SEO News webinars • Yoast

Yoast SEO news webinar – June 20, 2023

pamyoast — Tue, 30 May 2023 09:52:14 +0000

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

AI news

Other tech news

Apple Vision Pro hands-on: Way ahead of Meta in critical ways

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Arnout Hellemans

Arnout Hellemans is a Dutch freelance SEO and analytics consultant, with a big focus on technical SEO and site migrations. Some brand he has worked for are Thenextweb.com, NatWest Group, rvshare.com and many more.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – June 20, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – May 30, 2023

pamyoast — Thu, 11 May 2023 17:47:47 +0000

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

Other tech news

Neeva, the would-be Google competitor, is shutting down its search engine

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

Nitin Manchanda is the Founder and Chief SEO Consultant at Botpresso. Prior to building his own consultancy brand, he led Global SEO for the brands like trivago and Omio. Nitin is a seasoned SEO professional with expertise in topics like International SEO and Enterprise SEO. His engineering and product background, along with 11+ years of SEO experience working with some of the leading brands globally makes him a strong product-led SEO. Nitin has been hosting webinars for Semrush on a regular basis and has been speaking at various SEO events across the world

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – May 30, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

SEO for international expansion, with Weglot

pamyoast — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 09:43:04 +0000

Why this webinar?

International expansion can be a great way to reach a new audience, and grow a business. But international SEO is complex, and easy to get wrong. We’ll be joined by experts from Weglot to discuss some of the challenges, opportunities and best practices when it comes to considering whether you want to try and expand to target additional countries, languages and cultures.

What can you expect from this webinar?

Insight into best practices and options when it comes to internationalization;
Tips for how to avoid common mistakes;
Q&A session with SEO experts Jono from Yoast or Elizabeth from Weglot

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

Based in Paris, but originally from the UK, Elizabeth is Head of Content at Weglot, a website translation software that allows businesses to translate and display their site instantly. Outside of the office, she enjoys cooking, discovering new restaurants, and interior design.

Weglot is a WordPress translation plugin that allows you to instantly launch a multilingual website. By detecting, translating, and displaying the content of your website under multilingual SEO-friendly language subdirectories, it removes the need for multiple websites for multiple markets.

The post SEO for international expansion, with Weglot appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – April 25, 2023

pamyoast — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:40:46 +0000

Topics & sources

Google news

Microsoft Bing news

Microsoft’s SwiftKey brings Bing AI smarts to any iPhone or Android app

AI news

WordPress news

WordPress developers are experimenting with Gutenberg-native AI block and content assistants

Other industry news

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

Lily Ray is the Sr. Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Lily brings a strong technical background, performance-driven habits, and forward-thinking creativity to all programs she oversees. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world. She loves diving into algorithm updates, assessing quality issues, and solving technical SEO mysteries.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – April 25, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – March 28, 2023

pamyoast — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:22:42 +0000

Topics & sources

Google news

Microsoft Bing

WordPress

Upcoming 6.2 release
Our team (Diede, Leonidas, Petar) won multiple awards for their WordPress Eco-Mode plugin at Cloudfest

Other tech news

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

Nick Wilsdon, CEO of Torque, is a digital marketer and strategist with 20 years of experience who can deploy high-performance programs across large organizations and global brands. Subject matter expert on several digital channels and how they should interact in cross-platform campaigns. Often engaged to assist with digital transformation projects.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – March 28, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – February 28, 2023

pamyoast — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 14:11:54 +0000

Topics & sources

Bing news

Google news

WordPress news

WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 released and ready for testing

Industry and tech news

iOS 16.4 adds new capabilities for web apps on iPhone and iPad, including access to push notifications

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

Alex has been developing and marketing websites since 2003 with a strong background in technical SEO and WordPress development. His WordPress plugins have been installed on millions of sites, two of them later being acquired by global brands. Forming FireCask in 2013 with Anna, the agency has built and marketed for hundreds of brands from startups to global corporations. In late 2020 Alex found himself immersed in the NFT space and was involved in several drops throughout 2021.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – February 28, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – January 31, 2023

pamyoast — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 10:39:01 +0000

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

WordPress news

WordPress project aims to complete customization phase and begin exploring collaboration in 2023

Industry & tech news

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – January 31, 2023 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – December 20, 2022

pamyoast — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 13:34:29 +0000

Topics and sources

Google news

Other tech news

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – December 20, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – November 22, 2022

pamyoast — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 10:39:32 +0000

Topics & resources

Google news

WordPress news

WordPress 6.1 is out

Other tech news

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – November 22, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – October 25, 2022

pamyoast — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:10:37 +0000

Why you should watch this replay

Catch up on the latest SEO news in our webinar! Renaming things is the flavor of the month, and there’s quite a bit going on with AI too.

Jono Alderson, Head of SEO at Yoast, talks us through the SEO news from October 2022. In this edition of our monthly SEO webinar, Jono is joined by Hannah Smith, who shares some really fantastic tips for getting creative in digital marketing. Watch the replay or read our recap below to know more!

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next (free) webinar on November 22, 2022.

Google news

3:14 – Google replaces its Webmaster Guidelines with Google Search Essentials
What was historically known as webmaster guidelines to Google Search Essentials, which feels like they’re getting with the times a bit. Right. Do go and check these out if you haven’t met them. They’re quite high level and a bit generic, but they’re a nice framing for what Google is looking at, and the kinds of things you should and shouldn’t do.
4:35 – Introducing site names on Google Search
Mobile search results now include the name of the site, quite prominently above the listings, which speaks a lot to branding and trust. If you’re doing more than just building links and writing content, then you want to be investing in growing brand recognition and making people remember you, influencing their emotions and their opinions. And then when they search, if your brand name shows up recognizably, then that’s great. All of this is powered by structured data.

If you’re running a recent version of Yoast SEO, we’re already adding all the schema that you need to control this. Also, in our latest update for Yoast SEO we give you more control over this, so you can tailor it and be really specific in how you want to represent your brand name.
5:52 – Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform
Google Data Studio has just rebranded to Looker Studio. What’s interesting about this is Looker is a pretty awesome enterprise analytics visualization tool. And Data Studio has always been a little bit rough and ready, it felt a little bit clunky. Nothing’s changed in the product yet, but hopefully they’re going to come together a bit and Data Studio will become better and better. If you’re struggling with Google Analytics, Data Studio is a really good tool. It’s much more intuitive than a lot of Google Analytics-type interfaces. So hopefully this is the beginning of that becoming much smarter.
7:12 – Get more visual results when you shop on desktop
Google is showing more images in its desktop Google Shopping search results. Unfortunately these still struggle to be specific enough. You can find things that are roughly in the right category. But if you want a very specific thing, it’s terrible. And actually something like going into an Argos store or going to Amazon might still be better for that sort of thing.
10:42 – Google answers Meta’s video-generating AI with its own, dubbed Imagen Video
Google announced Imagen, a new AI video-generation tool. In the release post, Google acknowledges that even the examples they’ve cherry picked to show how good it is are still a bit weird. This is as good as this gets at the moment. I think we’re years off this being useful for kind of real world scenarios.

Microsoft news

12:22 – AI-generated imagery is the new clip art as Microsoft adds DALL-E to its Office suite
There are more and more of these AI image-generators, and some of them are getting really good. Now Microsoft Office is integrating DALL-E into its Office suite, and calling it Microsoft Designer. So when you’re writing, it can generate an image to go with your text. The quality is surprisingly good.

WordPress news

17:37 – WordPress 6.1 RC 1 released, ready for testing and translation
WordPress 6.1 is coming out quite soon. The first and second release candidates have been released if you want to get early access and test it. Don’t install this on a big, important site that your livelihood is tied to, because it’s not ready yet. But if you want to trial it and get hands-on with some new stuff, then you definitely can.

There are a few exciting things in the pipeline. There are some potentially huge performance boosts from some new caching structures and systems in the backend. The WordPress core performance team, which Yoast is heavily involved in, has been working on a lot of that. There’s also a whole bunch of backend changes, and there’s some new stuff you can do with things like fluid font sizes, too.

18:51 – Introducing handles: A new way to identify your YouTube channel
YouTube has added handles. So now you’ll effectively be able to app someone via their handle, much like you’ve been able to do in Twitter since 2008. Like you can do on Instagram, and TikTok. It’s good that they’ve finally added this. It seems this has become the de facto standard for tagging people on the net, now. No platform or network is ever going to launch now that doesn’t have this feature because it’s become universal.
20:44 – Facebook announces the retirement of ‘Instant Articles’
Facebook had a thing called instant articles, which allowed you to read news articles in a kind of Facebook-flavored environment. And news publishers and websites could pipe those articles to Facebook in the right format. And it would be faster, it would be sleeker, it would be a better experience for the user. They wouldn’t have to leave Facebook so it was also a better experience for Facebook, because they can monetize that. Now they’re ending that and adding Tik-Tok style videos instead.

Other tech news

26:29 – Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon & Microsoft join to improve voice recognition
This project has all the tech giants joining together to build out their systems capabilities for recognizing speech patterns from people who aren’t middle-aged white men. I’m sure anybody with even the remotest accent – nevermind difficulty speaking or other challenges – trying to tell the assistive device to add something to a shopping list or turn the lights on, is having trouble with it, failing three times out of four. I can’t imagine how much harder that is for people who genuinely have difficulty communicating. The more effort and energy we put into this to make it accessible, to make it work reliably, the better. And it’s great to see them plowing resources into this.
27:33 – Privacy Shield 2.0: Data protection framework may benefit US businesses
So we’ve talked on and off for months now about the looming challenges around the death of cookies. Or at least third party cookies and the upcoming sunsetting of Universal Analytics, and how Google Fonts may or may not be illegal. All of these things essentially boil down to the same problem: that there is no good legal framework for data belonging to EU citizens being moved to America. Yet many of the services we rely on, like Google Analytics, and Amazon Web Services which hosts things like Google Fonts, all of these are based in America either partially or entirely.

There’s been zero progress until now. We’re starting to get a hint that there might be a way forward. It’s not perfect, and it’s still got lots of challenges. But in theory, it might shut down a lot of these conversations around Google Analytics being illegal and Google Fonts being illegal because they’re exposing an IP address as personal information.

They will introduce some new requirements. They will contain and geo-fence data. If this goes through, it will make life a lot easier. If it does not go through, it is still going to be the end of the world come July or so next year, when all of these systems become more formally illegal. We’ll have to fundamentally rethink the way that the internet works and what services we can use where, and nobody is ready for that. There’s no real answer to how that’s managed, so this, or something like this, has to come through. It’s good that they’re making progress on it. Fingers crossed.
29:17 – AI content platform Jasper raises $125M at a $1.5B valuation
Most AI content is plagiarism in some form or another – but that doesn’t stop there being a huge amount of money in the space.

There’s a great consolidation happening in the AI content space. Jasper’s eating up a whole bunch of platforms. These things are still brand new, and a lot of them are burning money in the startup phase, and yet they’re eating each other as fast as they’re growing. It’ll be really interesting a few months from now to see which ones are winning and to get a feel for whether they’re any good. A lot of these are quite samey, and a lot of them produce stuff that’s not quite good enough. But maybe if they’re gobbling up each other’s staff and capabilities, and each one is a bit better at something than the others, then maybe whatever comes out or this is passable. But that still doesn’t address the fact that these AIs are just recycling content, which isn’t pleasant.
30:44 – Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
If you haven’t seen it yet, this year’s Web Almanac is out. There’s a big chapter on SEO, there’s a big chapter on accessibility, on web performance, all sorts of stuff you can read about the general state and nature of the internet. There’s some fascinating research like how many fonts are used on the average website, who has too much JavaScript, what’s the most popular CMS, and all sorts of other bits and pieces.

Yoast news

31:25 – New in Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium
We’ve added some more controls in Yoast SEO for identifying the name of your site. We have some new, super nerdy stuff in Yoast SEO Premium, where you can consolidate some of your search URLs for your internal site search. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it can have quite a big impact on your crawl budget and stop Google getting down rabbit holes and in all sorts of nasty places.

