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On-page SEO: The complete guide to on-page SEO (2019)

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Getting your on-page SEO right is a fundamental part of organic search engine optimisation (SEO) and essential to secure high Google rankings.

To help you get to grips with the on-page factors that matter, we’ve put together a complete guide to the on-page SEO basics below.

But before we get stuck into the nitty-gritty, you may have one burning question:

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimising different elements on a web page to give it the best possible chance of being indexed by Google and ranked highly in searches made by your target audience.

How does on-page SEO differ from off-page or technical SEO?

Off-page SEO is concerned with actions that can be taken outside of your website to improve the rankings of your web pages.

Many people would say that off-page SEO is entirely about attracting backlinks from third party websites.

Yes, backlinks are at the heart of a successful off-page SEO strategy but you can also build reputation and trust in your content through off-page activities such as social media marketing, guest blogging, influencer marketing and brand mentions (even if they don’t link back to your site).

There is some crossover between on-page SEO and technical SEO but the latter specifically focuses on making web pages as easy for search engines to crawl and index as possible. Good technical SEO also enhances the user experience by making sure pages load quickly and everything works as it should.

Do you want page one ranking on Google?

If you do, on-page SEO matters.

We know that Google’s search algorithm uses approximately 200 signals/factors to decide where to rank a web page on a search engine results page (SERP). Some of these factors count on a page level, some on a domain level and some are completely outside of your control, e.g. Google giving some preference to big brands for certain keywords.

On-page SEO is something that is within your own hands to implement, monitor and improve.

Read on, and, should you have any questions about how you can put this information to work on your website, drop a comment below the article or get in touch – at SEO+, we are always happy to help.

On-page SEO: Our complete guide to the on-page SEO basics

Our complete on-page SEO guide

Follow the steps below on each of your web pages to properly optimise the on-page elements.

If you have a large website, you might want to pick your most important 10 to 20 pages to start off with. You can then measure how the changes you make effect your web traffic and decide if elements of the page need tweaking further down the line.

 

1. Have a SINGLE topic in mind for each page

When someone does a search on Google, they want to be taken to a web page that meets the needs of that particular search. For example, you’ve come here because you want to understand more about on-page SEO so that’s what this page is about.

This means that the strongest web pages, both for readers and in terms of SEO, are those that have a single focus.

If you know EXACTLY what a web page should be about, it helps you to keep the content super relevant. It also means that you can explore a topic in greater depth than if you were trying to cover lots of different subjects at once.

Plus, if you have lots of different pages covering the same topic and competing for traffic for the same keywords, you risk diluting your SEO efforts and not having any page rank well for your target keywords. This is what people mean when they talk about splitting the link juice from a keyword across two or more pages.

A note about keywords:

It’s been a number of years since Google dropped keyword tags as a ranking factor. It’s also becoming harder to track the performance of keywords because search engines are increasingly able to personalise searches. They do this by considering factors such as the searcher’s location and their previous search history.

Although keyword research is still important, our advice is to focus on the topics that matter to your customers. What would someone search for to find a topic? That’s your springboard.

 

2. Always start with the creation of quality content

Your website will ALWAYS rank higher if it’s full of useful, relevant, UNIQUE content that’s been written to create a great user experience first, and satisfy Google second.

Two key ranking signals are:

  • Your website’s bounce rate, i.e. the percentage of people who land on the site, stay on just one page and ‘bounce’ away without visiting any other pages
  • The average ‘dwell’ time of visitors to your site, i.e. how long they spend on your site during a visit and how many pages they look at before they leave

This is because Google wants to know that, if it sends people to your site, they’re going to find information that’s useful and valuable to them, and that they’re sticking around to read it and even go deeper into your site to find out more.

Well-written, well-researched and unique content that’s genuinely useful to your audience kills two birds with one stone because it gives visitors what they were looking for and lowers bounce rates while increasing dwell time.

Our tips for creating great quality content are:

  • Write in a natural way– Yes, keywords are still important (see above) but search engines are rapidly evolving to be able to understand natural language.  Being able to write like you would speak to your customers is a fantastic way to develop a tone of voice for your brand; it’s engaging, readable and builds trust, which is so important to current SEO.
  • Check your spelling and grammar – Subconsciously, potential customers often judge businesses that have a poorly written website. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes suggest that you may not pay attention to detail or care about presenting a professional operation. Also, Google will find it harder to crawl pages where the content is unclear because of errors.
  • Blog on a regular basis – Google will reward you for keeping your site updated with fresh, relevant content. In addition, you get more and more chances to rank for a variety of keywords. Blogging is also a fantastic way to show your audience that you know your stuff – this builds your reputation as an expert, which attracts mentions, backlinks and trust.
  • Tackle your topic in-depth – Although you may have been told to keep your content bite-sized in the past, Google actually seems to prefer longer, in-depth copy. Various studies have shown that the highest ranked pages contain approximately 2,500 words on average. Many are longer. Long-form content gives you the opportunity to provide truly useful information and is more likely to attract backlinks from third party sites.

 

3. Think about the user experience (UX)

Google is a business and its goal is provide its customers with the most relevant, useful search results as well as a great user experience.

It’s the user experience that should always be front of mind when working on your on-page SEO and creating or updating your web pages.

  • Is the content useful?
  • Is the content (and the page it’s on) usable?
  • Is the answer to the searcher’s query easily findable on the page?
  • Is the content well-researched and credible?
  • Is the content and the experience of viewing it desirable?
  • Is the content accessible?
  • Is the content valuable to the reader?

These seven characteristics are at the heart of a great user experience. They can be influenced by everything from the design of your website, the calls to actions you use, the font, images, writing style, punctuation and grammar, right through to your social media presence, professional reputation, guest blogs and more.

 

4. Use a focused and descriptive Title Tag

The title tag is the title of a web page as it appears in SERPs.

A focused and descriptive Title Tag is important for on-page SEO

It’s also visible on the tab above the address bar when a web page is open.

The title tag is visible on the tab above the address bar when a web page is open

As you can see from the picture above, if you can’t see a title tag in full, you can hover your mouse pointer over it and the entire title will appear.

The Title tag is there to give web visitors and search engines an insight into what a page is about. As well as influencing how your page is ranked, it will also affect click through rates (CTR) – i.e. the percentage of people who see the page in SERPs and click through to it on your site – depending on whether or not it meets a searcher’s needs and captures their interest.

Here are some pointers:

  • Include the main keyword for which you want your page to rank as near to the beginning of the title tag as possible
  • Target just one keyword or phrase per page
  • Write your title in a natural way – cut the spam and the keyword stuffing; instead think about how you can create interest
  • According to Moz, if you keep your title tags to under 60 characters, at least 90% of them will be displayed properly in SERPs

 

5. Write Meta Descriptions that stand out in the SERPS

The meta description is a short piece of text that describes the content of a page in SERPs. This helps people to decide whether the page is likely to answer their search query.

Here’s an example from one of our pages:

Write Meta Descriptions that stand out in the SERPS

Whilst search engines no longer use Meta Descriptions as a ranking signal, the words you write remain crucial because they influence your CTR from the SERPs.

