Fibre Marketing

Year: 2019

How To Recover From The Google Medic Update

Posted on by Ed Ziubrzynski

What Was The Google Medic Update?

The Google Medic update was one of the largest core algorithm updates in recent memory. The update was rolled out on the 1st August 2018 and confirmed by Google on August 2nd in the UK.

Who Was Most Affected by the Medic Update?

Analysis of the impacted websites showed that Healthcare and Ecommerce were the most affected areas.

The above pie chart demonstrates the most affected industries (taken from SERoundtable).

Why Were These Sites Affected?

The Google Medic update saw the rise in importance of EAT on YMYL sites. Both EAT and YMYL are acronyms that had appeared in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines for quite some time prior to the update.

YMYL sites that displayed low levels of EAT were affected the most, due to Google deeming them to be low quality and potentially dangerous to the website visitor.

What Is EAT?

E-A-T stands for “Expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness,” and it’s the metric by which Google’s evaluators rank pages.

Google hires evaluators to analyse content and rank it on a scale of “Lowest” to “Highest” quality. The evaluators help Google understand how the algorithm updates are performing, but they don’t have direct input into the algorithm itself.

Though the evaluator guidelines document was created to help with quality rating, it’s an excellent source to better understand how Google defines quality.

Expertise – You need to be an expert in your field. This means you need to show the expertise of the creator for the Main Content (MC) and mention it within your text.

Authoritativeness – You need to show that you are an authority, or the authoritativeness of the creator for the main content – this comes from the expertise of your writers or organisation.

Trustworthiness – You need to show users they can trust the creator or company of the main content and the website.

What Is YMYL?

YMYL stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life,’ and refers to queries that involve your money, finances as well as your life, health and well-being. The reason why these queries are important for Google to tighten up on, is that they can strongly affect a person’s life.

If non-authoritative and non-factual sites are prominent in these kind of queries and are giving bad advice, then that could be dangerous to the well-being or financial state of that searcher.

What’s The Relationship Between EAT & YMYL?

High-ranking YMYL pages will show a high level of E-A-T. That’s because the safer a user feels while visiting a page, and the more the content meets their search query, the more it will meet the needs of E-A-T. Sites that are genuinely offering helpful advice or a solution to a problem will meet these needs more readily than sites that try to game Google’s system.

Google defines pages that “could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users” as “Your Money or Your Life” pages, and these include:

  • Shopping or financial transaction pages
  • Financial information pages
  • Medical information pages
  • Legal information pages
  • News articles or public/official information pages

What Does Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines Say About These Sites?

“High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on a regular basis.

We will consider content to be low quality if it is created without adequate time, effort, expertise, or talent/skill.” 

By rolling out the Medic update, Google decided to reduce the organic visibility of domains that are deemed to be offering services or selling products that it deems unsubstantiated by the necessary bodies — be that official government institutions, medical associations, charities for illness/disease/medical conditions, or external reviewers (including customers and industry experts) — or that are publishing content written by unqualified professionals.

What Is Google Looking For?

  1. Enough main content (MC): content should be ample enough to satisfy the needs of a user for a page’s unique topic and purpose (broad topics require more information than narrow topics, for example)
  2. The page and its associated content is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy for the topic they discuss
  3. The website has a positive reputation for its page topics
  4. The website features enough auxiliary information, for example, “About Us,” “Contact,” “Customer Service” information
  5. The website features supplementary content (SC) that enhances the user’s enjoyment and experience of a web page
  6. The page is designed in a functional fashion that allows users to easily locate the information they want
  7. The website is maintained, edited regularly and frequently
  8. Is your website easy to use on mobile?
  9. Is your website easy to navigate?
  10. Is the main content easy to read?
  11. Are there too many ads interrupting the reading and flow of content?
  12. Does the page take too long to read?
  13. Is your content original?
  14. Is your websites NAP consistent throughout the web?
  15. Does your organisation have a positive reputation across the web

How Do We Achieve This?

This process needs to be utilised across your core ranking and key performance pages – as supplementary pages on your site won’t require as extensive attention to detail or EAT as they aren’t used to generate convertible organic traffic.

Always remember to write for the user first, not the search engine. By doing this, you commit to creating credible, accurate and trustworthy information that is displayed in a safe environment.

Please see our checklist on how to achieve this below:

Expertise

You need to be an expert in your field. This means you need to show the expertise of the creator for the Main Content (MC) and mention it in your content.

Points to consider:

  • Can you demonstrate why you are in a position to offer advice?
  • What experience can show expertise for this topic?
  • Write in your brand’s voice, directed towards your audience
  • Make sure you include accurate statistics and attribute the correct sources
  • Make sure your content is updated and contains accurate facts
  • Review content so that there is a greater chance of publishing the most accurate content possible

Authoritativeness

You need to show that you are an authority, or the authoritativeness of the creator for the main content – this comes from the expertise of your writers or organisation.

Points to consider:

  • Why are you credible?
  • Can you demonstrate accolades, awards, industry recognition for the topic in question?
  • Credentials are important, but so are personal experiences
  • If you can’t demonstrate authority on the chosen subject, cite your research
  • Do not display business advice without a creditable source or author
  • Customer reviews/case studies will help demonstrate reputation, experience and authority

Trustworthiness

You need to show users they can trust the creator or company of the main content and the web site. This is especially important for websites that could directly impact a searcher’s life and/or finances.

