure how to optimize your content for related keywords and synonyms? Our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help! It allows you to optimize for related focus keyphrases, and also gives you the option to define synonyms for your focus keyphrase, so that it can take them into account. Awesome, right?

  6. Not checking whether you should use singular or plural

  Always check if you should target the plural or the singular form of a specific keyword. Should you aim to rank for [ballet shoe] or for [ballet shoes]? Do people search for [holiday home] or [holiday homes]? While Google can recognize that the plural and singular versions of a word refer to the same thing, the search result pages and the number of results are often still different, because what users are looking for differs slightly. 

  In this case, again, it’s important to think about the intent of people searching for your keyword. Someone looking for the singular version of a keyword may be looking for information, while someone looking for the plural version could be looking to compare products and/or buy something. In any case, whether you should use a singular or a plural depends on your specific keyword and its intent, so take that into account.

  7. Forgetting to evaluate

  If you aim to rank for certain terms, make sure to check whether you succeed. You need to evaluate regularly if people actually find your articles. One way to do that is googling your proposed focus keyword every now and then. But be aware that your search results may be biased because Google has personalized search. So, use a private browser session, or a tool like https://valentin.app/ and check if your article turns up in the results. If you forget to evaluate, you won’t know whether you could aim for more competitive keywords or you should focus on long tail variants.

  Read more: Adapting your content SEO strategy »

  Conclusion: avoid these mistakes for a successful keyword research strategy

  Executing keyword research takes a lot of time. It’s important that you take that time and really think about the terms you want to rank for. Read Keyword research: the ultimate guide for lots of practical tips that’ll help you to set up a successful keyword research strategy. And if it’s starting to look good, you can check for other common SEO mistakes as well.

  Keep reading: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »

  The post 7 keyword research mistakes you should avoid appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/7-keyword-research-mistakes-avoid/feed/ 15 Schermafbeelding 2016-09-07 om 11.37.13 https://yoast.com/the-block-editor-gutenberg-why-you-should-be-using-it/ https://yoast.com/the-block-editor-gutenberg-why-you-should-be-using-it/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2020 13:20:00 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2123684 At Yoast, we truly believe you should be using the block editor (formerly known as Gutenberg) in WordPress, simply because it’s a much better experience than the ‘classic editor’. Unfortunately, when we look at our statistics, we see that a large segment of our users still uses the classic editor. Which is why we’d like […]

  The post The WordPress block editor: Why you should be using it appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> At Yoast, we truly believe you should be using the block editor (formerly known as Gutenberg) in WordPress, simply because it’s a much better experience than the ‘classic editor’. Unfortunately, when we look at our statistics, we see that a large segment of our users still uses the classic editor. Which is why we’d like to explain why you really should start switching over.

  Do you want to learn how to use the blocks in the block editor to their fullest potential? Look no further and check out our free WordPress block editor training! It’ll teach you how to create a well-designed blog post with the block editor. Let’s create some amazing content!

  Get your free Block editor training now

  Why you should switch to the block editor

  The Gutenberg project and with it, the block editor is literally where all the innovation in the WordPress space is happening. Think of it this way: the only car race you’re going to win by using old technology, is a classic car race. If you want to win in SEO in the next few years, I guarantee you’ll need to be on the block editor. If you’re not, and if some of your competitors are, they’re going to beat you.

  While the block editor may be very good, you may think: why would I switch? If the classic editor is working for me, so why bother? Well: the block editor is only the first step in a longer process. More and more parts of the WordPress admin will start using blocks, and because of that, getting familiar with the block editor is essential.

  Future versions will iterate on what the block editor already does, moving to site-wide editing, instead of just the content area. The first required step for that is defining content edit areas, something Matias discussed in this post on Make Core, one of the blogs of the core WordPress development team. That post by Matias prompted this post by Justin Tadlock on how the Gutenberg project is shaping the future of WordPress themes. This is getting me, and our entire team at Yoast, very excited.

  The Gutenberg project aims at making WordPress easier to use. That’s a long term goal, but it’s already doing that now too. When we have site-wide editing, we won’t need to teach people how to use widgets anymore: they’ll be the same as the blocks they see in the editor. In fact, the entire distinction will be gone.