We also added a new check in Premium to make sure that you’ve given your post a title. You’d be amazed how many people publish pages and don’t give them a title or a name. And it causes all sorts of problems. Now we’ll check and suggest that you add one if it’s missing.

Interview and Q&A

What makes a good content strategy?

Hannah: We define it thusly: a content strategy is the high level vision that guides future content development to deliver against a specific business objective. And the business objective I think is really the important bit. So I’m a firm believer that all content should be goal-driven, and therefore what you create depends on what you want to achieve.

Any good strategy starts with an objective. So rather than worrying too much about what content strategy is like, start with your objective. Now obviously for most people the objective is often going to be something like increase revenue, or increase new leads. Some kind of money-based metric. Then you need to decide how you’re going to do that. So for example, if your goal was to increase revenue, one way to do that might be to rank better in organic search for some particular terms, which are related to your business. That’s just one way. You might decide that actually SEO is not the thing you want to do. You might just want to do a bunch of stuff with paid search, for example.

You might want to do something totally different, but let’s just roll with SEO for now. So if that’s the direction you want to go in, some things you might need to do are update and improve existing pages or create some new pages to rank for those terms. Then of course your page content aside, you’ll also need to think about how it is that you can help those rank well organically. So you’ll definitely need to think about things like internal links. And you might also need to think about external links – the links from external sites to those pages.

So to my mind, a ‘good’ content strategy has a clear objective, has some sort of well-researched hypothesis and a plan. So it contains what you’re going to do to reach that objective. It clearly outlines things like resources and costs – how much work is this thing? It explains how efforts will be measured and you’ve got appropriate tracking in place. It includes key timelines and dates to review progress. And finally, it is appropriate and realistic, so it’s something that the business can actually do. If it’s not, then I don’t think you have a content strategy.

Yeah. Nice. I think, um, it’s probably quite rare for people to have all of that. In place. Yeah. Um, that’s why people like me exist. Ah, So, I guess, I guess one of the, one of the challenges a lot of people will go. Yep. That makes sense.

So let’s say some people are doing baby steps on this. They’ve committed to writing some blog posts. And they never get past that first step. And then on the other end of the scale, what does best look like? Big creative flamboyant, successful, press coverage, mind changing stuff, stuff that wins hearts and minds. How do you close that gap?

Hannah: I’d still encourage people to think about their objectives. Because obviously it’s entirely appropriate for some businesses to be wanting to do this flashy stuff and get a load of coverage on high-tier news websites. There is a genuine and sane and sensible business need to do that. But for most businesses, there actually isn’t necessarily a need to do that. And there may be a different way to go about that.

If we assume that you’ve done your research and actually yes, linked coverage from journalists is the thing that you do need in order to fulfill your business objectives of ranking higher for a few key phrases? Where I would suggest people begin is by starting out with where they actually want coverage.

So like start out with say five or ten publications that you’d like to get coverage in. Study those publications. Look closely at the articles that journalists are writing there, which topics are you seeing appear over and over and over again? What kind of emotions are those articles provoking? Which articles are being written that have obviously been supplied by PRs in some way, or fuelled by PR. There may be research reports which are getting coverage, for instance. You can recognize when a thing has been made by a company and therefore it’s something that’s been done as a result of PR.

Have a look at those things and have a think about why those journalists are writing those articles. And then have a think about what you could do to add to the conversation in some way. What are you in a position to do? Honestly, if you don’t have experience of this, I would suggest either you hire someone with experience on a freelance basis, or maybe consider getting an agency in. Because it’s a very steep learning curve, this stuff, and this stuff fails a huge amount.

For people who don’t have a huge amount of budget or resources, how do they shortcut that?

Hannah: PR tactics like offering expert commentary to journalists can be a great option for small businesses who want to get coverage but don’t have the time to create those big, flashy, extensive reports. First and foremost, journalists are on Twitter, and they often put out requests using the hashtag #journorequests. There are also services like Help A Reporter Out, which can help you filter and keep track of journalists’ requests like this.

A friend of mine called Surena Chande just did a Brighton SEO talk, and she wrote a great presentation all about how to maximize your chances of the journalist picking your expert comments. I will just paraphrase really quickly here: essentially, resist the urge to sell or promote yourself. Instead what you should try and do is provide actual expertise, which should hopefully go without saying (but actually doesn’t). So offer actual expertise, add something of value. So ideally a new perspective or an alternative take is better than the same old advice that everyone spouts. And obviously it will increase your chances of coverage.

Surena is a journalist, and she says that sometimes she notices that people will Google the tip or whatever someone’s asking for advice on. So, for example, often you’ll get a journalist’s request come out, say, around Christmas: “any tips for people who are dreading the festive period and who suffer from loneliness”. People basically Google it and copy and paste the featured snippet. And then pretend that was something they said. And just don’t do that, because journalists can use Google and they don’t need that from you. They need actual expertise and ideally, a new perspective or an alternative take, and your aim ultimately should be to educate the readers and provide unbiased, truthful, useful, accurate up-to-date information.

I think the only other thing I would say is, do you pay attention to what the journalist has asked for? So if the journalist has said, I am looking to speak to a doctor about X. Don’t send a marketing manager. Everybody describes themselves as an expert, but it’s much better if you can qualify that in some way. So for example, rather than claiming to be a sleep expert, but it would be much better if you said, “I wrote this book about sleep and I did these particular qualifications”, that kind of thing. So prove your expertise rather than calling yourself like a sleep expert, or whatever kind of expert. That’s what I would recommend you do.

I imagine there’s a lot of people who say, “I just want an insurance website. I’m not very creative”. How do you cross that chasm, and be more creative?

Hannah: How do you be more creative? Creativity is a skill, not a talent. So I think the way that you be more creative, honestly is just practice. A lot of the things that we think of as talent are actually skills. My friend Mark used to say that, “complaining you’re not creative when you don’t do any creative work is a bit like going to the gym once doing one sit-up and complaining that you don’t have a six-pack”.

Because it’s just work. It’s just work like everything else. If I said “Oh, I’m not very good at coding”. And you said to me, “how much coding have you done though, Hannah?” And I went like, “Oh, you know, I tried it for half an hour once and thought it was hard.” Your first instinct would be to tell me “Well, maybe do a little bit more, commit to doing a bit more.”

So what does commiting to doing a bit more look like, in terms of creativity? I think the thing that most people miss is they are trying to come up with ideas in a vacuum. Ideas don’t come from nowhere. They always come from somewhere. So it’s kind said earlier, my starting point always when I’m doing creative work for any client, is those publications where I want coverage. So I spend a bunch of time looking at those publications, looking at which topics seem to be particularly resonant right now. I do things like read books and watch films and try and talk to people who are interested in this stuff, so that I’m able to get under the skin of it. And kind of essentially what I’m trying to do is create some kind of swipe file of inspirational stuff. And then based on that, only when I’ve got tons and tons of stuff, would I even think about trying to generate or come up with any ideas.

But I think the trouble is, people kind of go like, “oh, I’ve got a pen and a bit of paper, and I’ve tried to come up with ideas and I can’t”, and I’m not surprised. You’ve got no fuel.

Are news articles good for backlinks?

Jono: I think the best way to get links is to have content and a website and a product or a proposition that people naturally talk about, and care about, and are interested about. And then as a result they’re going to link to it. However, that’s a little bit naive. So there’s a middle ground. I think if you are writing and publishing news about interesting, exciting stuff that there is evidence that people care about, and you have some kind of mechanism to get that in front of them so that they see it and read it and engage with it and share it with their friends? Yeah, you can get some links. But I think probably in most cases, just churning out “news articles” is going to achieve somewhere around nothing.

Hannah: Yeah I don’t think newsletter articles are a great way to get links. I mean, obviously there’s an ‘it depends’ in there. What are these news articles? Are you regurgitating news from somewhere else? If so, almost certainly that won’t get links. Most niches, and most business verticals and not terribly ‘linky’. We come from this weird space, like SEO and digital marketing are this very weird and linky space. There’s an awful lot of websites and there’s an awful lot of people who read things, share things and link to each other. But most spaces are not linky.

Let’s use the insurance example, right? If you were writing a load of insurance news articles and hoping that those articles would get links. It’s very, very unlikely. Very very unlikely in my experience that that would get links. I’m not sure why somebody else would want to cover your insurance news.

Taco: So now we have your creative mind here, Hannah, what would be a better alternative to create something that would be share-worthy, link-worthy?

Hannah: As I said before, the first step is to figure out where you want those links from, and go and read what those people are writing and think about a way that you could maybe add to the conversation in some way. For example, if in your particular niche you notice – (we’re sticking with insurance. Let’s assume that you do car insurance. That’s your thing, right?) It would make sense then maybe that you would want to get links from automotive journalists. If you go and have a look at what automotive journalists write about, it’s actually incredibly limited. So they write about new car releases and new car launches. You can’t help them there. You don’t make cars, you sell insurance, right? So that bit’s out.

Similarly, you don’t make anything to go on a car, right? You don’t make sat navs, you don’t make tires. What do people care about, exhausts? You don’t make any of that stuff. Right? So you can’t help the automotive journalists that way.

But something else that you will notice that automotive journalists write about are things like driving rules. There’s something you see constantly are the driving laws that people don’t realize are laws, and therefore they break the law by accident. So there’s the driving law thing. There’s driving conditions stuff. So at various points in the year, it might be dangerous to drive for various reasons. So, winter driving, there’s always like a bunch of that winter driving. Similarly, if it’s very rainy where you are in the world, I imagine there might also be some rain stuff. If you get hurricanes, then maybe some hurricane stuff. There will be various driving conditions things. The other thing that you will see that gets covered is things like studies. I’ve done a lot of work in the insurance space, and in car insurance particularly, and I think it’s actually kind of fun.

So a few of the things that we did was we used publicly available data sources to figure out where the most congested, or traffic-y roads were in every single region of the UK. That got a bunch of coverage. So we weren’t using our own data, but we were using an alternative data source and interrogating it. I’ve seen people do something similar for the most dangerous roads. So they’re looking at traffic accident data. Somebody did this brilliant thing about like, is it called rubbernecking? They took all of the attractions in the UK that you could see by road, and saw which ones seem to cause the most accidents. That’s really good. So, stuff like that. You know, see what’s out there, see how you can build upon it. That’s what I would recommend you do.

I hear a lot of structured data. How can I use structured data myself to rank higher in Google?

Jono: I won’t dwell too much on this one because we’ve talked about this a lot, but I guess very briefly: structured data does not affect rankings. But it absolutely does affect how Google and others understand your site and your content. And that improved understanding might unlock different types of results formats, which might increase click through rate, might increase recognition, might do a whole bunch of other stuff.

They might buy you entry to result formats and listings that you might not be able to get without structured data. Like in the recipes or flight space, you’re going to struggle without it. And kind of more existentially – helping Google to better understand not only your content, but the people who wrote it, and the companies they work for, and the places they live, and where they went to school, and which awards they’ve won are all good things to do. Because if they understand that they’re more likely to understand that your concept is more trustworthy. All of these are secondary effects. While it might not help you rank, it might help you do better in search.

And how can you use it? Install Yoast SEO, and configure it, and we’ll do all the heavy lifting for you.

Hannah: I’m guessing it might help with stuff like Google Shopping as well. It might actually help you rank better in Google Shopping, if you had good structured data, your product may trigger a result higher up for certain types of queries, right?

Jono: there’s so much happening in that space. Things like stock levels, sale prices, and delivery details etc. If you are doing e-commerce stuff, make sure you are using our WooCommerce add-on for WordPress or our Shopify app, because they will do all that schema stuff for you.

What about Accessibility? Is that a real thing or just “words”?

Hannah: It’s definitely a real thing. And definitely not just words. I think it’s really, really, really important. Just in an existential way, right? Like, you want everybody, surely, to be able to read, understand, interact with your website. If you’re interested in money, then the excuse you can give yourself is ‘if my website is inaccessible, I’m leaving money on the table’. I’d like to think that you ought to do it just because it’s the right thing to do, but if you need the money reason, it’s the money reason.