Points to consider:

  • Do not keyword stuff your content
  • Content should be written to help users not search rankings
  • Your content should either help or teach your users something on a topic related to your business
  • Adding links to other related articles will increase trust on the chosen subject

Google SERPs Potential New Layout?

Posted on by Chloe

Google makes regular core updates multiple times throughout every month, seemingly increasing each year. In 2018, Google stated that they had made over 3,000 improvements to search, compared to 2009, where there were only 350-400 changes reported. Some of these are hardly noticeable, while others have a significant impact on search engine results and SEO rankings, which is why it is vital that any algorithm update Google releases are closely monitored.

Here at Fibre Marketing, we track these search changes and help our clients beat the updates to improve their rankings.

Recently (Sept 28th 2019), it has become apparent that Google was testing a new search results page design for desktop – something that caught our attention.

With this particular test, Google has added several additional options to the area at the right and left of the search results that was previously a blank white space. The left side now offers more search filters, while the right side has related search options that allow users to expand their search and look at related search result pages.

(click on images to expand)

Types of searches this will apply to

It appears that the new search results design update will only be available on certain types of searches. This may include searches for:

  • Songs
  • Games
  • News
  • Video

So far, it seems that the new design cannot be replicated and may not apply to searches for movies, books, artists, or bands, according to Barry Shwartz and Adarsh Verma, who reported the test. Although this could of course change at any time in the near future.

Impact on search results

As with all Google updates, this has left people questioning what effect the changes will have on search results.

Decrease In Click-Through-Rate?

Firstly, it has the potential for less click-through rates as users have more options when searching for answers and information online. This also includes YouTube searches, as the videos from the video platform are integrated in the results page here, although it is currently unclear whether or not the video will play in the SERPs, or if it’ll open in a new tab on YouTube itself.

On the other hand, music-sharing platforms such as Spotify will clearly benefit from this change, as they are linked directly underneath the video, above fold.

Of course, all of the above features will likely see search results themselves pushed further down the SERPs than they already are. Google tailors the design of their results pages to the user in order to optimise their search experience. This means presenting the answers within the SERPs themselves, as shown by this potential design, which will likely result in an increase in zero-click searches.

In June 2019, 49% of all Google searches ended with zero-clicks. Google has now become a competitor within a variety of sectors, including hotels, flights, song lyrics, etc., which has landed many website owners in a panic as they watch their organic traffic decrease. This potential search design will not likely help this situation.

A UX-Based Design

The changes could likely result in quicker searches as users will be able to locate the information they are looking for more efficiently using keywords. Google is constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience, and these changes to the results design page could help search results become more UX based as it offers more shortcuts to what they need, if they are wanting a media search itself.

A Tough Challenge For Organic Search Results

However, this new SERP design will push the organic results further down page, a continuing trend with any new search update. Over the years, Google has added a staggering amount of features onto their results pages over the years – 39 overall, according to Paige Hobart’s talk at BrightonSEO – from featured snippets, map packs and knowledge cards. And then, there’s the Ads.

If your site is currently ranking as the top position, this does not necessarily mean that your listing will be above fold. Therefore, site owners have adapted their strategy over the years to create more user-friendly content which will appear in featured snippets, as well as implementing schema to take up more space in the results. It is not clear from this recent test how featured snippets will show up – beneath the media results, or above.

Regardless of this, if Google does go ahead with the proposed search design, site owners will continue to watch this drop.

Final Insights

So far, the only real information we have is that Google has made changes to its search results page design. The full effect of these changes on search results is still unclear, but it is likely to create a more UX-based experience that could decrease organic traffic to your website – although it is too early to say for sure. Currently, it appears that these changes only apply to a limited number of search types including songs and games, and it is unknown whether the changes will apply to other search types at a later date.

All You Need To Know About The Google Update To Reviews Rich Results

Posted on by Chloe

Making your business stand out online can be tough what with all the competition out there – it’s therefore vital that your search listings stand out in search results. Rich results, created by schema markup has always been one of the best and most popular ways to do this as it allows for prices, dates, star ratings and more to show underneath your meta title. These features can work wonders for your organic performance, as over 80% of local business consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

However, on Sept 16th 2019, Google implemented changes to their reviews rich results policies and procedures, affecting how it shows review rich results and rating stars. The overall aim of this change is to improve the rich results for search users as well as addressing abusive implementation (e.g. ‘self-serving’ reviews) that have occurred over the years.

All website developers should strive to understand these new changes to ensure that their knowledge is up to date and relevant.

What Are Reviews Rich Results?

Reviews rich results are those results which show at the top of the Google Search Results. They are based on the reviews and ratings of a product, service, or production that have been produced by

Rich Results

a well reputed and established website. There are many different types of products and services for which a review can be left, including books, events, guides, local businesses and establishments, software and applications, recipes, and other similar features.

Reviews rich results tend to look similar to the image shown on the right.

The Google Update

The changes that Google have released, at their very simplest, are designed to limit the number of reviews rich search results that can be made; notably, self-serving reviews are no longer allowed.

The schema that are now allowed are:

  • Book
  • Course
  • Creative work session
  • Creative work series
  • Episode
  • Event
  • Game
  • How to
  • Local business
  • Media object
  • Movie
  • Music playlist
  • Music recording
  • Organization
  • Product
  • Recipe
  • Software application

Clarification

Google’s primary goal with the new regulations were based on preventing businesses from self-promoting their own material, content, services, and the like – hence, creating ‘self-serving’ reviews. For example, reviews about business A that have also been posted on business A’s website will no longer feature as a reviews rich result; only reviews which have been made by unbiased third party individuals will be considered.

