On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Google has unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the search engine market, marking a significant victory for the U.S. Justice Department and the 35 states that brought the case against the tech giant. The court found that Google’s business practices, such as paying billions to ensure it remains the default search engine on devices like Apple and Samsung products, were designed to stifle competition and maintain its dominant position — the definition of a monopoly.

Legal implications and precedents

Google immediately said it will appeal the decision. The appeals process could extend the timeline of the resolution of this case, potentially delaying any immediate changes to Google’s business practices. It’s worth noting that there was a relatively recent monopoly ruling against the NFL, which was overturned on appeal in just over a month. This suggests that while the initial ruling is a Big Deal^TM, the odds that Google will successfully overturn this decision on appeal are non-zero. Exactly how non-zero are their odds? At the risk of sounding like an SEO: it depends. These types of cases are notoriously complex. The vagaries of U.S. antitrust laws are fairly open to broad interpretation, and Google, of course, has the very best lawyers their vast mountains of money can buy. It should be noted that the NFL case was very different from the Google case and in my “I’m not a lawyer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express” opinion, the cases are not analogous.

Comparisons to past antitrust cases

More so than the NFL antitrust case, the Google suit reminds me of the early 1980s antitrust suit against AT&T which resulted in the company being broken up into dozens of smaller pieces, but that was a very long time ago and the tech landscape is totally different now. Probably the most analogous antitrust suit is the 1998 case against Microsoft in which Microsoft was found to be holding “an oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune.” Notably, Microsoft was not broken up into smaller pieces like AT&T, and the Microsoft case was the model the DOJ used for the Google suit. Originally, Microsoft was supposed to be divided into two halves, one for the operating system and another for the software products, but ultimately they settled with the DOJ and agreed to conduct modifications while remaining intact as a business unit. In both cases, AT&T and Microsoft survived but neither really held or reached the same level of dominance (which, I suppose, was the point). In Microsoft’s case, they were essentially hamstrung while companies like Google and Facebook basically ran roughshod over, well, everyone. It will be interesting to see what the remedy/punishment is for Google. Will it be the AT&T treatment or the Microsoft treatment? Either way, it won’t be the same business it was last week.

Implications for the US market

If the decision is upheld on appeal, it could lead to a more competitive search engine market in the US. Consumers might see more choices for default search engines on their devices, and smaller competitors could have a better chance to innovate and gain market share. This could also result in stricter regulations and oversight of large tech companies, potentially setting a precedent for future antitrust cases in the technology sector.

Implications for the EU market

In the EU, regulators have already taken a hard stance against Google’s market practices, resulting in several fines and imposed changes. This US decision could bolster the EU’s regulatory framework and encourage similar legal actions or stricter enforcement of existing rules. It may also inspire new regulations aimed at curbing the power of dominant tech companies, further promoting competition and consumer choice in the digital marketplace.

Impact on SEO and digital marketing

The ruling against Google could significantly affect the SEO and digital marketing landscape. If Google is forced to alter its business practices, it could open up the market for other search engines, leading to a more diversified search environment. (Diversification is the goal of the ruling.) This diversification could impact SEO strategies, as businesses would need to optimize for multiple search engines rather than solely primarily focusing on Google. Reporting will change, strategies will change, how resources and time are allocated will need to change. It will be a significant disturbance in the force.

One side effect, perhaps unintended, might be that the “rules” of SEO that we play by right now will become somewhat unenforceable because they were created by Google to close exploitable loopholes in the algorithm and other search engines might not have the same objections to them. Rules like “you can’t sell links” and the prohibition of “reputation parasite SEO” were added to modify publisher behaviors that skewed or manipulated the SERPs. We could be looking at a return, or maybe a partial return, to the halcyon days of link buying and selling, overt pay-to-play publishing, and high authority subdomain rentals.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and paid ads

For SEM and paid ads, the decision could lead to changes in Google’s advertising model. If Google is required to reduce its control over the search market, there might be more opportunities for advertisers to explore alternative platforms. This could potentially lower the cost-per-click (CPC) on Google Ads due to increased competition and provide more options for advertisers looking to diversify their ad spend across different platforms.

Advertisers may also benefit from improved ad transparency and fairer bidding processes, as regulatory scrutiny could enforce stricter guidelines on how ads are served and priced. The overall effect could be a more competitive and equitable digital advertising ecosystem, benefiting both advertisers and consumers.

However, lower paid search costs for advertisers will translate to lower revenues for publishers whose business model revolves around revenue from CPM, PPC and PPA ads or affiliate relationships. A reduction in ad prices would translate to less revenue, potentially impacting their ability to produce content, maintain staff, and invest in new technologies. This shift could drive publishers to seek alternative monetization strategies, such as subscription models, sponsored content, or diversified advertising partnerships.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, if this decision is not overturned on appeal, the digital marketing ecosystem should expect a major shift in dynamics, where both new opportunities and new challenges will emerge as a result of increased competition and regulatory changes.

The post Google ruled a monopoly; search industry braces for change appeared first on Yoast.

What does Yoast AI Optimize do?

You have finished drafting your copy, and you are relatively happy with the results. Great! Until you realize that there’s a lot of manual tweaking needed to implement the suggestions in the Yoast SEO analysis. We get it, reworking copy is not the most interesting part of blogging. In fact, internal research informed us that optimizing content for SEO is the most tedious and challenging part of the content creation process. At the same time, our customers know how important this final stage can be to gaining visibility in the SERPS. So we found a solution. This is where Yoast AI Optimize steps in to help your content over the ‘SEO’ finish line. 

How you can access the new feature

Easily recognizable by the color fade and signature sparkle icon, Yoast AI Optimize is automatically available to all our Yoast SEO Premium customers. To access, customers must have updated to the most recent version, 23.2 and granted consent to use AI. 

Where you can use Yoast AI Optimize

Currently you can optimize three of the assessments in the Yoast SEO Analysis; Keyphrase in introduction, Keyphrase distribution and Keyphrase density. Just click on the sparkly icon next to the assessment to receive the AI-powered suggestions.

Pricing and usage

You can look out from behind your fingers, there are no additional or hidden costs! That said, we know you will all understand that to continue offering sustainable innovation using AI, we must consider fair ways to maintain our current pricing. For this reason, we have introduced the spark counter which keeps track of how many interactions you have with our AI features. 

At the moment there is no limit on the number of sparks you can generate. Currently, the counter is set to 100, but you may surpass this limit without issue for now. Of course, the general Yoast AI rate limits apply. The counter resets on the first day of every calendar month. Our internal research on usage tells us that this number will not pose a challenge for the vast majority of our customers, allowing for flexible and uninhibited use across all our AI features.

What are sparks and how do they work?

A spark is defined as a single click on a button of one of Yoast SEO’s AI features. In practice, this means that when you click ‘Use AI’ to generate five example meta descriptions, this would be considered one spark. Should you regenerate another five, this would be another single spark.

You can find the spark counter at the top of the dismiss or apply modals which pop up whenever you interact with the feature within the Yoast SEO analysis sidebar.

The new signature colors help you know when you interact with AI

Kai van Grunsven, UX Designer at Yoast, comments on how the UX team created awareness around when our customers interact with artificial intelligence in line with our core ethical values. The spark counter applies to all Yoast’s AI features. Naturally, this is also fully responsive on mobile. 

“As a UX designer, my goal was to give our AI features distinct branding that stands out and integrates seamlessly into our UI. I used a ‘sparkles’ icon and a gradient transitioning from Yoast’s purple to indigo to enhance AI buttons and the spark counter. This familiar icon and modern color scheme help users recognize and engage with our AI features effortlessly, ensuring a visually engaging and intuitive experience for our customers.”

Limitations

Yoast AI Optimize, like all other AI features, is currently in beta. This means you may experience limitations when using the tool. For transparency, these are listed below. 

• Yoast AI Optimize is only available for texts up to around 1000 words. For longer texts, the button will be inactive.
• Yoast AI Optimize is only available for the Block editor. It can optimize content in the following blocks: Paragraph, Heading, List, and Table block. Content from other blocks cannot be optimized.
• Yoast AI Optimize currently is available for the following SEO checks: Keyphrase in Introduction, Keyphrase Density, Keyphrase Distribution. For keyphrase density, we only support the case in which the keyphrase is underused. If the keyphrase is overused, we do not provide the Yoast AI Optimize feature. 
• You can only accept or reject all suggestions. It is not currently possible to accept parts of a suggestion.
• For longer texts, it might take up to a minute for AI Optimize to produce a result.

Provide feedback on the new beta feature

Yoast AI Optimize is currently in beta, with this in mind, we value your feedback to make it even better. Your insights and suggestions will help us refine and enhance the AI-powered title and meta description generation feature. To help shape this tool’s future and contribute to your SEO strategy’s success, please provide feedback here.

Try out Yoast AI Optimize today

Upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium to unlock the full potential of our AI features! Gain access to all our advanced tools, including the award-nominated Yoast AI Generate and the powerful Yoast AI Optimize. Streamline your processes and receive SEO-ready suggestions at a click when you upgrade to the latest version, 23.2.

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What is accessibility?

Let’s briefly get on the same page. The goal of digital accessibility is to ensure that all users, regardless of their abilities, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with your website.

For more in-depth information, we have a post on how to improve the accessibility of your website.

Why is accessibility important?

There are many reasons, but (we think) these are the three most important ones:

• Firstly, because Google thinks it’s important too. On their website, they state that “Everyone should be able to access and enjoy the web. We’re committed to making that a reality.” 
• Secondly, because if you’re not thinking about accessibility, you could be neglecting a huge part of your audience. Which means you could be missing out on engagement and SEO opportunities. 
• Thirdly, because the European Accessibility Act has a deadline for compliance of June 28th, 2025. It means websites and apps need to be compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA ruling. This applies to all organizations selling to EU customers by the way; not just companies that are located in Europe.

A bit of context about people’s needs

We all know that the pandemic changed people’s shopping habits. Everyone was ordering things online. After the pandemic, however, people didn’t revert back to their old shopping habits. They still order online a lot, but people also want the option to visit a store. Meaning: they want the best of both worlds. As a business, it’s good to keep this in mind. 

Accessibility trends in 2024

Let’s go over some emerging trends in the field of accessibility. 

A new demographic?

When you think of ‘old people’, you might picture a white-haired person who has no idea how to turn on the computer at the library. But that’s not true anymore! 

A lot of people who will soon retire have spent the last 20 years working with computers (in the workplace). And they probably want to continue using technology as they get older. But as people get older, their vision or mobility for example might worsen. Which means they’ll need websites and apps to be accessible. 

New assistive technology

If you’ve done research on accessibility, you’re probably familiar with screen readers. They help people with visual impairments to use a website or app. But the world is slowly moving on as technology keeps evolving.

Take SeeingAI, for example. It’s a smartphone app that narrates the world around you. It helps with describing photos, identifying products in the supermarket, and much more.

And we can’t forget about eye tracking technology, which has been part of assistive technologies for people with disabilities for years. With the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, it’s clear that huge steps have already been made. 

A more involved AI tool

Since AI technologies are booming, it’s not a leap to consider that a personalized AI interface will be developed soon. Think of a tool that finds the information you’re looking for from multiple websites and apps, then presents it back to you in an interface which suits you best. 

But in order for this tool to work, your website needs to be accessible and easy to crawl.

AI-powered captioning

To stay in the realm of AI, AI-driven captioning tools are becoming more accurate and reliable too. Now, you can offer real-time transcription for videos, webinars, and live streams. Which means you’ll be able to engage with everyone in your audience, including users with hearing impairments.

More and better voice technology

We can’t talk about new assistive technologies and not mention voice-controlled technologies and interfaces. These can be especially useful for people with mobility impairments. 

But it can also be helpful for people who get easily overwhelmed or anxious while doing certain tasks, such as banking. Imagine a voice-controlled interface that asks you what you want, then gives you the results. That does sound more relaxing than navigating hundreds of functions and capabilities on a small screen, doesn’t it?

Read more: Voice-to-text: The future of search? »

Should you keep up with all the trends?

It’s good to remember that your business doesn’t need to be compatible with all these new tools and technologies. However, we think it can only benefit your brand. By showing users that you care about their needs, you’ll create a bigger and more loyal audience. 

How to leverage these new accessibility trends in 2024

While it might sound like a lot of work to become compatible with these new tools, it doesn’t have to be. Since most tools use some type of machine learning, it’s good to get your website basics in order. Make sure your site has a sitemap, and a clear and logical site structure. Luckily, if you use the Yoast SEO plugin, we take care of the sitemap for you! 

Once you’re done polishing your basics, it might be interesting to see if you can change the way you present your content. Perhaps you can try a new assistive technology and see how well it works with your website. If the answer is ‘not so great’, it might be worth changing things up.

Keep reading: Why accessibility is important (in the time of AI) »

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Tracking author and publisher entities

The leaked documents confirm that Google tracks and retains content authorship and publisher credibility data. These elements help the ranking algorithms. The rationale behind this is straightforward: credible and authoritative content is more likely to be accurate, reliable, and useful to users. Therefore, content attributed to recognized authors and reputable publishers is favored in search results.

Optimizing author and publisher entities

As interpreted by various sources, the Google document leak indicates that author and publisher entities play significant roles in search rankings. However, it does not clearly show whether one is inherently more important than the other. Instead, it highlights the complementary nature of these entities in establishing content credibility and authority.

Recently, Google’s Gary Illyes shed light on specific signals that are not considered beneficial for SEO. This emphasizes the importance of genuine user engagement and content quality rather than relying on easily manipulated elements. The following are signals Google deems less effective in contributing to your site’s search performance.