Jono: People are very, very different. They see and hear and interact and read and experience things in different ways. And if you are excluding a portion of those? You’re leaving money on the table, because those people have credit cards. But also they are people who might recommend something, or retweet something, or maybe even link to something.

Intentionally going “We are only going to cater to 70% of the population”. Well, how do we make more money? How do we grow our business? How do we rank higher? How do we get more visits? How do we get more conversions? Maybe make sure that your text is readable to somebody who’s neurodivergent, or that your color scheme doesn’t cause people to struggle to focus on your text. All of these are real considerations that you should be thinking about for sure.

Want to learn more about accessibility? Join the free WordPress Accessibility Day virtual conference November 2-3!

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – October 25, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Free webinar: Is your SEO ready for Black Friday?

Meike Hendriks — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:16:20 +0000

Webinar recap

You can download the presentation slides here. You can also download our checklist for preparing for Black Friday.

Prepare for Black Friday with Yoast SEO: Shop now and add the code PFBF2022 for a 30% discount on our plugins!*
*Excluding Shopify, valid until October 18, 2022.

3:04 – Why prepare for Black Friday early? And why focus on SEO for Black Friday?
Due to the pandemic, more businesses moved online. What we’re seeing now is that the holiday retail landscape is still changing. For example, shoppers are starting very early with preparing for Black Friday. Nowadays, a customer’s research phase can start even 30 days in advance or more. People really take their time to research a product, then wait for Black Friday to purchase it.

In addition, sustainability is also a trend these days. And we’re not only talking about the products people buy. Businesses also want to operate in a sustainable manner, so they can continue growing.

Because the online landscape is getting busier, there is more advertising competition, which makes advertising more expensive. This can be unfortunate. As a business owner, you can’t tell for sure how much money you will have to spend on ads until the check comes.

That’s why it’s increasingly important to have an SEO strategy for this “sales holiday”. A strategy can help you drive more sales, while simultaneously saving costs. So why should you start early? Because SEO takes time to work. After you’ve published a page, it will take days or even weeks for your page to be crawled, indexed, and ranked on search engines like Google.

Besides creating a strategy, you could also try to get backlinks from other sites, get in touch with journalists, and produce stuff that gets attention. These are all valid tactics, but they do take time. You need to email people, wait for responses, gain popularity, and wait for Google to discover your content and evaluate it.

So, while it might feel weird to start marketing and communication about a sale way ahead of the actual sale, you need all this run up in order to get ahead of the competition. And more importantly, get noticed by your customers.

7:06 – 6 optimization categories to work on

Product pages
Structured data
Content strategy
Speed & mobile
Create buzz
Analyze

Optimization for product pages

9:00 – Be clear with your product/SEO titles
You know what your product is and what it can do. But other people might not. That’s why you have to help them understand what they’re looking at. Make it as easy as possible for them to understand what you’re trying to say.

9:29 – Differentiate your page
If your product pages are generic, you’re missing out on opportunities to stand out from your competition. In addition, they might be hard to distinguish from other pages on your website.

10:13 – Emotional triggers
While it shouldn’t be the primary focus for page titles, you could use them to trigger an emotional response. For example, if you say only 10 items left in stock! that might give your customers a sense of urgency. Of course, you want to make sure that you’re using the right keywords and sending the right message. Because the title turns up in the search results. It’s your snippet text. In other words: it’s an advert for your page. So anything you can do to kind of entice or compel is going to be pretty valuable.

11:45 – Optimize meta descriptions
How do you make sure your meta descriptions aren’t generic? They have to spark interest. People should want to click on it. So, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Try to think of their problems and how can you help solve those problems with your product or service. And don’t forget to make every single product and page description different.

As for Black Friday, people are very price sensitive. They will absolutely demand that you have free shipping and free returns. So you really need to make use of every letter to try and convey everything. If you put in the work, it’ll make a difference. Instead of skimming over results, people will actually click on your page.

11:45 – Optimize your URL
Your URL should be easy to understand. It should explain what you’re looking at. If you have a set of URLs that you’ve been using for a long time, don’t change them. People might know them by heart. If you do change or delete them, make sure to redirect them. You don’t want your visitors to run into dead ends!

However, don’t go out of your way to change all of your existing URLs if they’re okay. If you’re starting from scratch, though, you might want to spend extra time and effort on crafting clear URLs.

15:30 – Optimize media (photos, videos)
Be unique! Don’t use stock photography. People have seen so many stock photos that they’ve become blind to them. Instead, take your own pictures (or hire someone to take them for you). And make sure your images have a high resolution and high quality. Don’t forget to shoot your product at multiple angles, as well as show the context of your product so customers can get a genuine feeling of how it looks and feels. Basically, you should provide your customer’s questions with answers using images.

18:45 – Customer reviews
Social proof really helps to convince people that they should buy your product, and that the product is valid. It aids conversion, because you’re taking away people’s doubts. So, actively look for reviews. They could even be reviews from a third-party website that isn’t registered by you.

20:06 – How to get reviews
What you can do is ask, and you need to make sure that you’ve built a process to collect reviews. Say thank you to those who have bought your product and ask them to follow your review process: please go here. Follow this process, fill out this form, and give them the opportunity to upload a photo of the product they’re using. Try to make it as easy as possible. The more of those reviews you get, the more human your business becomes, and the more likely someone sees a review on your site of someone who looks like them.

21:28 – Make the next action really clear
You need to consider that there are multiple options that customers might want to take. Of course, this depends on where they are in their customer journey. Your objective is to get them all the way across the line. In other words: get them to buy without taking multiple steps. For example, if people have questions, make sure there are routes to answer their questions. Help people who don’t understand your product sector become experts.

You can use the period leading up to Black Friday to establish a content strategy to help people with their questions. Besides, people are going to do a lot of research way in advance of Black Friday, then wait for the moment to purchase. So you’ve got to make sure that you’ve answered those questions way in advance.

Optimization for structured data

We talked about broad marketing strategy stuff, which is about convincing humans to take action. Next, you need to convince search engines that you are the right supplier. And a big part of that is structured data.

When we’re talking about structured data, we’re talking about rich results. Getting featured snippets in rich result format is super rewarding as a product or store owner. It’s located at a so-called position zero. Which means you’re at the top and you’re standing out.

26:43 – Adding structured data to your product pages
It’s definitely worth looking into structured data if you can. Especially if the competition is high or your competition isn’t using structured data, because it might help you get that edge over your competitors.

An important tip: Describe your products as richly as possible. Don’t just copy-paste the manufacturer’s description. And don’t do the minimum amount of configuration in something like WooCommerce. Really go through every single one of those tabs. Fill in all the information that you have, and make it rich and full.

Getting your content strategy in check

28:11 – Keyword research
What we would recommend is getting some input from your keyword research. That’s because you need to know who your users are and what terms they’re using to search. Their search terms are your keywords, so you have to find out what terms your customers are using. Do they use words that you’re using as well, or are they searching for something totally different than you thought?

There are actually four types of search intent. For ecommerce, there are three that are most important. There’s informational intent that helps people understand your product and answers questions they might have. Next, you have commercial intent that will help customers make their choice, because it guides them through the buying process. And finally, there’s transactional intent. This means the buyer intent is already there. Customers just want to buy products.

Look into this, and decide where you should focus on. Then, look into how many people are searching for these kinds of keywords and reflect on what people are searching for. Where is the opportunity versus my competitors? Is there a gap where you can add value and compete? Then, decide where you’re going to spend your energy on accordingly.

30:43 – Aim for the long tail keywords
Make sure that you have different types of content for different types of intents as Jono said. Also, a great tip is to find related keyphrases. That’s because you might be using words that your audience just isn’t using or they’re using a different version. So you’ll have to look into related keyphrases to your own keyphrase.

33:42 – Authentic content
With blogging, you can really add a personal touch to your website. Which is good, because people are more likely to buy from you when they feel like they know you a little bit. And that might help with conversion as well.

We added some tips to help you out. First, you have to be relatable. Always put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What problems do they have and what questions are they asking about? Use those in your content strategy. Next, write in a way that’s relatable to your reader and focus on their needs. Sounds simple enough, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating content about your products or services.

Next, you have to create high-quality content. Your goal should be informative, funny, relevant, and just a little bit different from others. This might be challenging, but it’s definitely worth investing time in.

And last but not least: You need to be consistent. Make sure you think about concept planning to make it easier for yourself to show up. This also ties a bit into relatability. There is a lot of competition out there, so make sure you always have something unique to bring to the table. Also, make sure that your brand voice is shining.

38:18 – Storytelling
Storytelling is effective on product pages because it allows you to show people why your product is awesome instead of telling them. And showing is always more convincing than telling. Once again, it is very important to focus on the problem instead of the product. This usually results in great sales copy.

And if you use stories on your product pages, you’ll automatically shift away from your product to the problem and a solution your product offers. And sales copy will benefit from that.

Speed and mobile optimization

Speed is now officially a ranking factor. And it’s only gonna get more important. When a website is slow, you get annoyed consciously or subconsciously. When that happens, you are less likely to convert, browse, engage, recommend, et cetera. There’s a solid relationship between faster and better in terms of real money.

43:39 – Optimize your website for speed
You’re broadly gonna be looking at something like getting a caching plugin or system depending on what platform you’re on. If you’re on WordPress, that might be WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or NitroPack. Others exist, but these are the good ones. And they will do some of the heavy-lifting on preventing your website from becoming slow.

The next win is changing and optimizing the way your theme loads or works. That might need some development resources or other plugins and logic. Also, think about removing bottlenecks and kind of legacy stuff. A lot of templates and themes were built many years ago and have just been iterated since best practices changed and evolved. So you’re gonna want to rip out some of that old stuff.

The big wins for many people are going to shave some kilobytes off your images, compress your videos better, and make sure you are lazy loading stuff below the fold. Make sure you’re not shoving loads of high, big images down people’s mobile phones when they’re not immediately visible on the page. There are combinations of plugins and modifications you can use for this.

When you’re taking photographs or compiling your videos, take the extra effort to consider: Where is the trade-off between quality and file size? If you knock the quality down from 70 to 60, it might become a little pixelated, but if it also halves the file size, then maybe it’s a good trade-off.

Do that really with finesse about every single one of your assets and reduce the overall overhead. That’s really good practice. Aim for really high-quality media, but make sure that you are balancing that with a small file size, and that you are using plugins to optimize your media.

Create a buzz

47:03 – How to create a buzz
Creating buzz is just getting the word going and getting your deals out there. We recommend starting off with a marketing plan. Create a plan of attack, and especially a calendar. So what’s going out, when, where, and how. When, what days, and where are you doing it? Facebook, Instagram, email marketing, etc. And how: what you’re trying to say in these messages. And some recommendations for how you can announce your sale: you can remind people, do some exclusive deals, or sneak peeks. Just get people involved in your products. Get people excited in the run-up, so they’re ready to buy.

And also a perfect opportunity to optimize is optimizing your social snippets. So for instance, if you want to get on people’s wish lists, make sure that your social snippets look attractive. With Yoast SEO, you can really easily optimize your social snippets so they look attractive to people. Maybe you can even get in those Pinterest top 10 lists for your certain niche. Get on a gift guide or get something fun going.

One of the big bits we haven’t touched on yet, which is a huge part of SEO, is getting links. You definitely shouldn’t be going out and buying links. We would recommend against handing over large sums of money to third parties like agencies to go and buy links for you. But you do need to be thinking about links if you want to convince Google that you really deserve the top slot. Having lots of other sites authentically and naturally link to you and saying good things about you is gonna be a huge part of making that happen.

And one of the tactics you can use for Black Friday in particular: think about the types of things that journalists want to write about and cover. And you can maybe go look at what they’ve done in previous years, what kinds of topics trend, what kinds of things get covered in newspapers? What’s popular on Google Discover and in Google News? And then do your own versions of that.

