Fibre Marketing

Year: 2019

12 Days of Xmas: 12 Reasons Why We Love SEO

Posted on by Chloe

Days are getting colder and shorter, but Christmas time is the season of warmth, good cheer and being thankful for all the good things the year has brought. It’s times like these that we stop and appreciate our industry, and what it takes to really master search engine optimisation. We love bringing our clients tangible results again and again, and we love SEO because it’s simply the best way to do it.

This holiday season, we’re listing the 12 reasons why we love SEO.

It’s rewarding

SEO techniques can help webpages rank on the first page of Google. But this is easier said than done! However after creating content, building links, enhancing GMB listings and more, the wonderful thing is that it’s more than possible to see real results. Staying committed throughout this process means we get to see our clients’ brands becoming more visible, with measurable boosts to their business.

It’s creative

Search engine optimisation is now a key part of marketing spend, but not without significant ingenuity. We love that we get to be on the cutting edge and pioneer trends in the digital marketing world, improving the way we all use and understand technology.

It allows you to be flexible

Working in SEO is truly a job for the modern employee. Connected by the internet, we’re not forced to stick with outdated workplace conventions, and can work remotely, independently, or create a career path that’s 100% our own. The world of work is changing, and as we move into 2020, we like to think that those in SEO are leading the way with creative, flexible work schedules.

It’s a life skill

As the world grows more complex, we see the emergence of many increasingly niche job roles. But when it comes to SEO, you’re looking at a skillset that can be applied almost anywhere. Everyone is online so everyone uses search engines. Mastering this arena means we get to have life skills that we can use for almost anything.

You can specialise

With an SEO career, you have the opportunity to specialise if you want to. The world is your oyster, and we love the fact that you can pick and choose the areas of SEO – be it content strategy, technical or, digital PR – that you’re most passionate about.

It’s challenging

Did we mention it’s easier said than done? In the SEO industry, the rules are constantly shifting and the field is a dynamic one, to say the least. We’re grateful that we always get to learn something new, to evolve, and to create better solutions every day. The fact is that you cannot succeed in this field without a willingness to experiment, persevere and push yourself.

No two days are the same

Those working in SEO (or at least at Fibre Marketing) aren’t too familiar with the boring 9 to 5. On looking back at the past year, most of us are amazed at the immense diversity of the work we do.

It opens further career paths

There’s not only the opportunity to carry these proficiencies into other careers, but SEO skills are also crucial for those wanting to break away from the mainstream and start their own fledgling businesses. We love that SEO gives us a key insight into business operations – not to mention the sense of determination and hard work that comes with the territory!

It’s genuinely valuable

SEO marketers have an advantage over their more traditional counterparts – they get to devise campaigns that are bigger, more targeted and more intelligent than ever before. There’s a lot of optimism that comes from knowing that you’re helping business owners to achieve the goals they never thought possible.

It touches on many different marketing platforms

PR, social media, even coding… with such a board range of tools at your disposal, SEO marketers seldom feel hemmed in by their work! There’s always a new skill to acquire, and a new angle to optimise.

It builds character

Finally, on a more personal note, SEO is not just practically valuable and technically challenging. It’s also a field that demands only the best from its workers in terms of resilience, creativity and teamwork. Thriving in SEO asks a lot of you – but the rewards are worth it.

You’re never alone

The power of the internet is sometimes mind-blowing. One of the great things about a career in SEO is that you have access to a thriving Twitter community and online forums that are always there to help you troubleshoot, learn something new or sympathise with your challenges.

Fibre Predicts The SEO Landscape for 2020

Posted on by Ella

In 2018 alone, Google made over 3,200 changes to search, and while this figure is yet to be determined for 2019, it does show how much can change in the space of a year. And with another busy year nearing ever closer, the team at Fibre can only guess what might be in store for the SEO landscape.

So without further ado our Director, Adam Adlkish, kickstarts our SEO predictions for 2020.

Adam Adlkish – Company Director

Prediction: ‘It’s all about brand. I believe brand strength is key to success with organic traffic, especially for online and e-commerce enterprises. There will be less focus on anchor texts orientating around brand offerings, which has been an SEO strategy since 2003.’

Tell us more: More recently, organic listings have been pushed further down the results page with featured snippets, map packs and Ads dominating the top positions on the SERP. After this, usually the first few organic results are well-known, high authority brands, leaving little wiggle room for a smaller company to make their mark and persuade users that they too can be trusted.

This is where branding strategies are key. Building brand awareness and credibility can be done through undertaking numerous tasks such as, comment and review maintenance on GMBs, achieving quality, authoritative links for the client that are relevant to the user, and displaying signs of E-A-T across as many aspects of a site as possible.

Edward Ziubrzynski – Search Performance Manager

Prediction: ‘For E-commerce category pages, I predict that content heavy SEO strategies will slowly become less important. Instead, Google will better rank pages that immediately satisfy the intent of the searcher,  favouring pages that offer immediate access to products and/or services as opposed to typical keyword optimised content that will interfere with the user experience of the page.’

Tell us more: While Ed’s prediction goes against the content-first rule of thumb for SEO strategies in the mainstream, we are currently seeing some success with one of our clients who have strayed from the norm. Originally, heavy blocks of content were placed at the top of the page and while this did give the client a small boost in rankings, it certainly wasn’t enough. We then decided to cut down the text so that the user could find the product listings quicker, and we’ve been seeing steady improvements in rankings ever since.

Google likes to see fresh content that marries providing value with a great user experience. If users struggle to find your products, it’s compromising on their shopping and that’s not going to help bolster brand visibility.