1. Authorship markup: Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned that authorship markup, which is controlled by SEOs and site owners, is generally not considered a good signal for ranking purposes.
2. Controlled markup: Any markup that can be easily manipulated by site owners or SEOs is not typically viewed as a reliable signal by Google.
3. Quality signals: Google prefers signals that are harder to manipulate and more reflective of genuine user engagement and content quality.

While Google may describe certain signals as “not good signals,” it’s important to note that they are still considered signals. This situation is reminiscent of the famous exchange in “Pirates of the Caribbean”:

• “You’re the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.”
• “But you have heard of me.”

In other words, even if these signals aren’t the best, they still have some recognition in SEO.

Practical implications

Google’s comprehensive approach to assessing online content trustworthiness involves many signals and metrics. Publishers can enhance their trustworthiness by focusing on content freshness, originality, structured data, and robust anti-spam practices. Their history further aids in evaluating long-term credibility, encouraging them to maintain high-quality standards consistently.

The Google document leak highlights the importance of both author and publisher entities in SEO. A balanced approach that optimizes both can significantly enhance content credibility and authority. Focus on detailed and accurate author and publisher profiles, leverage structured data, and employ tools like Yoast SEO. SEOs can build a strong foundation for improving search engine rankings and driving organic traffic.

Establishing credible author profiles

Building up your author profile is essential today. But you shouldn’t just limit yourself to building your profile; you should also make sure to present it properly on your publisher’s website. That means you have to build great author pages as well.

But how do you create detailed bio pages? Authors should have a dedicated bio page with qualifications, expertise, and a professional headshot. This page should be linked to all articles written by the author. For example: If Jane Doe writes for your publication, create a page like yourwebsite.com/authors/jane-doe that includes her bio, credentials, and links to all her articles.

On that author page, you should also include social proof. Incorporate links to the author’s social media profiles, professional networks like LinkedIn, and any notable publications they have contributed to. For example, on Jane Doe’s bio page, link to her LinkedIn profile and any major publications where her work has appeared.

Your author pages should have a solid foundation built on structured data, so implement schema markup. Use structured data to tag author information on each article. This helps search engines recognize and index author details accurately.

For example, add JSON-LD markup to each article page, including the author’s name, bio, and profile URL.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Understanding the Role of Author and Publisher Entities in SEO",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "url": "https://example.com/jane-doe",
    "sameAs": [
      "https://twitter.com/janedoe",
      "https://www.linkedin.com/in/janedoe"
    ]
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Media",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": "https://example.com/logo.png"
    }
  },
  "datePublished": "2023-10-01",
  "dateModified": "2023-10-01"
}
</script>

Use the Yoast SEO plugin’s schema framework to add author markup seamlessly. Yoast’s adaptable schema structure ensures all necessary author and publisher information is included and properly formatted.

Enhancing publisher credibility

What works for authors also works for publishers — these things go together. Don’t focus on just your authors; make sure you also put your publication in the spotlight.

Start by making it easy to find information about your publisher. Like author bio pages, create a dedicated publisher page detailing the organization’s mission, history, and achievements. Include logos, awards, and other forms of social proof. For example, create a page like yourwebsite.com/about-us/ that includes your publication’s background, mission statement, and accolades.

It’s important to prove who you are and what you stand for. List editorial policies, team members, and contact information to ensure transparency. For example, on the “About Us” page, include a section detailing your editorial guidelines and a list of key editorial staff with their bios.

Then, like enhancing authors, roll out structured data for your publishing house. Use Organization markup as implement schema markup provides search engines with detailed information about you. This includes the name, logo, contact details, and social media profiles.

Here’s a very basic example: Add JSON-LD markup to your publisher page including your organization’s name, logo, and contact information.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Your Organization",
  "logo": "https://yourwebsite.com/logo.png",
  "url": "https://yourwebsite.com",
  "contactPoint": {
    "@type": "ContactPoint",
    "telephone": "+1-800-555-5555",
    "contactType": "Customer Service"
  }
}

Again, be sure to use Yoast SEO for your structured data needs. Its schema framework allows you to efficiently add and manage organization markup, ensuring consistency and accuracy.

Combining author and publisher strategies

As mentioned, it’s not one or the other strategy — combine your efforts to make the most of it. Only then can Google truly understand your authors and publications.

This means that you must unify your branding across all content. Ensure that all content consistently reflects the brand’s voice and values. This includes using uniform author bios and publisher information across different platforms. For example, ensure that every article Jane Doe writes includes a standardized author bio snippet linking to her full bio page.

In addition, you should always attribute content to verified authors and the publisher, reinforcing credibility. For example, at the end of each article, include a byline such as “Written by Jane Doe, Senior Editor at Your Organization.”

Focus on content quality, relevance, and topical expertise

You can highlight your publications and authors all you want, but you will never make it without your topical experts writing high-quality, relevant content. This should be at the top of everyone’s list.

Focus on producing high-quality, original content that adds value to readers. This enhances the reputation of both the author and the publisher. Conduct thorough research and provide in-depth analysis in your articles to establish expertise and authority.

Encourage authors to write within their areas of expertise to build authority in specific niches. For example, if Jane Doe specializes in SEO, make sure she writes predominantly on SEO-related topics.

Actionable SEO strategies

You can also use classic SEO tactics to build your authors and publishers’ reputations. For instance, you could encourage your authors to contribute to reputable external sites to get a link to their bio pages. This builds both author and publisher authority.

Also, try to build up your citations. Find ways and outlets to get your content cited or mentioned by authoritative sources. You could contact industry influencers to review and mention your content in their articles or social media posts.

Keep everything up to date

Regularly update bio and publisher pages with new achievements, publications, and credentials. For example, you could enhance Jane Doe’s bio page with her latest speaking engagements, citations, and published articles. Also, periodically update older content to keep it relevant and accurate, maintaining the credibility of both authors and the publisher.

Entity SEO and its importance for publishers

Entity SEO focuses on optimizing for entities—people, places, organizations, and things—rather than just keywords. Google’s algorithms leverage the Knowledge Graph to understand and rank entities based on their relationships and attributes. Publishers should also focus on entity SEO.

One of the foundations of entity SEO is helping Google recognize your entities. One way to do that is to implement structured data. This helps Google recognize and categorize entities accurately. This includes using schema markup for authors, publishers, and organizations. You can use schema markup to define relationships between authors, their articles, and the publisher.

Together with structured data, linking your entities is a staple of Entity SEO. Make sure that internal links connect related entities within your content. For example, link an author’s bio page to their articles and the publisher page.

Be consistent in your entities. Maintain consistent information about entities across various platforms and websites. Inconsistencies can confuse search engines and harm rankings.

Last but not least, try to improve your chances of being included in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Make sure that you provide comprehensive and accurate information. For example, submit your organization and key authors to Wikidata and ensure their information is accurate and up-to-date.

Leveraging structured data and Yoast SEO

Structured data is the backbone of effective SEO for author and publisher entities. It enables search engines to understand and index content more accurately, making attributing credibility to the proper sources easier. The Yoast SEO plugin offers a robust schema framework that simplifies the implementation of structured data.

Yoast SEO provides a comprehensive and adaptable schema framework that supports various schema types, including author and organization markup. This ensures all necessary information is included and formatted correctly, enhancing visibility in search results.

Use Yoast SEO to add structured data to all relevant pages, including author bio pages, publisher information, and individual articles. The plugin’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to manage and update schema markup as needed.

Conclusion

The recent Google document leak has highlighted the critical role of author and publisher entities in SEO. SEOs can significantly enhance a website’s authority and trustworthiness by adopting a structured approach to optimizing these entities.
Implementing detailed author and publisher pages, leveraging structured data, and utilizing tools like Yoast SEO can create a solid foundation for improved search engine rankings.

Integrating these insights into current SEO practices will help build a credible and authoritative online presence, ultimately driving more organic traffic and engagement.

Read more: What is E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)? »

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Background on Google’s cookie plans

Google initially proposed to eliminate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022, later extending the deadline to 2024. The goal was to enhance user privacy and address concerns about online tracking. Google’s Privacy Sandbox was introduced as a replacement, promising to provide a more privacy-conscious way to target ads and measure their effectiveness without using third-party cookies.

However, after facing technical challenges and pushback from various stakeholders, Google has ultimately decided to keep third-party cookies, at least for the foreseeable future. Many SEOs find themselves torn between feelings of joy because they no longer need to accommodate life without cookies, or feelings of grief for the years (since 2020) spent trying to find cookie-less solutions to track user behavior and measure advertising.

Implications for Yoast users

1. Continued use of cookies for tracking and personalization
   • SEO Analytics: Many Yoast users rely on cookies for tracking user behavior and gathering analytics data. Tools like Google Analytics use cookies to provide insights into how visitors interact with your site. With cookies remaining in place, you can continue to gather detailed data to inform your SEO strategies.
   • Personalized user experience: Cookies enable personalized content and recommendations based on user behavior. This can enhance the user experience on your WordPress site, potentially leading to higher engagement and better SEO performance.
2. Impact on privacy and compliance
   • GDPR and CCPA compliance: While cookies remain, it’s crucial to ensure your site complies with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Yoast SEO provides tools to help manage and disclose your use of cookies, ensuring that you stay compliant with these regulations.
   • User trust: Transparency about data usage is vital. Use Yoast’s features to create clear, informative privacy policies and cookie consent banners. This helps build trust with your users, which can indirectly benefit your site’s SEO.
3. SEO strategy adjustments
   • Content targeting and advertising: For those using cookies to target ads and personalize content, the continuation of cookies means you can maintain your current strategies without needing to overhaul your approach. This stability allows you to focus on optimizing content and improving site performance with Yoast’s tools.
   • Future-proofing your SEO: While Google’s decision provides a reprieve, it’s important to stay updated on privacy trends and potential changes in the future. If there is a development in technology that makes getting rid of third-party cookies painless (or nearly painless), it is very possible Google will reverse this reversal. No matter what happens, Yoast SEO will continue to regularly update features to align with best practices, ensuring your site remains optimized and compliant.

Leveraging Yoast SEO for a cookie-present future

Yoast SEO offers several features that can help you navigate the ongoing presence of cookies effectively:

• Advanced Analytics integration: Yoast SEO seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics and other tracking tools, allowing you to leverage cookies for detailed insights into your SEO performance.
• Content optimization: Use Yoast’s content analysis tools to ensure your content remains relevant and engaging. Personalized content, supported by cookies, can lead to higher user retention and better SEO results.
• Compliance tools: Yoast SEO provides features to help you stay compliant with privacy laws, including options to manage cookie consent and create comprehensive privacy policies.

Read more about the features in Yoast SEO to find out what else it can do for you.

Conclusion

Google’s decision to retain third-party cookies means that users can continue to benefit from the tracking and personalization capabilities that cookies offer. However, it remains essential for website owners to stay vigilant about privacy compliance and to maintain transparency and build user trust. By doing so, you’ll ensure your SEO efforts remain effective and your site continues to thrive in a cookie-present future.

The post Google’s reversal on third-party cookies: what it means for you appeared first on Yoast.

SEO, SXO, OSO?

You might think, “Another acronym? SEOs sure love their acronyms!”. Of course, you are correct — we even wrote about another interesting acronym just last week: OSO (Organic Search Optimization). SXO, however, is one you’ll want to remember. It focuses on merging search engine visibility and user experience.

What is Search Experience Optimization?

Search Experience Optimization (SXO) enhances SEO with user experience design. One of SEO’s main goals is to improve your site’s visibility in the SERPs. SXO, however, goes a step further to ensure visitors have a positive experience that meets their needs and helps them reach their goals.

While modern-day SEO inches ever closer to SXO, it initially emerged as a natural evolution from SEO. It understands that ranking high in Google is just the first step. The challenge lies in keeping visitors and turning them into customers. Combining SEO techniques with UX best practices, SXO creates websites that are easy to find and enjoyable to use.

SXO is about optimizing for both humans and search engines. It takes the entire user journey into account. It sets a path from when someone types a query into a search engine to where they complete an action on your site. This holistic SEO approach gets your website traffic. Once there, you’ll provide a fantastic experience that engages and converts.

The main components of SXO

Search Experience Optimization merges traditional SEO with UX. Combining these components helps create a site that is both search engine-friendly and user-friendly.

SEO basics

SEO is the foundation of SXO. You’ll still do the same stuff, like conducting keyword research to identify the terms your target audience is searching for. Once you have these keywords, you should use them in your content like you are used to. On-page SEO helps search engines understand your site properly. As a result, it can correctly index your content, which helps improve your search rankings.

User experience

User experience is at the heart of SXO. The goal is to keep visitors engaged. For this, you must prioritize ease of navigation, build an intuitive design, focus on accessibility, and make your content readable with great typography. You’ll build a well-structured website with clear menus, hierarchy, and navigation to help users find what they need quickly. An appealing design with high-quality visuals can make your site more engaging. And, of course, there’s also a bigger focus on conversion optimization.

Engagement metrics

To offer a great experience, you need to monitor user behavior. Engagement metrics provide valuable insights into how users interact with your site. For instance, a high bounce rate might indicate that people can’t find what they need. On the other hand, a longer average time on page might suggest that they engage with your content. Analyzing these metrics finds many things to improve and gives you data-driven decisions to enhance the UX.

Content quality

As we know, content quality is essential in both SEO and UX. Your content should be helpful and relevant to your audience’s needs. Use clear and concise language. Aim for excellent readability. High-quality content helps with search engine rankings, keeps users engaged, and encourages them to explore your site.

How SXO differs from SEO

Search Experience Optimization is SEO with an extra focus on user experience. SEO aims to increase visibility in the SERPs and attract organic traffic by optimizing content and technical aspects. SXO, on the other hand, aims to attract visitors and retain and convert them. While SEO brings users to your site, SXO helps them have a great experience once they arrive.