And that might be top guide lists, it might be recommendations, comparisons, brand overviews, that sort of thing. But you want to be creating content specifically designed to get in front of journalists and publishers so that they link back to you and they say to their readers, “Look, we found this awesome, interesting, funny thing. Here’s a link. Go check it out.” And that will drive your SEO directly. You can really turbocharge how visible your pages are by getting links of that kind. It’s tricky to do. There’s a lot of noise. Everyone else is doing it. But if you’ve got the time and the budget, then trying to craft those kinds of campaigns can be a huge deal.

Then there’s email marketing. For Black Friday, it’s important to keep it simple. Inboxes are overflowing. People just want their information as easily as possible. So look at what you did last year, what worked and what didn’t. Make sure that you use segments to distinguish your actual current customers and potential customers. And make sure that you have different offerings for different target groups.

Just keep it simple and maybe think about what you’re doing after purchase. Maybe follow up with a drip feed to help people get a good experience after buying. And think about planning what you can do to help people through email marketing. It sounds a bit boring, but it can be the most direct way of talking to your customers or potential customers. If you have an email list of people who bought last year and you’ve got tactics that work, then you can build on that.

Analyze

50:41 – Analyze your marketing/sales after and during Black Friday
Analysis is a big part of Black Friday. If you can get your analysis going quite nicely, that will help you in the future as well. So first of all, start out with setting targets for your KPIs. What metrics and KPIs do you use, and which ones are relevant for your business? Don’t measure stuff just for the sake of measuring. What is success for you? Determine what defines success and see what metrics fit with that. So does that mean opens and clicks for your newsletter? Is it engagement? Or what’s relevant for you? And you can compare that with your regular stuff.

Next, check your ecommerce tracking. If you own an online shop, you want to gather your ecommerce data as well. That is easily done in Google Analytics and it really facilitates you. But make sure it’s set up correctly and make sure to read up and see if you’ve done that correctly to get the most out of it. Especially things like funnel reports on checkouts that might have multiple steps. You really want to see where people are dropping out and then you can do the work just in time for Black Friday to fill in some of those gaps and make things easier.

Then there are Google Tag Manager tags. This is very important for Black Friday, but also for your regular campaigns. Use UTM tagging whenever you’re using an internal link as well. So for UTM tagging, as a source, make sure that you add Facebook, newsletter, Instagram, or whatever sources you’re using. The medium: Is it social or email? Is there something different? And for a campaign, well, we’re trying to be original here, ‘Black Friday 2022’. If it’s interesting for you, you can add the content GTM as well to see how your buttons, text and images are performing. See what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adapt if necessary. If this sounds alien to you, it’s definitely worth going and checking out the Google Analytics help documentation.

Keep an eye on your real-time stats in Google Analytics because we’re talking about a limited time period here. Monitor activity as it happens on your sites so you’re able to identify changes and sudden drops in your goals and funnels. And check them regularly to see if they’re performing like you expect them to be. Maybe your checkout is broken or something happens so you can act upon it when it happens, and not after Black Friday.

Questions during the webinar

Don’t high-quality images slow the page down? As in they tend to be large files.

Yes, they can, but you can optimize the files and make them a bit smaller. And if you’re using a decent platform like WooCommerce with some performance plugins or Shopify out-of-the-box, those systems will find the best combination of size, file, and dimensions and try to manage that trade-off.

But typically, bigger is fine and the systems will constrain that for the most part. You can also use https://squoosh.app/ to reduce image sizes, which is built by a bunch of Googlers, so that’s a really good one. It’s good for adjusting one image at a time. If you want something systemized, then look at Photoshop or whatever process you’re using to produce them.

You mention internal links. Where do you suggest putting them on a product page?

We’ve produced this pdf showing what the structure of an ideal product page should look like. Show off your product features and include pain points as well – help people overcome objections. Add internal linking and help people understand those pain points and features you’re using. Get them in context, just work them in there throughout, and make it flow naturally. And related products are good, but don’t just dump out a few. Show people a cheaper version, a bigger version, or show it in blue, and steer people through to those alternative routes.

What is the best loading time for a product ecommerce site and how can you make it faster?

‘Best’ is complicated. Just as speed is a complicated thing to measure. I would suggest running your website through Google PageSpeed Insights, which will give you two scores. It will give you a) ‘how did this test perform out of a hundred?’ And if you have enough traffic, it will say b) ‘here’s how real users experience your site out of a hundred’. And if that’s showing big red lights, then try to make it faster. This will depend on who your audience is and how your site’s built. But make it faster until Google stops saying it’s slow.

Do you recommend specific review sites?

I think we named Trustpilot and G2. Those are the two most popular ones. And next to your own platform as well. I’d also check out Google Reviews, if you’re doing local stuff. Google Maps, Google Reviews, and Yelp (and similar) are really important as well. We know they directly feed into Google’s algorithms, so it’s worth looking at those.

If you have a product that is out of stock, would you delete it even with an SEO strategy on that page or keep the page with internal links to other products?

It depends. Is it going to come back in stock? If it is, then don’t delete the product. Otherwise, you’re going to start again with a brand new page and a brand new set of links and metrics. If you know that one day it might come back into stock, you can do some nice stuff. You can add a little email box saying, ‘Let me know when it’s back in stock’, and still maintain all your internal linking. You might add a little overlay: ‘Here’s some related stuff you might want instead’.

If it’s gone forever? That’s tricky. It’s probably not a good experience just to serve a 404, but you don’t want to be doing lots and lots of redirects back to the homepage. Really think about the user and remember if you delete that page, all your hard work has gone. So don’t be in a rush to do that. It’s really about what’s the best experience here.

If we have a unique handmade product with no SKU, can you provide advice for the best info to get higher ratings in SEO?

Do people know about the product? Is it something they’re searching for? If so, then you might have a huge advantage, because many people are competing for the same products in the same spaces. If you’re doing something unique(ly), you’ll stand out. So, write big old blog posts, and win hearts and minds. However, chances are that you’re going to struggle in things like Google Marketplace because your product doesn’t fit neatly on a shelf with an SKU. But you can go down other routes and use social media or other channels to gain awareness and demand.

If you’re selling handmade jewelry or something specific, make sure that you describe the product. For example, if people are looking for a blue bracelet, they’ll be able to find you. In addition, make sure you use your uniqueness to profile yourself on social and give people an idea of the type of products you’re selling, so they can come back to you and recommend it to their friends. Traffic will be more organic that way.

If you have handmade products, you’re most likely working in a niche. A niche most likely uses long-tail keywords, and you can definitely own that space. Long-tail keywords are keywords with like four, five, six or more words in them. So maybe even ‘handmade’ is already a niche for some products.

Resources and further reading

Want to learn how to get the most out of Yoast SEO? Join our weekly webinar for advice, how-to’s and tips!

The post Free webinar: Is your SEO ready for Black Friday? appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – September 27, 2022

pamyoast — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 12:00:08 +0000

Why you should watch this replay

There’s been a major Google algorithm update this month, which is always a big deal for SEO. Don’t miss our experts’ discussion of all the latest SEO and internet news!

As always, our Head of SEO, Jono Alderson, will keep you up-to-date on the SEO news you need to know in September 2022. In this edition of our monthly SEO webinar, Jono is joined by Jill Quick! After the news, they talk about GA4. Watch the replay or read our recap below to know more!

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next (free) webinar on October 25, 2022.

Topics & sources

Google news

We’ve been talking for a while about Google’s helpful content update which has been rolling out. They said it would be an overhaul of how they treated either really helpful content or really unhelpful content. Sites which are built to try and game SEO, with content purely designed to chase the algorithm shouldn’t really be ranking very well. Meanwhile they should be rewarding authentic, independent contributors who really want to help their users.

It’s not surprising really – that’s how Google has always strived to work. We were expecting this to be quite significant and then really nothing happened. As far as the SEO industry has seen, the research suggests that very little has changed. Maybe some very low quality spam sites were penalized, but for most of us it doesn’t look like much has happened. Maybe this is just the beginning and we’ll start to see more of this. Either way, good content is better than bad content. Check out Google’s guidelines and follow them.

Google’s core update in September was similarly about rewarding high quality content. This update had a massive impact on a huge amount of the publishing industry. Major news publishers and information sites which publish reviews and informative guidelines lost up to 40% of their traffic in some cases.

The perspective is that it’s getting harder to be a broad, generalist publisher. You have to be specialized. There’s a broad lesson here that focus is good and less is more, which is hard for big established businesses to scale. This has been a really impactful update. So if you’ve seen your traffic tank in the last two weeks or so, this might be why.

A lot of this month’s news focuses on products and product reviews. There were some big updates around product structured data. There were also some new features in Google Search Console highlighting your eligibility for merchant listing.

If you’re selling online, make sure that you have a Google Merchant Center account and your products are in there. It manifests like the free shopping listings in Google. Now there are dedicated reports for that in Google Search Console and a bunch of new schema requirements (which the latest version of Yoast SEO is already aligned with!).

11:46 – Google Discover now lets you better express your disinterest on topics

Google Discover is a kind of preemptive search. If you run Android on your phone or you use the Google.com homepage, you get a list of articles that it recommends. That’s Google Discover.

It’s powered by your search history, your interests, and so on. Now you can start to say “I’m not interested in this topic”. That’s really interesting as a feedback mechanism, because it might start to impact which types of sites show up. It might also cascade through to the ad ecosystem, influencing which kinds of sites you choose to advertise on. Theoretically, we might see the death of cookie-based advertising sometime next year; this could be a step in another direction.

12:55 – Find more sustainable travel options with new search tools

Google Flights had a big update, and it now allows you to select eco-certified flights. We’ve also seen some similar stuff happening around local business, involving structured data for restaurants and stores that offer recycling services. Google are working on identifying which businesses tick certain boxes when it comes to social responsibility and similar concepts. This could become a competitive advantage, for instance if your competitors don’t recycle, and you do, these become attributes that help you stand out in the search results.

WordPress news

15:36 – WebP by default pulled from upcoming WordPress 6.1 release

The aggregate impact of adding default WebP images in WordPress is like rainforests worth of trees. Unfortunately it keeps getting pushed back for various technical and political reasons. And once again, it has been pushed back. However, if you wanna get ahead of the curve and start taking advantage of WebP images in WordPress, now you can do that with the Performance Lab plugin. This is like the official beta testing plugin for all the stuff that the WordPress Performance Team are shipping, so you might want to test it before you roll it out in any live production sites.

TikTok is just taking over everything and suddenly all the other platforms are starting to panic. And more broadly outside of TikTok, the short-form video format is getting bigger and bigger. Now Instagram are announcing that they’re going to essentially abandon their eCommerce and shopping focus in favor of chasing short-form video. We see Facebook desperately trying to reinvent to become focused on this. Is this a bubble, or is this how people search and learn and research now?

YouTube Shorts now is trying to compete directly with TikTok and they’re saying if you have 10 million Shorts views over 90 days, you now become eligible for a revenue share of all the ads viewed within a set period. That sounds like an enormous amount, but given the kind of scale of TikTok and short-form video, it isn’t unachievable.

Increasingly this feels like it’s not only a change in the way that people search and discover, but maybe it’s an entirely different business model. There’s a whole world emerging here that we need to be watching closely and not see as a novelty, but see as a new format and a new landscape for marketing.

Other tech news

20:53 – Shopify strengthens international selling with Shopify Markets Pro and Translate & Adapt

Shopify is doing something really interesting that many of the other platforms aren’t: it’s making it easier to handle logistics and integrations and shipping costs. Now you can start a Shopify store and say: “I want to market in 20 different languages. I want to drop ship all my products, so I want to have them manufactured on demand. I want to store them in localized distribution centers and I want to market in 20 different currencies without having to manage any of that”. That’s a pretty awesome proposition!

It might mean that smaller independent manufacturers, products, and sellers can compete with Amazon in a way that’s not really feasible otherwise. Shopify can use their economies to scale, to benefit individual retailers. They’re breaking down barriers, making things which are just unnecessarily hard for e-commerce and shipping easier.