Follow these tips:

  • Describe what the page is about and give readers a reason to WANT to click through to keep reading – it helps to think of it as a call to action
  • Weave in keywords, but write in a natural way – if you accurately reflect the topic of the page, the keyword should crop up naturally
  • There’s no definitive maximum length for meta descriptions. But as a rule of thumb, aim for around 156 characters as anything longer is often truncated with ellipses (like this…)
  • If you’re getting a high volume of impressions in searches (i.e. your pages are ranking highly and being seen by lots of people) but your CTR is low, it may be that your meta descriptions need revising to make them more engaging

 

6. Give your main heading an <H1> tag

The main heading or title on a web page is potentially the most important piece of copy on the entire page. Eye tracking studies and heat maps repeatedly show that people look to the top left of a web page first.

A clear heading that identifies what the page is about – that central topic we discussed above – is a sure-fire way of letting visitors know that they’ve landed on the right page for their query.

The role of the H1 tag is to tell search engines what the main heading on the page says and, therefore, what the page as a whole is about. This helps the algorithms determine whether or not to feature a page in SERPs about the same topic.

Follow these tips:

  • Stick to just ONE H1 tag per page
  • Include your focus keyword/phrase in the main heading
  • Most content management systems (CMS) like WordPress automatically add an H1 tag to page headings but some themes can override this setting
  • To check whether a web page has an <H1> tag, right click on the page and choose the Inspect page source Type ‘Ctrl’ and ‘F’ to bring up the ‘Find’ option and enter <h1>. Look for the title of the page between the <h1 and </h1> tags

 

7. Break up your content with sub-headings (each with headline tags)

Sub-headings are a great way to break up long-form copy so that people can read a web page in detail or scan through the headings to get a gist of the content.

As with the main heading, all sub-headings on a web page should be given appropriate heading tags, i.e. <h2>, <h3> and so on, to help search engines distinguish headings from body copy.

  • You can weave your keywords in – or words and phrases related to your focus keyword – but, again, do it naturally
  • Incorporating your keywords and related phrases tells Google that you’re staying on topic, meaning the content is still relevant to the original search term
  • H2, H3, H4 tags (etc.) can be used more frequently than H1 tags, but use them in a hierarchy – for example, use H2 tags to head up new sections, and H3 tags to indicate sub heads in each sections and so on.

 

8. Ensure your URLs are short, simple and descriptive

URLs should be meaningful and reflect the hierarchy of your website.

  • This is a meaningful URL – domain.co.uk/page-name or www.domain.co.uk/keyword (in other words, a searcher could potentially guess the URL just from your company name and the topic in which they’re interested)
  • URLs that look like this – domain.co.uk/index.php?id=2 are to be avoided – they don’t give search engines (or users) any useful information about what the page contains
  • Hyphens (-) in URLs are ALWAYS preferable to underscores (_)
  • Use your URLs to reveal your website’s hierarchy (i.e. how the site is structured and where pages sit in the navigation). For example:
    • domain.co.uk/services/SEO
    • domain.co.uk/blog/SEOtips

In the above examples, search engines (and users) can instantly conclude the SEO page relates to a service offering, and the SEO Tips is a blog post.

 

9. Include your focus keyword in the first 100 words of your copy

By having a single focus/topic for each page of your website, it’s inevitable that your target keywords, phrases and related words will crop up. The key is to know what terms your audience will be using when talking about your products, services or things that are happening in your industry.

One tip is to include your main focus keyword within the first 100 words of the body copy of a web page. This is another sign to users and search engines that the entire page is relevant to the search query.

When you’re writing your introduction, it’s worth thinking about how you could make it more likely to be listed as a featured snippet on page one of a Google search – we’ve written a blog packed with hints and tips to help you with this.

 

10. Break up the copy

Although we mentioned above that long-form copy tends to rank better with Google, the very act of reading from a screen does make big chunks of body copy harder to process.

You can help make your content more accessible for users and search engines by employing the following tactics:

  • Keep paragraphs short with plenty of line breaks
  • Use sub-headings to signpost the different sections
  • Use bullet points (like the ones in this article) to draw out key points so that they’re easy to skim read
  • Use italics or bold text to highlight important points
  • Reinforce the message of the copy with good quality images

 

11. Use a variety of (optimised) multimedia

While we’re on the subject of images, well-optimised web pages will often include a variety of media such as images, infographics, videos and diagrams.

It’s important that these elements are properly optimised because search engines aren’t as clever at identifying and understanding images as they are text.

Follow these pointers:

  • Include your focus keyword in the file name of an image
  • Give each image a strong alt tag
  • Consider adding captions to visual elements on the page

You can find loads more helpful advice on this topic over on our blog about optimising the non-text elements of a web page for accessibility and SEO.

 

12. Apply structured data (Schema markup) to your web pages

Web page elements such as reviews, product descriptions, recipes, events, etc. can be hard for Google to spot.

Structured data using Schema markup is a way of flagging up content so that it can be indexed properly. Search engines are also able to use this information in the rich snippets that sometimes supports page listings in SERPs:

Apply structured data (Schema markup) to your web pages to help with on-page SEO

Check out our Schema made easy beginner’s guide for a comprehensive breakdown about applying Schema to your site.

 

13. Use outbound links

There are a number of reasons to include outbound links to external sources within your web pages.

If you’re able to show where the information you’re sharing came from, it demonstrates to readers that you’ve done your research and have referenced credible sources to support your expert opinion.

It’s also an excellent way to reach out to third party sites that you respect and may help you to attract backlinks to your content from them.

Adding external links enables your audience to read deeper into a topic, making your content more valuable and in-depth because it’s supported by wider sources.

Follow these tips:

  • Link to the source of any data, stats or quotes you include in your content
  • Ensure the link destination opens in a new window so that users can read the external content without leaving your site

 

14. Use internal links to tie related content together

If you have a blog on your website, the chances are that many of the articles complement one another or touch on related topics.

Your blog readers will find it incredibly helpful if you let them know where you have related content about a topic because it will enable them to explore different aspects of their search query and develop their knowledge over time.

As an example, you’ve come to this page to learn more about on-page SEO but as you get to grips with it, you may specifically want to understand more about how internal links work. By adding a hyperlink to the copy, you can go straight to our Ultimate Internal Linking Cheat Sheet without having to search the site for possible information.

These days, more and more websites are using a Pillar and Cluster model (sometimes referred to as ‘Hub and spoke’) to organise content and make it easier to browse.

With this approach the pillar/hub is a long-form article that gives a strong overview of a topic. The article you’re reading right now is an example of a pillar article about on-page SEO!

But, much like a table of contents, the pillar/hub article links to all the other content on the site that’s relevant to the main topic. These off-shoot articles – the spokes – cover sub-topics of the main pillar.

Use internal links to tie related content togetherThe strength of this model is that, by linking to every spoke from the hub and then back to the hub from every spoke (and targeting a different keyword in each spoke article), link juice comes into the hub and spokes from every interconnected element.

Each time a new spoke article is added, the hub should be updated to reflect this, which helps the content to stay evergreen and crawled regularly.

 

15. Avoid duplicate content

Google rewards unique content. That said, there may be occasions where you need to have duplicate content on your website – this especially happens with product descriptions, for example. If that is the case, make sure you don’t get penalised and label your pages appropriately.

  • Use a canonical tag to tell Google which version of your duplicate content is the standard, most important version that you want it to index – this ensures Google knows which page you want to earn page rank

Yoast does a great guide to using the canonical tab. We’ve also put together comprehensive advice about identifying and dealing with duplicate content.

 

16. Use social sharing buttons

Although social sharing buttons on a web page aren’t a direct ranking factor, research by SEO platform BrightEdge Technologies found that their presence on articles can increase shares and mentions by a whopping 700%!