Technical vs. holistic approach

While content forms a big part of SEO, it is often more technical, focusing on structured data, meta tags, backlinks, and site speed. These elements help improve your rankings. SXO has a more holistic approach and combines this with user-centric design principles. It aims to improve the overall user journey, from the initial search query to the final conversion. It focuses on ease of navigation, usability, and content relevance.

Metric differences

Measuring success in SEO and SXO has quite some overlap, while SEO metrics are a bit more search engine-centric. They include rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates (CTR). These metrics tell you how well your site is performing in search results. SXO metrics are also more user-centric. They include engagement metrics and conversion rates. These metrics provide insights into how users interact with your site and how effectively it meets their needs.

An example of SEO vs. SXO

Let’s look at a short example that hopefully makes the differences even more insightful:

SEO approach

An e-commerce website that sells running shoes focuses on optimizing for high-quality keywords. They begin by conducting extensive keyword research to identify popular search terms like “buy running shoes,” “best running shoes,” and “affordable running shoes.” Once they have identified these keywords, they optimize their product pages by incorporating these in the content. Additionally, they ensure that images are optimized with relevant alt text.

To enhance their technical SEO, they improve site speed and mobile-friendliness, both of which are crucial for better search engine rankings. They also create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines to improve site indexing. The content creation strategy involves publishing blog posts and articles targeting specific keywords, such as “Top Running Shoes for Marathon Training” and “How to Choose the Right Running Shoes.” To further boost their SEO efforts, they build backlinks by contacting fitness blogs, influencers, and online publications, increasing their authority.

SXO approach

In addition to the above SEO tactics, the e-commerce website also focuses on the user experience to better meet user intent. They start by analyzing search queries to understand the underlying intent, such as whether users are looking for buying guides, reviews, or specific product features. With these insights, they create comprehensive buying guides that explain how to choose running shoes based on different factors like foot type, running style, and terrain. They also offer interactive tools like quizzes to help users determine the best shoe for their needs.

The website has a clean, intuitive layout that ensures easy navigation. This way, users find what they’re looking for quickly. Clear, prominent calls-to-action (CTAs) like “Shop Now,” “Learn More,” and “Take the Quiz” guide users through the purchase process. To increase engagement and build trust, they incorporate user reviews and ratings on product pages, videos, and 360-degree views of the products to give users a better understanding of the shoes.

Personalization plays a key role in their SXO strategy. They use data from previous interactions to personalize recommendations, showing users products that match their preferences and past behavior. For conversion optimization, they streamline the checkout process to reduce friction, offering multiple payment options and guest checkout. Additionally, they implement retargeting strategies, such as email reminders for abandoned carts, to encourage users to complete their purchases.

Uniting SXO and SEO

The online store integrates SEO and SXO approaches. This attracts a high volume of visitors through search engines and provides a superior user experience. Combined, this leads to higher engagement, increased user satisfaction, and better conversion rates.

For instance, a user searching for “best running shoes for flat feet” might land on a detailed guide that explains what features to look for, showcases top-rated products, and offers an interactive quiz. This comprehensive approach answers their query and guides them toward purchasing, enhancing both the SEO and the user experience.

What is Search Experience Optimization?

Search Experience Optimization combines SEO and user experience. With SXO, you don’t just aim to attract visitors through improved search engine rankings; you want them to have a great experience. This experience should be so good that it encourages them to stay, explore, and convert.

If you want to integrate SXO into your strategy, you need a holistic approach. This focus on experience and rankings builds a great online presence, ultimately driving long-term success.

The post What is Search Experience Optimization (SXO)? appeared first on Yoast.

Page previews in the site editor

The site editor now comes with a visual overview of your pages, also allowing you to preview a page before clicking edit. It creates a very natural workflow and makes working from the site editor easier. Make sure to check it out. You can find the editor under Appearance in the side menu of your WordPress dashboard.

More control over design

As they’ve done for the past couple of releases, the WordPress team has once again added loads of features that allow WordPress users more freedom in web design. WordPress 6.6 allows for more color palettes and font sets within one theme, making it easier for users to customize their website without compromising overall design and consistency. This feature, although aimed at theme developers, benefits everyone using a block theme.

But this release also comes with the ability to easily set negative margins for blocks, add background images to be used site-wide, section-specific styling, box shadows for our featured images and more.

Override your synced patterns

Are you familiar with synced patterns in WordPress? A synced pattern can be described as a few blocks, grouped together, to be used in different places on a website. To give an example, the image below shows a standard synced pattern that comes with a WordPress theme and it consists of a heading, paragraph, button and image.

You can add this pattern to different pages for consistency (and it can save you loads of time). The new feature in WordPress 6.6 now adds the ability to do an ‘override’ of this pattern that allows you to tweak the pattern where needed. You can edit headings, paragraphs, buttons and images blocks to customize the pattern per instance while continuing to use the overall pattern for consistency. Simply go to your synced pattern, click edit, select the block you want to change and go to Advanced in settings to find the override feature.

Keep your plugins up to date

A really cool feature in WordPress 6.6 is the optional rollback for your automatically updated plugins. The idea is that you can set your plugins to auto-update without having to worry about any unexpected negative impact. This new feature makes it possible to restore your plugin to the previous version if anything goes wrong. This allows you to keep your plugins updated and improve your security. While also making sure your website keeps working and behaving as it should.

What’s new in the block editor?

This latest release comes with a new publish flow in the sidebar of your post or page. It shows the featured image at the top and shows all the other page settings in a list. You can simply click the setting you want to edit and it will give you a pop-up as shown in the screenshot below. It might take you a few seconds (or clicks) to figure out where everything has moved. But it looks very clean and makes everything feel very unified.

Another small and nifty feature I’d like to highlight is the shortcut that you can now use to group blocks together. Select the blocks of your choice and use Ctrl + G on Windows or ⌘ + G on MacOS.

Performance and accessibility

What’s a WordPress release without any performance and accessibility enhancements? Of course, WordPress 6.6 comes with a bunch of them. Performance updates such as a 40% reduction in template loading time in the editor, removing unnecessary WP_Theme_JSON calls and getting rid of lazy loading post embeds. The accessibility improvements have been mainly focused on interaction with blocks and patterns and the data views component that powers the new site editing. Read all about this and more in the WordPress 6.6 release notes.

Read on: WordPress 6.5: The features you want to know about »

The post WordPress 6.6: The 6 highlights in this release! appeared first on Yoast.

Understanding the need for guardrails

As AI continues to evolve, so do its capabilities to generate creative content. Generative AI can do everything, from writing articles and creating marketing copy to composing music and generating artwork. However, this comes with great responsibilities. Unchecked creativity in AI can lead to various challenges and risks. It’s very important to implement guardrails.

What is AI creativity?

Generative AI refers to the ability of models to generate new content. This can include text, images, music, and other forms of media. AI models like GPT-4, for instance, can write poetry, draft emails, create fictional stories, and even generate code. At Yoast, we use it to power the AI title and meta description generator in Yoast SEO. There are various ways to determine how creative the chatbot or AI system can get while generating that content. For instance, various AI tools like Copilot and Gemini have options to make the output more or less adventurous.

Where AI gets its creativity from

AI models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, exhibit creativity through their ability to generate content. But where does this creativity come from? The answer lies at the intersection of training data, deep learning architectures, and fine-tuned parameters.

Diverse training data

The foundation of AI creativity is the huge datasets used during training. These datasets contain a range of text sources, including books, articles, websites, and other forms of written content. Exposure to a wide variety helps the model learn patterns, styles, and contextual nuances across different genres and topics. Diversity helps AI generate content that is not only coherent but also varied and imaginative.

Deep neural networks

At the heart of LLMs are deep neural networks, specifically transformer architectures. These consist of multiple layers of attention mechanisms. These layers allow the model to understand and generate complex language structures by focusing on the relationships between words and their context. With billions of parameters fine-tuned during training, these models can produce human-like text that mirrors the creativity found in their training data.

Predictive text generation

LLMs’ predictive text generation capabilities also drive creativity. The models generate text one token (word or subword) at a time, predicting the next token based on the preceding context. This token-by-token generation, influenced by probability distributions, allows the AI to craft coherent and contextually relevant content that can surprise and engage readers.

Influence of parameters

Parameters like temperature and top_p are crucial in modulating the model’s output. Temperature controls the randomness of predictions, with higher values leading to more diverse and “creative” outputs, while lower values result in more deterministic and focused text. Top_p, or nucleus sampling, controls the diversity of the output by sampling from a subset of probable tokens. By fine-tuning these parameters, users can balance creativity with coherence — more on this later. These are helpful tools to guide the AI in producing content that meets your needs.

Pattern recognition and replication

Ultimately, the AI’s creativity stems from its ability to recognize and replicate patterns from its training data. By mimicking the linguistic and stylistic patterns it has learned, the model can generate content that feels original and inspired. This pattern recognition allows LLMs to compose poetry, write stories, create marketing copy, and generate artistic descriptions that resonate with human creativity.

AI creativity is a product of training on diverse datasets, neural network architectures, and calibrated parameters. Understanding these components helps harness AI’s creativity while ensuring the content aligns with your objectives.

Human creativity vs. AI creativity

Various forms of creativity often produce similar outputs but from very different backgrounds. Human creativity is rooted in personal experiences, emotions, and conscious thought. This allows people to create art, literature, and innovations that resonate emotionally and culturally. It involves intuition, inspiration, and the ability to make abstract connections that are uniquely human.

In contrast, AI creativity consists of processing data and recognizing patterns within that data. AI generates new content based on learned patterns and statistical probabilities, not personal experiences or emotions. While AI can mimic human creativity and make coherent and relevant content, it lacks human understanding and emotional depth. Fusing human and AI creativity can lead to interesting results, but it’s crucial to recognize and appreciate each’s distinct nature.

Letting the AI run wild

While AI’s creative capabilities are impressive, they come with inherent risks. With proper guardrails, the outputs can become predictable and manageable.

AI can produce off-topic, irrelevant, or even inappropriate content without proper constraints. As a result, businesses and content creators might get hurt. For instance, an AI writing tool might generate marketing copy that is in the wrong tone or even offensive, which can damage a brand’s reputation.

Controlled creativity can generate content that aligns differently with the brand’s voice or message. The end goal, of course, is clarity and consistency.

Guardrails are critical for generative AI

Given these risks, it’s clear that guardrails help control AI’s creative potential. Here’s why guardrails are crucial:

• Maintaining relevance and focus:
  • Guardrails help keep the AI’s outputs focused on the intended topic, preventing deviations that can dilute the message.
• Ensuring appropriateness:
  • Guardrails protect your brand’s reputation and ensure that the content suits your audience by filtering out inappropriate or offensive content.
• Aligning with brand voice:
  • Guardrails ensure that AI-generated content is consistent with your brand’s voice and tone, maintaining coherence in your messaging.
• Enhancing credibility:
  • By preventing factual inaccuracies, guardrails enhance the credibility and reliability of AI-generated content, especially in fields that require precision.
• Optimizing user experience:
  • Well-implemented guardrails contribute to a better user experience by ensuring the content is engaging, relevant, and valuable to the audience.

The following sections will explore practical techniques for providing these guardrails to manage AI creativity effectively.

Techniques for providing guardrails

Effective guardrails for AI are strategies that can help control the output, ensuring it meets specific requirements and aligns with your objectives.

Keyword filtering

Without limiting what the LLM does, it loves to come up with sentences/words like: “In the ever-evolving landscape of…” and “As we stand on the cusp of this new era, the possibilities are as limitless as our imagination.” It uses long-winded sentences with very expressive language, full of cliches. You can curb this by limiting the words or expressions it can use.

Keyword filtering involves setting up filters to exclude specific words, phrases, or types of content deemed inappropriate, irrelevant, or not aligned with your brand’s voice. This technique is useful for maintaining content suitability and relevance.

It’s not hard to implement:

• Identify keywords: List words or phrases that should be excluded. This can include offensive language, jargon, or off-topic terms.
• Set up filters: Use AI tools that support keyword filtering. Configure these tools to flag or exclude content containing the identified keywords.
• Continuous monitoring: Regularly update the list of keywords based on feedback and new requirements.

Try this as an experiment. You’ll notice it’s fairly easy to influence what chatbots use and don’t use.

Write a short piece on the future of content creation with generative AI. Don't use the following words:

Buckle up
Delve
Dive
Elevate
Embark
Embrace
Explore
Discover
Demystified

but do use:

Unleash
Unlocked
Unveiled
Beacon
Bombastic
Competitive digital world

You can also make this process more proficient and scalable using APIs to communicate with LLMs and chatbots.

Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering involves writing prompts to guide the AI in generating content that meets the criteria. Leo S. Lo from the University of New Mexico developed the CLEAR method (context, limitations, examples, audience, requirements), an effective approach to prompt engineering. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to write great prompts for your content.

A practical example of using the CLEAR framework

Imagine we are creating content for a travel blog. Using the CLEAR framework, we devised the following prompt to inspire the AI chatbot to create a blog post about Kyoto, Japan.

Prompt: “Describe a day in the life of a local in Kyoto, Japan. Focus on their morning routine, interactions with neighbors, and favorite spots in the city. Use a descriptive and engaging tone to captivate travel enthusiasts. Include at least two historical landmarks and one local cuisine.”