Ella Morley – Search Engine Marketing Executive

 Prediction: ‘The gap between average desktop (46.52%) and mobile (45.98%) market share in the UK is rapidly closing. While website rankings are still primarily orientated around the desktop version of a site, we’ve seen some significant hints from Google in the past couple of years or so pointing towards the need for a more mobile-friendly SEO approach.

 It’s been a slow slog towards Google ranking mobile content alongside desktop, but I think that 2020 will be the year we see more progress. With Google defaulting mobile-first indexing for new sites this July and other tools jumping on the hype, SEO’s will start to direct more attention to their mobile SEO strategy and harness that 51.51% of web traffic.’

Tell us more: As an SEO agency, we cannot stress enough the importance of mobile SEO. If your website is not optimised for mobile you’re missing out on roughly half of your traffic potential. Slow user load times, difficulty navigating the site on the go and poor adaptation to a smaller screen size, are big red warning signs indicating that your user experience is not up to scratch.

Chloe Price – Content Marketing Specialist

Prediction: ‘Content creators are increasingly desperate for links and seeing as interest in SEO continues to grow rapidly, more journalists and bloggers have become aware of the true aim of guest posting. Publishers will be putting up as many barriers as they can, including increasing guest posting prices, paywalls or demanding more link-for-link exchanges. However, as this goes against Google’s guidelines, sites that ‘sell’ links will see decreased traffic and SEO performance sooner rather than later.

 Link relevance will also be the top priority now that branding is becoming more of a focus. In order to encourage brand awareness, the links need to place clients as authoritative sites in their industry so that consumers make a connection with the company and will want to return. If a link does not encourage engagement, then it will be rendered useless.’

Tell us more: As we mentioned earlier, there were many updates this year based on link trust, and affiliate sites were knocked down the rankings and disavows grew in significance. These updates certainly tell us that link quality is far more important than quantity, and so a few links on incredibly good sites will be worth more than hundreds of sites with hardly any authority.

Before, links were inserted into articles just for ‘link juice’ purposes, but when users followed them through there wouldn’t really be much interaction on-site following that. Now that brands are needing a push, any links built must provide value, even if that makes finding accurate sites more of a challenge.

Jamie Smith – Search Marketing Specialist

Prediction: ‘In regards to local search, I believe we’ll see even more of a push towards Google My Business (GMB) pages.

 With the SERPs continuing to evolve to show more local results, we are seeing local map packs reign as the top dogs. Ensuring that businesses have this profile updated and continuously interacted with will be a stand out factor in comparison to those who don’t. 

 I can also see the GMBs becoming more of a one-stop-shop. As with the current hotel format (showing increased filters, resources, and an additional fourth map pack addition), Google allows you to book without even visiting the website. It won’t be long before we see other businesses actioned in the same way.’

Tell us more: Google My Business is certainly becoming more and more of a competitor for businesses, as features are constantly being added that have the potential to steal organic traffic, which has been kickstarting a lot of controversy in the industry. This illuminates the fact that in order to give your business a boost, you need to optimise your GMB listings to the best possible state.

Local packs are taking up more room on SERPs, and if you’re not included, you’re going to see the effects with your traffic, and looking at the way Google’s search features are going, businesses will need to work harder if they’re involved in the travel or hospitality industries. Booking flights, rooms and orders are being integrated into search. Jessica Bowman from Search Engine Land has previously commented that Google is becoming more of a portal and less of a search engine – and it’s certainly plain to see across many searches.

Emma Howell – Content Marketing Specialist

Prediction: ‘I think that building a brand up through a natural network of links will become more of a priority. Furthermore, relevance of the anchor and context concerning the link will be very important.’

Tell us more:  Emma’s prediction aligns with the theories of the general SEO community: that branding is one of the strongest aspects to be considered in any search strategy. As mentioned earlier, this suggests that link builders will play a role in gaining placements on sites that will drive traffic and conversions, as opposed to creating links that simply sit on the page for SEO purposes.

The anchor of a text is certainly an interesting one. Ever since the Penguin Algorithm Update, Google has been paying close attention to anchor text and the keywords used, which is why nowadays most SEO’s play it safe and work to build a more natural linking profile.

Eryk Kilianek – Junior Search Specialist

Prediction: ‘Small high street businesses will struggle to attract new customers without appropriately optimising their Google My Business listing. Google has made it relatively straightforward to achieve some local visibility and build trust with your target market using their free tools such as GMB and website builder. In my opinion, 2020 is the best time for local businesses to build up their listings and trust with local customers before the competition.’

Tell us more:  We all know what a difference having a Google My Business profile can make – after all, 86% of people look up the locations of businesses on Google Maps, and it’s your GMB listing that helps you sit on top of that map pack. It has also been estimated that a whopping $10.3 billion worth of sales are lost every year due to false or missing local listing information.

Back To Basics: A Guide To Keyword Research

Posted on by Chloe

Keyword research is an essential SEO technique used to drive traffic, increase visibility, and boost revenue potential.

In this guide, we’re going to cover everything keyword related – from how to find the best keywords, to how to use keyword tools effectively. We will also provide you with some valuable tips to enhance your keyword research and maximise the benefits.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is a process that allows you to identify words and phrases that people use in search engines like Google. You can then use this information to optimise your content around those key terms.

The main aim of keyword research is to determine which words or phrases are most aligned with your business’ content. This allows you to tailor your content market strategy to increase visibility and improve search engine rankings. Businesses’ can use a number of tools to conduct effective keyword research. We will discuss these in more detail later in the guide.

Why is it important?