In turn, this can put your content in front of new audiences and bring traffic back to your site from a wider range of sources. Google looks at factors such as your reputation and influence as signals around page and domain authority, with higher authority sites and pages ranking higher in searches.

We love the Social Warfare WordPress plugin here at SEO+.

 

17. Check your website is mobile friendly

These days, it’s essential that any website is multi-device friendly. Google now prioritises mobile-first indexing to return the most mobile-friendly versions of websites in SERPs. Having a site that offers a poor mobile experience can damage your rankings.

Follow these tips:

  • Check out whether your site is mobile friendly
  • Responsive website design automatically resizes the content of a web page to fit the device being used – is your site responsive?
  • Mobile URLs allow your content to be tailored specifically for viewing on a tablet or smartphone
  • Make sure that call to action buttons on your site are easy to use on a mobile device and that pages load quickly and display properly – a good UX is essential

Mobile friendliness is one of many Google ranking factors

 

18. Check your page load speed

Users get a better experience when a website loads quickly. As a result, one of the ranking factors Google uses is your page load speed.

 

19. Resolve any crawl errors

A “crawl error” relates to individual URLs that search engines can’t crawl (and therefore can’t index), or that return an HTTP error code.

  • Use Google Search Console to identify any crawl errors so you can fix them
  • Many errors can be fixed with 301 redirects (this is a permanent redirection from one URL to another. Use it if you’ve removed a URL to avoid a user landing on a 404 ‘Page not found’ error)

 

20. Check the Robots.txt file

The Robots.txt file is a nifty tool that enables you to see which pages are blocked from being viewed by search engines. Remember, any pages that are blocked CANNOT be indexed (and so are unlikely to appear in the SERPS). There is a good reason for blocking certain pages – for example, admin pages or poor quality content – but core pages should NEVER be blocked and will harm your ranking if they are.

  • View your robots.txt file by typing the following into your web browser (swap www.domain.co.uk for your website address) – domain.co.uk/robots.txt
  • This will give you a plain text list of any URLs on your website that can’t be crawled
  • “Disallowed” pages are blocked – so ask yourself, “should they be?”
  • If any core pages are disallowed, remove them

 

Quick SEO Overview

SEO practices keep changing as Google gets smarter at eliminating loopholes and ensuring quality websites rise to the top. Success all starts with your content. Writing for users first and then Google will ensure your website is filled with the relevant information that will appeal to your target customer.

And whilst outreach and link building remain important, if these external SEO strategies aren’t supported on-page, you won’t achieve the ranking you deserve.

What do you think?

Which of these on-page SEO fundamentals have you neglected? Have you seen a boost in your ranking after checking off an on-page SEO basic that you’ve overlooked? Do you have any questions?

I’d love to know what you think so please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

SEO Checklist

We’ve created a handy SEO checklist to help you increase your visibility in Google. Download your free copy here and create a website that Google and your customers love.

Need help with your SEO, we can help you. SEO+ are an award-winning SEO Company and help businesses throughout the UK naturally rank at the top of Google for the long term. Take a look at our  SEO packages here and if you’d like to explore your options and discuss your business and your goals schedule a call with Hazel here

If you found this post helpful, we’d love it if you could share it – thank you!

SEO and GDPR: Why SEO will be your best marketing tool in the GDPR world

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At the beginning of April, I saw the following post from fellow SEO expert Andrew Holland on LinkedIn talking about SEO and GDPR.

Andrew’s post raises some key points about marketing in the GDPR world. Many businesses, especially those who have been reliant on poor quality or spam marketing, are going to have to adapt.

But how?

And how will GDPR affect future marketing approaches?

Plus, of course, where does SEO sit in the GDPR world?

How will GDPR affect future marketing and where does SEO sit in the GDPR world?

 

What is GDPR?

Firstly, let’s look at GDPR and what it means.

GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation, which was launched two years ago and comes into force on 25th May 2018.

It applies to every business that holds, collects and stores information about EU citizens that makes them personally identifiable, even if it’s just their name, email address or computer IP address.

GDPR also covers if/how we give data to third parties such as web developers, virtual assistants, web hosts, email marketing providers, analytics providers, plugins installed on our websites and more.

The aim of the regulation is to protect people’s privacy and ensure that data that could personally identify them is held and used in an ethical way, and that it is disposed of in a timely and correct manner too. This includes giving people the ‘right to be forgotten’ and to have their data fully erased.

The regulations require that data is “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes”.

Previously, each of the EU countries have had their own privacy laws. GDPR is about unifying data protection laws for a single, consistent approach. It’s also about bringing data protection into the 21st century.

Even when/if Brexit is finalised, the GDPR will be incorporated into UK law and will still apply, especially if you want to do business with anyone in the EU.

If you run a business then GDPR is something you need to know about and act on.

 

Personal data as a commodity

Why is data protection such a hot issue?

Everything we do online leaves a digital footprint. In May 2017, The Economist called personal data ‘the world’s most valuable resource’, even rating it above oil!

Companies (maybe this includes your own) track the searches we make, the websites we visit, the things we buy, the phone calls we make, the photos we take, where we go and much, much more. This helps to build up an understanding of buyer behaviour, making it easier to sell to us.

And because all this data is so valuable, it’s also a target for theft and misuse.

According to UK Government statistics, nearly half of all UK businesses suffered a cyber breach or attack in 2017.

The joint class action against Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and two other companies for allegedly misusing the personal data of more than 71 million people to develop ‘political propaganda campaigns’ highlights that data protection isn’t just about cyber-attacks, fraud or identity theft – it may also be used to influence opinions and shape the very fabric of modern societies.

 

Beyond the scary headlines

There have been a lot of headlines about the potentially massive fines associated with GDPR non-compliance. Worst-case scenario figures such as €20 million or 4% of annual turnover are daunting for any business.

Couple this with misinformation out in the public domain and it’s tempting to panic about the impact GDPR will have, especially on small businesses without extensive resources.

However, I think we all need to take a calming breath and look beyond the hype.

One of the most reasoned explanations of GDPR I heard recently is that it really just tightens up and consolidates the data protection regulations already in place.

GDPR is about gaining ‘active’ consent from people about capturing their data rather than relying on implied consent or expecting people to opt out of data capture.

The GDPR says that you must use plain language to tell people who you are when you request their data, as well as:

  • why you want it
  • how long you’ll keep it
  • what you’ll do with it
  • who will receive it

Businesses that are collecting customer data in a responsible way with a clear opt in and information about how they will use the data probably don’t have too much to worry about (although you should understand how GDPR will affect your business and be proactive about compliance).

This article isn’t about how you become compliant with the GDPR though. Instead, I wanted to explore why SEO and other GDPR-compliant marketing approaches will be even more important from May 2018 onwards.

 

How GDPR may effect marketing and data capture

Recently, Smart Insights asked their members whether their companies were GDPR-ready – only 6% responded that they were! Sixteen percent said they don’t even know what GDPR is.

It’s clear that there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Many business owners are currently trying to work out what the GDPR means for their company, especially in terms of marketing and capturing/using data for current and potential customers.

  • Will long-established mailing lists have to be deleted?
  • Or, at the very least, will masses of customers decide not to opt back into mailing lists if/when prompted to confirm their ongoing consent to be contacted?
  • Is it still OK to get people’s sign-up details in exchange for a lead magnet?
  • Is Google Analytics GDPR-compliant?
  • Will we be able to hang on to the contact details of previous clients and contact them with special offers?