  Reasons to use the block editor now

  Besides all of these great developments, you really should use the block editor now and stop using the classic editor. Let me give you an overview of simple and clear reasons. With the block editor:

  • You will be able to build layouts that you can’t make in TinyMCE. Most of the stuff we did for our recent digital story required no coding. Plugins like Grids make it even easier to make very smooth designs.
  • You can make FAQs and HowTo’s that’ll look awesome in search results. Our Yoast SEO Schema blocks are already providing an SEO advantage that is unmatched. For instance, check out our free FAQ and How-to blocks.
  • Simple things like images next to paragraphs and other things that could be painful in TinyMCE have become so much better in Gutenberg. Want multiple columns? You can have them, like that, without extra coding.
  • Speaking of things you couldn’t do without plugins before: you can now embed tables in your content, just by adding a table block. No plugins required.
  • Creating custom blocks is relatively simple, and allows people to do 90% of the custom things they would do with plugins in the past, but easier. It becomes even easier when you use a plugin like ACF Pro or Block Lab to build those custom blocks.
  • Custom blocks, or blocks you’ve added with plugins, can be easily found by users just by clicking the + sign in the editor. Shortcodes, in the classic editor, didn’t have such a discovery method.
  • Re-usable blocks allow you to easily create content you can re-use across posts or pages, see this nice tutorial on WP Beginner.

  There are many more nice features; please share yours in the comments!

  If you haven’t used the Block Editor recently: go, try it! I’m sure you’ll be happy with it.

  Read on: Pressing questions about Gutenberg: the new editor in WordPress 5.0 »

  The post The WordPress block editor: Why you should be using it appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/the-block-editor-gutenberg-why-you-should-be-using-it/feed/ 19 https://yoast.com/new-free-online-training-block-editor-training/ https://yoast.com/new-free-online-training-block-editor-training/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2020 10:29:42 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2407242 At Yoast, we are huge fans of the block editor. Admittedly -not right from the start-, but we’re now block-editor fanboys and fangirls. That’s why we created an awesome free block editor course! We hope it will help everybody to use the block editor to the fullest! In this course, you’ll learn how to create […]

  The post Brand-new free online training: Block editor training appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> At Yoast, we are huge fans of the block editor. Admittedly -not right from the start-, but we’re now block-editor fanboys and fangirls. That’s why we created an awesome free block editor course! We hope it will help everybody to use the block editor to the fullest!

  In this course, you’ll learn how to create awesome content with the new WordPress block editor! It adds thousands of new possibilities for creating posts and pages and it makes editing a lot easier. In the new Block editor training, we take you by the hand and guide you through the process of creating and publishing content with the new block editor. What’s more, we also show you some cool examples and explain how you can make the switch from the classic editor to the block editor. Ready to start learning?

  Yes, I want access to the new & free Block editor training »

  What will you learn in the Block editor training?

  In this online course, we teach you everything you need to know about creating well-designed, perfectly structured content with the new WordPress block editor. You’ll learn:

  • what the block editor is, why it was created and why you should be using it;
  • how to use the block editor: how to add, move, transform, group, reuse and edit blocks;
  • how to publish a post using the block editor;
  • how to add more blocks – and thus: functionalities – to the block editor;
  • how to switch from the classic editor to the new block editor and what you should pay attention to when transitioning;
  • everything about the future of the block editor – or project Gutenberg, like the goal of the project and the plans that have been announced.

  We’ll take you by the hand and guide you through the process of creating a post with the block editor through practical screencasts, PDFs and assignments. To illustrate the endless possibilities of the block editor, we’ll also show you some awesome examples of content created with the new editor. 

  How is the course set up?

  The Block editor training is a hands-on and practical training that consists of three modules:

  1. What is the block editor?
  2. Using the block editor
  3. Extras

  These modules are divided into several lessons. Each lesson contains interesting videos, in which our WordPress experts – like Marieke van de Rakt and Jono Alderson – explain everything you should know. The practical lessons in module 2 also contain screencasts, so you can see exactly what you should do. We’ve also created reading materials, in which we explore topics more broadly. To complete a lesson, you take a quiz or do a practical assignment. In this way, you’ll know for sure whether you fully understand the theory and whether you’re able to put your knowledge to practice. Once you’ve finished the course, you’ll receive a Yoast certificate and a badge you can display on your website.

  Online & on-demand

  The block editor training is an online and on-demand training, like every other Yoast SEO academy training course. This means you can learn whenever you want and wherever you want! And did we already mention it’s completely free of charge?

  Start creating block-tastic content now!

  After the Block editor training, blocks will no longer hold any secrets for you and you’ll be ready to outshine your competition with visually stunning blog posts and pages! Are you ready? Check your Yoast SEO academy courses overview or click the button below to start the course!