A more detailed case could be a search result featuring the review markup showing something like 5000+ reviews, when realistically they actually have 100. These extra reviews have been generated by the business themselves, and therefore do not count.

This update therefore is to protect the integrity of the content and ensure that the results are of the most relevance and use to the searcher as possible; biased self-reviews, unsurprisingly, do not meet this requirement.

This algorithmic update was met with confusion amongst the SEO community, and so the team at Google Webmasters updated their blog to clarify the regulations more clearly. They stated that, essentially, you can’t review your own local business and then host it on your own website. See the Twitter discussion here.

But Why Do We Care?

You might be wondering why you might need to be worried about these new changes. While they don’t necessarily need to be all that consequential, it should be considered as they could impact a page’s ability to show its own star rating. This means that everyone should always work to ensure that they have reviewed and analysed the new changes to ensure that their markup meets the regulations in order to avoid their rich results being dropped.

In addition, for people who make use of these reviews rich results when making a search, the new changes could also be beneficial. The changes are heavily based on the idea of making it easier for people to use the system without having to worry about reviews from biased sources. This means that search users can feel confident in the quality of the reviews that they are finding for the products or services that they are searching for, thus receiving a better user experience from Google.

How should you respond to rich results review display limitations

Even though this update is only a small change, it may have an indirect impact on a site’s ranking as these reviews can affect organic performance. Therefore, if your website uses review rich results, you should strive to understand the new changes.

Elimination of self-serving reviews

The changes to self-serving reviews are now in place for entities that are a local business, organization, or anything in between. The same will be the case for third party reviews—such as a TripAdvisor review—that are embedded into a business’ website. Already, there have been a large number of cases of sites losing their review rich results, as reported by numerous tools including Mozcast (35.8% rich results, down from 39.2%) and SemRush (47.6%, down from 52%) – statistics dated two days after Google’s announcement.

It should be noted that there will not be any penalties for businesses who still display these self-serving reviews; rather, the case will simply be that the snippet won’t appear in the Google Search results.

Mandatory “name” property in featured snippets

In addition to this, Google have also announced changes that have been made to the ways in which you name your reviews. In order for a review to be eligible for showing  as a reviews rich result, they will now need to feature the name of the product or service in their markup—and failing to do so will mean that the review won’t be possible for being a reviews rich result.

Final Thoughts

If you’re deeply involved with SEO, you’ll know that review rich results are not a ranking factor, so it won’t your site’s position. But, adding this markup took websites a long way as it can affect the number of sales and users, information that search engines use when selecting the best results for the search user. So this small change will likely have a significant impact amongst the SEO community and search results, as we’re already started to see. It is therefore vital that you get to grips with the latest regulations to ensure that your organic performance isn’t affected a great deal.

BrightonSEO September 2019: Key Highlights For Fibre Marketing

Posted on by Ella

Last week, a few members of the Fibre team attended BrightonSEO – one of the world’s largest SEO conferences – where we spent the day listening to talented speakers’ tips and advice as well as seeing some big SEO names (Greg Gifford was a highlight). Preceded by a pre-party that allowed attendees to DJ and followed by a grab-all-the-free-stuff session the next morning, we can say that it was certainly a full-on, exciting couple of days.

We’ve come away inspired to try out new tools and strategies throughout our company and see what results they bring. With that in mind, here are just some of the talks that stood out for us.

Link Building

Creating Sexy AF Outreach Emails To Land Sexy AF Links – Carrie Rose

Carrie Rose claimed that she wasn’t 100% during her talk as she was hungover, yet she had so much energy that we could barely imagine how charismatic she is when she’s feeling more like herself!

Carrie offered great advice throughout her talk, exhibiting screenshots of her outreach emails and providing an insight into the day to day of journalists and bloggers. Essentially receiving around 600 emails a day – Carrie highlighted the need for outreach emails to really stand out. Carrie then provided tips for crafting the perfect subject heading as well as going through the best time slots to send emails each day, along with other valuable SEO wisdoms.

Takeaways:

  • Top-tier journalists receive around 600 emails a day, so it’s essential that your outreach email stand out.
  • Create stories within your content – something that bloggers/readers will be interested in and will be considered, ‘resourceful, useful or different.’
  • The relevance of what you’re pitching should be stated near the top of your email.
  • Match your tone of voice and title to the publication’s.

Carrie’s slides are available here.

Email Anatomy: How To Get Top Tier Links – Alex Cassidy

Alex Cassidy’s talk on building top tier links was one of the most insightful sessions in the conference for us. He broke down the perfect outreach email, accompanied by screenshots, and shared his methods that he and his team created based on the 100,000 emails they sent out last year.

He titled his method ‘SLLAM,’ an acronym for Subject, Lede, Link, Angles and Methodology, as these make up the structure of outreach emails. He also shared how to chase writers to include links in already-published articles, but encourages his team to state the link needed in the email to minimise constant back and forth. Some of the most memorable screenshots of his talk however were the many, many blunt rejections that ‘outreachers’ receive that everyone in the room could relate to – we’ve all been there!

Takeaways:

  • If you’ve tried a subject line 25 times which hasn’t received much traction, then move on to a different technique.
  • Constructing the perfect email is an ‘art’ – you need to cut down large amounts of content to something digestible yet intriguing for the reader.
  • You want to keep your emails short and sweet, but provide enough information to eliminate back and forth conversation.

Alex’s slides are available here.