1. Clear: The instructions are straightforward to understand. We specifically ask for a description of a day in the life of a local in Kyoto, including particular elements like their morning routine, interactions, and favorite spots.
2. Logical: The prompt is logically structured. It begins with a general description of a day in the life and then narrows down to specific details such as the morning routine, interactions with neighbors, and favorite spots. This logical flow helps generate a coherent and comprehensive piece of content.
3. Engaging: The tone is described as “descriptive and engaging,” which is crucial for captivating travel enthusiasts. The prompt invites the writer to create a vivid and relatable narrative by focusing on personal interactions and favorite spots.
4. Accurate: The prompt asks for at least two historical landmarks and one local cuisine. This ensures that the description is rooted in Kyoto’s actual cultural and historical elements.
5. Relevant: The topic is highly relevant to travel enthusiasts interested in different places’ cultural and daily life aspects. The prompt taps into a subject of high interest by focusing on Kyoto, a city known for its rich history and cultural landmarks.

Enhanced prompt

To refine it even further, you can add a few more specific guidelines to enhance clarity and completeness:

“Describe a day in the life of a local in Kyoto, Japan. Focus on their morning routine, interactions with neighbors, and favorite spots in the city. Use a descriptive and engaging tone to captivate travel enthusiasts. Include at least two historical landmarks (e.g., Kinkaku-ji, Fushimi Inari Taisha) and one local cuisine (e.g., yudofu, kaiseki). Ensure the narrative captures the essence of Kyoto’s culture and daily life.”

Why these improvements work:

• Clear: Specific examples such as Kinkaku-ji and yudofu provide clarity.
• Logical: The flow from morning routine to interactions and favorite spots remains logical.
• Engaging: The descriptive and engaging tone is maintained.
• Accurate: Named landmarks and cuisines ensure accuracy.
• Relevant: Provides a detailed, culturally rich experience relevant to travel enthusiasts.

Now, the prompt is well-crafted and aligns with the CLEAR framework, and the enhanced version provides additional guidance and specificity.

Template usage

Templates provide a structured framework the AI chatbot can follow, ensuring consistency and completeness in the generated content. Templates can be particularly useful for recurring content types like blog posts, reports, product descriptions, etc. Using templates, you can maintain a uniform structure across different pieces of content. As a result, all necessary elements are included and appropriately organized.

• Identify common content types: Determine the types of content you frequently generate, such as blog posts, product descriptions, social media posts, etc.
• Create templates: Develop templates for each content type. These templates should include sections and prompts for each part of the content.
• Provide clear instructions: Include detailed instructions within each template section to guide the AI. This can involve specifying the tone, style, length, and key points to cover.
• Consistent use: Use these templates consistently to maintain uniformity across all generated content. Review and update the templates regularly to reflect new requirements or insights.

Parameter tuning

Adjusting parameters like temperature and top_p can control the randomness and creativity of the AI’s output. This might seem like it controls creativity, but that’s not actually the case. Instead, it fine-tunes how the model balances creativity with coherence. Temperature affects the variability of the generated content, while top_p controls the diversity by sampling from a subset of probable tokens.

Understanding temperature and top_p in LLMs

Imagine you’re baking cookies, and you want to experiment with different flavors. You have a big jar of various ingredients (chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruits, etc.), and you can either stick to the classic recipe or get a bit adventurous.

Temperature:
Think of temperature as the level of adventurousness in your cookie recipe.

• Low temperature (e.g., 0.2): You’re playing it safe. You mostly stick to the classic ingredients like chocolate chips and maybe a few nuts. Your cookies are predictable but reliably good.
• High temperature (e.g., 0.8): You’re feeling adventurous! You start throwing in various ingredients, like mango bits, chili flakes, and marshmallows. The cookies are more unpredictable — some might be amazing, while others might be too wild.

In AI text generation, a lower temperature means the model plays it safe and chooses more predictable words. A higher temperature allows for more creativity and variety but with the risk of less coherence.

Top_p (Nucleus sampling):
Now, imagine you have a friend who helps you pick the ingredients. Top_p is like telling your friend only to consider the most popular ingredients but with a twist.

• Low top_p (e.g., 0.1): Your friend only picks the top 10% of frequently used ingredients. You end up with a very standard and safe mix.
• High top_p (e.g., 0.9): Your friend considers a wider variety of ingredients, maybe the top 90%. This allows for more interesting and diverse combinations but still within a reasonable limit, so the cookies don’t turn out too strange.

In AI text generation, a lower top_p value means the model selects from a smaller set of high-probability words. This makes the output more predictable. A higher top_p value lets the model choose from a larger set of words, increasing the output’s diversity and “creativity” while maintaining coherence.

Adjusting temperature and top_p controls how adventurous or safe the AI is in generating text. This is much like how you control the ingredients in your cookie recipe.

A misconception

As we’ve mentioned, the temperature and top_p control the randomness and diversity of AI-generated text. However, they do not create or improve creativity. Instead, they manage how the AI explores different word choices. True creativity in AI comes from the model’s ability to generate new content based on the patterns it has learned from its training data.

Experimenting with and fine-tuning these parameters helps you guide the AI. These tools help it produce imaginative and relevant content without veering off into incoherence or irrelevance.

Combining techniques

Combining the above techniques can provide a more robust framework for controlling AI creativity. Each technique complements the others, creating a comprehensive system of guardrails.

An integrated approach combines keyword filtering, prompt engineering, template usage, and parameter tuning to create a multi-layered control system. You can support this using a feedback loop that considers all aspects of the content generation process, from initial prompts to final outputs.

Conclusion to creativity in AI

It’s important to maintain control while still harnessing AI’s creative potential. Use guardrails such as keyword filtering, prompt engineering with frameworks, template usage, and parameter tuning to help the AI produce relevant, high-quality content that aligns with your objectives.

Remember that parameters like temperature and top_p do not define creativity; they merely influence the randomness and diversity of the output. True creativity in AI is limited and cannot be replicated without outside help from real people.

With some help from these techniques, we can purposefully use generative AI’s creative capabilities. Whether generating blog posts, marketing copy, or educational content, these strategies help the AI to add value and meet desired standards.

The post Curbing AI creativity: How to provide effective guardrails appeared first on Yoast.

How can social media help your SEO?

Before we dive into Threads specifically, it’s good to refresh our memories. So, why is it good for your business to be on social media? Multiple reasons. First, because it helps your off-page SEO, which means it generates traffic to your site.

Second, a lot of people use social media as a search engine nowadays, so being active on multiple platforms can boost your brand’s visibility big time. And finally, it can only enhance your trustworthiness, because your audience will see that there are actual people behind the brand. 

What is Threads?

Created by Instagram, Threads is a text-based conversation app. Think of it as Twitter’s sibling. It’s a platform where people are encouraged to be authentic and write whatever they’re thinking. 

When Threads was first launched, it became the fastest platform to ever reach 100 million users. Which happened in just five days! However, after a month, Threads quickly lost 80% of its users. So is it not worth the trouble anymore? Not exactly. It still boasts a few million users, and for a new social media platform, that’s not a bad start.

Should you create a Threads account?

Depends! As always, you should look at where your audience is. However, sometimes it can pay off to venture into uncharted territories. And maybe the leap to a new platform isn’t even that big. If your posts always perform well on X (formerly Twitter), then they might actually do well on Threads too—seeing as it’s a similar platform.

4 reasons why you should consider using Threads in your social media strategy

Okay, let’s talk about why it might actually be a good idea to create that Threads account.

1. Rapid user growth

As we already mentioned, Threads has quickly gained a large and active user base. This means it has the potential to become even bigger, especially if X (formerly Twitter) keeps making not-so-popular choices. 

2. Integration with IG

Since Threads is already connected to Instagram, it allows a seamless integration between the two. This means you can easily share content between the two platforms. Plus, it allows you to use your existing follower base from Instagram. You won’t have to start from zero! 

3. Authentic platform with real-time conversation

A huge trend at the moment is authenticity. It’s part of the reason why TikTok has grown so popular, because people are looking for authentic content. They want to see the people behind a brand or business. Since Threads is designed for real-time interactions, this makes it the perfect place for you to build a connection with your audience.

4. Stay relevant

Last but not least, you might want to consider creating a Threads account to stay relevant. If your audience is on Threads, you should be too. This will allow you to stay visible and in the loop, because you know just what your audience is talking about—which you can then use to your advantage!

The future of Threads

It’s tricky to predict what will happen to Threads. How long will it be around? Will it grow more popular or less? Seeing as more people are leaving X (formerly Twitter) and moving to Threads, there’s a  big chance that Threads will stick around. 

Especially since it’s expected that Threads will introduce more features, such as advanced analytics, ecommerce integration, and an in-app camera function. According to PR Daily, Threads is also testing a draft post option, and exploring automatic archiving of posts, which are all positive signs that Threads is here to say.

Don’t be afraid to experiment on social media

Social media is all about experimentation. Whether it’s trying out funny content or short-form videos, or trying out new social media platforms. Because if you don’t experiment, how will you know what your audience will engage with? 

Plus, as we said before, it’s also great for your off-page SEO. If your social media content gets shared by others, you’ll be getting more brand mentions and recognition. You might even get more backlinks! So if you have the time, why not give Threads a go?

The post Should your business start using Threads? appeared first on Yoast.

OSO is a relatively new acronym that adds a layer to SEO as we know it. Although I’ve seen different explanations of the acronym (optimized search optimization, organic search optimization), they all boil down to the same concept: multi-channel search optimization.

SEO vs. OSO: what’s the difference?

Where SEO is traditionally focused on getting your web pages high in the search results, the focus is shifting towards being present on different platforms, not just in the SERPs. Now, we have a good acronym for this new mindset: OSO. Naturally, you can continue working on getting your site traffic up, but you also need to think about the performance of your content in other places. Your website is no longer the only focus point; it’s one of (hopefully many) places where you can be found and contacted. Sure, you want to beat your competition and claim that first search result, but you also need to focus on overall branding online.

It comes down to seeing your website as part of the equation rather than the result. OSO wants you to be more. It wants you to become the best information source on all the channels where your audience can be found. It’s all-encompassing and ties all your marketing efforts together instead of being one part of it.

Where does this shift come from?

Online search continuously changes, and people are no longer just visiting your website. There are so many different places where you come into contact with them. Or want to come into contact with them. And when you do, you want to ensure their experience with you is pleasant and consistent. So your content needs to be high-quality and make purchases (or other actions you want them to take) possible in different places. Make sure to align your content and communication and be where your audience is. Don’t forget, that nowadays, even social media platforms act as search engines.

SGE and other AI-powered tools

Other good reasons to take organic search optimization (or OSO) seriously are the Search Generative Experience and Google AI Overviews, and the overall use of AI in search engines. This is an AI-powered search tool (by Google) that pulls from different places to generate an answer to an online query. SGE uses different sources to generate its results: online pages, customer reviews, social media posts, YouTube videos, etc. So, it’s not just focused on your website content. These AI tools will look at your content across platforms and use them to generate personalized results. Another reason why it pays to be present on multiple platforms and spend enough time on the content you’re sharing there.

So, do you need to make any changes?

Well, are you mainly focused on your website content? Or is your brand also represented on other online platforms? Either way, I suggest researching where your audience can be found. Which online platforms are they using, and with what intent? You need to be there and catch their eye. As written by Andrew Holland in this article on OSO by Search Engine Land:

Your job is to build nets… giant nets.

We need to go back to the drawing board and alter our priorities. Naturally, website content will remain high on the list. But you need to add more stuff to the list. Come together with your social media team and align your content, strategize with your email team, consider creating videos or podcasts, and even look at offline events you should attend. And if you are doing everything independently, set the right priorities. Spend enough time on your website, but also think of ways to broadcast your expertise in your field.

What would that look like?

To give you an idea of what that would look like, I would like to use Yoast as an example. We have the SEO blog you’re reading, which we’ve been using to reach our audience since the company’s launch. Of course, our newsletter and social media followed quickly after that. But we also speak at (and attend) SEO, development, WordPress, and marketing events. We host different types of webinars and create videos and podcasts. This strengthens our brand and shows our expertise in different places where our audience can be found.

It sounds like even more work…

This shift might cause you some worries regarding time management, but it also means that you can spend less time diving into data as this is becoming less important. So save time by obsessing a bit less over the numbers and invest that time in researching your audience and creating new (and fun) ways to reach them. This allows you to think more outside the box, which can also be exciting! And don’t forget that you’re also involving other team members, so you’ll have more people involved in your SEO (or OSO) efforts. Use their expertise, work on the content together, and find out what works for your team.

It comes down to building your brand

To recap what we talked about today, OSO is not that different from SEO. This new acronym reminds you to think beyond your pages and Google’s search results page. SEO is still here and going strong; it just continues evolving. And that means that you and your SEO efforts should, too. Good luck!

The post Is OSO, organic search optimization, the new SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

PHP? Hosting? What does it all mean?

WordPress, (like Yoast SEO), is built in large part in a programming language called PHP. This language, as WordPress itself, has gradually improved over time. Web developers worldwide are enjoying the features that newer versions of PHP have brought. Also, more importantly, everyone worldwide enjoys the increased security these new versions bring. Unfortunately, WordPress developers do not get to join in.

Right now, the minimum PHP required for WordPress is PHP version 7.0. But they recommend using PHP version 7.4 or higher. Compared to WordPress, PHP has a rather aggressive update path. PHP 8.1 will receive security support for another year and a half, but anything older than that will not. As they mention on their website, any release older than that should be upgraded as soon as possible as they may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities.

Why do we care about this?

At Yoast we care about a lot of things, but two things in particular are important in this regard: user happiness and developer happiness. A user is happy when they have a fast, easy-to-install, secure content management system like WordPress to build a site in. A developer is happy when they can use a modern language and tooling to build software.

Security

The most important reason for us to want to increase the minimum requirement is security: older PHP versions, while still actively in use on millions of sites, no longer get security updates.