22:35 – Introducing Canva Websites

Canva is one of the best tools on the web. It makes it really easy to design a great-looking banner or a landing page. However, they’ve just launched a website builder thing. If you want to build something pretty, it’s definitely a really nice tool. But if you want to build something that’s going to get to market and tick all the SEO boxes, you really do need to be using either WordPress or Shopify. Other options exist, but you will suffer as a result of missing out on some important features and extras.

Yoast news

New in WooCommerce SEO 15.2 and Yoast SEO for Shopify

We added support for Google’s new schema options and requirements in WooCommerce and Yoast SEO for Shopify. It’s really powerful. You can now create even better looking search results and access additional reports in Google Search Console. We also added new checks to our ecommerce products to make sure that you are using SKUs and product identifiers properly. It’s a tedious admin job, but Google reads that data, and it gets output in your schema. Identifying what all your products are is quite a big deal.

New features in Yoast SEO Premium

In Yoast Premium, we’ve added some new crawl settings, allowing you to block Google from crawling a load of pages that shouldn’t even exist in WordPress. That saves you a bit of crawl budget. The feature is buried in some of the advanced settings, but if you really want to nerd out and micromanage where Google is and isn’t going, you can do that now.

Come and meet us at SMX Advanced Berlin or The News and Editorial SEO Summit (NESS)

If you are in Germany on 29 September, come and say hi to us at SMX Berlin where Jono will be speaking about schema. And if you are online on October 4-5 pop over and see us at NESS, the News & Editorial SEO Summit.

GA4: Migration Plan – The Helicopter Method

In her (very stylish) presentation, Jill gets to grips with what’s changing in Google Analytics 4. With Google planning to phase out Universal Analytics from June 2023, it’s time to prepare for GA4. Jill explains the key differences between the old and new measurement models, and guides us through setting up event tracking in GA4. Her ‘Helicopter Method’ is a phased plan for migration. Watch the recap to see her full presentation and tips, or check out The Helicopter Method on her website.

Want to see Jill speak live in person? She’s giving a talk at the SearchLove conference in London on October 18. And you can get 30% off your tickets with our discount code!

Questions asked during the webinar

Is there any advice about the legality of Google Analytics, considering the recent cases and rulings such as in Denmark? Should we still be using Google Analytics?

Disclaimer: we are not lawyers and this does not constitute legal advice.

There was the Danish Protection Agency in particular that had said they don’t think Google Analytics is legal. It’s worth pointing out that these are guidelines and it’s not law. So it’s worth pointing out that it’s not illegal in terms of, you know, official law and you’re not going to go to prison for using it.

Having said that, this is definitely still something that we should all be looking at anyway. So with the Data Protection Authority stuff in other countries, if you want to continue to use Google Analytics, obviously now that we’ve got this migration on our hands, you do have an option now that it’s not the only tool that you want to use.

I’ve got some of my favorite things that I can do in GA4 that some of the other programs can’t do. Having said that, depending on your business, GA4 may not be for you. You might not need all the things that happen. If you are telling me that you only look at who goes to the website, do they look at the content and does the phone ring, then do you need to go through all of this? Maybe not.

If you want to use GA – and all of us through our careers, if you’re in an agency or you’re a consultant – you’re going to touch it at some point, so we’re all going to have to learn it at some point. You can’t really avoid it. When it comes to the legalities of it the first thing to have a look at is your cookie management, and this is for any software you are using by the way. It’s not good enough to say “well, we’re compliant because we have a cookie banner”. Most cookie banners are garbage and they don’t work properly. You have to really think through the implementation, what should be firing, what are the rules, and making sure you’re not sending any ghost hits to Google or wherever. And that needs to happen first.

The second point for the legalities of data collection is making sure that you collect the bare basics and then work your way up if there’s a use case. Are you using any of that data? Because for one, there’s a question of whether you can legally store all of this? If your privacy policy and consent mode isn’t saying you can, do you need it? Focus on the bare basics so you can answer questions like, how many people come to the website, how do they find you and what did they do? And then move out from there.

If you are really concerned about Universal Analytics, and this is probably one of the reasons that Google is setting it on fire next year, it is really difficult to get into compliance mode. In terms of GA4, they are trying to make it more compliant by moving the servers over onto EU soil and truncating the IP address from it.

Further down the line, give it two to five years. There’s been lots of stuff over the years talking about service side tagging. I think for a lot of big organizations in particular, I think we are gonna be seeing a movement toward collecting all of your first party data and then storing it on your own server, or maybe in BigQuery and then modeling it. There’s a process people have to go through, for sure.

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – September 27, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – August 30, 2022

pamyoast — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:37:21 +0000

Why you should watch this replay

There’s been a major Google algorithm update this month, which is always a big deal for SEO. Don’t miss our experts’ discussion of all the latest SEO and internet news!

As always, our Head of SEO, Jono Alderson, will keep you up-to-date on the SEO news you need to know in August 2022. In this edition of our monthly SEO webinar, Jono is joined by Nichola Stott, a seasoned SEO and Managing Director of SEO/UX agency Erudite. Watch the replay or read our recap below to know more!

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next (free) webinar on September 27, 2022.

Topics and sources

Google news

3:08 – The Helpful Content Update to diversify search results

Google recently announced a new core update – the Helpful Content Update – which started rolling out on August 25. The focus of this update is to remove unhelpful content from the search results, particularly AI-written content and spam. So far, the impact seems to have been quite subtle. But as time goes on, we should see some more diversity in the results. More authentic human-written content from people who care and have opinions. That can only be a good thing; it’s so common to see a page with yet another set of advice that is just kind of generic and unhelpful. Hopefully this update will change that.

6:12 – New in structured data: Pros and cons

Google has introduced a new type of structured data and rich results: pros and cons. So now if you are editorially reviewing a product, you can say: here are the pros and cons, and those show up in the search results. That’s quite exciting! As a consumer searching for a new mobile phone or a car, this is quite nice for a quick overview of what you want to rule in or out with your consideration.We’re definitely going to see more like this – there’s some talk behind the scenes at Schema.org about doing the equivalent of this for declaring the main features of a product. So if you are selling an iPhone and you want to do something similar to this, you can say ‘it comes in blue, it has a camera phone’ and so on. And we’ll get similar rich results for that kind of stuff.

7:39 – How we’re improving search results when you use quotes

So when you’re searching, you can use quote marks with the aim of querying the entire database for something that exactly matches the phrase inside the quotes. It doesn’t really seem to work very well at all at the moment. Now, it’s still not going to give us exact content matching, but, according to the engineer, it should be much more accurate in extracting the right pieces from the metadata. Plus they’ll now show the search phrase in the snippets, so you can see the context those words appear in on the page.

9:58 – Google Search Console update: More data in Core Web Vitals report

Google has introduced a whole bunch of improvements to performance reports and Core Web Vitals metrics. Before, the reports in Search Console were a bit rubbish – they were fairly vague and you had to click a lot of things and dive down 10 levels to actually see what was going on and get a feel for what needed to be done. So this is a much nicer, more considered user interface. It’s worth taking a look and seeing which pages are slow, what’s wrong with them, what should be fixed. It’s much easier to ask and answer those kinds of questions now

Microsoft Bing news

11:22 – IndexNow attributed for 7% of all new URLs clicked on in Bing in the past month

IndexNow is a system where when you publish or update a post or page, you can ping Bing, and then Bing and a whole bunch of other systems ping each other, and then they can crawl it. So in theory, you get much faster calling and indexing. It’s a nice idea. It’s riddled with technical and environmental and conceptual challenges, but it could be good for the web. And Microsoft is saying now that 7% of all new URLs clicked in Bing in the last month, came via IndexNow. We added support for IndexNow in Yoast SEO Premium recently, so if you have that then maybe you’ll see some more traffic and value from Bing now.

WordPress news

13:40 – WebP by default on hold for 6.1 after new objections from WordPress lead developers

The performance team in WordPress (something we’re deeply involved in) is doing some really exciting stuff. We almost got WebP images by default in WordPress 6.1, which is coming up soon, but there’s a whole bunch of politics and technical complexity that’s holding it up. It’s worth noting that WebP is supported in WordPress now. So if you are doing image optimization, you can convert your images to WebP, you can upload WebP images, but WordPress isn’t going to automatically do it by default for you. There’s like a whole bunch of performance questions, a whole bunch of storage questions.

14:56 – Pinterest introduces hosted checkout for merchants

Pinterest has added hosted checkout capabilities for merchants. So if you have a Shopify store, people on Pinterest looking at your stuff can buy it right there. Lots of social media platforms have inbuilt ecommerce solutions now. Search is increasingly removed from the buying cycle and discovery cycle. We’ve talked before about using a kind of hub and spoke strategy where your website is still really important, but you need these social media platforms for discovery to bring people back in. But now the lines are blurring. The question of what is a search engine changes, and that raises the question of where you should do your SEO. We assume that should be your domain and website, but maybe it’s a bit more complex than that.

16:19 – TikTok is fast becoming a key search and discovery platform for younger audiences

Google has done a big study and found that almost 40% of young people use TikTok when they’re looking for a place to go to lunch, or they want to buy some new shoes, or they want to read a book. They don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go on TikTok and maybe Instagram and they consume short form video. This is huge. If you haven’t already thought about your strategy when it comes to this stuff, it’s time to start taking it seriously.

Other tech news

18:14 – We need to talk about how good A.I. is getting

So we’ve all been waiting for AI and machine learning to become a thing. Now suddenly it feels like there has been a massive revolution and a step change. AI has become really good at generating stunning images based on prompts. These are images that you could hang in your home or use for a featured image in a blog post. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Content generation is progressing quickly too. It feels like we’re living in the future and the implications aren’t yet clear, but it’s huge. Still, we started by talking about how Google is working hard to remove a load of low-quality automated content from their search results. So the takeaway from this definitely isn’t to go and automate writing a billion blog posts, because that is bad. We need to figure out where AI can be helpful and assistive, rather than just shipping trash.

Yoast news

We’ve added a whole bunch of new features in Yoast Premium recently, including an emoji picker for page titles and meta descriptions. We also launched a front end SEO inspector. So now you can launch a sidebar in the front-end with your SEO metadata. And besides that, we’ve just launched a beta version of our Inclusive language analysis, which tries to spot if the words and phrases you are using might be offensive or exclusionary.

There’s been some new stuff in Yoast SEO free, too. We’ve overhauled the integrations page, and added some schema improvements, a whole bunch of bug fixes, and some performance improvements. And finally, in our Local SEO plugin, we added support for civic structures, which are like churches and zoos and museums. These have a weird position in the schema structured data space, but now you can use all of those in the plugin, which is really, really cool.

SEO strategy vs tactics discussion

Nichola talks about the difference between strategy and tactics, and tries to disambiguate the concepts. She breaks down the marketing process into four strategic elements and explains her perspective on how to build those elements into a real, workable strategy. She also shares some fantastic insights and tips about what tends to go wrong, and how to avoid that. Check out the full discussion in the video!

Questions asked during the webinar

You mentioned traditional marketing models like SWAT, what else can we learn from old school or offline marketing?
I mean, there’s all sorts of mnemonics and phrases and things like that. I would suggest not to get too hung up on those. There’s two other learning resources I would recommend for you. One is Think with Google, it is brilliant. They combine lots and lots of different data, online and offline, joining up. It’s fantastic. I’ve also got a great book recommendation, which is Marketing Strategy, by a lady called Jenna Tiffany. That’s a great book to read.

Another good exercise to do is understanding your brand voice. Who are you? What, what are your brand values? Making sure you’ve got that nailed down. If you’re a medium to a larger size organization, that’s probably really well established. And if you speak to your brand team or your internal PR team, get a copy of your brand book and brand guidelines. That will really help you. If not, if you don’t have that, if it’s your own business, I would suggest working on that first: actually establish who are we, and what are our brand values? And you can use that as something to pin, and it guides your decision-making as well.