SERPS

Mining The SERPs: How To Make The SERPs A Powerful Weapon In The SEO Armoury – Rory Truesdale

Rory Truesdale explored the language of SERPs during his talk to explain how they can show you what customers/users are looking for.

Using certain tools, Rory explains how you can analyse the language of search engine results in order to improve your own online performance. Conductor composed a study which revealed that Google rewrites 84 % of SERP-displayed meta descriptions, so the meta description displayed on search pages can differ from what’s defined in the page’s HTML.

Takeaways:

  • Google has data that helps it make sense of what the user is looking for, so it will pick sections from the content that it thinks best meets the criteria of the search. So by exporting this data, we can take the content pulled from SERPs and gain insights into how Google is interpreting queries, which can thus be used for webpage content.

Future Of Search

Bettlejuice’s Guide To Entities And The Future Of SEO – Greg Gifford

In his talk, Greg Gifford explores the evolution of Google and it’s algorithms, starting from a simple matching keywords-to-keywords basis to now understanding real-world signals. An insightful talk with a horror movie theme that made his session even more enjoyable for our team.

Greg explained that Google originally used keyword matching for search queries – meaning that their bots considered the keyword patterns instead of the meaning behind the query itself. It wasn’t until 2012 when Google then started to evolve towards the latter, stating that they were ‘moving from keywords towards knowledge of real-world entities and relationships.’ Reflecting on past major algorithm updates, we can see that Google continues focusing on semantics and entities.

Takeaways:

  • When thinking about the future of search, it’s obvious that rankings will be based on real-world signals. This means that the weight of keyword matching is decreasing as these signals cannot possibly be faked by anyone.
  • Furthermore, these changes tell us that SEO will be less concerned with writing content for search, but instead will focus on ensuring that websites have the best answer for the search query. We are already seeing this today.
  • Local SEO is also becoming more and more significant, especially for mobile searches. Make sure your Google My Business Listings are updated and monitored, focusing on images and reviews.

You can see Greg’s slides here.

Rethinking The Fundamentals Of Keyword Research With The Insights From Big Data – Tim Soulo

Tim Soulo from Ahrefs gave us an insightful talk that took a deep dive into keyword research by providing us with data based studies composed by the company.

We knew we were in for a session of discoveries when the first statistic was presented to us: the average #1 page position in Google rank for about 1000 other keywords! While we all knew that pages rank for multiple keywords, but it was still a shock to know exactly how many. Tim continued his talk by offering advice on applying this data to websites and what effects they can have.

Takeaways:

  • 88% of webpages receive no traffic from Google, which serves as a reminder of how essential keyword research is.
  • In their study, Ahrefs concluded that there are two reasons why pages are not ranking in Google. The first being the number of backlinks (links are a major major ranking factor), or, the page isn’t targeting a topic with a decent amount of search potential. Essentially, if no one is searching for what your webpage is about, you’re not going to get any traffic for it.
  • This demonstrates that search intent is one of the most important aspects of gaining that first-place ranking.

We’ve absolutely loved BrightonSEO this year, and we’re looking forward to attending the next conference in April 2020 and seeing what else we can learn.

Author Authority in Search: Does it Matter to Google?

Posted on by Ella

The ability of author reputation to influence page rank has been an ongoing dispute for many years. Google Authorship was a feature that appeared in Google search results for around three years, from June 2011 until August 2014. The feature allowed and encouraged content creators to identify themselves when posting a piece of content – be it a blog post, article or other type of web-based copy – by displaying a profile image and linking to their Google Plus account. Theoretically, this aimed to help authors stand out in the SERP and bolster their click-through-rate. The Google Authorship markup fell under Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) umbrella, whereby the verification of authors on the internet would improve users’ overall search experience.

Unfortunately, the Google Authorship initiative retired in August 2014 when Google removed all author photos in their mission to better marry the user experience with mobile and desktop search – which involved decluttering the search page. Google had also established that participation in the authorship markup was extremely low (almost non-existent in many verticals), with searchers receiving little to no value from the addition. It was reported that when the markup was removed, there was little difference in ‘click behaviour’ on the search results page than when the authorship feature was in play.

However, conversations around author authority in the SEO space have since crept back into the headlines. In July there was an interesting discussion on Twitter surrounding the weight of author authority in the health industry. Google’s John Mueller referenced YMYL sites as an example of why authorship is a necessary factor to consider when publishing or reading sensitive content, such as online medical advice. He mentioned that if you are writing about a topic on health and you’re not an expert in that field, then you’re already starting off on a “shaky foundation.” He added that it makes sense for writers to find experts to write or review the content so that it is “correct and trustworthy.” Despite this, there is still little evidence to suggest that content authorship is a ranking factor in Google search. However this doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t an important element. In fact, many people believe that author authority has a number of benefits. With this in mind, let’s look at some of the evidence for and against the importance of author authority in Google search.

Considerations for content authorship

There was renewed interest in the impact of author authority on Google search following Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (SQRG) update back in July 2018. Under these guidelines, web pages could appear higher in the search results if they rank highly in Google’s three attributes of content quality – Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. An addition to the July 2018 update was the inclusion of content creators as part of the measure of content quality. On assumption, this could imply that the reputation and expertise of the author is still an important component of the overall E-A-T rating.

What’s more (while this has not been confirmed), should Google want to identify and evaluate authors on the web according to the E-A-T specification, using something like Machine-Readable Entity IDs (MREIDs) would be essential. Google is constantly looking for ways to enhance the user experience, so it makes sense that at some point Google will begin to look for signs of authoritative and reputable authorship on content pages. For that reason, it’s advisable that publishers only accept content from creators with good reputations who have experience in the specified field. Publishers should also give preference to content creators who have a clear, positive presence online i.e. creators with active social media accounts.