  I'm ready to learn all about the block editor! »

  Want to take a deeper dive?

  Yoast SEO academy offers more in-depth courses about SEO and WordPress too. Want to learn how to write texts that are a breeze to read for readers and search engines alike? We offer classes on SEO copywriting! Or do you want to find out what keywords are most effective for your site? Our keyword research classes will tell you how. With a Yoast SEO academy Premium subscription, you’ll have access to 11 specialist courses created by SEO experts. Check it out now!

  Yes, I want the Yoast SEO academy Premium subscription!

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  ]]> https://yoast.com/new-free-online-training-block-editor-training/feed/ 2 Brand-new free online training: Block editor training • Yoast Check out the brand-new free online Block editor training in Yoast Academy! Learn all you need to know about the new WordPress block editor. WordPress,Yoast Academy https://yoast.com/how-to-start-with-seo/ https://yoast.com/how-to-start-with-seo/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2020 13:27:40 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2147313 Now is the time to start with SEO. If you want your customers to find online too, you need to rank high. What to do? How do you get started with SEO? Or, how do you start with SEO on a brand new site? In this blog post, I’ll talk you through the 7 steps […]

  The post SEO tutorial for beginners: How to start with SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> Now is the time to start with SEO. If you want your customers to find online too, you need to rank high. What to do? How do you get started with SEO? Or, how do you start with SEO on a brand new site? In this blog post, I’ll talk you through the 7 steps you need to take in order to get your SEO strategy up and running. 

  How to start with SEO?

  So, you’ve started your first site and you want it to be found, so you can share your thoughts and views with the world. What to do? Let’s go through the steps of starting with SEO!

  1. Install Yoast SEO

     Provided that your website is on WordPress, installing Yoast SEO should be the first step in your SEO strategy. Our Yoast SEO plugin will help you to make sure your website is crawlable and findable. Yoast SEO will immediately take care of some technical SEO issues, just by being installed on your website. Besides that, our plugin will help you to construct your website in such a way that Google will understand and rank it. We offer a free and a premium plugin. If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably won’t need our premium version yet, although it can already save you some valuable time.

  2. Get that first link

     Google needs to know your website exists. And, in order for Google to know about your awesome new site, you need at least one external link towards your site. The reason for this: Google crawls the web. It follows links and saves all the webpages it finds in a very large database called the index. So, if you want to get into that index, you need (at least) one external link. So make sure to get that link from an external website!

  3. What do you want to rank for?

     Make sure to attract the right audience to your website. Who are your customers? For whom did you build this website? What terms do your customers use when searching on Google? And what’s their search intent, what kind of content are they looking for? Find out as much as you can about your audience.
     
     SEOs refer to this stage as doing your keyword research. This is a hard and important phase. There are a lot of helpful tools that make doing keyword research easier. Some of these tools are free, others are rather expensive. While these tools will make the difficult phase of keyword research easier, you should remember that you can’t outsource your keyword research to a tool. You really need to think about your audience and about the search terms they are using. It’s also important to analyze what you’re seeing in the search results pages when entering your keywords. Take your time for this phase. It is crucial. If you do your keyword research correctly, you’ll come up with a long list of keywords you want to rank for.

  4. Set realistic goals

     For a new site, it is rather hard to rank high in the beginning. Older sites already have a history, established their authority and a lot of links pointing towards them. That means that Google’s crawlers come by more often at older sites. For a new site to rank, you’ll always need to be a little patient. And remember: some search terms will be out of reach for a new site because there’s too much competition. Trying to rank for [WordPress SEO] will be rather hard for any new blog, because of some fierce competition on that term from Yoast.com.
     
     If you’re just starting with your site, try to aim at ranking for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords that are longer and more specific and have far less competition than the popular head keywords. After a while, when your site starts to rank for the long-tail keywords, you could try and go after the more head keywords.
     

  5. Internal linking

     As I already mentioned in step 2, Google follows links. Google also follows the links on your website, your internal linking structure. It crawls through your website following the internal linking structure of your site. That structure is like a guide to Google. Make sure your internal linking structure is flawless. That’ll help with your ranking. 
     
     If you start with a brand new website, you’ll probably don’t have much content yet. This is the perfect time to think about structure. Now it is relatively easy. It’s like having a new closet and you haven’t started buying clothes. Now is the time to think about the things you want to put on the top shelf and which items you want to hide in the back of your closet. So, decide which pages are most important to you. What are the pages you want to rank with? Make sure that these pages have the most internal links pointing towards them.