These questions and more are being asked time and again, often receiving different answers, depending on who’s answering the question.

Without a definitive, plain language list of obligations for each type of business, GDPR will herald a period of uncertainty as everyone tries to work out what applies to their organisation.

This means that companies are likely to look for ways to attract new business that are less reliant on data capture and lead magnet marketing in order to risk falling foul of the GDPR and associated fines.

As Andrew Holland said in his LinkedIn post that I referenced at the beginning of this article, businesses may turn to Google AdWords or Facebook advertising to target and bring in new customers. But, with growing competition for keywords, the prices will soar. There is also some debate about how the GDPR will affect these two PPC advertising options.

SEO may be a safer investment.

SEO and GDPR: SEO is about creating a fantastic user experience (UX) and building your professional reputation as an authority in your field.

SEO and GDPR-compliance

Search engine optimisation will potentially be one of the best and most effective ways to market your business once GDPR comes into effect because, in many ways, it is already GDPR compliant.

On- and off-page SEO doesn’t rely on data capture. Instead, SEO is about creating a fantastic user experience (UX) and building your professional reputation as an authority in your field.

As we’ve explored in numerous previous blogs, the ranking signals that search engines look for when creating search engine results pages (SERPs) are all about relevance and best answering the searchers’ queries.

Simple steps can help you bring more customers to your website and, in turn, attract more enquiries, bookings and/or purchases WITHOUT marketing to your mailing list.

Think about the following:

·      Meta data

A strong meta title and meta description should reflect what visitors will find on the web page and show how your content will meet up to the reason for their search.

If you can write each meta description as a compelling call to action, it should bring people to your website from search engines. It’s your opportunity to say, “Click on me instead of anyone else”.

·      URLs

Short, targeted keyword-rich URLs also help to signpost what each page is about to your website’s visitors and show the relevance of your content, bringing in more traffic.

They also make it easier for people to make an educated guess about the address of a web page on your site without having to search for it. According to SEMRush’s Ranking Factors Study 2017, direct website traffic – i.e. traffic where the source or referrer is unknown or the visitor has typed in the company URL – is the most important ranking factor. This beats dwell time, bounce rate, backlinks, content length and more.

·      Crawlable pages

If you use text that search engines can read, as well as images and videos or embedded properties with relevant alt tags, it will help search engines to rank your web pages and bring in a relevant audience who want to buy what you sell.

·      Clear headings

Headings and sub headings that reflect what your content is about are essential to help visitors identify what a web page is about. If people can see at a glance that they’re in the right place, they’re likely to stay on a page for longer, lowering the bounce rate and upping the dwell time. These are both important ranking signals.

·      Intelligent use of keywords

As I discussed in a recent blog, artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping SEO, not least in how we use keywords. It’s crucial to intelligently employ primary, secondary and related keywords throughout your content to show its relevance to a specific topic to search engines.

If you can do this, it will help search engines to return the most relevant results in searches, especially in the context of voice searches through virtual assistants such as Google Home where the top result is often the only one searchers hear.

·      Website security

Google recently announced that, from July 2018, a ‘NOT SECURE’ notification will pop up on websites that are HTTP rather than HTTPS.

Changing the security certificate of your website to HTTPS is an effective way to show that you value the online security of your web visitors. It is also likely that non-secure websites will drop in rankings moving forwards with priority being given to secure sites.

Under the GDPR, you will also need to update your cookie and privacy policies to capture an active opt in rather than implying that a person gives consent to their details being tracked or captured by virtue of visiting your site.

These are all steps that you can take today to boost the visibility of your business at the same time as cleansing your data and making sure that your mailing list is GDPR compliant.

GDPR-compliant marketing options

 

Other GDPR-friendly marketing options

SEO isn’t the only GDPR-friendly marketing option you have at your disposal. You might also want to think about the following:

·      Social media marketing

Social media marketing is likely to become more important to businesses in the GDPR-compliant world.

In many ways, GDPR is about encouraging organisations to create mutually beneficial relationships with their audience, which is a concept that social media is built on.

We already understand that, via social media, fans can unfollow or unlike a business with a single click. Other forms of marketing will be subject to the same rules under the GDPR.

Each of the social media platforms are reviewing and clarifying their position as data processors and data controllers. These are two important distinctions within the GDPR rules.

In the most part though, GDPR is likely to have less of a direct effect on social media marketing than other marketing avenues.

People who follow your social media platforms are actively saying that they want to see your content. If that changes, they understand that they can unfollow at any time. In the meantime, you can ‘speak’ to them via advertising and/or your business profiles without ever holding personal details beyond their names.

A bonus is that social media marketing can have many positive effects on your SEO and vice versa.

Of course, because every business will be looking for GDPR-compliant marketing options, social media marketing may become a lot more competitive.

My advice, as with every other form of marketing and SEO, is to focus on creating relevant and quality content for your audience. Think about how you can give value, be engaged with conversations and genuinely invested in building a relationship with your customers. This is how you will stand out in the marketplace.

·      Content marketing

With GDPR coming into force, content marketing is also an important weapon in your marketing arsenal and great for SEO too.

Content marketing is not reliant on data collection. Instead, your focus should be on creating fresh, informative and relevant content that is targeted to your key audience.

This is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field. If you can get people to read your blogs and share your content, you can build your credibility in three ways: with your audience, with influencers and with Google.

Content marketing is also essential to attract backlinks to your website. Each backlink acts like a vote of confidence from a third party, and the greater the authority of the backlinking sites, the better for your rankings.

Good quality, relevant articles usually encourage people to stay on a website for longer (increasing dwell time) and read deeper into a website via internal links (decreasing bounce rates). Again, these are two important signals to Google about the quality of your content compared to that offered by other sites.

If you can create content that supports the products and services that you offer, you should find that you attract more enquiries by being seen as an expert and, in turn, make more sales.

 

Your mailing list still matters

I’m not suggesting for a second that you should ditch your mailing list and forget about lead capture mechanisms such as your newsletter or a free ebook. These are the lifeblood of most businesses.

What GDPR means is that businesses may need to revise, diversify or clean up their marketing strategies.

SEO, social media marketing and content marketing are all areas that are great for boosting visibility and creating customer loyalty without being reliant on capturing data. You may want to develop your activities in these areas while tightening up your data processes.

 

Conclusion

As an SEO professional, I know that websites are rewarded with higher rankings and greater visibility when they focus on giving value to visitors, creating a great UX, and being ethical.

I believe the GDPR will drive more businesses to build relevant and value relationships with their customers and that this can only be a good thing.

The outcome will be connecting with potential customers who are actively interested in the products and/or services that you offer.

Are you ready for the GDPR? How will the new regulations affect your business, especially your marketing activities? Will you be investing more in SEO as a way to bring in new customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comments below.

 

BEFORE YOU GO

GDPR resources

Are you confused by GDPR?
 
Heard so much conflicting advice that you don’t know what to believe?
 
Not sure if it applies to you?
 
If that’s the case I’ve got something really cool to share with you. This FREE GDPR Checklist makes it easy for you to ensure you’re compliant come May 25th.
 
Download the FREE GDPR Checklist HERE
 
This Checklist has been created by the brilliant Suzanne Dibble, the Small Business Law expert and multi-award-winning data protection lawyer.
 
Suzanne is on a mission to break this complex regulation down into simple steps and bring you the straight truth about what you REALLY need to do to comply.
GDPR comes into force on 25 May 2018, so you need to start working towards compliance now.
 