Keyword research has a significant impact on every SEO strategy within your business. It is an extremely powerful marketing tool that can be utilised to drive traffic, boost search rankings, and give you valuable insight into your target audience. Without keyword research, your marketing campaigns are likely to be ineffective and produce poor results. If people aren’t searching for your keywords, then they aren’t going to see your content, regardless of how good it is.

In short, to survive and thrive in the digital age, a business must be able to be found online. For that reason, keyword research should be one of the first steps in any SEO marketing campaign.

Step by step guide to keyword research

Now you know why keyword research is so important, we’re going to discuss how to conduct effective keyword research:

Step 1: Brainstorm a list of key topics

The first step is to brainstorm topics that users are likely to search within your niche.

Create a list of broad topics related to your business. For instance, if you run a finance business then you may consider topics like accounting, investing or the stock market.

Step 2: Use keyword tools to find specific phrases

Once you have a list of topics, you need to carry out keyword research to determine the best words and phrases within each topic. You can try typing the word into Google incognito and seeing what terms it suggests for you. This is a great way to identify keywords as Google only suggests terms that are searched frequently by users. You can also try checking the “searches related to” section at the bottom of Google’s search results for variation.

Keyword tools can be a highly effective way to identify the best keywords for your content. Here are three keyword tools that you can use to find specific phrases within each topic:

  • SEMRush – This tool offers both a free and premium paid version. The free version still offers plenty of valuable information, including a detailed list of search results for every individual keyword. The paid version provides a more in-depth analysis with 10,000 results generated on every report.
  • Ahrefs – The “Keyword Explorer” section of Ahrefs offers a huge selection of useful data on each keyword you input. This can help you decide whether a keyword is worth using.
  • Google Keyword Planner – If you have a Google Ads account, then you have access to Google’s free Keyword Planner. You simply log into your account and enter the “tools” bar on the top right.

Step 3: Consider search intent

It is essential that you consider search intent if you want to use keyword research effectively. You must understand why users search specific words and phrases and think carefully about what they are actually searching for. Knowing search intent plays a key role in successful keyword research and SEO marketing in general.

Tips for effective keyword research

Hopefully, you now have an idea about how to find keywords related to your business niche. Below, we are going to give you some useful tips on how to further enhance your keyword research:

  • Avoid using only high-volume keywords as these can be extremely competitive. Low-volume and long-tail keywords often generate much higher conversions.
  • Use Google search to check who ranks top for your individual keywords. If it’s major companies like eBay and Amazon, then it’s going to be incredibly hard to gain that top spot on Google. You should, therefore, consider choosing a different keyword that is less competitive.
  • Try to gain featured snippets on Google, as these can significantly boost visibility for your site. If there is one for a specific keyword you’re using, then look at what you need to do – Make a new page? Restructure content? Optimise?

Summary

Keyword research is an extremely valuable marketing tool that can be used to increase visibility, boost search engine rankings, and increase sales and profits. It should be the starting point of any successful SEO campaign. Hopefully, this guide has equipped you with the basic knowledge to find quality keywords and use them as part of an effective content marketing strategy.

The tips that we have provided can help get you started, but as keyword research can become more advanced or you find yourself falling deeper and deeper into the black hole of searches, an SEO expert will offer guidance and conduct research efficiently and quickly for your website.

How Guest Posting Can Still Build Good Links

Posted on by Ella

Recently, there have been several rumours that guest blogging is no longer an effective way to build links and boost search rankings. In fact, some individuals are even claiming that companies using guest blogging for SEO will be penalised. Despite this, there is still plenty of evidence to suggest that guest blogging remains a viable way to drive traffic, generate targeted leads, and improve search engine rankings. A recent survey found that 60% of online blogs write 1-5 guest blogs per month and consider guest blogging to be a powerful tool for lead generation and SEO. With this in mind, here is everything you need to know about how to utilise guest blogging as part of an effective digital marketing strategy.

What is guest posting?

Guest posting is a marketing method used by online businesses to increase leads to their website. With guest blogging, businesses post content on another blog in an attempt to increase exposure through backlinks, gain authority, and build relationships. To be effective, it’s crucial that the content is high quality and includes a strategically placed anchor text. Anchor text is a direct ranking factor, so you must choose your text carefully to ensure that it’s most effective.

Professionals also advise against overusing keywords in your content for the sake of it, as this can harm your search rankings. You should aim to produce natural, well-written content that is informative, reliable, and adds value. You should also ensure that your content includes sources to several other relevant, authoritative sites and not just your own. Otherwise, you risk your content coming across as promotional and spammy. This is likely to harm your credibility and may destroy your chances of being offered another guest blogging opportunity with that publisher in the future.

How does it work?

Ideally, you should post content on sites that are credible and authoritative in your industry. Links should not be the main motivation behind your guest blog, or the quality of your content will suffer. Keep in mind that you should only publish content on sites you would choose to post on even without a link. Choose a relevant, quality blog that has built a high level of trust and domain authority. You can find blogs accepting guest blogs by searching online or joining websites and forums that connect publishers and content writers.

Once you have a few publishers that you would like to contribute to, you need to write a quality pitch. This should be as concise as possible, while still being personalised and tailored to the person you’re pitching to. Make sure you research the publisher beforehand and offer clear details of the value you can add to the blog. And don’t forget to follow up in a couple of days time.

Advantages of guest posting

When used correctly, guest blogging offers several excellent benefits. This includes:

  1. Generating new leads and traffic
  2. Building relationships with a larger target audience
  3. Increasing brand authority and awareness.