This security concern is not a theoretical concern. We have seen time and time again that the number one reason sites get hacked is because of outdated software. WordPress has automatic updates for security updates built-in for exactly this reason. Why would we push people to update WordPress and its plugins regularly, but let the PHP version fall behind?

Speed

Another big issue is speed. WordPress is sometimes said to be slow, but it doesn’t have to be slow at all. If it’s running on old versions of PHP however it is, most certainly, slow. This will lose you site visitors and it’s also an important factor in your SEO, so make sure to take this seriously.

Modern programming language

PHP 7.3, which was released in 2018, is no longer a modern language. This makes developers unhappy because they’re missing many great features that a lot of the more recent programming languages have.

This can cause more developers to turn their back on WordPress because it’s moving too slowly. Developing themes or plugins for WordPress, where an old PHP version is required, is a hassle and thus not as much fun. Over time, losing developers can mean missing out on great contributions and other products moving faster, and WordPress will lose market share.

Enhancing performance and security

By supporting only PHP 7.4 and higher, Yoast SEO can implement more modern coding practices, which significantly improve your website’s performance. Faster, more efficient code not only boosts SEO but also contributes to a better user experience and reduces server load, thereby conserving energy.

The update also sets the stage for future developments, including our readiness for the upcoming PHP versions. Staying ahead of technology curves ensures that we can always offer the most up-to-date features without compromising on stability.

What is Yoast going to do?

As we said, the minimum PHP required for WordPress is PHP version 7.0 and they recommend using 7.4 or higher. Yoast will drop support for PHP versions 7.2 and 7.3 from November 2024. Our commitment to providing you with the best possible service means ensuring our software utilizes the most advanced and secure technology available. The phasing out of older PHP versions, much like our earlier updates, will allow us to leverage newer features that enhance plugin performance and site security.

As per WordPress’s official statistics, about 8% of WordPress installations still operate on PHP 7.2 and 7.3. Our data shows an even smaller percentage among our user base. We believe this transition will affect only a minimal number of users but is vital for maintaining high standards of quality and security.

Updating your PHP version

If you’re uncertain about how to upgrade your PHP version, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. Visit our comprehensive guide on how to update your PHP, complete with resources for numerous hosting services. If your host is not listed, we’ll provide you with a template email to send to your hosting provider, requesting the update.

A huge thank you to all who have already upgraded their PHP versions in anticipation of this change. We are thrilled to journey with you towards a more secure, efficient, and robust web environment. Stay tuned for more updates as we will continue to enhance Yoast SEO to serve you better.

The post Getting your hosting into shape and why you need to update unsupported versions of PHP appeared first on Yoast.

What is the lastmod tag in XML sitemaps?

The lastmod tag in an XML sitemap indicates the last time a particular page on your website was updated. This information helps search engines understand which pages have fresh content and prioritize them for crawling.

The situation before

Before the recent emphasis from Google and Bing, using the lastmod tag was optional and often misused. Many site owners either ignored it or didn’t understand its proper use.

This led to inconsistencies in how search engines crawled and indexed updated content. Some site owners would incorrectly update the lastmod date every time the sitemap was regenerated, regardless of actual content changes, causing inefficiencies in crawling.

Recent advice from Google and Bing

Both Google and Bing have updated their guidelines to stress the importance of accurately using the lastmod tag.

• Google: Google’s latest guidelines emphasize that using the lastmod tag helps the search engine prioritize crawling and indexing pages with fresh content. In its XML sitemap documentation, Google says: “Google uses the <lastmod> value if it’s consistently and verifiably (for example, by comparing to the last modification of the page) accurate.”
• Google also clarified how to view lastmod dates for page updates: “The value should reflect the date and time of the last significant update to the page. For example, an update to the main content, the structured data, or links on the page is generally considered significant, however an update to the copyright date is not.”
• Bing: In February 2023, Bing also highlighted the critical nature of the lastmod tag in XML sitemaps, advising site owners to ensure this tag accurately reflects content updates.

A key reason behind this renewed focus is to improve crawl efficiency, contributing to a greener, more sustainable future. Efficient crawling reduces search engines’ computational resources, lowering their carbon footprint. By using the lastmod tag correctly, site owners can help search engines crawl their sites more efficiently, supporting environmental sustainability.

Why this matters for SEO

XML sitemaps are crucial for SEO because they help search engines efficiently discover and index your website’s content. Sitemaps list all your site’s pages, ensuring that crawlers don’t miss your important content.

The lastmod tag in sitemaps indicates when a page was last updated, helping search engines quickly re-crawl fresh content. This keeps your site’s information current in search results. Including new pages in your sitemap speeds up their indexing, improving your visibility.

Sitemaps are invaluable for large or complex websites. They help search engines navigate extensive content, and they can also include details about images, videos, and news articles, enhancing visibility in specialized search results.

XML sitemaps boost your SEO by ensuring search engines discover, crawl, and index your content efficiently. This leads to better visibility and higher rankings in search results.

With this latest news, lastmod becomes an ally for your SEO efforts:

1. Improved crawling efficiency: Accurate lastmod dates help search engines allocate their crawling resources more effectively, focusing on new and updated content.
2. Better indexing: Fresh content is more likely to be indexed quickly, improving your site’s visibility in search results.
3. Enhanced user experience: Keeping search engines updated with the latest content ensures that users find the most current information when they visit your site.

How to implement the lastmod tag correctly

Most XML sitemaps will probably already have a lastmod built-in. At Yoast, we help over 13 million sites with proper XML sitemaps built in the best possible way. If you’re using Yoast SEO, you can’t misuse lastmod because we update the XML sitemap for you, and don’t allow you to use it incorrectly.

In short, there are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Update only when necessary: Ensure that the lastmod date reflects the actual last modification date of the page’s content.
2. Automate with care: Use automated tools to update your sitemap, but ensure they are configured correctly to update the lastmod tag only when the content changes.
3. Monitor and review: Regularly review your sitemap to ensure the lastmod dates are accurate and reflect genuine content updates.

Yoast SEO’s support for lastmod

Yoast SEO has always supported the lastmod tag in XML sitemaps. Our plugin automatically includes the lastmod tag for each page and post, ensuring that search engines are notified of the most recent updates.

• Automatic updates: Yoast SEO updates the lastmod tag whenever you update a post or page, taking the guesswork out of maintaining accurate sitemaps.
• User-friendly: By incorporating the lastmod tag seamlessly into its XML sitemaps, Yoast SEO makes it easy for site owners to follow best practices without needing technical expertise.

By using Yoast SEO, you can ensure your sitemaps are always up-to-date. This keeps you aligned with the latest recommendations from Google and Bing.

Conclusion to lastmod support by Bing and Google

Google and Bing’s renewed focus on the lastmod tag reminds site owners to adhere to best practices in sitemap creation and maintenance. Implement these recommendations and use tools like Yoast SEO to enhance your site’s SEO performance. This ensures search engines will discover and index your fresh content promptly.

The post Google and Bing stress the importance of lastmod in XML sitemaps appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast’s perspective on understanding The Leak:

The contents of the leaked documents do not contain the secret recipe for the algorithm. They are lists of API calls that can retrieve specific bits of information from the data that Google is tracking and storing. When reading through the API documentation, remember that presence or existence is not definite confirmation of current use. Please do not confuse existence with use, or mistake any of the data points included in the leak as “proof” that “Google’s been lying to us!” The existence or presence of certain data points in Google’s API documentation does not mean those data points are actively being used as ranking factors in the algorithm. The only thing confirmed is that the data is collected and stored for potential use, but the existence of the data itself does not prove it is actively used in the ranking algorithm.

Personally, I like to think of the information collected as ingredients in the pantry. I can assemble them in a number of different ways and in different amounts to make a variety of recipes. They’re useful to have handy; however, the fact that they’re in the pantry doesn’t mean I am definitely using them in the recipe I am cooking right now. However, it is possible I will use some of those ingredients to make dinner tomorrow — or maybe next week. The point is, I keep them on hand so I have options, and that is why Google is collecting the data, to have options when testing or modifying the algorithm.

At Yoast, we believe in equipping our users with tools and knowledge that stand the test of time and tide. The recent leak does not change our core philosophy; rather, it reinforces our commitment to adhering to SEO best practices.

Clarifying the Leak’s contents:

1. API documentation vs. algorithmic use: The leaked documents reveal API calls to a data warehouse, not direct insights into the algorithm’s operational mechanics. Because the data is being tracked and stored, does not mean it is actively used for ranking, but it also doesn’t mean it isn’t.
2. Long-term data storage: The data points revealed confirm that Google maintains a kind of ‘permanent record’ of a site’s performance and usage data (if you went to public school in the US, you’ll know what a permanent record is). This underscores the importance of maintaining consistent, quality SEO practices over the life of a domain.
3. Potential data utilization:
   • Usage data and performance metrics: Data from sources like Chrome, tracking speed, and user interaction, highlight the breadth of Google’s data collection, which could influence or be used in future algorithm updates.
   • Non-link mentions and click data: The storage of click data and non-link mentions suggests a broader scope of interest in metrics that many believed were not being tracked or used in the algorithm. Any or all of these could be tested or integrated into ranking factors at any point, or could be used currently.

Key takeaways and recommendations:

• Transparency and behavior: Everything is potentially recorded, so engage in SEO practices with the awareness that any ‘cheaty’ behavior not only risks penalties but may also impact your site’s long-term reputation and performance.
• Comprehensive optimization: Optimize all aspects of your site’s performance, from speed to user engagement, not just for current benefits but for future-proofing against potential algorithm updates that might use some of the other data being recorded and stored.

Conclusion

The Google Leak, while certainly not a nothing-burger, isn’t quite the massive disturbance in the subspace continuum we originally thought. It is absolutely interesting and the potential uses of some of the data points are fascinating to contemplate, but ultimately, this is a reminder of the complex, evolving/mutating nature of SEO. It’s also a reminder that it is not enough to just adapt to immediate changes, but to consistently practice a holistic, ethical approach to SEO. At Yoast, we continue to support our community by providing tools that guide you through these uncharted galaxies with integrity and foresight.

The post The Google Leak: insights and implications for SEO best practices appeared first on Yoast.

What can you do with this tool?

Rich results are incredibly important in today’s world. Once you add structured data to your site, you might get a highlighted listing in the SERPs. This gives you an edge over your competitor, as highlighted listings tend to get more clicks. For many sites and types of content, it can make sense to target rich results.

This post won’t detail how to get structured data on your site. If you’d like to dive into that, please read our ultimate guide to schema.org structured data, check out our free Structured data for beginners training or our Understanding structured data training course. You can also find out how Yoast SEO automatically applies structured data to your site.

Here, we look at how to verify your eligibility and what you can do to improve on that. Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool helps you check your pages to see if they have valid structured data applied to them and if they might be eligible for rich results. You’ll also find which rich results the page is eligible for and get a preview of how these would look for your content.

How do you use the Rich Results Testing Tool?

Using the Rich Results Testing Tool is very easy. There are two ways to get your insights: enter the URL of the page you want to test or the piece of code you want to test. The second option can be a piece of structured data or the full source code of a page, whichever you prefer.

While testing, you can also choose between a smartphone and a desktop crawler. Google defaults to the smartphone crawler since we live in a mobile-first world, people! Of course, you can switch to a desktop if needed. 

There is a difference, of course. It is a good idea to use the URL option if your page is already online. You’ll see if the page is eligible for rich results, view a preview of these rich results, and check out the rendered HTML of the page. But there’s nothing you can ‘do’ in the code. The code option does let you do that.

Working with structured data code

If you paste a piece of JSON structured data into the code field and run the test, you get the same results as the URL option. However, you can now also use the code input field to edit your code to fix errors or improve the structured data by fixing warnings.

So, how do you go about this?

1. Find and copy the code you want to test
2. If it’s minified, unminify it for better readability
3. Paste the code in the code field of the Rich Results Testing Tool
4. Run the test

You’ll get a view similar to the one below.

Editing an event page

The page above is an event page; you’ll notice warnings in orange. Remember: red is an error, and orange is a warning. An error you have to fix to be valid, but a warning is a possible improvement to make. Because this concerns a paid event, the page misses an offers property. It also misses the optional fields performer, organizer, description and image. We could add these to remove the warnings and round out this structured data listing — because more is better.

Look at Google’s documentation about events and find out how they’d like the offers to appear in the code. To keep it simple, you could copy the example code and adapt it to your needs. Find a good place for it in your structured data on the left-hand side of your Rich Results Testing Tool screen and paste the code.

You could expand the code until it looks something like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Bonnaroo",
  "startDate": "2024-06-13",
  "endDate": "2024-06-16",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
  "location": {		
    "@type": "Place",
    "name": "",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "",
      "addressLocality": "Manchester",
      "addressRegion": "TN",
      "postalCode": "",
      "addressCountry": "US"
    }
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://bonnaroo.com/tickets",
    "price": "450",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "validFrom": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"
  }
}
</script>

Rerun the test, and more sections should turn green. If not, you might have to check if you’ve correctly applied and closed your code.

Once you’ve validated your code and know it’s working, you can apply it to your pages. Remember that we’ve described a very simple way of validating your code, and there are other ways to scale this into production. But that’s not the goal of this article. Here, we’d like to give you a quick insight into structured data and what you can do with the Rich Results Testing Tool.

See a preview of your rich results

The preview option is one of the coolest things in the Rich Results Testing Tool. This gives you an idea of how that page or article will appear on Google. There are several rich results that you can test, like breadcrumbs, courses, job postings, recipes, and many more.

These previews aren’t just for showoff — you can use them to improve the look of the rich results. Maybe the images look weird, or the title is not very attractive. Use these insights to your advantage and get people to click your listings!