Get your copy of Suzanne’s straight-talking, FREE Checklist and discover the easy way to GDPR compliance.

 

Suzanne’s free GDPR Checklist will guide you through the simple steps you need to take to be GDPR compliant and to keep the Regulators at bay.

What is off-page SEO? – SEO BASICS

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What is Off-page SEO?

SEO BASICS – WHAT IS OFF-PAGE SEO?

SEO can really be split into 2 main areas.

We have On-page SEO, everything that we do on a page to optimize for Google and Off-page SEO, everything that is done outside of a site or an article to help it rank in the SERPs.

On-page SEO is relatively simple because we can control everything that we do.

We can implement Htags, build internal linking as we link from one related article to another, add images with keyword friendly descriptions and tags and speaking of keywords we can carefully set up and optimize for our chosen keyword phrase or phrases if you are targeting multiple keyword phrases.

You are in control of how you set up for On-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is a little different because there are a few elements to this side of SEO that move out of our control the big one being gaining quality backlinks.

A Backlink is when another site links back to you

A site needs as many quality backlinks as they can get because they provide positive signals that your site is one that Google should take notice of.

There are two types of links that you can acquire for your site. Nofollow links and Dofollow links.

They are self-explanatory really but just in case you don’t know the difference Nofollow links instruct the search bots to ignore the link so if a site links to you with a Nofollow link there is no real benefit.

No link juice is passed to your site.

The only benefit is that you have the chance of a click through to your page as a result of someone reading the content and finding you in an organic way.

Despite the fact that Google ignores Nofollow links they are still very important.

They do generate traffic and visitors to your site and they are a very big part of a natural linking profile,

I will explain more on this in a second.

Dofollow links are links that pass on link juice, they pass on some authority to you.

For this reason, they are on every site owners wish list. They are a positive signal that Google acknowledges.

 

Do you have a natural linking profile?

Dofollow links are harder to obtain because webmasters are scared of passing on their authority they, therefore, tend to be much harder to gain.

Nofollow links, on the other hand, are much easier to obtain. and for this reason, Google looks for you to grow a lot more Nofollow links than Dofollow links.

It would be very unusual to have more Dofollow than Nofollow links because of the difficulty in obtaining Dofollow.

A linking profile with more Dofollow links may be seen as suspicious and unnatural and Google wants everything to be organic.

Google wants webmasters to be rewarded for good content not for finding a way to, as Google sees it, manipulate its search algorithm.

So if you think Nofollow links have no value then think again, they are very much part of a natural linking profile.

 

Why Are Backlinks A Big Deal For Off-page SEO?

As already said backlinks pass on link juice and that boosts your own in the eyes of Google.

It is simple really, the more sites linking to you the more Google pays attention and passes better SERP’S results your way.

What you really want are links from authority sites and news sites.

If you can secure these then your own authority and TrustRank grows but these are not easy to get because authorities tend to link to authorities as a way of qualifying what they write about.

As a blogger, you also need to be qualifying what you say and guess who you link to do this? Yes, the authority sites.

Once you become an authority in what you do it is a win-win when it comes to gaining quality backlinks.

This article is a guide to off-page SEO and so you will find that I also link to a few authorities that qualify and confirm what I am saying.

It is easy for authority sites to get backlinks for the reasons stated but it is not so easy for regular bloggers to get backlinks.

This is why it is crucial to make your content as good as possible and as long-form, insightful and relevant as possible.

You have to stand out.

If you can answer the search users intent you will pick up backlinks and comments on your content.

 

Should You Buy Backlinks?

It sounds like a good way to fast-track your site, doesn’t it?

But knowing that Google likes natural linking the answer is no.

It is a very bad idea. It is seen as a very black hat SEO method.

There is nothing more suspicious to Google than seeing 100 Dofollow links suddenly appear.

And where do these paid for links come from? Are they even from a related niche?

 

Social signals

Social media is one area of off-page SEO that you can control to some degree and it really does benefit your SEO strategy

Again the better your content the more shares you can pick up.

And of course the more followers you have the easier it is to get shares.

If you can grow your audience within your social media channels then it does get a lot easier to create a buzz.

The problem is the buzz doesn’t last that long.

 

Automation

Although automation is useful, I’m not a huge fan.

Saying that there are a few sites that I can recommend that will help you with automation.

When I talk about social media automation I am really talking about some software or a site Tweeting or Pinning or Liking my content on my behalf.

Its basically a means to save time.

And time is something you need if you are running a business or you just have a hectic home life.

Whenever you can free up time it is a good idea.

I tend to go for a semi-automation approach for off-page optimization.

Whenever you share to a social site particularly the main socials that you are active on then you need to appear as a real person rather than a robot.

You need some personality in your share to engage a response from followers.

Engagement is born from creating real natural shares that ask questions to gain a response.

Of course, you can do this with automation but you will find you will forever be updating your message just to keep it natural.

It actually becomes quicker to just go ahead and share without automation.

My strategy with automation is to share on my main social channels with natural call to action type shares and then to automate those to secondary channels.

The secondary channels then appear natural because they follow your real message that you share on your main channels.

An example of a great site to use to set up secondary social shares would be IFTTT

There is so much you can do with IFTTT an example would be when you add a new image to Instagram the same image can be tweeted on Twitter with the same message and tags.

What you have to bear in mind is how the message will appear on different channels.

It is accepted to add lots of tags on Instagram however on Twitter too many will make your tweet look spammy.

For a full guide on how to cross-promote with Instagram and Twitter, you can check out my guide here How to cross promote with Instagram.

 

Leverage 0ther Social Media Users

As I mentioned earlier it is very difficult to keep the buzz going when you social share.

After all, there is only so many times that you can share the same message.

But what if you could leverage other social media users to Tweet, Pin, Facebook share etc for you?

Does that sound like a good idea for you?

It does to me!

It is very easy to leverage other social media users particularly on Twitter and gain tweets on accounts with potentially 100s of thousands of followers.

If like me you think this sounds like a good idea then you need to head over to ViralContentBee and create a free account.

There is an upgrade but you do really just need the free version.

ViralContentBee is a community site that allows you to add articles that you would like shared on social media.

You simply share other peoples articles for ViralContentBee credits that you can then apply to your own. It is a reciprocation kind of deal.

ViralContentBee (no affiliation) is one of those sites that you must join because as long as you keep your projects active you can keep the buzz around your own content alive.

There is also another overlooked feature on VCB and that is the ability to see who is interacting and engaging with your projects.

You just click interactions on the VCB menu and you get a list of everyone who has Tweeted, Facebook shared, Pinned on Pinterest and Stumbled.

 

 

Off-page SEO - VCB
Click Interactions on the VCB menu bar to see who has been engaging with your content.

Building Relationships Really Boosts Off-page SEO

Checking out who interacts with you on ViralContentBee gives you the opportunity to build valuable relationships with bloggers in your niche.

This leads to more followers and the potential of organic Dofollow links to your own content and maybe guest blogging opportunities which can prove very useful.

 

Blog Comments

When readers visit your pages they often have the option of commenting and having their say on the subject you have written about.

This is great because it keeps the buzz around the content going and it makes the content longer and adds additional value.

And yes you guessed it does help lead to better rankings as Google notices.

If you want more comments on your posts then work on building relationships and comment on relevant posts.

It often leads to reciprocation and it shows other niche bloggers what you are writing about as they click through to you to comment.