  6. Start writing

     In order to get ranked, you need to have content. A very important step in how to start with your SEO is to write amazing content for all these search terms you want to be found for. The content analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin will help you to write that content. Our analysis will help you to write a text that is both readable and SEO friendly.
     
     While you’re writing, make sure to use the words you want to be found for. Use them in headings and in the introduction and conclusion of your text. After writing your text, you should optimize your SEO title and your meta description. The Yoast SEO plugin will help you to do all these things.
     

  7. Get those links!

     External links are important to get your site in high positions in those search engines. But gathering those external links can be a hard process. Make sure to write content people want to share and link to. Original ideas and great, valuable content will make the chance that people would want to share that much bigger.
     
     Of course, reaching out to people and making them aware of your awesome website and product can be a good strategy to get those external links too. Read more about a successful link building strategy or find out what link building is first.

  Want to learn all about SEO? Get the FREE SEO for beginners training! You’ll learn the basics of SEO, so you can start optimizing your own website! Check out all our free and premium SEO training subscriptions here.

  And then what?

  The truth is that SEO is more than these 7 steps. This is only the very beginning, the steps you take to start with SEO. In order to get longterm high rankings in the search engines, you need to do hard work. Your content has to be amazing, your site structure has to remain flawless (and that’s challenging when your site is growing) and you’ll have to keep earning those external links. The only way to really do that, in the long run, is to make sure that your audience enjoys visiting your website. So, if you want to rank the highest, make sure your site is the very best. Good luck!

  Read more: WordPress SEO the definitive guide »

  The post SEO tutorial for beginners: How to start with SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/how-to-start-with-seo/feed/ 15 SEO tutorial for beginners: How to start with SEO? • Yoast You've just started a new site and you want visitors to find you. So how do you start with SEO? Let's look at 7 steps to get you on track! Content SEO,Internal Linking,Keyword research,Link building,SEO Basics,how to start with SEO https://yoast.com/how-to-index-new-wordpress-site/ https://yoast.com/how-to-index-new-wordpress-site/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2020 13:13:00 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2415208 When you roll out the red carpet on a new website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index and rank it. In this article, I share some tips that could help you get your site indexed faster.  A quick note […]

  The post How to get your new WordPress site indexed appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> When you roll out the red carpet on a new website, you might be expecting visitors to start coming eagerly. In reality, before people start visiting your site, search engines need to find, index and rank it. In this article, I share some tips that could help you get your site indexed faster. 

  A quick note before we go on. Although in the short term, there are some things you can do to get your site indexed faster, you mustn’t forget the long game. A sustainably high-ranking website depends in large part on creating remarkable content. Why? Because search engines want to find the best answer to the queries their users make. The site with the best content wins the race to the top of the search results. 

  How do search engines work? 

  To understand how to get your site indexed, it’s useful to know how search engines work. Search engines generate results in three main steps: crawling, indexing, and ranking. 

  Crawling is the process of discovery done by crawlers, bots, or spiders. A computer program instructs crawlers on what pages to crawl and what to look for. When crawlers land on a page, they gather information and follow links. Whatever they find, they report back to the search engine servers. Then, the search engine tries to make sense of the page in order to index it. It looks at the content and everything it finds, it puts in a giant database; their ‘index’. 

  Finally, ranking begins when you search for something online. So, the search engine algorithm looks through the index and filters the pages to find the best ones. We do not know the exact mechanics of the algorithm. Still, we know that search engines are especially enthusiastic about high-quality content and user-friendly, up-to-date pages.

  Read on: What does Google do? »

  Crawling, indexing and ranking never stop. As new pages keep pouring in, and as old ones get updated, the crawlers continuously crawl, and the search engines get new and improved ways to gather and display results. 

  So, how can you speed up this process and help search engines find you quicker? An excellent way to start is submitting an XML sitemap in Google Search Console.

  How to get your site found and indexed by Google:

  1. Create an XML sitemap with Yoast SEO

     An XML sitemap is a file that contains information about your website. In plain language, it is a list of your most important pages. It is a useful tool that helps Google find and explore your site. Yoast SEO can help you to create a sitemap. All you need to do is enable the XML sitemap option and the sitemap will be automatically generated. It’s quite a time saver!