Introducing the Rich Results Testing Tool

This is a short overview of what you can see and do with the Rich Results Testing Tool. Remember that your content is eligible for rich results if everything is green in the Rich Results Testing Tool and no errors are found. This does not — and we mean not — guarantee that Google will show rich results for this page. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Read more: Rich results are rocking the SERPs »

The post Optimize for rich results with the Rich Results Testing Tool appeared first on Yoast.

Understanding Google’s AI Overviews

Google’s AI Overviews are designed to summarize information from multiple web pages to answer user queries more efficiently. These overviews appear at the top of search results. They include links to the source websites, potentially driving more traffic to diverse sites. According to reports, users tend to click on links within AI Overviews more frequently than traditional search listings. This suggests an opportunity for increased visibility for well-optimized content​​. AI Overviews are widely available in the US and will gradually roll out worldwide.

Steps to prepare for Google’s AI Overview rollout

1. Enhance content quality:
   • Focus on creating high-quality, comprehensive content that addresses user queries in depth. Google’s AI will pull from various sources, so ensure your content is detailed and authoritative. Your ability to influence or to be cited in the summary will be directly related to your existing authority on the subject.
   • Use structured data to help Google understand and categorize your content accurately.
2. Optimize for user intent:
   • Identify and target the specific user intents behind searches. Use tools to determine your audience’s questions and tailor your content to provide clear, concise answers.
   • Incorporate FAQs and summaries that Google’s AI can easily extract for overviews.
3. Leverage Yoast SEO features:
   • Content analysis: Use Yoast SEO’s readability and SEO analysis tools to ensure your articles are well-optimized with relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and readability scores.
   • Schema markup: Implement structured data with Yoast SEO’s schema markup feature. This makes your content more accessible and understandable to search engines.
   • Internal linking: Improve your site’s internal linking structure to guide users and search engines to your most important content.
4. Monitor performance:
   • Keep an eye on your Google Search Console for changes in traffic and visibility. Google plans to include AI Overview impressions and clicks in Search Console reports. Unfortunately, these won’t be distinguished from traditional search results​ (SiliconANGLE)​​ (Search Engine Land)​.
   • Use this data to adjust your strategies and optimize underperforming content.
5. Stay informed and adaptive:
   • Update your SEO knowledge regularly and stay informed about changes in Google’s algorithms and AI capabilities.
   • Participate in SEO communities and forums to share insights and strategies with peers.

How Yoast SEO can help

Yoast SEO can help you navigate the upcoming AI upheaval. Here’s how:

• Content optimization: Yoast SEO’s analysis tools help you create content that meets high-quality standards. Quality is crucial if you want to feature in AI Overviews.
• Readability checks: Ensure your content is easy to read and understand. This increases the chance of AI summarizing your content effectively.
• Keyword optimization: Yoast helps you target the right keywords and phrases that align with user intent. As a result, you improve your chances of getting into AI-driven summaries.
• Structured data implementation: Use Yoast SEO to add structured data to your pages. With structured data, you make it easier for Google to extract and present your content in AI Overviews.

Use Yoast SEO and be proactive

Use Yoast SEO and stay proactive with your SEO strategies. This way, you prepare for and thrive in today’s world of AI-driven search results. Stay adaptable and focus on high-quality content. Use the powerful tools at your disposal to maintain your visibility and traffic in this new era of search.

The post AI Overviews by Google and how Yoast SEO helps you prepare appeared first on Yoast.

Introduction

Launching an online store has become increasingly popular due to several economic and technological trends driving growth. The e-commerce market has been growing steadily, and with increased accessibility to the internet, entrepreneurs can connect with a broader global audience and start businesses from anywhere. The low cost of starting and operating an online store makes it easier for small business owners or start-ups to enter the market.

Advancements in e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce have made launching an online store easy. The platforms simplified managing store operations and enabled businesses to conduct digital marketing campaigns. A couple of years ago, the global pandemic further accelerated the shift to online shopping. The trend is expected to continue as e-commerce businesses evolve and adapt to changing consumer behavior and technologies.

One of the most apparent successes in the meteoric rise of online shopping is Shopify. With the following SEO tips for Shopify, you can also benefit from that rise.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Get it now! »

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an online tool that helps you easily build and maintain an online store. It is a managed platform, meaning the software is hosted on their servers, so you won’t need separate hosting. Shopify will take care of all of this for you. You take out a subscription to use it to build your online shop. Currently, Shopify has several plans:

• The Basic Shopify plan starts at $39 per month.
• The Shopify plan is $105.
• While the Advanced Shopify plan is $399.
• In addition, there’s also the enterprise-grade Shopify Plus plan.

The differences between the plans consist of having more options or different discounts on various costs. For instance, you’ll get better shipping rates and lower payment costs. The most significant difference is the selling internationally section: only the higher plans let you set up an international domain and specific pricing for these countries. Also, the basic plan does not come with reporting options.

Remember that paying yearly will save you 25% on the subscription costs.

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to consider when considering SEO. As with all content management systems, you must optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use Shopify SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in.

The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your Shopify store!

Does Shopify have good SEO?

Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly, and customers and search engines can reach it. Shopify already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for a lot of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers of Shopify allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be suboptimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to cover and how Shopify and Yoast SEO for Shopify can help you.

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with some finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store.

Most SEO issues with Shopify arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Shopify products can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, Shopify adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is canonical. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about this, but be aware of the limitations.

Another area people could improve is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, making for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a Shopify store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. Some apps help ship your products, design your store, and offer customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re biased, but we think Yoast SEO for Shopify stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your Shopify SEO expert

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress SEO app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify helps store owners improve their site technically and comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will suggest improvements to your product page descriptions, helping you create the best product descriptions.

These analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO for Shopify app helps you write high-quality, readable content that resonates with potential customers.

The best structured data for your Shopify store

To enhance your Shopify store’s organic traffic, it’s crucial to capitalize on the benefits of rich results, which increase search visibility and edge out competitors. Yoast SEO provides rich structured data/Schema.org output in JSON-LD format, supporting various types such as Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Yoast SEO also ties all its structured data together in a single graph, which helps search engines understand your store.

Additionally, Yoast SEO has integrated with the popular Shopify review apps Judge.me, Loox, Ali review, and Opinew, to generate the necessary AggregateRating schema to show your reviews in Google. Furthermore, the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block can conveniently be added to Shopify themes v2.0 to increase your store’s structured data and help boost its organic traffic.

Of course, that’s only part of what the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your Shopify SEO.

Read on: How to become a Shopify expert »

SEO basics for Shopify

Shopify is an excellent platform to host your online shop, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive to potential customers. In this guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful.

Define who you are and what you stand for

To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of explaining what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for your online store’s SEO and marketing strategy. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

Start with keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research for online stores produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found. It will also give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. If you do it well, you can instantly fill in your SEO strategy for your Shopify site.

Various tools out there can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush — Yoast SEO for Shopify even integrates with Semrush. You can even use generative AI tools like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini to inspire you.

Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Remember that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

It would help if you also looked at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey has a number of steps, and you need to provide content for those steps.

Look at what the competition is doing

When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that?

Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or a strategy you might use. Or, you can find something that inspires you to work from. Please look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on?

Write unique and high-quality product descriptions

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means: the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

7 tips to write better product descriptions

Writing excellent product descriptions is crucial for online stores as it can significantly impact the products’ success in driving sales. Here are some expert tips on how to write product descriptions that will help you attract customers and make money:

1. Know your target audience: Before writing any product description, understand your target audience’s needs and preferences. Compile a consistently elaborate and compelling answer to the three core questions: “What is the problem?” “How will my product solve this?” and “What will you get by buying this?”
2. Focus on benefits: Emphasize the products’ benefits rather than just their features. Benefits tell customers what they stand to gain from buying your product, while features describe what the product does.
3. Use sensory language: Use descriptive language to paint a picture of what the product looks, feels, smells, or tastes like. Invoking the sensory love of your target audience enhances their chances of making a purchasing decision, which is crucial for converting visitors to buyers.
4. Keep it short and skimmable: Online shoppers bounce between different tabs or windows. Make your product descriptions short but informative and easy to scan so that they can be quickly absorbed. But don’t make it too short! The text has to have a certain heft to it.
5. Optimize for SEO: Be intentional about your keywords, headlines, and subheadings to ensure your product descriptions are optimized for search engines. Include descriptive terms to make it easy for potential customers to find your products.
6. Address pain points: Mention common pain points that the product can solve so that the product description speaks to your customer’s pain and provides them with a solution.
7. Use social proof: Including reviews or testimonials from happy customers can increase the credibility of your product’s quality and effectiveness, increasing the likelihood of purchases.

By implementing these expert tips, you can create persuasive product descriptions that drive conversions and attract customers, increasing sales and revenue. We have more tips on improving your product descriptions in your online store in general and an article on how to do that, specifically in Shopify.

Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and tips to help you improve both readability and SEO.

Keep on reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO »

Write great titles and meta descriptions

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. Title and meta descriptions are essential aspects that you can focus on to improve Shopify’s SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click.

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings.

Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview in Shopify. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular titles and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages.

You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO for Shopify makes this process much more manageable. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables. Using variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself, but this allows you to automate some parts, which can be helpful when you have many products.

How to create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify

SEO-friendly URLs are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, Shopify is inflexible, and there is little wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters

The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest.

Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation

One of the most impactful tips to improve your Shopify SEO is fine-tuning your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system in Shopify should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal links are essential

Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site.

For your navigation, keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations; your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base, right?

Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them.

Make products findable with an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are like maps detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also applies to your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. Your Shopify XML sitemap will include product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages.

You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps.

To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can add a noindex to determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results. You can also decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can.

Don’t add a bunch of Shopify apps you won’t use

While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest.

Properly working with images on your store to improve Shopify SEO

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can only get a good feel for the product with great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as they are one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest. So what should you look for?

1. Use high-quality images: Use high-resolution images that are clear and visually appealing. This will highlight your product features and attract customers to your website.
2. Use consistent image sizes: Maintaining image consistency throughout your website will give your store a more professional look and make it easier for customers to compare products.
3. Use multiple images: Use multiple images to show different angles of the product, including close-ups of essential features, which will help customers easily understand the product.
4. Develop lifestyle images: Contextual lifestyle images, such as images of people using your product, will help customers visualize how they might use it.
5. Optimize your images: Optimize images for faster loading times, improving your website loading speed and preventing customers from leaving before seeing your products. Shopify automatically optimizes images for the online store.
6. Consider getting professional help: Work with a professional photographer or graphic designer to create high-quality images to make your products stand out and attract more customers.

Optimize the file sizes

One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

Average product pages have around five or more images. If these product photos are enormous, high-res files, your product page’s loading times will increase. You need to keep your file sizes in check. There’s no need to upload 3MB photographs. Be sure to size them and run them through an optimizer properly. You can find several tools in the Shopify App Store to help you do this.

When uploading, Shopify already compresses images, but not to a massive extent. In addition, Shopify automatically converts your images to the next-gen WebP image format and serves those smaller files to browsers that support these.

Optimize your images before you upload these to Shopify. If you already have them uploaded to Shopify, you can use an app to fix them. Compressing thousands of images is tedious, and there are better ways to spend your time than going through them individually.

Luckily, some tools can help you speed this up. The Shopify App Store has multiple apps that compress and optimize your photos. You could try Crush.pics to get started.

Lazy loading images

Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should always load all your images, as you want the images at the top of your browser window to always be visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice.

While Shopify does some lazy loading by default, you might have to check if your theme has incorporated it. In the past, you needed to use JavaScript libraries to get this done. Today, you don’t have to use those for lazy loading — use native lazy loading. This works in almost all major browsers.

<img src="screenshot.jpg" loading="lazy">

Preventing CLS

While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign that your user experience is lacking for Google. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site.

<img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200">

<img
  alt="{{ image.alt }}"
  src="{{ image.src }}"
  width="{{ image.width }}"
  height="{{ image.height }}"
>

Add alt text and good file names

Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number. Additionally, including relevant keywords in the tag can improve your website’s visibility in SERPs and drive more traffic to your site. However, avoiding keyword stuffing and keeping the tag short is essential. Lastly, you should always follow best practices for accessibility, ensuring that the alt tag is descriptive and accurate and can be used by screen readers to describe the image to people with visual impairments.

File names also help Google understand your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. For example, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 15, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_15_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

Just as with the proper compression of images, give your pictures an appropriate file name before uploading them to Shopify, as it’s hard to fix once they’ve been uploaded. Of course, you can also delete the image you’ve already uploaded and re-upload the proper one.

Can you create a blog on Shopify?

You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, Shopify has a basic blogging engine that functions appropriately, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way to enhance your SEO strategy as you try to reach an audience via search engines. It’s a beautiful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company.

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, Shopify has a blog called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your Shopify store. Check it out!

If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post you choose to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data.

Is blogging good for my Shopify store?

Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog allows you to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize.

First, you have to determine the goal of your blog. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

Blog on WordPress or Shopify?

WordPress is the king of blogs, while Shopify has a basic but competent blogging feature. Wouldn’t you use WordPress to build a blog and tie it into your Shopify store? While WordPress does give you more tools to create a perfect blog, combining these two is probably not worth the hassle. You would be running WordPress on a subdomain, which isn’t always the best option. Unless you have particular hard-core needs, the ease of using the built-in blogging tool in Shopify makes a lot of sense for most people.

You can integrate your Shopify store with external plugins if you already have an excellent WordPress site. This makes handling your store different from how you would typically do it. Primarily, if you use any third-party apps, many of these won’t function correctly in this manner due to the limitations of the Shopify API. You can use Yoast SEO on WordPress and Shopify to optimize your store and site.