 

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a very popular method of growing backlinks.

The idea is that you write for another blogger in exchange for a link back to one of your articles.

There is, however, some controversy about this as Google has gone on record to say that if you are guest blogging purely for backlinks then it is not a very good idea and can get you penalized.

The reason being the links you gain are not organic and gained naturally. You basically put them there yourself.

I don’t have a problem with guest blogging at all.

I do accept them on my own site as long as they meet my specifications

1/ The content has to be great

2/ It has to answer user intent and offer value

3/ Long-form content is what Google likes

I am also happy to contribute to other webmasters sites, providing they are the same niche or closely related.

Google loves great content and great content is still great content despite there being a backlink or two within the post.

Google is not going to worry too much about that.

However, if you add 3,4,5 backlinks to your own content and the article is very short in length then that will be seen very differently by Google.

If you are linking back to your own site more than once or twice I would recommend no following some of the links so as to get Google to discount them.

Show Google that your guest blogging for the right reasons and that it is just not a part of a bigger backlinking strategy.

 

Off-page SEO Checklist

Here are some SEO Basics to boost your Off-page SEO and the backlinks to your site.

5 Simple Ideas For Link Building

1/ Create great content.

If your content serves a purpose, if it answers a question then it will gain backlinks over time naturally and this is the Google way.

But it is slow and you need to be patient.

2/ Drive traffic with social media

It is by far the best way to get pretty much instant traffic to your content while you wait for Google to decide where to place you in the SERP’s.

Social sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest are great traffic generators.

3/ Guest blogging done the right way works

The content that you write for someone else’s blog needs to be as good if not better than you add to your own.

4/ Reach out to other bloggers

If you have written a great article that you think would benefit the readers of someone else’s blog then drop them a message on their contact form.

Maybe they will agree and link to you.

5/ Be consistent in what you do

Post regularly, share on social media often. Be consistent in what you do.

Off-page SEO Backlinking Checklist
Thanks for pinning my image to Pinterest 😉

Off-page SEO – Takeaways

SEO is not that hard to set up on your site but it can be time-consuming.

With On-page SEO, you’re in control, when you move to Off-page SEO then it gets a little bit more difficult to get the desired results you are after.

The best course of action is to just write the best content that you can.

Get noticed for the right reasons.

Create exposure to what you write via social media. Build relationships and trust and grow your brand awareness.

That’s all for now

If you have any thoughts on this subject then please leave them in the comments section and I will be sure to follow up with you

Regards

Dexter

Convert to HTTPS by July 2018 or Risk Losing Rankings and Customers

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LATEST UPDATE: Google Sets a July Deadline for HTTPS

Google has announced a deadline of July 2018 as the date for when Chrome will begin clearly warning users if a site is insecure. This prominent warning is likely to affect how secure users feel and may cause visitors to leave a site, resulting in a negative impact on a sites bounce rate, impressions, clicks, and sales.

This warning comes after a previous one last year where Google warned webmasters to switch from non-secure HTTP to HTTPS, or risk losing traffic.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a way to make your website secure and protect ‘the integrity and confidentiality of your users’ data’ (Google).
Way back in August 2014, Google announced that changing the security certificate of your website to HTTPS/SSL (also known as ‘HTTP over TLS’, Transport Layer Security) would be used as a ranking signal, albeit a weak one. At the time Google predicted that switching from HTTP to HTTPS would positively impact on less than 1% of global queries.

In fact, in a Google webmaster hangout, Google’s John Mueller said that HTTPS is far from a ‘magic bullet’ that would cause a visible change or noticeable SEO benefits, although making your site more secure does make sense in the long-term for user peace of mind.

Back in 2015, HTTPS was only a minor ranking signal that didn’t make a huge difference to your overall rankings, however, Google has continued to look at ways to improve and prioritise website security. The search engine wants to make sure that the websites people access via Google are secure and what they say they are.

Latest Information from Google: February 2018

Google’s announcement was firm about their goal to warn users of insecure sites, with the intent of persuading more web publishers into upgrading to HTTPS.

“Chrome’s new interface will help users understand that all HTTP sites are not secure, and continue to move the web towards a secure HTTPS web by default.”

Google http warning in Chrome

 

Previous Information from Google: 19th August 2017
Google Is Forcing You to Switch to HTTPS by October or Lose Rankings

Google is now sending out emails to Search Console users saying that if you don’t switch from your non-secure HTTP website to HTTPS, then you risk losing traffic and have a “NOT SECURE” notification pop-up on your website for all Chrome users. The deadline is October 2017.

Here is a copy of one of the emails that were sent out:

Google HTTPS Security Warning

HTTPS is safe, HTTP is not

The reason for Google’s push towards HTTPS is website security. Earlier in 2017, Google sent out notifications that secure-data must be secured. This includes, but is not limited to sites that collect customer data such as credit-card information and even personal information. HTTP basically allows unauthorized people to tap into your computer and steal all of your valuable information. Google wants to avoid that by strongly encouraging the shift to HTTPS.

 

Convert to HTTPS by October 2017 or Lose Rankings

 

HTTPS Everywhere

When presenting the ‘HTTPS Everywhere’ campaign, Pierre Far from the Google Webmaster team and Ilya Grigorik from the Google Developer team explained why Google believes that every website should be secure.

Their position is that a single search may not reveal much about a person but, cumulatively, the websites we visit, the searches we make, the articles we read and even the music we listen to online can all reveal a great deal about our personalities, our likes and dislikes, our location, belongings, holidays and much more. Google says that its priority is secure searching and protecting the privacy of web users against malicious attacks.

In the HTTPS Everywhere presentation (which is worth a watch if you have a spare 45 minutes), Far and Grigorik explained that switching to an HTTPS certificate helps with:

  • Authentication – Is the website visitor on the site they think they’re on?
  • Data integrity – Is the data safe when transferred?
  • Encryption – Could someone be eavesdropping on the website visitor?

HTTPS stops malicious attackers from impersonating the destination site, tampering with data or listening in.

You can read a full guide on how to secure your website with HTTPS here. Different 2048-bit TLS certificates are available for commercial and non-commercial websites, as well as single host certificates and multi-domain certificates.

Need a Guide to Stress-Free HTTPS Migration? Take a look at the following from Search Engine Journal

Want to check that your SSL certificate is installed correctly? Here’s a free SSL Checker

It’s a good idea to test your server too – you can do that here SSL Server Test

 

Google Chrome

In December 2014, the issue of secure browsing came to the forefront of SEO conversations again when Google developers working on the search engine’s Chrome browser proposed warning people their data is at risk every time they visit a website that does not use the HTTPS system (you can read the proposal here). When implemented, initially planned for 2015, web users will see a message that the connection they’re about to make to a website ‘provides no data security’ or they may simply see a red cross through the padlock symbol at the start of the web address.

In 2015 only 33% of websites used HTTPS, this number has grown and today the average volume of encrypted internet traffic finally surpassed the average volume of unencrypted traffic. When Google does begin to flag up warnings on non-secure HTTP websites we are likely to see a much bigger swing towards HTTPS across the board.

This may initially cause confusion for website users who may not understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and worry that there is something wrong with a website they have previously used without hesitation. People tend to assume that websites and emails are private but creating an indicator that this isn’t the case will challenge that assumption.

Webmasters will face the initial challenge of moving a website over to HTTPS but supporters of Google’s HTTPS Everywhere campaign feel this will be a good thing for the Internet and Internet users in the long-term.