Overall, guest posting helps to increase search rankings, boost sales, and improve revenue potential. This makes it one of the smartest digital marketing strategies you can invest in. Not only will guest posts give you instant exposure to your target audience, but it can also be used to encourage social media shares and grow your online presence by increasing your followers.

In addition to these great benefits, guest blogging also gives you a fantastic opportunity to develop your content marketing skills. For these reasons, all online businesses should be taking full advantage of the power of guest blogging as part of their SEO strategy.

A holistic approach

In summary, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that guest blogging is still an excellent way to build links and boost search rankings, but it’s not the only way. While guest blogging is clearly an important tool for online marketing success, businesses should also use a combination of SEO strategies to boost brand exposure and reach their target audience. An effective SEO strategy should include several methods such as optimised H1 tags, brand building, and fully-responsive web pages.

6 Misconceptions About SEO 2019

Posted on by Ella

Anyone who has a website or knows anything about marketing will probably have heard of SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation. In a world where we use the internet for everything from buying Christmas presents to booking holidays, it is essential that your website can be found amongst the great expanse of the internet. And that is what SEO is all about.

There are two important concepts behind SEO – being able to give searchers what they are looking for as efficiently as possible and understanding how search engines, like Google, produce their search engine rankings.

The world of SEO is ever-changing and full of misconceptions, and here are 6 of the most common ones…

1.   It’s a ‘trick’

Some people believe that SEO is all about trying to trick search engines into putting your website at the top of the rankings. Actually, it’s about trying to provide the best and most useful information to the public by ensuring that the right content is found easily.

An understanding of the technical side of SEO will help the right people find your website, making a search engine more effective and bringing you the quality traffic that you need.

2.   It’s all about the keywords

Back in the day, SEO was all about stuffing your content full of keywords. Today, however, things have changed. It is no longer about getting as many keywords into your content as possible, but about creating content that’s valuable to the user while strategically placing well-researched keywords in the text. This ensures your searchers will get straight to the information that they are looking for and not click away (increasing your bounce rate).

With recent algorithm updates being released, such as the BERT update, search engine optimisation focuses now on answering users’ queries in the best way they can, while being concise and visually-appealing. This balance can be tricky to uphold, but when mastered, it can make all the difference to the reader.

3.   SEO, tick!

Another common misconception of SEO is that it’s something that you do, then tick off the list. Just like any other sort of marketing, SEO is something that needs to be continually worked on and updated.

Not only will you find that search engines like Google, are regularly changing their algorithms which decide on website rankings, but your competitors are also likely working on improving their SEO too. And, frankly, if you don’t keep on top of it, you will find yourself being left behind.

An SEO consultant will be able to continuously look at your website to determine exactly what needs to be done to help you rank at the top of the search engine results.

4.   SEO isn’t very important

Of course, we’re going to say that SEO is important. But it really is.

75% of online marketers never scroll past the first page of search engines, and to get to that first page, you’re going to need SEO in order to compete with the hundreds of sites in your industry. Furthermore, showing up on the first page doesn’t just help you to get new customers; it also builds your brand, credibility and trust. When people read over your website and receive useful, accurate information from you, even if they’re not your customer now, they could turn into one in the future.

5.   Linking doesn’t help

You might think that linking both external and internal, is annoying and unnecessary, but hear us out. In fact, linking and link building are major players in the way that search engines like Google determine popularity and therefore where they are going to rank your website.

But it’s not that easy. There are many tricks to gaining links for your site and it is a multi-faceted task. Google is aware of black-hat link building strategies and understands that some links are included in content purely for SEO purposes, which goes against their user-orientated values. Not only that, bloggers, journalists and marketers are becoming more and more aware of this strategy which makes it harder to get that desired link. It’s an ongoing, ever-changing process that needs to be done in the right way – so take your time and get those links in ethically and organically.

6.   First Place or Nowhere

Although ranking first is certainly not something to turn your nose up at – and you will receive significantly more traffic just by appearing on the first page – Google has been making it harder to improve organic traffic for websites. One reason for this is because, over the years they have released SERP features that continue to take up space on the page, such as featured snippets. Simultaneously, ads continue to dominate the first part of the search results, with Google altering their appearance so that they blend in more with organic listings. Therefore, not only have you got to gain a first-page ranking, you also need to master the art of optimising for other SERP features. Statistics show that the first ranking is being increasingly pushed down the results page, reducing the number of search queries that result in organic clicks to just 40%. Read more on our blog about Google’s latest design of the results page and how this could impact you.

 

Why Low Speed Scores Could Be Killing Your Traffic

Posted on by Chloe

Earlier this month, Google rolled out its new speed reports on the Google Search Console to the general public. This aims to identify webpages that are slow to load and provide advice on how to improve the website’s performance.

Use this new feature and you could potentially boost your website rankings and improve user experience, allowing you to stand out from the competition and get the business results you need.

Keep reading to learn why your website speed matters, how the new Google speed reports can provide useful insight and learn more on how you can improve your website speed.

Why does site speed matter?

Site speed matters because it can potentially make or break user experience and influence your Google rankings.

Since the Google Speed update in 2018, speed has been one of the direct ranking factors used by the search algorithms to rank your pages and is used for both mobile and desktop sites. If your website is slow to load, the search engines could crawl fewer pages and your rankings are likely to suffer as a result.

Unsurprisingly, slow load speeds also affect the overall user experience. When a website visitor has to wait longer than they expect for a page to load, they’re more likely to click away from your page and choose your competition instead.

According to an article titled “Why Performance Matters” on the Google developer guide, “The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.” This can result in a higher bounce rate and a lower than average time spent on the page which damages the reputation of your brand and negatively impact your conversions.