  2. Set up an account with Google Search Console

     After you’ve created the sitemap, you need to tell Google about it. Google Search Console is a tool that can help you with that. To add your sitemap to the Console, you need to create an account. Yoast SEO can also help you get your site verified with Google Search Console.

  3. Add your sitemap to Google Search Console

     In Google Search Console, you will find the XML sitemap tab. There, you can add the sitemap you created, so that Google will know where to find it. If you update content on your site, your XML sitemap will be updated automatically.

  4. And/or, submit your most important individual pages in Google Search Console

     On top of this, you can ask Google to crawl individual pages too. In Google Search Console you’ll find the URL inspection tool, where you can ask Google to crawl or recrawl a URL. There’s a quota, so think about which pages are crucial for your business in terms of ranking and submit those here.

  Why do you need an XML sitemap?

  We mentioned that crawlers discover pages by following links. When you have a new website, you may face at least two issues. First, there are likely not that many external sites that point to your website. Second, you probably still don’t have a lot of content, so your internal linking and your site structure are not (yet) stellar. Without links, how can the crawlers come to your site? 

  One solution to getting your site indexed is to create a sitemap right from the start and add it to Google Search Console. However, since you might still not have a lot of content, you should be careful with what you include in it. Although you can create sitemaps for videos, images, categories, and tags, it does not mean that you should necessarily do it. For example, you might have already set up some categories. But, for each category, you have just one post. In that case, creating a sitemap for your categories is not so useful, since the content does not give a lot of information, both to visitors and crawlers. 

  It is important to note that Google may not crawl and index all the items in your sitemap. Still, we encourage you to create one, as we believe that you will benefit from it.

  Getting your site indexed beyond Google

  We told you how you could submit a sitemap with Google Search Console. But, it’s not the only search engine out there. So, how can you submit your sitemap to other search engines? It is easy with Yoast SEO. Other search engines also have Webmaster tools, where you can submit a sitemap and follow the performance of your site. Currently, you use Yoast SEO to add your site to:

  • Yandex webmaster tools
  • Bing webmaster tools
  • Badiu webmaster tools

  What’s next? 

  After you’ve created a sitemap and connected it to search engines with Yoast SEO, can you finally sit back, relax, and watch as visitors pour in? Not really.  As we said, you will have to continue making high-quality content. Don’t forget that you can also use social media to your advantage and strategically share your content there. Another important thing is getting links from other, preferably high-ranking websites. That means that you will need to work on your link building. Of course, don’t forget to apply holistic SEO strategies to your website to cover all SEO fronts and ensure high rankings.

  Keep on reading: How to rank high in Google »

  The post How to get your new WordPress site indexed appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/how-to-index-new-wordpress-site/feed/ 10 https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-3/ https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-3/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2020 07:56:45 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2413547 Our current string of releases focusing on improving our code is continuing with Yoast SEO 13.3. In this release, for instance, you’ll find a sizable update to how we work with languages. In addition, we have a Schema structured data addition and several improvements to how Yoast SEO handles URLs. Read on! Improving the way […]

  The post Yoast SEO 13.3: Improving our language analysis appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> Our current string of releases focusing on improving our code is continuing with Yoast SEO 13.3. In this release, for instance, you’ll find a sizable update to how we work with languages. In addition, we have a Schema structured data addition and several improvements to how Yoast SEO handles URLs. Read on!

  Improving the way we handle languages

  As you know, Yoast SEO has a very advanced system for working with languages. We analyze your texts and give you tips to improve the readability or the enhance the SEO-friendliness of those articles. Yoast SEO Premium customers get an even more advanced analysis that makes it even easier to optimize your text in a natural way. All thanks to word form recognition, related keyphrases and synonyms.

  Getting the analysis so smart is no small feat. Languages are hard to grasp and every language has its own rules and peculiarities. To get these analyses to function properly, we need to finetune these for each language. In Yoast SEO 13.3, we’ve drastically improved this system.

  We now break down words to their stems automatically — also called stemming —, but no longer build a complete list of all the different word forms. This was a complex and time-consuming process that made it hard to scale. This new version makes it much easier for us to improve the system — and to roll out a lot more languages in the near future.

  Keep in mind, the analysis itself haven’t changed — just the way we come to the end results.

  Enhancements in Yoast SEO 13.3

  In Yoast SEO 13.3, we’ve improved how the plugin handles URLs. Saša Todorović also submitted a number of improvements to how Yoast SEO works with URLs as well. We made sure that URLs keep human-readable, both in our forms and in the metadata Yoast SEO outputs on the frontend. Of course, they will remain encoded in the Schema structured data, because of the way JSON works with this.