When should you change strategy or at least review it and, and how do you know if you’re going in the right direction or in the wrong one?
I would review strategy on a monthly basis in SEO because it’s changing so quickly all the time. And we’ve got all of these macroeconomic factors that can happen at any time. So I think it makes sense to not be too utterly wedded to your strategy. And again, when you are justifying it, if it’s to yourself, fine, have a word with yourself. But if you’re justifying it to other people, set that expectation right at the beginning, because you don’t want to find yourself eight months in with the sort of scope of work that’s got something like ‘oh now we’re at war with’, or you know, ‘we can’t get those materials shipped over to you’. You don’t want to paint yourself into a corner.

So definitely revisit it on a monthly basis. Do you know if your strategy is working? Are those goals that you set at the outset moving in the right direction? If they are, then it’s working. If not, why not? You need to reassess what it is against that.

How harmful is illegal copying of blogs or entire sites, sometimes even entire websites including branding & design? Can bots see who the original belongs to? What can you do about this?
As with so many SEO answers, it’s at least in part. It depends. If you are a huge, successful household brand that everybody knows and loves? It doesn’t really matter if a whole bunch of other sites copy yours and clone your design and content. It’s a minor annoyance at best, maybe. But obviously many sites aren’t that huge. Then it’s really tricky. Google is generally quite good at working that out; there are signals that are hard to fake. Like, your business is the one that’s at your address. Not the ones who copied you.

Is it a problem? It can be problematic if you have other technical issues on your site. Like if Google finds somebody else’s first and then it looks like you’re second, that can be a bit messy. So you really wanna make sure you’ve got your house in order. Other than that, I think try and grow your site and grow your brand and put some distance between you and the sites that are copying you. The kinds of sites who are going to be doing this aren’t going to have big, strong domains. They’re not going to have lots of real people talking about them and linking to them and shopping with them. Build those signals and that evidence that you are authentic and legitimate, which is just the same thing as doing good SEO, and then gradually leave them behind.

One thing you can do is to lock down wildcard subdomains. If you are allowing wildcard subdomains in your domain hosting (or however), that can on occasion be hijacked. So someone could create 6471.this-is-your-website.com, copy your entire site on there, and then use that to link spam. That’s obviously quite a dangerous tactic. So make sure that you turn off the wildcard domain ability.

There are a couple of ways to solve it. You can file what’s called a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. You can also just contact their host. So if they haven’t hijacked your site, and it’s someone who’s just ripped your site completely? Generally contacting their host directly and saying ‘you are hosting a site that is doing this, what are you going to do about it?’ will often do the job itself before you need to do a DMCA.

Ann, one of the webinar attendees also left a comment about using WordProof, a blockchain based technology we’ve talked about before in the webinar. WordProof is useful because it helps to prove that you were there first, right? That will definitely make something like a DMCA takedown request much easier. If you can show something verifiable that confirms your content has been copied, it’s gonna make that much easier, faster, and more reliable.

I’ve started receiving video indexing issues. They only seem to tell me that the video share link is actually resolving to a different URL of that video. Or am I misunderstanding this? It seems like a waste of resources. Thoughts?
So Google recently, in the last week or so, updated Google Search Console with all of their new video reporting stuff. We’ve had a whole bunch of these, I’ve been looking at them. The reports are messy and confusing and not very informative, as is so often the case with these. I see a bunch of examples where they show what look like warnings, where actually you don’t need to do anything. Like if you have three videos on one page, which is not an unusual scenario, it will say we can’t work out what the main video is. That sounds like your problem. There isn’t a main video. What does that even mean, conceptually? Yes, there are scenarios where you have a main video, but quite often you’ve just got some videos.

I would not worry about too much if there are explicit errors – go in and have a look. If you’re running the Yoast SEO Video plugin and you’re getting warnings or errors, email, or tweet me and I’ll look at it. Otherwise I’d spend a little bit of time digging around, but if it looks like it’s just a bit unhelpful and the errors don’t make sense, probably ignore them.

I have a major spam problem in comments and pingbacks, should I delete all in WordPress or will this hurt me SEO? Deleting individually is impossible given the quantity.
I would work out how and where it’s coming from and prevent that with something like Akismet, which is Automattic/WordPress’s own spam protection tool, it is surprisingly good. And if that isn’t enough, then get on CloudFlare, which we talk about a lot. That might prevent some of the bots upfront.

I would also question the strategy behind having comments. Like, is it useful? Are they useful? Are they helpful? A lot of that kind of comment interaction mechanic has moved to places like Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. I don’t know how much of a thing comments are for many sites anymore. And then you can go and delete all of that rubbish and you’ll be a happier, better person for it. And Google will not be confused that your pages are not in fact about dating in Saudi Arabia or whatever the content is.

Running a food blog I never know what to lay as ALT TEXT on my photos. I read for SEO you should describe what is in the picture imagining someone is blind, but I’ve heard other people say it’s important to name the restaurant. Which is correct?
If you’re reviewing a dish from a particular restaurant and taking a picture of that dish? I would put both in. So describe what the picture is, you know, what does this dish look like? How is it composed? How is it structured? Then towards the end ‘from Gordon Ramsey’s blah blah blah restaurant’. There’s no reason why you can’t have both. An alt text doesn’t have to be long, I wouldn’t worry too much about having an optimal length for an alt text. So just describe what’s in there. And then name the restaurant in the process.

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Alex Moss

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – August 30, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – July 19, 2022

pamyoast — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 12:44:45 +0000

Why you should watch this replay

The world of SEO is constantly evolving, and keeping up with all of these changes can be quite difficult. But no worries, we’ve got your back!

Our Head of SEO, Jono Alderson will keep you up-to-date on the latest SEO news in our monthly SEO news webinar. Joining Jono in this month’s webinar is a special guest – Areej AbuAli. Besides being an amazing SEO consultant, she is also the founder of Women in Tech SEO, a global community for women in the technical SEO field. She will tell us all about in-house SEO, as well as the unique challenges faced by people working in businesses with a lot of moving parts. Watch the replay or read our recap below to know more!

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next (free) webinar on August 30, 2022

Recap and resources

Google news

6:37 – Google to pay Wikipedia for content in the knowledge panel & search
Wikipedia announced Wikimedia Enterprise, a paid service to let large organizations repurpose Wikimedia content for a fee. Google has entered into a formal agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation. They will start to pay for Wikipedia’s content shown in Google Search, like the knowledge panels. Jono and Areej think it’s about time Google pays Wikipedia as, for instance, the knowledge panels are a big thing on the search result page.

8:13 – Signed Exchanges launched for desktop sites
Signed Exchanges is a new feature that Chrome has started supporting. It’s not talked about a lot because it’s quite a techy feature. The practical implications of this feature are that before the user clicks on a search result, Google can already preload content for that page so it loads instantly. Historically, this was only available on mobile devices (mostly for Android) AND only available if your website’s running AMP. Now, this is available for anybody who can configure their server to support it.

9:40 – Google Maps adds new features for business owners
This is a new tool from Google to let businesses build rich, interactive maps for listing their business locations. It also provides a nice way to embed direction finders and local business locators into your website. This will help businesses streamline some of their integrations with Google Maps. At the same time, this can make businesses more reliant on Google because businesses are putting more data in Google.

11:26 – Google’s AI team announces a system for automatic video captioning
Google’s AI team announced that they are using an AI system to automatically caption videos based on a combination of the image content and the spoken content. Video as a content format is only becoming more important and more valuable. It’s become the preferred way for many audiences to research, form opinions, and get quick decisions. When Google releases this tool, it may be a big deal as it can help speed up the workflow of many people, making it less cumbersome to produce video content.

13:56 – Search Console launches Video Indexing Report
You will only see the Video Indexing Report if Google detects pages with videos on your site. The report shows you the status of video indexing on your site. From the report, you can see:
– On how many pages has Google identified a video.
– Which videos were indexed successfully?
– What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?

Additionally, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index.

15:08 – ‘Top ranked feature’ now works in conjunction with critic reviews and product review articles on mobile
This feature provides shoppers with review information from experts in the niche, while also providing links to other product review articles where you can learn more about the top products in that category.

17:02 – Nearly half of Gen Z is using TikTok and Instagram for search instead of Google
Nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers searching on TikTok and Instagram over Google Search and Maps, according to Google’s internal data. A Google executive has confirmed that TikTok’s format is changing the way young people conduct internet searches, and Google is working to keep up. But it’s not only the youth, people are increasingly using snaps of videos as a way to search for information and make decisions.

Microsoft news

19:11 – Microsoft launches Merchant Promotions coupons
This feature will allow advertisers to promote products using coupons directly from the Microsoft Shopping Campaigns inventory with special offer tags. Microsoft will use crawled data from the advertiser’s website to create automated coupons, so website owners need to ensure they have the correct information to be captured and communicated with potential customers. Microsoft also stated that the automated coupons will only apply to store-wide promotions, not individual products.

WordPress news

21:36 – WordPress Performance Team proposes developing a new plugin checker tool
The Performance Team wants to build a plugin checker tool that would flag any violations of the plugin development requirements and suggest best practices with errors or warnings. This is an effort to ensure that new plugins are meeting the latest standards and best practices.

23:00 – FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asked Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores
There is a whole bunch of political regulatory stuff going on in America that might result in TikTok being removed from all the app stores over China-related data security concerns. The background information is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese firm called Bytedance, which historically has had not great relationships with the US government.

24:13 – Pinterest launches new shopping features for merchants
Pinterest announced that it’s rolling out new features for merchants. The company says all of the new features are designed to make it easier for merchants to create engaging shopping experiences. The new features include:
– Product tagging on Pins with
– Pinterest API for Shopping
– Video assets in product catalogs
– Shop Tab on business profiles

Other tech news

25:55 – W3C announces major changes
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will become a new public-interest non-profit organization. The organization is responsible for setting and managing web standards such as HTML and browser privacy. This change may give W3C a bit more influence in things like the political ecosystem. For instance, they can come in and give explanations when politicians don’t understand how certain things work. And so they are more able to have an authentic discussion with politicians and policymakers about many things regarding the web.

26:30 – Meta launches an AI knowledge-based tool
Meta launched a new AI tool named Sphere for essentially identifying fake news. Initially, it will be used to verify citations on Wikipedia. Wikipedia content edits and system moves far too quickly for human evaluation, so Meta had the idea to apply AI to help verify citations.

Yoast SEO News

28:00 – Yoast SEO 19.3 and Yoast SEO Premium 18.9
We’ve been working hard to introduce new features and enhancements to our plugins. Particularly, we’ve improved the way we handle schema for images and provide more robust handling of webpages’ schema id in the latest release. Next to that, you’ll find a new feature in Yoast SEO Premium 18.9 – the word complexity assessment, which is replacing the Flesch reading ease score in the readability analysis. Additionally, we’re continuing to enhance our crawl setting feature, including more settings for you to toggle and optimize the crawlability of your site. Check out our release post for more information!

In-house SEO discussion

28:30 – Jono and Areej talk about in-house SEO
Areej shares her experience working as an in-house SEO; from what she works on, how her work days look like, to how she works together with other teams and departments within her company. Then they go on to talk about when companies should look to outsource SEO tasks to agencies. After that, they talk about some of the benefits when switching from working for an SEO agency to working as an in-house SEO. Of course, they also mention the disadvantages when working in-house. There are a lot of insights, especially for those looking to develop a career in SEO, so check out the discussion!

Questions asked during the webinar

What online communities do you all like to help you stay up to date on SEO?
Areej mentioned Women in Tech SEO. It’s a super friendly, kind, and judgment-free community. Other than that, Twitter, Reddit channels like BigSEO, and Slack communities are good places to find news and learn about SEO. Jono added that Twitter is really handy for seeing what’s happening at the moment and discussing about things that are unknown or not well-known in SEO.