Clearly, for both SEO and user experience, we need to keep website load speed in mind and troubleshoot any issues we come across. But how do you know how your website is performing?

Enter Google Search Console speed reports.

Using the Google Search Console speed report

Google Search Console speed reports were officially released this months after several months of testing.

Available in the Google Search Console interface under the ‘enhancements’ tab, users can quickly test the speed of the sections and URLs on their websites and identify any potential problems.

The results divided between ‘fast’, ‘moderate’ and ‘slow,’ for both mobile and desktop sites and colour-coded for ease of reference.

Google also provide useful tips on how you can overcome any problematic pages and increase your page load speed. Once you make these changes, you can continue to track your performance and make changes until your website performs as well as possible.

How to increase your website speed

If you identify a problem with one or several of your webpages, don’t panic.

There are many ways you can boost the speed of your website. Here are some tips:

Compress your images

By decreasing the file size of your images and choosing the right file format, you can speed up your website load time significantly.

While we do need crisp, compelling images to drive conversion, according to HTTP Archive, they can take up around 21% of the weight of the entire webpage. They also tend to be resource-heavy, impact user experience and slow down the page load speed considerably.

There are many tools, programmes plugins and scripts that can help you to achieve this relatively seamlessly.

The most popular of these is Affinity Photo as it is free and works in a similar way to Adobe Photoshop. Gimp is another programme which can help you achieve the same. You might prefer to use an online tool such as JPEG Mini or ImageResizer.com.

When you compress your images they will naturally lose quality so it’s important to find the balance between file size and quality. Experiment to find what works best for your website.

It’s also important to save images in the right format. Generally speaking, it’s better to choose JPEG for larger images as these have more flexibility with resizing and compression, WebP for smaller images and SVG for logos and icons as this format is vector-based.

Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML

Cleaning up your website code and removing any unnecessary characters, spaces, commas, comments, formatting and unused code, you can significantly boost your website speed and improve both UX and your search rankings.

Although these tiny pieces of unwanted code might not seem like much, they can slow down the time it takes to load your website and increase the crawl time needed by the Google bots to do their job.

Ask your web developer to do this of use one of the minifying resources recommended by Google such as HTML Minifier, CSSNana and UglifyJS.

Reduce redirects

Redirects are more than just annoying. They force your website visitor and Google to wait longer before they can access the information they are looking for.

Start fixing the problem by first identifying where you have redirects on your website. Tools such as Redirect Mapper can be excellent tools to help. Once you’ve found them, ask yourself why it exists and see how it affects the rest of your site. If it’s not essential, remove it where possible.

Use browser caching

When a user accesses information on a website, certain information such as images and stylesheets are stored on their browser. This allows them to be accessed quickly next time they visit.

You can leverage this process by telling browsers what they should do with the various information on your website.

There are several ways that this can be done by asking your developer to add code directly to your website or select a plugin that will handle the process for you. For WordPress, W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket are excellent choices.

Boost server response time

Provide faster results to your website visitors by improving your server response time.

Ensure that you’re using the best host and server that can meet the unique needs of your business. It should provide enough resources, provide excellent customisation option and give you fast results. Also, configure the settings to use HTTP2 and enable the cache so your website loads faster.

Use a content distribution network

Content distribution networks (CDNs) allow your website content to be accessed more quickly to users who are geographically closer to your servers. For example, if you’re a website visitor in Bristol, you’ll access the website on a London-based CDN much quicker than someone based in Sydney, Australia.

They can also provide a range of benefits including improving site accessibility, reducing website downtime, compressing images and delivering a more stable website to your visitors. Ask a professional if you’d like to do this for your business.

A slow website is more than just a minor annoyance. It directly affects SEO and user experience, increases bounce rate, reduces conversions and harms your brand image. Use the new Google Search Console speed reports and you can identify any issues, find a solution and boost your flow of website traffic again.

How To Future-Proof Your Website Against Black Friday Mayhem

Posted on by Ella

Black Friday has become increasingly popular in the UK over recent years and the number of consumers partaking in the furore of discounts and sales grows year on year. In fact, sales are expected to top £7 billion this year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the UK alone. What’s more, e-commerce platforms generate 300% more sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday than on an average day in November. No business can afford to miss out on this incredible opportunity to boost sales and maximise profits ahead of the new year lull.

The Black Friday event provides every business with the chance to enhance profitability and revenue potential. However, high volumes of traffic can put significant amounts of pressure on websites, rendering them more susceptible to problems such as poor user load times, crashes, and so on. This can lead to a high bounce-back rate and lost sales, which will negatively impact your profits. Particularly considering the fact that purchases made during November and December account for around 20% of the retail industry’s average annual sales. For that reason, retailers must utilise SEO to leverage this traffic, avoid site issues from occurring, and capitalise on sales. Below, we have compiled the ultimate optimisation checklist to help your business get the most out this Black Friday.

1. Don’t disarm a ‘sold out’ product page

Disabling a product page once it has sold out can harm sales for several reasons. Firstly, you are less likely to be able to sell customers an alternative product once they land on a 404 page. Often, potential customers will just leave your site after seeing this. Secondly, disabling the product page without implementing a redirect for the user will impede the link equity of respective backlinks to your site. Backlinks that point to a 404 page ruin the user experience and will affect your SEO. Hence why you must have an SEO strategy in place to manage out of stock products efficiently.

2. Use the same URL every year for Black Friday

It may seem like a good idea to create a few new web pages in the lead up to Black Friday, however this can have a detrimental effect on your success during the event. In particular, newly built pages often take longer to rank than older, more established ones. This means newer pages are less likely to perform as well in the SERPs as a page that’s been attracting quality backlinks

and visitors for many years. Avoid this common mistake by using the same URL every year on Black Friday.