Are you concerned about this latest update?

Are you now thinking about moving your site to HTTPS? Or have you already moved your site? Are you concerned about this update? Please let me know in the comments below – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Free SEO Checklist

Find out how to create a website that Google and your customers love with our SEO Checklist

Discover how to:

  • Optimise your website for higher rankings in Google while also providing a good user experience for your customers.
  • Build site credibility and increase influence so that Google ranks you even higher and your potential customers find and trust you
  • Create unique and authentic content to drive conversations and fuel online searches leading to more quality leads, inquiries, and sales.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE SEO CHECKLIST

 

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The no-nonsense guide to using Google Analytics to boost your SEO – Part 2

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In Part One of our Google Analytics mini-series, we looked at how to set up Google Analytics for your website. This article goes deeper into Google Analytics to help you make sense of the various reports and options.

Understanding Google Analytics

Now you have Google Analytics set up for your website, you can start to get to grips with the data and what it all means.

When you log in to Google Analytics, you’ll be presented with a screen that lists the various websites (‘properties’) you’ve set up under your account. Click on ‘All website data’ under the applicable website.

From here, you will enter the main Home screen, which has a menu running down the left-hand side and brings you straight to an overview of your website’s main data for the last 7 days.

Google Analytics

To see data about your audience click on Audience Overview. If you want to get an overview of your audience for a different time period, simply click on the dates on the top right-hand side of the screen and enter the date range you want to see.

Google Analytics

 

This initial Audience Overview screen contains some important data:

  • The number of sessions – a session is a period where a user engages with your website in some way. One user could account for several sessions if they’ve been back to your site a few times.
  • The number of unique users – this is the number of unique users (both new visitors and returning) who have spent at least one session on your website.
  • The number of page views – this is the total number of web pages that people have looked at during the time period.
  • The number of pages/session – in other words, this data tells you the average number of web pages people look at during a session. The higher the number of pages per session, the more deeply people are reading into your site.
  • The average session duration – i.e. how long each session lasts on average. The longer your session average, the more likely Google is to view your site as ‘sticky’, attracting visitors who want to read what you have to offer.
  • Your website’s bounce rate – this is the percentage of single-page visits to your site, where a visitor comes in and leaves on the same page without going anywhere else on the site.

As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate of 50% or less is excellent; 60-70% is typical, 70-80% is poor and 80%+ is cause for concern. However, we have heard of high performing websites with a 75% bounce rate, the key being that the remaining 25% are target customers who engage extensively with the website.

A high bounce rate might suggest that you need to look at ways to make your main landing pages, including the Home page, more engaging to your target customers. If your website is new, you can probably expect to see your high bounce rate come down over the next few weeks but keep an eye on this figure in case it doesn’t improve.

  • The percentage of new sessions – in other words, how many of the sessions during the time period were first-time visitors to your site.
  • The number of returning visitors and new visitors – this is a good indication of how much of your web traffic comes from visitors who are already familiar with your business.
  • On this initial Audience Overview screen, you can also click on the various Demographics options under the Language, System and Mobile headings for a quick snapshot of where your website visitors live, what language they speak, what devices they’re using to view your site and much more.

Real-time data in Google Analytics

Real-time data in Google Analytics

 

As the name would suggest, the Real Time option in the main left-hand navigation menu of Google Analytics lets you see what’s happening live on your site at any given moment. The Overview screen (see the picture above) shows at a glance whether you have new or returning visitors currently on the site, the top active pages – i.e. what pages visitors are currently viewing, how long they’ve been on the site, the number of pages they’ve viewed, where they’re located, how they found your site (e.g. social media, search engine), and the keywords used to find the site.

This is a really useful tool if you’re running a specific campaign or you’ve published a new blog and have promoted it on several platforms, as you can see which platform is driving traffic to your site most effectively.

Under the Overview option, you can also click on Location, Traffic sources, Content, Events and Conversions for more in-depth real-time data about who’s visiting your website and where they come from.

 

Audience data in Google Analytics

Audience data in Google Analytics

You’ll notice that there are a number of menus and sub-menus under the Audience heading.

  • The Demographics and Interests data is there to help you better understand your website visitors – how old they are, their gender and their interests. This is all information that you can use to begin creating or refining your profile for your target customer.
  • Under the Geo heading, you can click on Language or Location to find out more about where your customers are based. This is a helpful tool if you’re trying to attract local business.

For example, I’ve known clients who run hotels and restaurants make good use of this data as it’s shown them that a lot of their website traffic comes from people in London who are looking for weekend breaks to the countryside, enabling them to tweak their on-page copy to make it more appealing to these potential customers.

  • The Behaviour report lets you look at data around your new and returning customers. You can see, for example, whether you get a higher bounce rate from new visitors or from returning visitors. A high bounce rate for new visitors might suggest that your website isn’t making what you offer clear, whereas you might experience a higher bounce rate for returning visitors because they are literally popping onto your site to read a specific blog article or to check something they’ve already seen on the site, then leaving because they’ve already read much of your content.
  • The Frequency & Recency data shows you how many times returning customers tend to come back and the average number of days between sessions.
  • The Engagement report lets you drill down more into how long people are spending on your site and how many pages they’re reading. Are people spending just 0-10 seconds on your site or spending minutes or even hours reading your content? You may spot some trends here.
  • The Technology data enables you to see what browsers and operating systems people are using to view your website. It’s a good idea to check that visitors are able to see your website properly in any browser. You can do this using a tool like Browser Shots or BrowserStack.
  • The Mobile data will show you how many people are viewing your website from desktops, mobile phones or tablets. Click on Devices and you can even see which mobiles and tablets people are using.

These days, it’s important to have a responsive website, or a desktop and mobile version of your site if you’re not in the position to create a responsive site at the moment. A responsive site is one that will adapt to fit the device on which it’s being viewed. If you don’t have a responsive or mobile version of your site, you may find you lose visitors who are on mobile devices because they may have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to view your pages, the text may also be difficult to read, and buttons and pull-down menus wrongly sized.

 

Benchmarking in Google Analytics.

 

  • In September 2014, Google announced the return of Benchmarking in Google Analytics. This data is great for contextualising the performance of your website against trends in your industry as it compares your site’s performance to data averaged from thousands of other sites in the same sector.

In the image above, we can see that the benchmark uses data from 91,518 other websites under the Advertising & Marketing category. The website in question is largely following the benchmark line, outperforming the benchmark on 8th September and 8th October, for example, but slightly underperforming on 28th, 29th September.

The top line of data gives a good overview. In the website above, we can see that it attracts 8.85% more sessions than the benchmark and 26.27% more pages/session. People spend 52.35% more time on the site than the benchmark and the site has a Bounce rate that’s 39.01% lower than the benchmark.

The data in the six columns breaks things down by the default ‘Channel’ grouping, i.e. where the traffic came from, but you can also view the data by location or device. Positive percentages (indicated by green arrows and boxes) show where your website is performing higher than the benchmark, whereas negative numbers show where the site is performing lower than the benchmark. The only exception to this is in the Bounce Rate column where negative percentages mean your bounce rate is lower than the industry benchmark.

With the website above, the business owner knows that they have sat back with their social media and SEO efforts recently and the downturn in sessions and new visitors is noticeable as a result. What they can see is that when people find the site, they are spending a lot of time on it.

  • The Users Flow data enables you to see how visitors move through your website – e.g. what pages they land on, which pages they visit next and where they leave the site.