I handle all marketing for my company and there’s so much to do, tell me where SEO ranks in importance?
The answer really depends on your business. You need to know the share of revenue (or traffic) from SEO compared to all the different channels. For example, if organic, or if SEO brings in 70% of traffic or 70% of revenue, then that’s probably something to really focus on. Whereas, if it’s a very very small percentage, and email or other channels bring in more revenue, then the importance of SEO is less in this case.

Next to that, you need to look at this from a resource perspective and a budget perspective. Do you have enough budget to spend on paid search and other ads? If not then you’re going to have to rely more on organic. If a lot of your problems are content-wise, then you need to focus on building a lot of content.

Then there’s also the consideration of what’s the potential of SEO. For instance, if you have competitors who are doing phenomenally well, while there are loads of people searching, and you know that there is a big slice of pie to be had, then maybe you can chase that.

Lastly, there’s the question of the short term versus the long term. A lot of your SEO effort is going to take time to yield results, so you’re going to have to invest time and slowly build up.

If there’s one thing that is detrimental or negative about the SEO of websites that you have experienced before, what is it?
This is something that you have to define for yourself. There’s always going to be one thing that you spend a lot of time on. We can’t specifically tell you what the one thing will be for your specific site, but Areej gave some examples. For instance, Areej was working on an aggregator website that had far too many indexed pages that all looked exactly the same. So the one thing to do is to noindex a huge chunk of them. On the other hand, for another website that’s lacking content, the one thing to do is to focus on producing content.

Can you please explain the nofollow attribute for links?
The nofollow tag basically tells search engine bots to not crawl and not give any page authority to the linked page. Google crawlers may still follow the link for discovery purposes, but will not pass authority to the linked page.

What about the rel=sponsored tag?
It’s a fairly new tag. The tag basically says that there is some form of like advertisement or agreement behind a link. If you’re linking to sponsored or affiliate stuff, it’s in Google’s guidelines that you have to use the sponsored and nofollow tags to tell Google not to pass any page rank.

Would the nofollow tag be good if you have the same blog post featured on two different parts of your website?
Jono mentioned that they needed to look at an example to be sure. But typically you don’t want the same content on two different pages. Jono went on to say that this was an oversimplification, but if this was the same blog post on two different URLs, that might be a problem. You might use a canonical URL to patch over that, but he couldn’t be really sure.

The nofollow tag doesn’t work for internal links, does it?
Google may still follow internal links with the nofollow tag for discovery purposes, but they won’t pass page authority to the linked page. Jono and Areej mentioned that it’s probably quite rare to use this tag for internal links.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – July 19, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – June 28, 2022

pamyoast — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:01:34 +0000

Why you should watch this replay

The world of SEO is constantly evolving, and keeping up with all of these changes can be quite difficult. But no worries, we’ve got your back! Our Head of SEO, Jono Alderson will keep you up-to-date on the latest SEO news in our monthly SEO news webinar. Joining Jono in this month’s webinar is a very special guest – Barry Adams. He is an award-winning SEO consultant, specializing in technical and editorial SEO for news publishers. We’ll discuss a lot about News SEO and Barry will share his expertise in this topic. Rewatch it in the video above or read a short recap of the topics below.

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next (free) webinar on July 19, 2022

Recap and resources

Google news

2:49 – Google News is getting a redesign
With the new design, Google News is putting more emphasis on local news and customized news feed. Before this, it can be a bit of a hassle to find the news you actively want to read, news from your favorite publication, or news from your local area. The new design has helped to make this much easier. You can now find a local news box at the top right of the Google News home page. There is a new filter button to add multiple locations to your local news section as well.

4:31 – Web Stories plagiarism
There’s a huge problem with plagiarism in Web Stories. For instance, when a big news outlet publishes a web story, other people can just grab the images and the headline and create a web story out of that. They can even rank with this plagiarised content and benefit from it. But this is not an easy issue to fix. Google isn’t great at deduplicating content when it comes to ranking in the first place. Barry also suspects that checking for plagiarism in the Web Stories format is very resource-intensive and possibly time-consuming.

7:30 – Author markup best practices added to Google documentation
Google recently updated a bunch of guidelines around best practices for describing the author of an article using structured data. Basically, you should:
– Include all authors in the markup
– Specify multiple authors when applicable
– Use the additional fields that are available to you
– Only specify the author’s name in the ‘author.name’ property
– Use the appropriate author type

The new guidelines and instructions can be found here.

9:05 – Simpler classification in GSC
Google is simplifying the way to classify pages, items, and issues in Search Console reports. Users have told Google that they are confused by the “warning” status when it’s applied to a URL or item. They don’t know if a warning means that the page or item can or can’t appear on Google. To make this a bit clearer, Google is changing the report format. For the top-level item, there are only two groups now. Pages or items with critical issues are labeled invalid; pages or items without critical issues are labeled valid. It’s a little bit tricky to find out the actual improvement. But at the same time, this will remove any ambiguity about what is working, what is not working in terms of content on your website and how it’s performing in the Google index.

Microsoft news

11:05 – Bing launched Buy Direct, a new retail marketplace
Microsoft is testing out a new retail marketplace in the U.S on Bing. Some people might say this is Microsoft’s own version of Google shopping, but it’s actually slightly different in interesting ways. You can do things like search for products, read reviews, and compare products on Buy Direct. What’s different about Bing’s approach is that it’s more tailored toward user preferences. So, you can specify that you like cats but not dogs, and then more of your search results will be orientated toward that preference. Or you can exclude products from a topic or a country.

WordPress news

14:07 – WordPress 6.1 and long-term road map
WordPress 6.1 is set to have a new “browse mode” that will allow site editors to zoom in and out while working. Next to that, working with patterns will receive a lot of attention. WordPress 6.1 is promised to bring better support for pattern usage in custom post types, block types, and a more intuitive experience with locking patterns and managing saved patterns.

In terms of the long-term roadmap, collaborative editing and multilingual support are two major features that WordPress will develop. These two features are hugely needed for WordPress as they are the fundamental requirements for the modern web. Collaborative editing is set to be introduced in 2023. After that comes multilingual support, which is set for either 2024 or 2025.

15:50 – Facebook is changing its feed to be more like TikTok
The rapid growth and adoption of TikTok have forced other social media players to make adjustments to compete. Facebook is saying they’re going to open up their newsfeed to more popular content from more sources instead of prioritizing posts from accounts people follow. They’ll also do some structural changes by bringing back Facebook and Messenger in the same app.

17:53 – Twitter no longer uses rel=”nofollow”
That means profiles, tweets, and other pages on Twitter may now contain followed link. But Barry believes that a link on Twitter won’t benefit your website’s SEO at all. Google is quite good at picking up ranking signals, and links from a social media platform like Twitter might not send strong signals.

Tech/other news

19:32 – Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google and others agree to new EU rules
The big players have got together and agreed on a new set of EU legislative rules. These rules will encourage them to take more responsibility for their content, deal with fake news and reduce abuse. Essentially, they have to make a greater effort to halt the spread of fake news and propaganda. There are around 44 specific guidelines. All of these are centered around things like more transparency for political advertising, easier ways to report spam or abuse, and penalizing sites.

21:47 – Kobuchar/Grassley big tech antitrust bill
There’s a new bipartisan bill in Congress aimed at big tech companies like Google, Apple and Amazon. They’ve become monopolies in their respective industries, making it very difficult for other players to enter, compete and innovate in the market. More importantly, they have a tendency to use their monopolistic power to favor their own products or services over those of third parties. Read the complete story here.
24:24 – Declining daily searches for DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine from a privacy perspective. The number of daily searches for DuckDuckGo has been declining since the beginning of 2022. In June 2022, it racks up 93.8 million searches, which is down from 106 million searches in January.

Yoast news

25:35 – Yoast SEO 19.1, Yoast SEO Premium 18.7 and WooCommerce SEO 14.9
We’ve had a few releases since our last webinar. We’ve made a few improvements and adjustments to our content analyses. For instance, the analyses should give you the correct assessment and suggestions when you use a focus keyphrase with hyphen. In Yoast SEO Premium 18.7, we’ve introduced a bunch of crawl settings that you can turn off to remove unnecessary stuff added by WordPress. Lastly, we’ve included a highly-requested feature in WooCommerce SEO 14.9 – the ability to add global identifiers for product variations. Check out our release post for detailed information!

Understand ‘Google News’ with Barry Adams

28:30 – What we mean by optimizing for Google News
Google News can be a confusing term because Google actually has a few properties that serve news articles. Google has a sub-domain ‘news.google.com’. It also has a tab called ‘news’ in the SERP. But these two are not the main traffic driver for news publishers. Actually, news publishers receive the majority of Google’s traffic from the ‘top stories’ box right on the search result page. It is estimated that 10-12% of search results have this ‘top stories’ box. So, when we talk about ‘Google News’, we primarily talk about the top stories box. The focus on optimizing for Google news in this entire ecosystem is similar to what you would do in classic SEO – build high-quality signals and create highly relevant content. What’s different is the attention to speed. You need to pay attention to the speed of your website, optimize your website’s crawlability and publish content fast. This is because articles in top stories usually have a short life span of one or two days.

35:24 – Discussion about Google News
Jono and Barry discuss a few things about the Google news ecosystem like the relationship between news publishers and Google.

Questions asked during the webinar

How do I improve my chances to appear in Google Local News?
If you’re a local news publishing website, you need to be identifiable as such. Ideally, you want to be associated with a fairly tightly graphic area code. Google tends to know where people are. It also tends to know where you – as a publisher, are focusing your content on. Google does this by looking at your on-page optimization like your headlines and navigation structure. So you need to optimize these elements on your website. It’s much more challenging if you want to target multiple locations with one website. If that’s the case, you may need to create separate versions of your website to adhere to the locations you want to target. That may require a separate homepage and separate content sections for each location. Next to that, you may have to be fairly explicit in your navigation structure, page title and locally-relevant content.

How do you even get your website to rank on Google Discover or Google News?
It’s not easy to rank on Google News. You need to be a news publisher and you have to take it seriously! You probably need a separate website with very little connection to other websites. Your site should have a very good technical setup. Content-wise, you need to consistently publish newsworthy content and you need to publish content every day. It’s good to publish from 5-10 articles per day, or even 10-20 if you can manage. Having popular or renowned journalists write content on your website is also beneficial. After about 2 years, then you have a decent chance of ranking on Google News. Again, it’s not easy at all.

For Google Discover, it’s a bit easier for your content to appear and rank there. You don’t necessarily have to be a news publisher. But you do need to produce useful, topical, in-depth content and a technically sound website.

How impactful is the author markup? Do you have an example of Google or other search engines using the data around authors, and does that improve visibility?
The author markup is an optional thing. It’s hard to quantify how useful it is because there is no actual output. Regardless, you should definitely include it in your articles. This is to help Google understand that a real human writes the article and the person has journalistic experience.

We don’t exactly have an example. Although, Barry has seen news websites that don’t use any schema markup ranking on Google News. But these sites have been around for a long time. They rely on many other ranking factors to rank. If you’re a smaller publisher (which is most of us), make sure to include the author markup and make it as complete as possible.

Is Google reading the caption on social media posts?
It might be. For instance, an Instagram post is just a page on the internet and Instagram is just a domain. And Google is actually allowed to crawl Instagram. But generally speaking, content on social media platforms is more about getting your brand out there, rather than for the direct ranking of your web pages.

What’s the best way to target more than one keyword on a page?
You can choose keywords that are similar enough or of a similar topic or sub-topic. You can have different sections about these sub-topics on your page. If the keywords you want to target are too diverse, or if there’s no topical overlap, then you might want to consider creating different pages.

Should you use keywords in your anchor text when link-building?
Yes, you can do that. Barry thinks anchor text link might still work. It can help your website rank better for the terms you have in the anchor text. But really, that shouldn’t be your concern. Barry gives an example of himself. If you search for ‘seo for google news’, his website tends to be the first or second result. But he doesn’t engage in any link-building activities at all. He just produces good content that people want to share and link to.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – June 28, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

Yoast SEO news webinar – May 31, 2022

pamyoast — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 11:15:24 +0000

Why rewatch this webinar?