3. Optimise the page months before and months after

Research shows that consumers start looking for the best Black Friday deals as early as September. You should, therefore, optimise your website as early as possible. Get creative with your content and use marketing strategies like discounts and exclusive access to deals, to entice customers to make early purchases. You should also keep your Black Friday page running for a few months after the event. Remember that many consumers continue to look for deals after Black Friday, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to capitalise on sales.

4. Optimise your search for the term ‘Black Friday’

It is extremely important that you optimise your site’s search for the term ‘Black Friday.’ Make sure that you direct your visitors to the right places when they search for terms relating to Black Friday, instead of just showing a ‘no results found’ page. Otherwise, you risk customers abandoning your site as they can’t locate any information on Black Friday deals.

5. Optimise landing pages and structure them correctly

Remember that shoppers will enter your site from different pages. For that reason, you must optimise all of your Black Friday pages, not just the main landing page. This will help ensure that all visitors have the best experience possible. Furthermore, try to limit the number of clicks necessary for your user to get to their desired product page (AKA your link depth), to avoid shoppers becoming frustrated.

6. Have an omnichannel strategy and optimise for mobile

More and more consumers are using smart devices to browse the internet and make purchases online. In fact, nearly 40% of all Black Friday sales came from mobile devices in 2017. This statistic is a clear reminder of how essential it is for retailers to optimise their website to fit the smaller screens of mobile phones and other smart devices. This helps ensures that all customers have a positive experience while using your site.

7. Improve page load time

If your website has a low page load time, then shoppers are likely to become frustrated and abandon your site. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to improve your page load time by

optimising your code, file compression, reducing redirects, and upgrading to a faster server, for example.

8. Set tags for the pages

Setting tags is a great way to group related pages together and make it easier for shoppers to find the content they’re looking for. Tags will allow visitors to quickly narrow down your content and focus on just your Black Friday deals. Make sure that you install the right buttons to take shoppers to pages quicker.

Final thoughts

Black Friday can be a massive opportunity for your business to make the most of consumer spend. All retailers should take advantage of the fact that an increasing number of UK consumers are getting involved in the Black Friday event each year. However, you must be prepared to handle the Black Friday spike in sales. Use the above tips to optimise your website, maximise sales, meet customer expectations, and get the most out of this Black Friday!

All You Need To Know About BERT: Google’s Latest Update

Posted on by Chloe

Last Friday, Google announced a major algorithm update that is being referred to by SEO experts as one of the most important updates in the past five years. The BERT update is thought to impact around 1 in 10 search queries and has been rolled out in Google Search over the past week. Below, we are going to discuss everything you need to know about the BERT algorithm update and how it could impact your SEO strategies.

What is the Google BERT update?

Google state that BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing.

Essentially, BERT helps Google recognise natural language and understand what words in a sentence mean to the user. This helps search engines better understand the intentions behind queries and provide users with more useful and relevant information.

Why was the update brought in?

According to Google, this update will aid complicated search queries that depend largely on context. Google said in their blog: “These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.” The BERT update means that Google Search has gotten better at understanding more prolonged and more conversational queries, thus improving the overall user experience.

Search Engine Journal provides a useful example of how the BERT update has improved search engine results. They state: “ In New England, the word “cow” in the context of fishing means a large striped bass.” They go on to describe how they typed the phrase, “how to catch a cow fishing” in Google and were provided with results related to livestock and cows, despite using the word “fishing” to provide context.

Now, following the BERT update, the same query brought up search results that are related to fishing and bass in particular. They conclude: “The BERT algorithm appeared to have understood the context of the word “fishing” as important and changed the search results to focus on fishing-related web pages.”

How does the update affect SEO?

Since last week, Google has been using the BERT algorithm to display search results. It has been confirmed that the new algorithm will impact around 10% of all search queries entered on Google Search.

This update will also affect Featured Snippets as Google will select different content from sites to display in their snippets, as previously, in many queries the snippets displayed were not that useful. Now, because of BERT, users will see featured snippets that will actually answer the posed question.

The BERT algorithm update has not been designed to punish sites, it simply aims to improve how Google understands search queries and user intent. Google has in fact already stated that there is no real way to optimise for the BERT update – Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted: “There is nothing to optimise for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.”

However, it’s clear that the new update will not favour sites with poorly written content. This means that all businesses can benefit from implementing strategies to improve the quality of their on-site content in order to get a boost in the rankings while avoiding being trampled by the new update. According to Google’s E-A-T guidelines, content creators should be writing for human enjoyment and real people, rather than focusing on writing for search engines.

How can I improve the quality of my content?

If you noticed a decline in your search engine rankings and organic traffic in the past week or so, then it’s likely that your site has been affected by the BERT update. As mentioned above, there isn’t really a simple answer for optimising in order to avoid a traffic decline. Primarily, there is nothing you can do.

But looking at your content may help. The update is more content-focused so technical improvements to your site are unlikely to improve your rankings. One of the main ways to boost your search engine rankings is by implementing strategies to improve the quality of your content in order to further meet Google’s guidelines.