The authorship veto

Back in August 2014 Google removed the ability for publishers to display the author’s name, photograph and the number of Google Plus circles the author had been added to. Once the Google Authorship feature was removed, many marketers and publishers no longer resonated with the importance of content authorship. What’s more, as mentioned above, Google has publically declared that content authorship is not a ranking factor. According to information on searchenginejournal.com – “Google’s John Mueller has clarified that the search engine’s algorithms do not look at author reputation when ranking websites.” For that reason, many businesses don’t consider it an important factor in their marketing efforts.

Final thoughts

There is little evidence to support both sides of the authority debate. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not an important factor to consider in your marketing efforts – there is certainly no harm in providing a quality, transparent and accountable author reputation to your content. It’s also important to keep in mind that Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines could update at any point in the near future and perhaps include author authority as a ranking factor.

Why Your ‘About Us’ Page Is Replacing Your Business Card

Posted on by Chloe

Before the digital world took over, business cards were one of the best ways to promote your brand and foster new business. However, with a plethora of online alternatives providing instant information for consumers at the touch of an enter key, the humble business card is slowly vanishing from the enterprise space.

According to data from Internet live stats, the number of daily searches on Google is rising exponentially – currently standing at 3.5. billion – and when consumers arrive at your website ‘About’ page, you need to be confident that you have followed SEO best practice to ensure maximum conversions.

Designing your website doesn’t have to be a complicated feat, so long as each component is carefully considered, planned and executed within Google’s guidelines. 81% of shoppers will conduct online research before making a purchasing decision, so it’s important that your website represents your business accurately and assures users that your company is the stand out competitor.

When users arrive organically at the website of a business they’ve never heard of before, they will likely conduct a quick online investigation. According to a study lead by KoMarketing, 52% of visitors will be looking for an ‘About’ page. Without one, businesses risk being hidden from potential customers.

An ‘About’ page:

  1. Allows customers to get to know you, the basis of a relationship between them and your brand. The better the relationship, the more successful your business will be.
  2. Present your achievements, experience and credentials, improving your site’s E-A-T (Enterprise, Authority and Trust) and thus helping your rankings.

The problem is, many businesses fail to create ‘About’ pages that effectively convey their message and brand mission to consumers. It is also all too common for companies to overlook the weight of this page entirely, despite evidence from Google Analytics that suggests ‘About’ pages are one of the most frequented webpages.

With this in mind, let’s look at the key features of an ‘About’ page, and what is needed to assure users that your company is one that they can trust.

Tell Us Your Story

When creating content of any form, it is vital that you keep your audience engaged. They need to be interested enough to carry on reading.

This page does not need to be an essay, but it does need to explain where you came from, what your goals are and how you or your business got started. Focus on key elements that have influenced you in some way and how they’ve impacted your company. Your readers don’t need to know how many suppliers you’ve been with or a year-by-year growth timeline – just the parts that emphasise your relevance to your target audience. It is generally advised to cut out any jargon – you’re better off using a simple tone of voice that suits your company ethos and writing in a way that users will actually understand.

Make Your Mission, Values and Visions Clear

This is probably one of the most important features to consider when creating your ‘About’ page. Your mission, values and visions provides an insight into what your business entails – they reflect pretty much every facet that makes up your company.

Is your company environmentally conscious? What do you believe in? These are your values, and they say a lot about your company culture.

Note, your values are not the same as your mission statement. Your mission is why your company exists and what it wants to achieve in the short term. This matters to users as it’s more action orientated and thus suggests what your team are doing to put their values into practice.

Now on to your vision statement. Your vision statement should explain what your business is aiming to achieve in the long run. The simplest way to differentiate this from your mission statement is to think about what goal your mission serves. How will your company change its sector? Where does your company want to sit within your industry or even general society?

E-A-T Factors

If you know anything about SEO, you’ll know that E-A-T is a major ranking factor (if you weren’t aware of this, click here).

There are many reasons why an ‘About’ page can work wonders for E-A-T. You can include your credentials, testimonials and experience within your content to show that you are a reliable business to go to within your field. When talking about experience, don’t forget to mention how long your company has been operating – this will fit in nicely with your story.

To demonstrate your enterprise, you’ll also need to include information on any qualifications and awards that you’ve obtained. Have you been mentioned by relevant experts from your industry? Integrate this into your page (and link to the source to make it easier for Google to associate you with them).

By following the factors above, Google is more likely to recognise your business’ website as credible and will favour you when ranking sites. Just remember that the aim of your content is to clearly demonstrate you or your business’ purpose, and how you intend to meet it. This information should always be easily accessible.

Include A Variety Of Features

User experience (UX) is an indirect ranking factor when it comes to websites. Google’s aim is to improve UX as much as possible by presenting high-quality sites to its users.

Visuals are a good way to achieve this, as they break up your text and make the page look less intimidating. They can add value to your content and, if they’re personal, they can add an element of company culture which users often find appealing. They don’t necessarily need to be headshots of your team members – there is a large variety of media you can go for instead, such as images, videos, infographics, and timelines. Don’t forget to optimise images for SEO.

A Quick Recap

There are many key elements that make up a quality ‘About’ page. We’ve explored the most essential features above, but here is a quick check list for you to take note:

  • The story of your business
  • Your values, mission and vision statements
  • E-A-T factors such as credentials and experience
  • Different forms of media

By including these different elements, your ‘About’ page will speak volumes and assure users that you and your team are capable of meeting their requirements. This will contribute to your overall visibility and keep customers coming back to you, boosting your rankings and future conversion rates.

