Fibre Marketing

Author: Ella

Your Next Biggest Competitor Is Google: What You Need to Know About Zero-Click Search

Posted on by Ella

The search engine results page (SERP) stands firmly at the centre of organic traffic generation. If you have a top-notch SEO team behind you and you’re lucky enough to land a placement on the first page of Google, you will likely be reaping the results. However, the SERP is changing, and it’s changing fast.

We had the arrival of black ‘Ad’ labels on mobile and the ‘How-to’ structured data markup in May 2019, not to mention the featured snippet deduplication change earlier this month, improved knowledge panels, and suggested content for long-tail search queries. Add to the mix video carousels and related product recommendations, and you’ve got yourself a very saturated SERP offering minimal visibility and poor click-through rates (CTR) for deserving websites.

As a result, for the first time, zero-click search (searches that end on the SERP because the user successfully found the answer to their query) has exceeded the number of searches resulting in organic clicks, at 50.33% to 45.25%. It’s not the best news we’ve heard, but not the worst either – it just means us SEO’s will have to work that little bit harder, and who’s not up for a challenge?

Crowded SERPs and zero complacency

SEO’s and digital marketers need to be one step ahead when it comes to SERP updates. If you think optimising your Google My Business profile once, or drafting your meta descriptions and incorporating a key term or two will earn you that top spot, you are mistaken. The Google SERP is a merciless territory, and you need to either adapt your strategy to suit users’ needs or face falling into the abyss on page 2…3…10…67!

Google is going to do what Google does, and that’s moulding the SERPs to maximise user convenience. If that means whipping a couple of websites off the first page and onto the second then that is what they will do. However it is important to stay resilient and have faith in the ability of your website. If it hosts the right content, is optimised correctly and technically sound, you might be ok.

There is also some comfort in knowing that this tech giant can only go so far. Back in June 2017, the European Union handed Google a €2.42bn fine for manipulating the SERP to favour its own comparison shopping service. Lyric website, Genius, also instigated a lawsuit for $50 million, claiming that Google had violated antitrust law by copying song lyrics from its website through a clever watermarking scheme.

Evidence that the SERP ship will keep on sailing

Amazon

Despite Google already dominating 90% of search engine market share, there has been increasing concern over the majority of product searches starting on Amazon, and unsurprisingly, Google is now working to follow suit. The search giant recently launched a new shopping platform that aims to be the go-to when finding items not available on Amazon. This comes after the revelation that only 22% of consumers are satisfied with their online shopping experience – a fact that Google has decided to improve in its own way.

Google lists similar products together with their prices encouraging the consumer to opt for the cheapest offer. When the user clicks on the product (through the shopping widget) they will be directed to the Google shopping platform. From here they can further click to view the product, see price comparisons and buy the product directly (all while being covered by a Google guarantee). There is no need to visit the retailer site at all.

Google’s BERT algorithm update

The long-term effects of the BERT update back in November are only just beginning to rear their heads. BERT was partly designed to target the results derived from long-tail searches and have since increased the number of featured snippets in 25 different languages. Featured snippets (FS) are special boxes where the format of a regular listing is reversed, showing descriptive content first. They usually hog the first part of the SERP and push organic results further down the page.

Furthermore, since Jan 2020, if you do succeed in obtaining a snippet, that URL will no longer be shown in the organic listings underneath. SEO’s have to choose between one or the other, depending on how much value each brings. This deduplication has resulted in severe drops in CTR for many sites across the board.

Growing Google SERP accessories

  • Ads – Up to four ads can be displayed at the top of the SERP and up to four at the bottom, leaving a lucky few organic results sandwiched between the two.
  • Rich Snippets – A rich snippet sits below the blue title on the SERP. It can include a picture, rating and extended description. They stand out from other results and usually generate a higher click through rate.
  • People also ask – This box is full of related queries to your original search and appears on the first page for pretty much all searches no matter the length of the query. When clicked it can answer your questions with no need to delve further to find the information’s original source. Written a short essay on how to boost your organic traffic? The likelihood is that the user will only read the most relevant paragraph regurgitated in the designated slot on Google and move on – that is, if your content is lucky enough to be featured in the first place.

The SERP epidemic is spreading to all corners of industry. Google job listings, flight price comparisons, hotel suggestions, Google thesaurus and dictionary not to mention the weather and Google reviews are all piled on the first page, distracting your target audience from executing your desired call to action.

What can you do to combat zero-click search?

Combating the zero-click epidemic is no easy feat. It takes a dedicated SEO team, a deep understanding of your niche, constant analysis of the changing SERP and the realisation that content must be produced for the user, not the search engine.

Get this right and you’re on the right track to effectively compete with Google and win back lost organic traffic. Contact us to talk about getting your metrics right first time around and help set your website on the right track for SEO success.

 

 

 

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.

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.

 

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!

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.

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 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.