With that in mind, here are some simple ways to enhance your on-site content and increase organic traffic to your site:

  • Update the content on your site regularly and ensure that it’s well-written, informative, and relevant. Remember to write for real people rather than machines.
  • Work with an SEO consultancy to create effective content strategies. SEO experts can work with you to build brand authority, improve search engine page rankings, and generate increased traffic flow and quality leads to your website.
  • Use a variety of different content on your site and experiment with various marketing techniques to engage as many users as possible.
  • Use natural internal linking within your content to help your website rank higher in search engine results.
  • While BERT is not directly linked to E-A-T, they do vaguely fit together as E-A-T guidelines strongly affect how Google reads your content – therefore, ensure that your site works with these factors.

Final thoughts

It is clear that the BERT algorithm update has had a significant impact on search queries – according to a press release by Google, BERT represents one of the biggest improvements in five years.

Overall, Google’s aim with updates is to enhance the user experience. BERT allows users to find relevant information quicker and use Google Search to find more satisfying results.

Remember, there is no real way for businesses to optimise their websites for the update – the best and most effective strategy you can implement is producing regular high-quality content that has been written to engage and inform your readership, thus improving your search engine rankings.

Do H1 Tags Impact Rankings?

Posted on by Ella

“H1 tags improve your SEO”.

True or false?

In this article we’ll be putting the H1 tag beneath the magnifying glass and assess its true ability to help bolster your website rankings. We’ll also explore what Google has to say and guide you step by step through how you can optimise the H1 tag for your website.

What is the H1 tag?

H1 tags are those snippets of HTML which help highlight the most important information on a webpage. They’re mainly used for page titles, blog post titles, or to name the page or topic and are written like this:

<h1 class=”entry-title” itemprop=”headline”> Do H1 Tags Impact Rankings? </h1>

They help explain the topic of a page to both readers and search engines alike, provide essential structure and generally help the text to stand out from the rest of the page.

They’re usually bigger, bolder and easier to read than the surrounding text and can vary in length from just a few words to an entire sentence.

Without them, the page would lack structure and it would be much harder to attract a reader and encourage them to fully engage with the content.

This is especially important as modern readers are more likely to skim read and have limited time to find the information they need, thus needing signposts like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are other tags which range in ‘importance’ from H1 (most ‘important’) down to H6 (least ‘important’). Like H1 tags, they help structure the webpage and provide a page hierarchy for Google to index. This can positively influence search results and simultaneously reduce bounce rates and improve user experience.

Why are H1 tags important to SEO?

Some debate in SEO circles suggests that H1 tags don’t matter, given that they no longer directly affect search engine rankings as they did in the early 2000s.

In the words of Google’s John Mueller, “Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags…”

However, others believe that these heading tags do improve the overall content quality, readability and user experience, despite speculation that they have been ‘crowded out’ by more advanced metrics.

Of course, Google won’t crawl your webpage, signpost your recent inclusion of H1 tags and instantly bump you up to 1st place on the SERP. But Google will notice the change in the behaviour of your readers. For example, whether they click away from your page quickly or engage with your content and keep reading. This could then influence your search rankings.

In the Search Engine Ranking Factors survey conducted by Moz in 2015, tags were indeed the third most influential ranking factor. Additionally, another similar study from 2018 showed that on-page ranking factors such as keywords in titles were the second most influential factor.

What does Google say about H1 tags and rankings?

Despite John Mueller’s statement claiming that your site would rank even if it doesn’t have any H1 tags, he also confirmed that H1 tags can help search understand the structure of prose;

“H1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page so that users and search engines can understand which parts of a page are kind of under different headings.

So I would use them in the proper way on a page. And especially with HTML5 having multiple H1 elements on a page is completely normal and kind of expected.”

How should you implement the H1 tag effectively?

  • Have an H1 tag on every page: Avoid confusion, increase reader satisfaction and help to reduce bounce rates by making it clear to search engines and readers alike what your page is about. Make sure you include at least one H1 tag on each page.
  • Don’t use more than one: You wouldn’t see a newspaper that had twenty front page news headlines or find a book with several titles. It would be hard to make sense of, let alone easy to read. Keep it simple. Just use one.
  • Make them all unique: Duplicate content is a big no-no when it comes to SEO. Ensure that every H1 tag is unique and bespoke to the page content.
  • Aim for between 20 and 70 characters: Too short and you’re not giving yourself much chance to be descriptive. Too long and you could confuse your potential website visitor.
  • Include H2 tags too: Again, adding other tags helps to provide structure to the page rendering your webpage easier to index and easier for your reader to extract vital information. Aim to include relevant secondary keywords in these tags where appropriate.

Final thoughts

While those H1 tags won’t make or break your search engine rankings, they do help to improve overall user experience and help Google understand your site structure better. This means they’re certainly worth optimising for and getting right.

The Importance of Disavowing Links In 2019

Posted on by Chloe

Disavowing links has been a hotly debated topic within SEO circles for many years now.

Many SEO experts are unsure whether they still need to submit disavows for low quality links or whether this practice could actually have a negative impact on their website ranking, as Google suggest.

Regardless of the debate, Google’s algorithms do still use quality of links as a way to rank websites and they do still hand out penalties if the site doesn’t comply with their tight guidelines.

This means that it’s just as important in 2019 to audit links and file a disavow with Google when it’s negatively impacting on your website ranking.

In this article, we’re going to look closer at the debate in the SEO industry, remind ourselves what manual actions are, and understand which sites we should still disavow.

Why the debate?

To clear up the debate, we need to travel back in time to those days when Britney Spears shaved her head, ‘to google’ was officially declared a verb and MySpace was the best thing since sliced bread. We’re talking about the early days of the internet as we know it- from the late 90s to the early 2000s.

During that time, SEO was still in its infancy and people did what they could to get their webpages to rank highly. This involved a lot of spammy practices such as keyword stuffing and hidden text on the website.