Why Reducing Your Link Depth Is Critical To Your Blogs’ SEO Success

Posted on by Ella

A new study has found that the structure of many blogs could be having a detrimental effect on their search engine rankings. The main issue is due to link depth, which is the average number of clicks from the homepage of the blog to the relevant content. The study by Perficient Digital found that two thirds of websites have a link depth higher than five. This is likely to have a negative effect on the PageRank and ability of search engine bots to crawl the content. Shockingly, the study found that – ‘31.5% of the posts were 21 clicks or more from their respective home pages,’ ‘9.5% of the posts were 50 or more clicks away’ and some posts even exceeded 1,000 clicks away.

The problem with high link depth

The main problem with having a high link depth is that your content will essentially be buried below multiple other links. This in turn, sends a strong message to the search engines that your content may not be relevant to the users query and as a result, reduces the websites search spider crawl budget. What’s more, if one page in the chain of links has an error, then the crawler will be unable to access any of the pages further down the link chain. Therefore your content may not be effectively crawled for long periods of time. Keep in mind that your link depth should ideally be between 3 and 5, depending on your website’s size and structure. You can easily check your average link depth with the help of online SEO analytics tools.

How to identify your link depth culprits

A number of factors may be affecting your link depth. Here are four of the most common culprits to be aware of:

1. Pagination

While pagination may be an essential tool for improving user experience and reducing server load time, content on your website that includes lengthy paginated lists can actually cause significant problems for SEO. For example, if there are 40 pages in the list but the highest page you can click to go to automatically is page 6, then you would then have to make many clicks to reach higher pages. Pagination can also be a catalyst for duplicate content issues, seeing search engine crawlers waste precious resources on indexing poor quality content.

2. Faceted Navigation

Filters implemented on large sites can help users narrow down their search results to find a desired product or content. However often construed as a SEO nightmare, a navigation strategy with poor filter combinations can create new pages at volume. This can quickly increase link depth, swallow up crawl budget and dilute link equity. It is advised that website developers should avoid using multiple filters simultaneously (two at most) to maximise traffic potential and to limit the URL being changed. Be aware that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy and you may have to manually create indexable landing pages for some of these key filter combinations.

3. Tracking parameters in URLs

Tracking parameters are used to deliver useful information about the source of a click through the site’s respective URL. Parameters can be derived from a huge range of combinations and can quickly generate URL variations en masse. Many low value URLs that display similar if not the same content, can lead to keyword canibalisation and impact site quality. Parameters are also a detriment to page performance as they often look less clickable and trustworthy in form.

4. Broken URLs

Broken links on a website can appear on an internal and external basis. Internal links on-page often return a 404 response as the page the link is leading to may no longer exist. Broken external links take users from your own website to a non existent page. Both types of malformations will impact user experience and likely diminish your click through rates. If these issues are not resolved quickly, Google will identify the deterioration of the website and reflect this in your search rankings.

Ways to amend your blog content structure

Fortunately, there are some simple ways to amend your blog content structure and reduce your link depth. Here are some key actions to consider:

Add internal links to valuable content

Determine what content on your site is most valuable to you and most importantly to your audience. Adding plenty of internal links – such as navigational links and contextual links – will help demonstrate to search engines that this content has value and should be seen by users. As a general rule of thumb, the optimal internal linking structure follows a pyramid hierarchy. See here for a trusted guide to internal linking.

Systemise your site structure

Ease of user experience and display of original, relevant content should be at the core of your website’s ambitions. Cleaning up your blogs’ structure doesn’t have to be an overly technical process and can be achieved through numerous strategies. Succinct site menus, functional categories, tags and keeping content updated and in line with Google algorithm updates are a couple of examples that come to mind.

Rethink your content strategy

If you are new to the SEO scene, prioritise quality content over quantity. Make sure you check your old content and either revive it or remove anything that is outdated, low quality, or no longer relevant. However, before deleting any content, be sure to perform rigorous audits so as not to upset your rankings in the SERP. Auditing your content will help you evaluate what adds value to your site and what is harming it. When refining your website, consider whether it meets Google’s E-A-T requirements and aligns with new algorithm updates before making any changes.

Final thought

Businesses should be aware that their blog structure can have a significant impact on their link depth and overall SEO ranking. It is important that all businesses take action to effectively improve their websites in order to ensure that their web pages are effectively crawled by search engine bots and are accessible to users. Use the tips above to help identify and improve any issues with your link depth or alternatively speak to us for specialist advice.

Leveraging Schema To Increase Organic Performance

Posted on by Chloe

Update:

From 16th September 2019, Google made changes regarding the regulations of Reviews Rich Snippets. Please see here before implementing this schema markup. 

If you’re somewhat involved in SEO, you will have likely heard of phrases such as schema and structured data. You also may have heard that by leveraging your schema or other forms of structured data, you can help improve your site’s rankings and visibility through featured snippets, knowledge graphs and other search features.

But what exactly is schema? Is it an essential for your website? And how does it help increase your organic performance?

In 2018, John Mueller stated that while structured data will not give you a ranking boost, Google understands that schema is important for a website as it can help them understand your content more, potentially leading to higher rankings.

Therefore, schema implantation is recommended for any website, especially now content is one of the most significant factors of SEO. If you’ve created quality content that complies with the Quality Guidelines, it may not rank if Google does not understand what exactly is on the webpage.