You can sort this data in a multitude of ways; for example, where does traffic from Google bring people into the site? If they arrive on your Home page, where do they go next? If people are coming to your site because of blog links on social media, which blogs are attracting the most traffic? Do people just read the blog and leave or do they stay on the site? What calls to action could you add at the end of your blog articles to keep people reading? Do people on mobile devices flow through the site differently to desktop users? All of this information is available here.

 

Acquisitions data in Google Analytics

The Acquisitions information available in Google Analytics is where things get really meaty in terms of reviewing your SEO efforts. This is the section to review regularly if you want to know where your traffic is coming from and whether your various campaigns are working.

Acquisitions data in Google Analytics

  • As in the other sections, the Overview screen gives you an immediate snapshot of how your website is ‘acquiring’ visitors. This data can be sorted by Channel – e.g. organic traffic, social media, referrals, direct traffic, emails and other – or by Source and/or Medium. If you’ve recently written a guest blog for another site or you’re using a WordPress plugin to retweet old blogs, for example, this is the place to see whether they’ve generated any traffic.
  • The All Traffic data will let you take a deeper look at how your visitors behaved from all channels, mediums and sources. You may see that organic searches through Google account for the biggest percentage or that when people click through from Facebook, they are less likely to bounce away from your site.
  • Under the All Referrals category, you can see where visitors have found you through backlinks on other sites, guest blogs, links in your newsletter or directory sites, as just a few examples. If you’re attracting a lot of traffic from a particular source, you might think about how you can nurture this relationship or promote this source more frequently.
  • If you send out a regular newsletter using a mailing service like Mailchimp or Mad Mimi, you can connect it to Google Analytics and review the traffic resulting from the campaign under the Campaigns heading. Which campaigns generated the most traffic, sessions or new users? Did you do anything differently in that campaign? Could you produce another newsletter on a related topic?
  • The Keyword data is the one that people are often interested in but Google doesn’t tell us as much as it once did here. I personally prefer the data you find under Search Console>Queries. I also find that Google Search Console – which we’ll be covering in a forthcoming blog – provides more comprehensive keyword data.

Apparently, Google has reduced the amount of keyword data available in Google Analytics as a reminder that keywords are just a small part of successful SEO and shouldn’t be our primary focus. It’s worth checking out the data here for some information about keywords used to find your site in organic searches. If you use paid-for Google AdWords campaigns, you can also review the keyword performance here.

  • The Cost Analysis data is in BETA testing and will let you see visit, cost and revenue performance data for your paid marketing channels, such as Google AdWords.
  • If you run a Google AdWords campaign, you can link it to your Google Analytics account for a comprehensive breakdown of each campaign’s performance. You will find various options under the AdWords heading and subheadings.
  • If you’re using social media to promote your business, then the Social information in Google Analytics will let you track which platforms are bringing traffic to your site. Are most of your visitors finding you through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest or somewhere else altogether? Which URLs from your website are people sharing and talking about on social media? This is the place to look.

Under the different headings, you can find out more about where your traffic is coming from and trackbacks to your site. You can also track how they are performing with the Social Plug-in Analytics.

  • The Search Console section of Google Analytics is where you will find the most helpful data about the keywords people are using to find your website. Click on Queries and you’ll be able to see a breakdown of the keywords used to find you during the given time period, the number of impressions for each keyword (i.e. how many times your website was seen in search engine results pages (SERPs)), the number of clicks through to your site from that keyword search, your average position for the keyword in search engine rankings, and your clickthrough rate (i.e. the percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks). A high clickthrough rate typically means that you are attracting targeted traffic, so you may not be getting a massive number of impressions but those that find your site are interested in visiting it.

Which are your best ranking keywords? Are they attracting much traffic? Which keywords attract the most impressions? Which keywords give you the best clickthrough rates? The answers to these questions can help you decide whether you need to tweak your content or write blogs around specific topics, for example.

  • The Landing pages data under Search Console lets you see which pages most often show up in SERPs as well as the impressions, clicks, average ranking and clickthrough rate. The Countries section shows you where in the world the daily impressions are being seen.

 

Understanding how visitors behave on your website

The Behaviour data in Google Analytics is really valuable in terms of understanding which pages on your website attract lots of visitors, where people come in, where they go and where they leave.

Behaviour data in Google Analytics

  • You can sort the Overview data by Page Views, Exit %, Average time on site, and more. This overview screen, which defaults to Page Views, will show you at a glance which were your ten most viewed pages during the selected time period. If, for example, your Rates page is one of the most viewed pages on the site, you might want to check that the information is up-to-date and that it reflects your latest rates.
  • The Site Content sections will really let you get up close and personal with how the different pages on your website are performing. Which get seen the most? Which have the highest bounce rates? Which bring the most traffic into your site? Which keep people reading? Which tend to be the exit pages? This information can all be found within the subheadings of this section of Google Analytics.
  • The page speeds of your website are important to the visitors’ experience. If certain pages, or your site as a whole, have a slow load time, you may find that visitors navigate away from the site to look for one that’s faster. The Site Speed reports will let you explore how your website is performing in terms of load speed. Click on Speed Suggestions to view the PageSpeed Insights from Google, what could do with fixing and how.
  • The Site Search report shows you how many people are using the search bar on your website to find content and what keywords they’re using to search.
  • The Events reports show you how people use the interactive elements on your website, such as video players, games and other interactive experiences. When a player watches a video, for example, no page view is generated, so the Events data means this interaction still gets captured. Google provides an Events Tracking Guide to help you make the most of this feature.
  • Google AdSense is a free way to earn money by displaying targeted Google ads to your website’s visitors. AdSense also lets you provide Google search to your site users and earn money by displaying Google ads on SERPs. If you have an AdSense account, this is where you will find the key metrics.
  • You can use the Experiments feature in Google Analytics to split test two versions of the same landing page to see which works best. Click on ‘Create experiment’ to set up your split test and generate the applicable code for Google Analytics to track the performance of the two page variations.
  • The In-page analytics can be a bit glitchy at times but they’re incredibly useful in terms of seeing where people are clicking within your web pages to navigate through the site. Are they clicking on your main navigation menu, sliders, images, hyperlinks or calls to action? Knowing where people are most likely to click can help you decide where to put the most important information on the page.

 

Tracking and measuring conversions in Google Analytics

So now we move to the final section of reports available in Google Analytics: the Conversions menu.

Tracking and measuring conversions in Google Analytics

The data under Goals lets you track how your goals are performing.

  • If you sell products or services online, then you can add a snippet of tracking code to track data such as product sales, purchase amounts and billing locations. The various reports in the E-commerce section enable you to segment and analyse your data, and discover relationships between your marketing campaigns, user engagement and transactions.
  • As Google Analytics explains, customers will typically visit your website multiple times before they actually buy from you, sign up or register. A potential customer may find your brand in an ad, on social media or through word of mouth referrals, visit your site to find out more, then finally return to buy from you. In fact, it’s estimated that people require between 7 and 27 touchpoints with a brand before they become customers. The data in the Multi-Channel Funnels and Attributions sections lets you analyse your customers’ conversions paths – in other words, the sequence of interactions that led to the goal conversions. This can help you make decisions about your advertising and marketing strategy.

So there you have it, our no-nonsense guide to using Google Analytics to boost your SEO. We hope you’ve found it helpful. Which sections do you think you’d like to know more about? How will you be using Google Analytics to supercharge your website’s performance? We’d love to hear more from you in the Comments below.