Another option to effortlessly integrate ecommerce functionality into your WordPress site using Shopify is the Shopify Buy Button feature. With this feature, you can quickly sell products on your WordPress site for $5 per month.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now!

Start your trial today! »

How to pick a good Shopify theme

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Shopify Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store.

Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

• Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
• Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
• Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these into several collections, such as catalog size or the type of industry, such as clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on a shop’s homepage. Now, almost 200 themes are available in the Shopify Theme Store.
• Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it.
• Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
• Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
• You can try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The Shopify theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you’ll need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run them through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
• Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme.
• Test the user experience: The Shopify theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, how the animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
• Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Are there other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

Having your own Shopify theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. It would help if you planned to ensure you avoid issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to help you learn more about building and adapting store themes.

Technical SEO for Shopify

Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights.

Optimize your Shopify store for speed

As a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide users with a speedy experience. Shopify focuses heavily on speed to help customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts!

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, Shopify has performance high on the list of priorities. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has a performance report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance.

While Shopify provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps you hardly use.

How to prevent duplicate content in your Shopify store

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might need clarification about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your search performance.

Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs:

https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

and:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. Recent themes, like the Dawn Shopify theme, have improved and now automatically output the correct URL.

Working with product variants

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get them to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

Of course, you must provide sufficiently different product descriptions for each to appear individually in Google.

Faceted navigation or product filters

Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store—no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways to add more filters to your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage them.

The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. They also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically.

Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

Here’s an example of a faceted URL :

https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool

Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines

Shopify hired top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve the platform’s capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do in your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues SEOs have with Shopify.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

You can find your robots.txt file at https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this well; most users don’t have to touch this file. However, adding rules to ensure that more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results for more complex or expansive sites might make sense.

You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click Create Template, and you can start editing.

Structured data for your products

Structured data is essential in this day and age. This data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org — that search engines read to better understand your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products.

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings rich results in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the Shopify App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details.

You must follow some steps to get Yoast SEO to output Schema. A lot of structured data is added automatically, like Product information on product pages, but we need your input on other details. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo, and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock.

Schema structured data for your articles and pages

Yoast SEO for Shopify does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google about your business — the name, logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. You can now describe the pages in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

This also goes for articles. Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article by default, but you can easily change this. There are news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and more options. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less.

How to manage redirects in Shopify

Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. This is useful when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links.

Shopify has a redirect feature built in. For one, Shopify automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. If you need to do large-scale work on your site, you can upload CSV files with your redirects. You can also use the URL redirect feature in the navigation section of the admin settings. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want the old one to point to.

Add your Shopify store to Google Search Console

With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into your store’s performance in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must.

A quick rundown

Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated:

• Open Search Console and log in,
• Add a new property
• Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party
• Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works)
• Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed)
• Enter your domain name (including https://)
• Copy the HTML file
• Open your site theme settings
• Click Actions > Edit code
• Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag
• Save and wait for Google to verify your site

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes adding the verification code to your ecommerce store easy. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings, and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste in the verification code you received. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added

How to increase sales in Shopify

When your store is up and running, the next step is to attract customers—and get them to return and spend more. Ranking products in the search results is complex for fledgling stores. It would be best to do more to get noticed, and marketing your Shopify store can help. Also, improving the UX can help you increase conversions.

Conversion rate optimization in Shopify

Your store should have great products, good content, an excellent design, and proper SEO to maximize its potential. But even then, the chances are that you are still not getting the most out of your store. Getting customers is one thing—getting them to convert and return is a whole different thing.

Besides improving your store, you should also improve the customer experience. You should remove any bump in the road that might keep a visitor from becoming a customer. These could be technical things — your shopping cart loads poorly — or they might be related to your content — is the text on that CTA explicit enough? Can you find ways to improve your product pages?

This is the domain of conversion rate optimization. Start thinking about the user journey and see if you’ve missed a step. Test different setups of your shopping cart to see which performs better. Put your product pages through the wringer. Track, test, change and improve!

Internationalization

Expanding your online store to markets outside your country has always been a chore. Things get complex fast, even with Shopify, getting everything set up — from international domains to hreflang, localization, and targeting. But there’s money to be made in the world, and why wouldn’t your shop have a piece of the pie?

To make selling a more viable option for online stores internationally, Shopify has Markets. Shopify Markets takes the guesswork out of internationalization. It comes with automatic solutions for payments in local currencies, translation of content and interfaces, fulfillment and shipping, and even tax and custom handling.

For SEOs, the beautiful thing about Shopify Markets is that it is part of the international domain. You can pick your proposed global domain setup using subfolders, subdomains, or top-level domains. A new Geolocator app helps redirect customers to the proper domain in their respective countries. Shopify will automatically add the appropriate hreflang tags to the pages so search engines can also make sense of the setup.

How to move from WooCommerce to Shopify

One of Shopify’s biggest competitors is WooCommerce. We’ve compared them both in an article on this site. If you are looking to move from WooCommerce to Shopify, you can rest assured, as the process of migrating is pretty straightforward. First, you need to export your data from WooCommerce. Then, import your data into Shopify through the Store Importer app. Lastly, carefully check and review the imported data. Missing products or customers can be added manually. Check Shopify’s store migration guide for more information.

The Yoast SEO for Shopify training improves your skills!

In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your Shopify store. Of course, there’s more to Shopify — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. Our SEO solutions come with training courses, and Shopify is no different. You’ll find an ecommerce SEO online course and training explicitly showing how to properly set up Yoast SEO for Shopify. Be sure to check out Yoast SEO academy. Please try the ecommerce and Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.

Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Shopify is a popular platform for hosting your online store. Rightly so, because it is easy to use and performs well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. This ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gives you an excellent place to start.

Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and sign up for Yoast SEO for Shopify!

Read more: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »

The post Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

The four benefits of email marketing

Before we start with the basics, let’s review all the benefits of email marketing—there are plenty!

1. Committed audience

First, it’s good to remember that people who sign up for a newsletter want to receive information from you. They’re very committed, which is why email marketing pays off — because the people you’re sending your newsletters to actually want to read your stuff!

2. Low costs

Second, the costs of email marketing are very low. This means email marketing has a relatively high return-on-investment. Plus, it helps that a newsletter is relatively easy to set up through a service like MailChimp or TinyLetter.

3. Increase retention

Third, email is a great way to increase your customers’ retention. This means it can increase the amount of customers that purchase repeatedly instead of just once. In other words, email will help you turn your clients into return customers. How? By emailing your customers regularly, your brand will stay top of mind and they’ll return more quickly to buy something again. Of course, your emails must be interesting, enticing, and engaging for this to work.

4. Specific messaging

Finally, targeting specific subgroups within your entire audience is easy. You can easily create these in your mail service and then send dedicated emails to your audience. Just don’t forget to regularly ask your audience what topics they’re interested in, and make it easy for them to opt in or out of receiving certain emails.

Three pitfalls of email marketing

1. A lot of work

Of course, creating content for a newsletter can be a lot of work. Especially if you’re also maintaining a blog. Plus, if you want to send out a newsletter regularly, you’ll have to ensure your emails are filled with useful content. Don’t send your audience something they’re not interested in or have seen a million times before.

2. Don’t be clickbait-y

What’s more, don’t try to tease or bait your audience too much. Just like with clickbait articles — which no one likes — people want to receive useful and helpful emails. Your emails can become frustrating if you constantly ask them to read on without providing much information. Plus, they’ll take up too much time to fully engage with.

3. People are busy

Nowadays, people receive hundreds of emails every day. Which means most people don’t have the time to read all their emails. At best, they’ll scan through your email before clicking away. At worst, they’ll only read the subject line and then decide to read or delete. So you only have a few seconds to get your message across. Remember to be helpful and to the point so people won’t get frustrated!

How to set up a newsletter?

Let’s examine the basics of email marketing. If you follow these tips, you’ll quickly write great newsletters.

1 Start with the most important message

As we just discussed, most people won’t read your entire newsletter. That’s why it’s crucial to start with the thing you want people to know more about. You could also choose something that people would like to read.

Bonus tip: one focus

While you can put in tons of messages and calls-to-action, keeping your newsletter focused and to the point is probably better. Ideally, you only want one call-to-action. Ask people to read, subscribe, or purchase. Don’t ask them to do everything at once. People are far too busy for that.

2 Choose a good subject line

Whether people open your newsletter depends on the subject of your newsletter. MailChimp, for example, makes it easy to test open rates of newsletters with different subject lines. So, it pays off to think about and test which subject lines work for your audience. Just don’t be too clickbait-y!

3 Clarity and focus

Make sure your newsletter’s layout is clear and appealing. Also, remember to make your design responsive so people can read it on their phones and tablets. Finally, make sure your calls to action are clear by using buttons or bolded text, for example.

4 Tone of voice

The people who signed up to receive your newsletter like your products, blog, or company. So, your tone of voice should be friendly and enthusiastic, not aggressive or salesy. Your newsletter should make your audience even more fond of you and your products, so try to make them feel special!

5 Make it visual

No one likes receiving a wall of text. It makes your email look cluttered and stressful, and people will generally not want to read it. So, use illustrations and pictures to break up the text and make your newsletter look more attractive.

Tips on making your newsletter more awesome

1. Choose the right tool

There are several helpful tools that make sending out emails that much easier. MailChimp is a popular one, and with good reason. It’s has an intuitive interface and a good free plan that allows you to easily get started with sending newsletters.

2. Test!

It’s smart to test what works and what doesn’t to get the most out of your email marketing. For example, you can look into the time and day of the week you’re sending your newsletter. For personal blogs, the weekend could be a time to draw people to your site, while for others, it might work better to send their newsletter during office hours.

Read more: A/B testing your newsletters »

3. Getting people to subscribe

To send people your newsletter, you have to convince them to subscribe first. Make sure you offer a subscribe field beneath your posts and in other visible places on your website. You can also use a pop-up to invite people to subscribe.

4. Make sure your newsletter is mobile-friendly

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again! You need a responsive email design because many people check their email on their phones. Luckily, a lot of mailing services offer default templates that are mobile-friendly and will scale down nicely. This is a good option if you don’t want to spend too much time or money on your newsletter.

Conclusion about email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to reach your audience. You can communicate with clients who really want to be informed about your products or your company. Plus, email marketing is relatively cheap and helps keep your audience coming back to your site. So get those subscriptions, and make sure you create a newsletter with interesting content and an appealing design that works on mobile as well!

Keep reading: Social Media Strategy: where to begin »

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Understanding the focus keyphrase

The focus keyphrase is the main keyword or phrase that you want your product page to rank for in search engine results. It represents the core topic of your product pages. Usually, this is what you expect potential customers to type into search engines when looking for products similar to yours.

Why is the focus keyphrase important?

The focus keyphrase helps search engines understand the subject of your product page. When search engines crawl your product pages, they look for word patterns to determine what your page is about. By optimizing your product page around a specific keyphrase, you make it easier for search engines to index and rank your products accurately. As a result, your customers can find your products in the search results.

Filling in a focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO helps you optimize your product pages based on provided feedback. This might improve your product page’s search engine ranking. Higher rankings mean more visibility, leading to increased organic traffic and, ultimately, more sales. A well-chosen focus keyphrase ensures that your product page is relevant to what users are searching for.

Yoast SEO algorithms

Yoast SEO, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, and Yoast SEO for Shopify use algorithms to analyze your product pages based on the focus keyphrase you fill in. It checks if the descriptions you wrote for your products correctly use these keywords. This includes examining the keyphrase’s presence in the title, meta description, URL, headings, body content, and more. The tool gives feedback and suggestions to improve your ecommerce SEO.

Benefits of using a focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO

Using focus keyword phrases in Yoast SEO is essential, as it has many benefits, such as getting more targeted traffic. Optimizing for a specific product keyword attracts visitors specifically looking for your offer, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

A well-researched focus keyphrase can give you an edge over competitors who may not optimize their pages as effectively. Tracking the performance of your focus keyphrases helps you measure the effectiveness of your ecommerce SEO strategy. Based on performance data, you can refine and adjust your keyphrases.

An example: “Organic aloe vera gel”

Suppose you are selling “Organic aloe vera gel.” Your focus keyphrase might be “Organic aloe vera gel.” This keyphrase should be used consistently across your product title, meta description, URL, headings, and body content to ensure search engines understand the page’s relevance to users searching for organic aloe vera gel.

Understanding and using the focus keyphrase for product descriptions can enhance your online store’s SEO. As a result, your products will be more discoverable to potential customers.

How to determine the focus keyphrase for your products

Finding the right focus keyphrase involves understanding your product, keyword research, and analyzing its effectiveness. Here’s a step-by-step approach:

Step 1: Identify the product’s main features and benefits

Start by listing the primary features and benefits of your product. This will help you understand what makes your product unique and appealing.

Example:

• Product: Organic aloe vera gel
• Features: Organic, soothing, hydrating
• Benefits: Soothes irritation, hydrates skin, suitable for sensitive skin

Step 2: Brainstorm potential keywords

Think of keywords and phrases a customer might use to find your product. Include broad terms as well as more specific, long-tail keywords. Head keywords are general descriptions of your product, while long-tail keywords are more specific and often less competitive.

Example:

• Head keywords:
  • “Aloe vera gel”
  • “Skincare gel”

• Long-tail keywords:
  • “Organic aloe vera gel”
  • “Natural aloe vera gel”
  • “Aloe vera gel for sensitive skin”
  • “Soothing aloe vera gel”

Step 3: Use keyword research tools

You can use keyword research tools to analyze the potential keywords you brainstormed. These tools can provide insights into search volume, competition, and related keywords. There are many tools out there, and you might have already picked a favorite. Popular tools are Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Moz, but you can even ask ChatGPT to help you find good product keywords.