To understand what schema and structured data can do for your business, follow our guide below.

Schema and Structured Data – what’s the difference?

Schema

Schema, also known as schema.org, is a project formed in 2011 across multiple search engines. It consists of different mark-ups made up of tags that you can add to your site’s HTML to help search engines understand your webpage and the way that page is displayed, thus resulting in better representation in the SERPs.

Essentially, it is these tags that tell search engines whether your information is about a specific place, person, movie, book, etc. These tags are classed as structured data.

Structured Data

When it comes to structured data, it is essentially a way of adding a standard set of values to the text on your webpage that will help search engines understand your content. It’s a bit like talking them through your website section by section so they can make sense of every part of it.

These set values are part of a hierarchy:

  • Itemscope – this simply paves the way for a new item on the webpage.
  • Itemtype – there are many different itemtypes, not just movies, people and places as we mentioned earlier. The broadest type is ‘Thing’, which has four different properties: name, description, URL, image. There are then more specific properties within these broader types, known as Itemprops, the final instalment in the hierarchy.

Here’s an example from the Schema.org webpage to break this down a little more.

So you have a webpage about the movie Avatar which includes details about a ‘Person’, which is a specific ‘Thing’. Say that person is James Cameron (director of Avatar), so that’s a specific type of ‘Person’. You can even broaden this even more, by saying that the film he directed is Sci-Fi, a specific type of ‘Movie’.

So, by adding these into your schema markup with the correct tags,  the search engine is now aware that this page features a link to the Avatar trailer, a Sci-Fi film directed by James Cameron. See here for how this would look in HTML code, or for a quick reference, here’s their image of this code:

Schema

And the difference?

To summarise, structured data puts names with values within your HTML code to help ensure that search engines thoroughly understand your content and index the webpage correctly. Schema on the other hand is the overall project that provides the set of standard values and definitions for the tags.

To check that your structured data is validated, you can test using Google’s Structured Data Testing tool.

How do you leverage schema to improve organic search performance?

There are a variety of ways to use schema that can help boost your visibility and presentation in the SERPs. This can be done by adding different features that can help promote your site and company as a whole.

The way that these results are presented were previously labelled as ‘rich snippets,’ but now they are ‘rich results’, and can take many different forms such as carousels, additional data, star ratings under the meta title, etc.

Here are a few examples of different types of schema that can help boost your visibility.

Location Schema

Schema can work wonders for local SEO, as it allows search engines to understand location-related information for your business, such as addresses, phone numbers, HQ location, events and more.

The problem with location schema is that not many people realise that it can work for local SEO as they have verified GMB listings and therefore believe that they do not need to do anything more. But the reality is that using schema can help provide essential information into your business’ knowledge panel.

Here are some ways you can do this:

  • You can apply Postal Address schema, which adds your local address for your business. Click here to see how.
  • There is also the Local Business schema mark-up which is ideal for brick and mortar businesses. This schema allows you to add opening hours and types of payments that your company offers.
  • The Organization mark-up allows you to specify your logo, social links and contact information.

As an example, the screenshot below shows The Lab Spa using schema markup for their business.

Reviews and Ratings

By using Ratings schema mark-up, star ratings and reviews that your business has received on its website will show in the SERPs. This can be added to certain content types, including:

  • Local businesses
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Recipes
  • Products
  • Books

This schema can be particularly useful for restaurants hotels and bars, as shown here:

Events:

This is incredibly beneficial for spreading the word about an event that you have organised. When your events show in the search results, you’re able to direct users to the listing most relevant to them while also taking up more space in the SERPs – streamlining traffic to your site.  As you can see below, the dates and locations of your event (so in this case, performances of Les Miserables) will be listed underneath the meta description and will take you straight to the landing page when clicked.

Event Schema

You can find the vocabulary for this schema mark-up here.

Product Information:

The Product schema mark-up allows businesses to show more information about the products they offer directly in the SERPs. So, underneath the meta title and the green URL in search results, users can see the product’s price, ratings and if it’s in stock, as seen below.

Product Schema

This particular schema can be beneficial for small businesses who are competing against well-known brands and organisations, such as eBay, Ikea, Amazon, or other large companies that operate within your industry. If your offerings are more price competitive, the searcher will likely come to you.

Breadcrumb:

This mark-up allows users to understand a website’s hierarchy by implementing a series of links in the SERP. It’s a useful schema to apply when the ranking page doesn’t appeal to the user as you can present a few other pages that you have on offer. To expand on the image below, the blue links under the meta description are known as ‘child pages’ or ‘breadcrumbs’. These results clearly emphasise the ‘Enhance Your Site’s Attributes’ page, but in case that doesn’t interest you, two more pages, (such as the, ‘Establish Your Business’ page), display below as an alternative option for the user. In doing this, you will increase your chances of users arriving at your website from an array of different search queries.

Breadcrumb Schema
The schema mark-ups listed above are just a small selection of possible options available to you and your website. While schema and structured data are not quick fixes for the architecture of a site, it can certainly enhance your chances of gaining featured snippets while improving your organic listings. This way, your website is more likely to be noticed over your competitors, improving your click-through-rate and organic traffic. With so many different Schema and structured data mark-ups available, they can truly be a benefit to any business looking to improve their organic search visibility.

The Untapped Potential of Google Image Search

Posted on by Chloe

When it comes to SEO, most people automatically think of words. Keywords, meta descriptions and links are all important parts of SEO, but one area which is often either overlooked or not given much attention is images.