  Speaking of Schema, we’ve added a potentialAction entity to the WebPage and Article Schema pieces. This means we can indicate in the structured data that readers of this piece of content have the option of leaving a comment, for instance.

  Update now to Yoast SEO 13.3

  There you have it, Yoast SEO 13.3. This release bring a better language processing system, plus enhancements to the way Yoast SEO works with URLs. In addition, we fixed several bugs and made improvements to our code. You can find out more in the changelog for Yoast SEO 13.3. Download now!

  The post Yoast SEO 13.3: Improving our language analysis appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-13-3/feed/ 10 https://yoast.com/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/ https://yoast.com/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2020 14:38:00 +0000 http://www.joostdevalk.nl/blog/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/ A question that often pops up for sites that are chasing “hot topics” is: how to get Google to crawl our site faster? This could be either because you have a big site and want to see changes faster or because you’re optimizing a news site. There are a few things you can do to […]

  The post How to get Google to crawl your site faster appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> A question that often pops up for sites that are chasing “hot topics” is: how to get Google to crawl our site faster? This could be either because you have a big site and want to see changes faster or because you’re optimizing a news site. There are a few things you can do to improve your crawl speed. We’ll cover them in this post.

  There are a couple of possible reasons why Google is slow when spidering your site. The first might seem obvious: if Google doesn’t find enough (quality) links pointing to your site, it doesn’t think your site is very important. The other reasons are technical: Google has too much to crawl on your site, your site is too slow, or it’s encountering too many errors.

  Your site doesn’t have enough authority

  When your site doesn’t have enough quality inbound links, Google will not crawl your site very quickly. You can imagine it doesn’t necessarily want to spend much time on a site that it doesn’t consider important. When your site is brand new, this will be the case.

  So, when you need more crawl action on your site, start doing some link building. We’ve written about that topic before, I’d suggest reading these three posts. They cover what you need to know to get started, so I won’t go into it any further here:

  1. Link building from a holistic SEO perspective
  2. 5 link building DON’Ts you didn’t know about
  3. 6 steps to a successful link building strategy

  If the above three posts are not enough for you, there’s more in our link building archive.

  Technical reasons for slow crawling

  The technical reasons for Google to crawl your site slowly can be divided into three groups: your site is too slow, you have too many errors, or you have too many URLs.

  Your server is slow

  The main reason why we see Google crawling sites slowly is when the site itself is actually slow. If your website is slow to respond to requests, or loads lots of bulky resources, Google might intentionally lower their crawl frequency and depth (or limit your crawl budget) to try to prevent things from breaking.

  If that’s the case, you probably have larger issues with site speed, and should read up on how to measure your site speed, and how to speed things up!

  Too many errors on your site

  If you have a lot of errors on your site for Google, Google will start crawling slowly too. To speed up the crawl process, fix those errors. Simply 301 redirect those erroring pages to proper URLs on your site. If you don’t know where to find those errors: log into Google Search Console. If you have access to your site’s access logs, you can also look at those, preferably with a tool like Screaming Frog’s Log file analyzer. To prevent your site from being crawled slowly, it’s important that you regularly look at your site’s errors and fix them. We have a more extensive article on fixing 404 errors to help with that.

  When your site is down too often, Google will also slow down incredibly hard. If this happens because of your hosting, switch hosting. Make sure to check your site’s uptime with a tool like Pingdom.

  Too many URLs

  If you simply have too many URLs on your site, Google might crawl a lot but it will never be enough. This can happen because of faceted search navigation for instance, or another system on your site that simply generates too many URLs. To figure out whether this is the case for you, it’s always wise to regularly crawl your own site. You can either do that manually with Screaming Frog’s SEO spider, or with a tool like Ryte.

  Tips to increase your crawl speed

  A couple of simple tips to increase your site’s crawl speed:

  • Using the methods above, find and fix all the errors.
  • Make sure your site is fast.
  • Add an XML sitemap to your site and submit it to the search engines.
  • If all of that fails to improve your crawl speed, start link building!

  Specifically for news sites, if you want to be indexed faster, you should also look at our News SEO plugin. When you’re in (or want to be in) Google News, it can help make sure you meet all the technical requirements.