Step 4: Analyze and select the best keyphrase

Once you have everything, you can select the best one. Choose a keyphrase that is highly relevant to your product, has a good search volume, the proper search intent, and is not overly competitive. Also, ensure the keyphrase aligns with your customers’ language and terminology.

Focus keyphrase vs. related keyphrases

The main focus keyphrase is the primary keyword you want your product page to rank for. It is the central topic of your content and should be used consistently across various SEO elements. For example, for the product “Organic aloe vera gel,” the main focus keyphrase could simply be “Organic aloe vera gel.”

Related keyphrases are secondary keywords closely related to the main focus keyword. They help broaden the scope of your content and capture additional search queries that your main keyword might miss. Related keyphrases add context and relevance, making your product content more comprehensive and improving your chances of ranking for multiple related terms.

For example, for the main focus keyword, “Organic aloe vera gel,” related keyword phrases could be “Natural aloe vera gel,” “Aloe vera gel for sensitive skin,” or “Hydrating organic aloe vera gel.”

Keyphrase synonyms in Yoast SEO

Keyphrase synonyms are alternative words or phrases with the same or similar meaning as your main focus keyword. Diversifying the language used on your page helps you cover a broader range of search queries, enhances the natural flow of your product descriptions, and avoids keyword stuffing.

For instance, aloe vera moisturizer could be an alternative to the main keyword, aloe vera gel. You could use this to enhance your product descriptions and use more words to rank for:

“Our organic aloe vera gel is perfect for those seeking a natural skincare solution. This natural aloe vera gel hydrates and soothes your skin, acting as an effective aloe vera moisturizer. This soothing aloe gel is ideal for sensitive skin and provides instant relief from irritation.”

Search engines use semantics to understand the context and intent behind queries. Using related keyphrases and synonyms helps search engines better understand your product descriptions and match them to relevant queries.

Additional tips for selecting a focus keyphrase

Of course, you can do more to choose a good focus keyphrase for the products in your ecommerce store.

• Consider user intent: Consider what the user is looking for when searching for your keyphrase. Ensure your keyphrase aligns with their intent.
• Look at competitors: Analyze your competitors’ keyphrases. This can give you insights into what is working in your industry.
• Use variations: Include synonyms and related terms in your content to cover a broader range of search queries.

Using branded keywords

If you want to rank products by their brand and model, the approach is slightly different but follows the same principles. When optimizing for branded products, start by identifying the brand and model names, as these are often the terms customers use in their searches.

Use keyword research tools to analyze these branded terms for search volume and competition. Look at how competitors are ranking and the specific keywords they are targeting. Consider long-tail variations, including the brand and model, such as “Nike Pegasus 39 Shield women’s weatherized road running shoes”. These long-tail keywords are often less competitive and more specific, attracting highly targeted traffic.

By combining the brand name with descriptive terms, you can create a comprehensive list of focus keyphrases that will help your product pages rank higher in search results and meet the search intent of potential customers.

An example project

Here’s an expanded example of how to find and implement focus keyphrases and related keyphrases for an “Organic aloe vera gel” product using Yoast SEO:

Example: Organic aloe vera gel

Step-by-step implementation in Yoast SEO

How to use focus keyphrases in Yoast SEO

By following these steps and effectively using the main focus keyword and related keyword phrases, you can optimize your product page for better search engine visibility and attract more targeted traffic to your online store.

The post Using the focus keyphrase for product pages in Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

It is important to understand why this happens and how to fix it. Here, we’ll explain the “Crawled — currently not indexed” status and provide tips to help you improve your site’s indexing and visibility.

What is “Crawled – Currently Not Indexed” in GSC?

The “Crawled — currently not indexed” status in Search Console means that Google has crawled your page but has not indexed it. This status indicates that while Google knows your page exists, it hasn’t added it to its search index. As a result, the page won’t appear in the SERPs.

This status can occur for several reasons. It might be due to content quality, technical issues, or even Google’s indexing process. Understanding why this happens is the first step in resolving the issue. By addressing the factors that lead to this status, you can improve your chances of getting your pages indexed and visible in search results.

But first…

Before we continue, you must understand the crawling and indexing process. In short, before your content can appear in search engine results, it goes through three key stages: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Crawling

Search engines use automated bots called crawlers or spiders to discover new and updated pages. These bots follow links from known pages to new ones, exploring and recording the web’s content.

Indexing

After crawling, the search engine processes and stores the information it finds. It analyzes the content, keywords, and usability and then adds valuable pages to its index.

Ranking

When a user searches, the search engine retrieves relevant pages from its index and ranks them based on relevance, authority, and user experience. Higher-ranked pages appear at the top of search results, attracting more traffic.

If you have that error message, the process stalls during indexing. For reasons unknown, your content does not move on to the ranking phase.

Reasons why this happens

Many factors can cause the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status in Google Search Console. Google may determine your content isn’t valuable or unique enough to be indexed. Duplicate content or thin content with little value can lead to this status.

Technical problems can also prevent Google from indexing your pages. These issues might include server errors, incorrect robots.txt configuration, or the presence of noindex tags. A poorly organized website can make it difficult for Google to understand and index your content. The lack of a clear hierarchy and insufficient internal linking can contribute to this problem.

Sometimes, Google simply needs more time to index new or recently updated content. This is especially true for new websites or pages. Addressing these factors can improve your chances of getting your pages indexed and appearing in search results.

Google’s changing indexing priorities

There’s another aspect to all of this. Due to the vast amount of content generated daily, Google has become more critical and uses fewer resources to process new pages. With the rise of generative AI, there’s a significant overlap in content, leading Google to be more selective about what it indexes. The recent updates, including the Helpful Content Update and the March 2024 Core Update, reflect this shift.

This means you might mean you need to ask yourself the following question:

Why should Google even index your page?

Given the vast amount of similar content out there, Google needs a compelling reason to index your page. Here’s why your content should stand out:

• Originality: Unique content that offers new insights or information is more likely to be indexed.
• Value: Content that genuinely helps or informs users will be prioritized.
• Quality: Google’s algorithms favor high-quality, well-written content with good structure and readability.

Tips to fix “Crawled – Currently Not Indexed”

Improving content quality, resolving technical issues, and optimizing your website’s structure is essential to address the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status.

Fix your content

Ensure your content is original and provides value to your audience. Avoid duplicate content. Cover topics thoroughly to offer in-depth information that meets user needs. Make your content as engaging and informative as possible.

Make sure your robots.txt file is not blocking Google from crawling your pages. Use Search Console to test your robots.txt file. If you want your pages indexed, verify that they do not have noindex tags. Use the Inspect URL tool in GSC to check. Resolve any 5xx server errors that may prevent Google from accessing your pages. Regularly monitor server logs for issues. Optimize crawling with Yoast SEOs tailored tools.

Improve your site structure

Organize your website with a clear structure, using categories and subcategories to help Google understand the relationships between your pages. Use internal links to connect related content and help Google navigate your site more effectively. Implement breadcrumb navigation to improve site structure and user experience.

Generate an XML sitemap that lists all the important pages on your website. This helps Google discover and crawl your pages more efficiently. Upload the XML sitemap Yoast SEO generates for your site to Search Console. This ensures that Google knows all your pages and can crawl them more easily.

Patience, please

Understand that indexing can take time, especially for new websites. Be patient and monitor your indexing status regularly. Regularly check Google Search Console for any issues related to crawling and indexing. Address any warnings or errors promptly. Keep track of changes you make to your site and monitor their impact on indexing and search visibility.

Additional best practices

Consider these additional SEO best practices to improve your indexing chances and enhance your site’s performance.

Add content regularly to keep your site relevant and valuable. Fresh content can attract more visitors and encourage Google to crawl your site more frequently. In addition, you should periodically review and update older content to ensure it remains accurate and useful.

Try to improve engagement on your site. Engaged users can signal to Google that your content is valuable. Promote your content on social media to increase visibility and drive traffic. Social signals can indirectly influence your SEO.

Ensure your site performs well on mobile devices. Google’s indexing processes work from a mobile perspective, so a good mobile user experience is crucial. Optimize your site’s loading speed. Faster pages provide a better user experience and can improve your search rankings.

Write guest posts for reputable websites in your niche. Quality backlinks from authoritative sites can boost your own site’s credibility. Create valuable content that others want to link to. Natural backlinks can improve your site’s authority and indexing.

Addressing the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status

Addressing the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status in Google Search Console is necessary if you want to improve your site’s visibility. Understanding the reasons behind this status and implementing practical solutions can enhance your chances of getting indexed.

Focus on improving content quality, resolving technical issues, and optimizing your website’s structure. Regularly update your content, engage with users, and monitor your site’s performance. These efforts will help you maintain a solid online presence and ensure your content reaches your audience.

The post What is ‘Crawled – currently not indexed’ in Search Console? appeared first on Yoast.

Are we sure Google understands text?

We know that Google understands text to some degree. Just think about it. One of the most important things Google has to do is match what someone types into the search bar to a suitable search result. User signals (like click-through and bounce rates) alone won’t help Google to do this properly. Moreover, we know that it’s possible to rank for a keyword that you don’t use in your text (although it’s still good practice to identify and use one or more specific keywords). So clearly, Google does something to actually read and assess your text in some way or another.

How Google understands text

Back to our initial question: How does Google understand text? To be honest, we don’t know this in detail. Unfortunately, that information isn’t freely available. And we also know, that Google is continuously evolving their ability to understand text online. But there are some clues that we can draw conclusions from. We know that Google has taken big steps when it comes to understanding context. We also know that the search engine tries to determine how words and concepts are related to each other. How do we know this? By keeping an eye on any news surrounding Google’s algorithm and considering how the actual search results pages have changed.

Word embeddings

One interesting technique Google has filed patents for and worked on is called word embedding. The goal is to find out what words are closely related to other words. A computer program is fed a certain amount of text. It then analyzes the words in that text and determines what words tend to appear together. Then, it translates every word into a series of numbers. This allows the words to be represented as a point in space in a diagram, like a scatter plot. This diagram shows what words are related in what ways. More accurately, it shows the distance between words, sort of like a galaxy made up of words. So for example, a word like “keywords” would be much closer to “copywriting” than it would be to say “kitchen utensils”.

Interestingly, this can also be done for phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The bigger the dataset you feed the program, the better it will be able to categorize and understand words and work out how they’re used and what they mean. And, what do you know, Google has a database of the entire internet. With a dataset like that, it’s possible to create very reliable models that predict and assess the value of text and context.

Related entities

From word embeddings, it’s only a small step to the concept of related entities. Let’s take a look at the search results to illustrate what related entities are. If you type in “types of pasta”, this is what you’ll see right at the top of the SERP: a heading called “pasta varieties”, with a number of rich results that include a ton of different types of pasta. These pasta varieties are even subcategorized into “ribbon pasta”, “tubular pasta”, and other subtypes of pasta. And there are lots of similar SERPs that reflect how words and concepts are related to each other.

The related entities patent that Google has filed actually mentions the related entities index database. This is a database that stores concepts or entities, like pasta. These entities also have characteristics. Lasagna, for example, is a pasta. It’s also made of dough. And it’s food. Now, by analyzing the characteristics of entities, they can be grouped and categorized in all kinds of different ways. This allows Google to understand how words are related, and, therefore, to understand context.

Google has heavily invested in NLP

Natural language processing is the understanding of language by machines. It is one of the hardest parts of computer science and one where the most advances are being made. Today, with a world increasingly powered by systems run by AI, proper language understanding is key. Google understands this and invests a ton in the development of NLP models. One key system was BERT, a model that could understand the text coming after the content words and before those words. This way, the system has the full context of a sentence to make proper sense of its meaning. What BERT did is awesome, but Google is doing more. Meet MUM.

MUM: Google’s language model

In 2021, Google introduced a new language model that can multitask: MUM. This means that this model can read text, understand its meaning, form a deeper knowledge about the subject, use other media to enrich that knowledge, get insights from more than 75 languages and translate everything into content that answers complex search queries. All at the same time.

Does the rise of AI change all of this?

Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of developments in the area of AI. Naturally, Google could not stay behind and introduced their own set of tools including the well-known AI model Gemini. Most recently, they introduced AI overviews in their search engine. And you might have already guessed it, but natural language processing models come in handy when you’re developing AI features. So Google’s ongoing research into NLP and machine learning is not slowing down anytime soon.

Practical conclusions

So, how does Google understand text exactly? What we know leads us to two very important points:

1. Context is key

If Google understands context, it’s likely to assess and judge context as well. The better your copy matches Google’s notion of the context, the better its chances of ranking well. So thin copy with a limited scope is going to be at a disadvantage. You need to cover your topics properly and in enough detail. And on a larger scale, covering related concepts and presenting a full body of work on your site will reinforce your authority on the topic you write about and specialize in.

2. Write for your reader

Texts that are easy to read and reflect relationships between concepts don’t just benefit your readers, they help Google as well. Difficult, inconsistent and poorly structured writing is more difficult to understand for both humans and machines. You can help the search engine understand your texts by focusing on:

• Readability: making your text as easy to read as possible without compromising your message.
• Proper structure: adding clear subheadings and using transition words.
• Good content: adding clear explanations that show how what you’re saying relates to what’s already known about a topic.

The better you do, the easier your users and Google will understand your text and what it tries to achieve. Which also helps you rank with the right pages when a user types in a certain search query. Especially because Google is basically creating a model that mimics the way humans process language and information.

Google wants to be a reader

In the end, it boils down to this: Google is becoming more and more like an actual reader. By writing rich content that is well-structured and easy to read and embedded into the context of the topic at hand, you’ll improve your chances of doing well in the search results.

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

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