PageRank

Google had always set itself ahead of the competition by focussing on link quality, so it created PageRank. The thinking was that if there were lots of links to a website, then it must be of high quality. But people simply added their details to directories, left comments on website and paid for links so the algorithm didn’t work as effectively as hoped.

The Penguin algorithm & the disavow tool

Once the Penguin algorithm update went live in April 2012, Google could now penalise your website for having low quality or spammy links. Linking practices changed completely and many websites found that their traffic sharply declined overnight. The only way to get around this was by going in and removing these links.

To help webmasters to recover and remove these links, Google created the disavow tool. By uploading a text file, you could ask Google to stop looking at the links of your choice and so your web traffic could recover.

Penguin 4.0

‘Problem solved!’ you’re probably thinking. But the case isn’t quite so straightforward because in September 2016, Penguin 4.0 was released. This meant that Google would no longer penalise your site for low quality links but instead devalue them.

According to Google, you wouldn’t need to submit a disavow unless you’d been actively dealt a manual action (more on that below) or you were actively trying to prevent one.

Basically, if you hadn’t suffered from problems arising from your links and you didn’t have cause for concern, there wouldn’t be any need to do anything.

Google’s current position on disavowing links

Over the years since, Google has stated that disavows don’t help websites, but there has always been some confusion as to whether that’s correct.

But in a Google Help Hangout this year, John Mueller from Google stated that disavowing can actually help some websites, especially when there are ‘bad links’ that haven’t resulted in a manual action.

“…So, it’s something where our algorithms when we look at it and they see, oh, there are a bunch of really bad links here. Then maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious with regards to the links in general for the website. So, if you clean that up, then the algorithms look at it and say, oh, there’s– there’s kind of– it’s OK. It’s not bad.”

To clarify, this means that it’s still worth disavowing your links, even if you haven’t received a manual action yet. Unnatural links can still influence the trust that Google places in your site and affect your ranking.

Having said that, Google still isn’t a fan of allowing us to use the disavow tool and has ensured that it’s hard to find in the Google Search Console. The thinking is that people are disavowing too many links, and according to Gary Illyes of Google, “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot.”

What is a manual action?

Much of the debate centres of the idea of a manual action, so it’s worth quickly recapping what that actually is.

As the name suggests, a manual action is taken by a Google staff member and lets you know that Google isn’t happy with some of your content. It tells you that it will omit or demote certain pages of your website from its search results.

The content and pages that can be penalised in this way include:

  • Unnatural links to your site: Just like it says on the tin, this refers to both inbound and outbound links which don’t seem quite right.
  • Thin content: This includes content created purely to promote, auto-generated content and content created by guest posters that don’t add value.
  • Hidden text and keyword stuffing: Keywords and text that appear too often and aren’t always visible to reader.
  • Clocking and suspicious redirects: Hidden content and conditional redirects fall into this category.
  • Use-generated spam: Spammy blog comments, forum posts and profiles that are spammy.
  • Spammy freehosts: If your website is hosted with other spammy websites, Google might paint you with the same brush.
  • Spammy structured markup: Does your markup match your site? If not, Google is likely to penalise you.

You can find out if you are subject to a manual action by going to Google Search Console and looking under ‘manual actions’.

Should you disavow your links?

This is a difficult question to answer. It all depends on just how bad those links and whether it is having a significant impact upon your organic search traffic.

Disavowing should always be done with care, and only once you’ve done everything else you can to remove the link manually.

It’s a serious action to take and as Google say, ‘This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results.’

In essence, if you use the disavow tool incorrectly, you could harm your SEO.

If you discover spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing back toward your site or you have received a manual action, you should first reach out to the owner on the website in question and ask for the link to be removed.

Usually this is as simple as visiting their ‘contact us’ page on the website or searching for them on social media. Then you can send them a polite email asking for them to remove the link. Only then should you consider disavowing your links.

What about when there’s not a manual action against you?

It gets trickier still if you don’t have a manual action against you, yet you’re still concerned about the quality of your links.

The best way to start is by conducting a link audit that can shed light on the situation. From there, you can go through the links to check their quality.

Don’t worry too much about those random low-quality links that can often appear because Google can happily ignore them. Google will only issue a manual action for low quality links that you or your SEO team are responsible for.

Instead focus on those linking practices which violate Google’s terms.

This includes things like:

  • Paid links or link schemes
  • Paid articles containing links
  • Publishing articles containing links to other sites (often through guest posting)
  • Product reviews and links which offer free products
  • Excessive use of reciprocal linking
  • Widgets that require linking
  • A high number of suspicious anchor texts

It’s also worth considering non-editorial links such as:

  • Malware
  • Cloaked sites (show google one set of results but the user a different set)
  • Suspicious 404s
  • Pills, poker and porn

You can often use your common sense to decide how bad a link is and whether to disavow. If there’s a borderline case and it seems like a matter of time before you receive a manual action, it might be worth disavowing anyway.

Generally speaking, if these links only relate to pages that you don’t care about and that don’t generate revenue for your business and they don’t negatively impact upon your organic search traffic and rankings as a whole, then you might not need to worry. You could simply delete the page altogether and move on.

Conclusion: Disavowing links and the future of Google algorithms

Maintaining high quality links and disavowing those which are low quality remains just as important in 2019 as it ever has.

The continual advancement of algorithms such as Penguin 4.0 can minimise the problem, but there will always be cases which slip through the net and negatively affect your website ranking.

The key remains to focus on creating high quality outbound links on your website, regularly monitoring the quality of incoming links via the Google Search Console or your SEO team and disavowing those which are harming your online presence.