In fact, images can have a massive effect on your SEO – Google Image has an important role in the world today. As everything becomes more visual, images, infographics and the like are increasingly important and can be a valuable asset in terms of SEO.

Understanding how Google Image Search can help your SEO is important in today’s world. There are a number of things that you can do to tap into the power that Google Image can have for you.

Optimising your current images

Before you start anything else it is important to make sure that your current images are optimised for search engines like Google. This basically means that it can help your image to appear in the Google Images rankings.

The aim again is to have your images come out at the top of the Google Images rankings – of which there are many more per page than text searches.

  • Edit your file names to something that is relevant to the picture (instead of the file name such as DSC_052.jpg as named by the camera).
  • Edit your alt tags to something rich in keywords and as short as possible. These alt tags can help with SEO, but their main purpose is to help people who are visually impaired so keep this in mind when you are choosing the words.
  • Compress your images. The time that a page takes to load is vital for SEO and attracting people. A large image file can take a long time to load, put people off, and, ultimately, bring up your bounce rate. By compressing your images, they will take up less memory, load quicker and improve your SEO.

Avoid Stock Photos

Stock photos are great because they’re free. But that’s about where their usefulness ends, as far as SEO is concerned anyway.

Stock photography usually looks poor quality and doesn’t do much for your own specific branding. It can be used sometimes but definitely not all of the time!

Using your own images can be vital to good image SEO – in a similar way to other content. If you have an image which is unique to your website, it will always link to your website and not to the hundreds of others that have used the same picture. People are also likely to use your image and include a backlink.

With Google Images, the first result on their search results list will always be the original image so it is worth the effort of getting your own images on there.

Content management involves ensuring that you have the best, most effective images, which can help to attract as much traffic to your website as possible. And this involves using unique images which are specific to your website.

A Reason for your Images

If you are putting an image onto a page, don’t put it on there just for the sake of it. Make sure that it is there for a reason. Just like in other SEO content marketing strategy, you will only increase your bounce rate if you have irrelevant and unconnected images.

You should also keep this in mind when you are labelling your images. Make sure that you label them in a way that connects them with your content. If, for example, you have a blog about cactus’s, make sure that you label it this way and not ‘Mexican landscape’. People who are looking for pictures of landscapes in Mexico might not want to learn about the inner workings of a cactus.

Infographics are an excellent way of attracting relevant traffic to your website, and, as long as you are making them, they can be both completely unique to you and informative.

Image Sitemap

Sitemaps ate useful to search engines like Google as they can help to tell them what images are present on your website and where. This means that all of the images that you want to be found are found quickly.
WordPress and Yoast automatically add images to your sitemap or you can create your own image sitemap for your website.

Understanding the power that images have in terms of SEO is important, and judging by current online trends, is only likely to become more important. By getting your image SEO right, you can add to the other work that is done to keep your digital marketing efforts effective and see it show not only in an SEO audit but also in the amount of traffic that you are getting to your website.

5 Biggest Observations From Google’s Latest Cheat Sheet

Posted on by Chloe

Many companies find that their site’s search rankings are negatively affected following Google’s many algorithm updates. And, seeing how many changes are made throughout the year, it can be frustrating when you can’t see a way to regain any losses.

Fortunately, for the first time Google has released a post giving advice on how companies can take advantage of new core updates to improve their SEO rankings. Here are the key things you should be aware of following Google’s advice on core updates.

1. There is nothing to fix

Google has advised that there is nothing you can do to fix a site if you see a decline in search rankings following an update. “We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.” They then added – “There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update.”

Many companies are therefore questioning how they can improve their site’s search rankings and what they should do following core updates. Google said that what has changed, is simply how Google assesses the value of content. Companies should therefore focus on producing the highest quality content possible. Google advised – “We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”

2. Content should be written for the user/audience

While Google have reiterated the fact that there is no quick fix following updates, they have however given advice on how to improve the quality of your content. Google has released a list of questions with their blog that companies should ask themselves if their site has been negatively affected by the core update. This includes things such as:

  • Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
  • Was the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
  • Is the content free from spelling or stylistic issues?
  • Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
  • Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

Recent updates prove that writing for the user/audience is the most effective way to write quality content and will be favoured by the Google algorithms. Their advice on assessing content asks questions like “Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?” and “Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it?” The emphasis is on the reader and their opinion on the quality and value of the content.

3. Content must focus on E-A-T

To improve search rankings, businesses must adapt their content to meet the new guidelines. One of the simplest ways to produce quality content is by focusing on E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Companies can read the search quality raters guidelines to get further advice on how to improve the overall quality and effectiveness of their content. According to Google – “Reading the guidelines may help you assess how your content is doing from an E-A-T perspective and improvements to consider.” They added “If you understand how raters learn to assess good content, that might help you improve your own content. In turn, you might perhaps do better in Search.”

The list of questions that Google published in their blog include a section on E-A-T and what you should ask when writing content for your site.

4. There are no further updates confirmed

The post was not confirmation of another update. Google confirmed their June core update but since then, no other rumoured updates have been confirmed by Google. However, companies should be aware that unannounced updates occur on a regular basis. Google said – “We are constantly making updates to our search algorithms, including smaller core updates,” They added “we don’t announce all of these because they’re generally not widely noticeable.”

5. Google wants to improve the user experience

It is clear that Google’s ultimate aim in introducing the core updates is to improve the user experience as much as possible. In summary, companies should focus on building high-quality websites that offer users high-quality, trustworthy content which has been produced in line with the search quality raters guidelines and E-A-T.