  Read on: Site speed: tools and suggestions »

  The post How to get Google to crawl your site faster appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> https://yoast.com/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/feed/ 3 https://yoast.com/search-results-create-intent-based-content/ https://yoast.com/search-results-create-intent-based-content/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:02:34 +0000 https://yoast.com/?p=2403687 Search intent is becoming more and more important. Google is getting better and better at guessing exactly what searchers are looking for when they type in their – sometimes cryptic – search terms. That’s why you need to focus on it as well! What is search intent, again? How do search engines approach user intent? […]

  The post Why and how to use the search results to create intent-based content appeared first on Yoast.

  ]]> Search intent is becoming more and more important. Google is getting better and better at guessing exactly what searchers are looking for when they type in their – sometimes cryptic – search terms. That’s why you need to focus on it as well! What is search intent, again? How do search engines approach user intent? And how can you assess if you target the right type of intent with your content? This post is all about that!

  Search intent?

  Let’s start with a quick refresher on the term ‘search intent’. You’ll recognize from your own online behavior that each search term is entered with a particular intent in mind. Sometimes, you want to find information. Other times, you’re looking to research or buy a certain product. And don’t forget all those times you enter a brand name because you don’t want to type out the site’s entire URL. We generally distinguish four types of searcher intent: informational, commercial, transactional and navigational. If this is new to you, head over to our SEO basics article on search intent, that’ll make understanding this post a bit easier.

  Search engines try to predict user intent

  Of course, for each of these four categories of user intent, there can still be a lot of variation in what exactly a user is looking for. Search engines use data to interpret what the dominant intent of a query is. They want to present results that match user intent exactly. Before we can use the search results to create our intent based content, we need to understand how search intent works for different queries. 

  Search terms with dominant intent

  Sometimes, a search term has one dominant interpretation. Those terms can be very straightforward, like [buy King Louie Betty dress] or [symptoms of diabetes]. For the first term, results will mainly show pages offering that particular model of dress for sale, or similar dresses by that brand. For the second, results are filled with answer boxes and websites offering medical information. 

  Google also understands the intent behind terms that aren’t as literal. For example, whenever people all over the world enter [white house] as a search term, they’re not looking for information on painting their house white. They want to know something about the residence of the president of the United States, and search engines show results accordingly. 

  Search terms referring to several entities 

  In many cases, the same term can be used to look for very different things. Let’s take the search term [Mercury]. Some people will be looking for the planet, others for the element, even others for the Roman god of commerce, and a few might actually be looking for the lead singer of the band Queen. The reason for that is that this one word can be used to describe several distinctly different things – also described as entities. The context makes clear which entity a word is referring to. It’s important to be aware of how this works in search engines, so read up on the topic in Edwin’s post about entities and semantics.

  All these searches probably have informational intent, but they’re not looking for the same thing. While it’s difficult – especially from one word, like in this example – search engines still try to figure out what their users really want when typing in their search term. So, if, for example, less people click to the ‘mercury-element’ results, than to the ‘mercury-planet’ results, they’ll deduce that more people want information about the planet Mercury, and alter the results pages accordingly. If we take a look at the search results for the term [Mercury], we’ll indeed see that most results relate to the planet. From that, we can conclude from that it’s the dominant intent: most people who type in this term are looking for the planet. 

  

  Search terms without dominant intent

  Some search terms don’t have one clear-cut intent, which leaves search engines guessing at what to show. You can recognize these searches when the results pages show many different results. Take the query [tree house], for example. Depending on your exact location, the search results show images of tree houses, information and videos on how to build one, advertisements for buying one, and businesses called ‘Tree house’, including a brewery, restaurants, holiday homes, and a code learning web platform. This variety means that Google has most types of intent behind this query covered. But it may make ranking more difficult.

  Why should you use the search results to create intent-based content?

  Simply put: because the search results give direct insight into what people are looking for when they’re typing in your keywords. You can easily lose sight of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as your most direct source of information. But if you focus on your site alone, or only look at things through the eyes of tools, you miss invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. Search results pages not only show you how you and your competitors are doing, but also where new opportunities are and whether you need to adjust your SEO strategy. For instance, if you see a lot of images in the results pages for your keyphrase, and you don’t have any, that’s an opportunity! 

  To get the most objective idea of the search results for a query, make sure you use a private browser window. A local SERP-checker, such as https://valentin.app/ can also help you get even more objective results, and find out what the results look like in other cities. 

  Creating intent-based content yourself

  There are a few steps you can take to attune your content better to user search intent and work towards creating intent-based content.

  1. Choose keywords from your keyword research and enter them in a private browser window or SERP-checker.
  2. Analyze what you see on the results pages. Which type of intent is most common? (informational, commercial, etc?) Is there one dominant interpretation and if so, what is it? Do you see videos? Images? Related searches?
  3. Evaluate whether the content you have – or plan to publish – is in line with the things you found on the results pages. Do the types of intent match? Is your content in the right form?
     1. If yes, great! Perhaps you can find ranking ideas in related searches. And, have a quick peek at the competition, to see what you’re up against.
     2. Do you notice that things don’t match up, and the SERPs show intent that doesn’t align with what you offer in your content? Depending on what you find in the SERPs, you might still be able to rank. For example, perhaps there isn’t a dominant type of intent, in which case your content could still make the cut. However, if you find intent that unanimously doesn’t match what you have to offer at all -unless you have a high authority site- ranking will be difficult. If this is the case, consider whether it’s worth the effort to create your content, or if you need to adjust your strategy a little. A solution could be to target a slightly different related keyword, with better matching user intent, or to adjust your content. 

  This all still sounds a bit abstract. So, let’s look at a few examples to give you a better idea of this process in practice!

  Examples of research to create intent-based content

  Using the right terminology in informational content

  Here at Yoast, we write about all aspects of SEO. One of those aspects is keeping your website in good shape. We had an article planned on this topic, and one of the most important terms we used in this article was ‘Website maintenance’. Our article was about keeping your site content fresh and your site’s structure well-maintained in the process. However, when we started looking at the SERPs, we noticed that wasn’t what people were looking for at all when they used that term. The content in the answer box wasn’t really related, and the other results almost exclusively consisted of companies offering services to work on technical site maintenance and hosting, with some results stressing the importance of this.

  

  So, from analyzing the SERPs, we got two important insights. Firstly, many people using the search term [website maintenance] have commercial intent, rather than informational. Secondly, they were actually looking for something completely different. So, while we could write an article about website maintenance, to rank, it needed to be a completely different article. It should discuss things like hosting, technical site performance, etc, as that’s what searchers are looking for. 

  We realized we had to make changes to the article, adapt our strategy and target a keyword with better matching intent. We changed some of the wording in this article (and related ones as well) from ‘maintenance’ to ‘keep old content’, ‘update or delete’ and ‘cannibalization’. Of course, you could argue that we didn’t pick the right words here in the first place. The reason for that might’ve been that we got a bit stuck in our own content bubble, and forgot about the user. Looking at the SERPs helped change perspective in this case.

  Business case: selling recycled jewelry

  Let’s look at another example, one that small business owners might relate to. Say, you run an online shop that sells jewelry made with recycled materials. One of your product groups is jewelry made of recycled nespresso pods. So, you’re thinking of trying to rank for [recycled nespresso pods] with a product page or category page. Is that a good idea? Time to look at the search results pages!

  Of course, it somewhat depends on location, but prominent on the results page for [recycled nespresso pods] are results about how the pods are recycled. A few are from Nespresso itself, and you could also find some of their videos on recycling. Other results cover the process of recycling and how consumers can get their pods recycled. There is nothing on using recycled pods as a crafting material. So, now you know that this phrase will be difficult to rank for, as it’s not what users are looking for. 

  

  What about [recycled nespresso pods jewelry], then? As can be expected, the results align a lot better with what you have to offer. However, most results are geared towards informational intent. While the top result is Etsy -which would be difficult to compete with- other results show lists of ideas and tutorials. This means, again, it would be hard to get your commercial or transactional product (category) pages on this list. However, you could still rank if you’d change your strategy, and wrote a tutorial on crafting a basic piece of nespresso jewelry. In such a tutorial, you could easily refer people to your products if they’re looking for more intricate pieces. It might even be worthwhile to make a video tutorial, as there are video results on the results pages.

  Conclusion

  This post covers a lot of different aspects of search intent in this post. It deals with which types there are, whether or not there is a dominant interpretation and looking at the SERPs to gauge a query’s intent. The exact steps to take will differ on a case to case basis. A good takeaway, in any case, is to always take a good look at the results pages for keyphrases you’re targeting. Analyze what you see, as it’s valuable, first-hand information. Be realistic and be prepared to put in the work if you find you need to change your strategy. We’ve said it time and again: SEO is a lot of work, and you need to work hard to be the best result – for the right query.

  Read more: On-SERP SEO can help you battle zero-click results »

  The post Why and how to use the search results to create intent-based content appeared first on Yoast.

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