The world of SEO is constantly evolving, and keeping up with all of these changes can be quite a challenge. Our Head of SEO and SEO specialist Jono Alderson will keep you up-to-date on the latest SEO news in our monthly SEO news webinar. Rewatch it in the video above or read a short recap of the topics below.

Stay on top of the latest news in SEO and register for our next free webinar on June 28, 2022:

A tribute to SEO legend Bill Slawski

The sad news reached us earlier this month that Bill Slawski had died. Bill was a legendary figure in the SEO industry – even before there was such a thing as SEO. He’s done a tremendous amount of work to educate the SEO community, and he’s famous for his analysis of hundreds of Google patents. He described this in intricate detail in a language that we all could understand. We’ll miss him!

On to Google news

Multisearch: local search and scene exploration

The idea of multisearch is that you can take a photo of something or point your phone at something and then supplement that image with a keyword to search for. For instance, you could take a photo of a shoe and ask Google to find this in red and within seconds you have the red version of the shoe in front of you. Suddenly, you combine Google text and images to do a multi-format search which is very futuristic. Multisearch will also get a variation called scene exploration, where you can point your Google Lens app at an assortment of products and have Google filter out the one you should pick. Multisearch is also going local, so you can add ‘near me’ to search for that product in a location near you.

Immersive view for Google Maps

Also announced at Google I/O is an immersive view for Google Maps. This takes everything Google has on maps, images, and data about a location and generates new visuals for you to browse through. This makes it much easier to explore the area you’re about to visit to see if everything is up to scratch. It might be good to look at your storefront to see if that’s something you need to improve upon. You wouldn’t want to scare away potential customers.

More natural conversation with Google Assistant

Voice search was touted as the big new thing a couple of years ago, but it hasn’t caught up yet. While impressive technology, it misses as often as it hits. At I/O, Google introduced a series of improvements to make it easier to have more natural conversations with the virtual assistant.

Improving skin tone representation across Google

Google is doing much proactive work and research on the experience you get when searching for anything to do with people and skin color. It tries to be more sensitive to differences in tones and contextualize that based on the things you’re searching for. Diversity is super important, and Google must do work to expose that.

XML sitemaps clean-up

A few weeks ago, Google announced that they were deprecating and removing support for some niche bits of how they handle XML sitemaps – stuff from way down in the depths of your XML sitemap. Google got smarter and doesn’t need these anymore. At Yoast, we made sure to update our plugin to adapt to the changes quickly. We pushed out an update on the same day as the announcement.

Search Console gets a new video page indexing report

Good news for anyone doing anything with video, which should be nearly all of you because the video is hugely important. It’s how many consumers expect to find and interact with information. It’s a step in the right direction for Google to add a dedicated video report section to Search Console. In Search Console, you can get information on which pages have videos on pages and how they are performing in search.

PageSpeed Insights adds new Lighthouse speed metrics

Core Web Vitals are the standard metrics by which Google measures the speed of a web page, and if you score well on them, you get a ranking boost. If you score poorly on them your customers get annoyed, so it’s worth investing the resources to do well on this front. Google added a couple of new metrics to their roster, namely TTFB (time to first byte) and INP (interaction to next paint). The first one is all about how long it takes for your server to respond to queries and the second one is all about measuring how long it takes for a loaded page to respond to interactions.

Microsoft news

Microsoft researchers present Turing Image Super-Resolution

This is straight from an episode of CSI: a super-enhancer to improve the quality of images. This means that algorithms analyze a pixelated image and enhance its resolution to make it crispier. The technology is already available in the Edge browser.

A new way to validate your XML sitemaps to Bing

Previously, you could anonymously ping Bing about your XML sitemap, but those days are gone. Now, you need to have a hardcode link to your XML sitemap in your robots.txt file. We automatically do this for you in the latest release of Yoast SEO.

WordPress news

WordPress 6.0 launched

WordPress 6.0 was launched last week. This release comes with a ton of cool updates and improvements, including a lot of performance enhancements. You can read up on the most exciting changes in our overview post for WordPress 6.0.

WordPress’ market share is shrinking

For the first time in forever, WordPress’s share of the CMS market is shrinking. The competition is getting more aggressive in their marketing while also improving their products in a good way. WordPress has interesting and unique challenges – being an open-source platform, it thrives when many good people come in and help the project move forward. At the same time, there needs to be a new focus on what we want WordPress to be?

Other news

Introducing the security.txt standard

Security.txt is a new standard in a format similar to your robots.txt file. In a simple text file located on a standardized location on your server, you can describe your security policies. So, if someone finds a leak on your site – who should they contact?

Apple, Google and Microsoft will implement passwordless sign-in

Logging into sites might become outdated when the major platforms roll this out. In the future, it might be that your customer will take a good and critical look at how you’ve implemented your login procedures. They might conclude that other sites do it better. Keep an eye on this.

Amazon unveils Buy with Prime initiative for third-party websites

Amazon helps third parties set up a payment system via Prime to connect to more customers than ever. This gets powerful if you’re also using Amazon’s fulfillment by Amazon program, which is where you store your inventory in local warehouses, and they handle the fulfillment. All of this now also comes with free delivery and free returns. Amazon becomes your ecommerce engine and your website and store just product listings.

Shopify to acquire Deliverr

This is a massive deal for Shopify, similar to Amazon’s fulfillment engine system. This is end-to-end shopping. You can set up a store on Shopify and walk away because the delivery integration will handle shipping, logistics, and storage imagery. From port to the porch, as Shopify says. All of the logistics stuff you would typically have to set up and manage gets taken away and n by Shopify internationally. It’s happening alongside all of their existing infrastructures.

Joost de Valk’s call to improve crawling

Some search engines crawl the web to find content and check if your content’s been updated. They follow links to discover new URLs — a hugely inefficient process. They act like they are drunk — bouncing off walls, hitting pages, and downloading CSS as drunks often do. It’s a very cumbersome, expensive process. The download comes at a cost. It costs them money in electricity to do it in their servers and their data warehouses, and it costs your site and your hosting money to deliver those resources, and those kilobytes add up. Also, it costs the environment. As SEO and search industry, we need to do better! With Yoast SEO Premium we’re trying to give you more control over what’s crawled on your site.

The post Yoast SEO news webinar – May 31, 2022 appeared first on Yoast.

How to get rich results for your online store

Nino van Tour — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 11:21:00 +0000

What can you expect?

Who doesn’t want to stand out in the search results? It helps you drive more traffic (and thus more sales). In this webinar, our head of SEO Jono Alderson, and VP marketing of Loox, Elad Levy, explain how rich results can help your online store get the attention it deserves.

But what are rich results and how do you get them? Rich results are ways to catch the eye of potential customers. These are search results that show a lot of extra information. For product pages, some examples are reviews, images, price, or availability. But also for blog posts there are many types of rich results, like FAQs, how-to’s, recipes, or knowledge panels.

Example of rich result for a guitarre

Why you should rewatch this webinar!

After this webinar, you’ll know best practices on how to get rich results.
Knowing how to improve your chances of getting rich results and make your site stand out.
Being more visible than your competitors will drive customers from their site to yours.

Speaker

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Elad Levy

Elad Levy is the VP of Marketing of Loox, the leading Product Reviews solution for Shopify merchants. Prior to Loox, Elad led the Product and Marketing for Fixel, an Israeli startup in the field of ad tech. Previously, Elad held various positions in digital marketing at tech companies and as an independent consultant. He is an expert in marketing technologies and web analytics.

The post How to get rich results for your online store appeared first on Yoast.

How to make killer product pages

Nino van Tour — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 11:06:38 +0000

What can you expect?

In this webinar, our CEO Thijs de Valk & manager content Willemien Hallebeek help you in making killer product pages to boost your online sales!

But a product page has a lot of different important aspects, so where do you start optimizing? This webinar focuses on:

Making SEO friendly content for your product pages;
Writing high-quality content to convince customers to buy;
Quick tips for conversion optimization.

Why you should rewatch this webinar!

After this webinar, you’ll know how to optimize your product pages and boost your sales;
Learn how to make your text easy to read for your customers and Google;
Learn from the experienced Yoast experts!

Speakers

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Willemien Hallebeek

Willemien Hallebeek is the Manager Content of yoast.com. She loves creating user-friendly content and making it easy to find for people and search engines.

The post How to make killer product pages appeared first on Yoast.

How to grow your sales with email and social media marketing

Nino van Tour — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Download the slides of this webinar here

What can you expect?

IIn this webinar, our COO, Chaya Oosterbroek & Marketing team lead, Nynke de Blaauw, will talk you through the first steps of growing your sales with email and social media marketing. Starting and maintaining these strategies can seem like quite some work, but is very important for reaching your target audience and staying connected with them.

As a bonus, we’ve invited Tomasz, CEO of Opinew, to join this webinar. Opinew is an app that helps users with a Shopify store with collecting reviews. And that is important because having good reviews and a high rating increases trust of potential customers. But how do you get those reviews? In this webinar, you’ll learn how to set up and improve email flows with review requests. And to make it even easier for you, we’ll give some best practices for setting up automations for these flows.

Why you should watch the replay!

After watching this webinar, you’ll have actionable tips on how to start with your email and social media marketing;
Know how to use email and social media marketing to reach your target audience, making you less dependent on paid advertising;
Get insights on how to get reviews for your online store with efficiënt email flows and automations;
Learn from the experienced Yoast experts, totally free!

Speaker

<>Chaya Oosterbroek

Chaya Oosterbroek is the COO of Yoast. She comes from a background of guiding companies and their entrepreneurs to the next level. That’s how she learned to have a passion for optimizing businesses. She’s a dedicated social entrepreneur and besides that, I love soccer and exploring different cultures around the globe.

<>Nynke de Blaauw

Nynke de Blaauw is the marketing team-lead at Yoast. She has a background in B2B marketing and is an experienced marketing software trainer. Seeking new commercial opportunities is on top of her to-do list!

<>Thomasz Sadowski

Tomasz is the founder of Opinew – a shopify review management app trusted by brands like MSI or Musclepharm to build a successful customer review strategy. Time permitting he also helps to run a family owned guest house, and enjoys ice skating or long hikes in the Scottish Highlands.

The post How to grow your sales with email and social media marketing appeared first on Yoast.

5 common ecommerce SEO mistakes (and how to fix them)

Nino van Tour — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 07:52:00 +0000

What can you expect?

In this practical webinar, our experts explain what common ecommerce SEO mistakes you shouldn’t make anymore. And don’t think that you are not making them! A lot of online stores make these mistakes without them even knowing it. Luckily, we’ll also go over the ways to fix these mistakes.

Why you should watch the replay!

You’ll leave with practical tips on how to improve your ecommerce SEO;
Prevent common ecommerce SEO mistakes and improve your rankings in search engines;
Learn how to solve most mistakes with Yoast SEO for Shopify or Yoast WooCommerce SEO.

Speakers

<>Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO. He’s a digital strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He’s into technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.

<>Iris Guelen

Iris Guelen is the email marketing teamlead at Yoast. She coordinates the writing process of the content and writes the newsletter, product pages, and other sales copy. She loves trying to find new ways to promote our awesome product to our audience.

<>Mike Quaranta

Mike Quaranta is a WordPress devotee for about a decade. He loves seeing the community and technology progress grow. He is Remote Support Engineer at Yoast and being part of Yoast’s worldwide support team.

The post 5 common ecommerce SEO mistakes (and how to fix them) appeared first on Yoast.

SEO News webinars • Yoast

Yoast SEO news webinar – June 20, 2023

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

AI news

Social news

Other tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – May 30, 2023

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

Social news

Other tech news

SEO for international expansion, with Weglot

Why this webinar?

What can you expect from this webinar?

Yoast SEO news webinar – April 25, 2023

Topics & sources

Google news

Microsoft Bing news

AI news

WordPress news

Other industry news

Yoast SEO news webinar – March 28, 2023

Topics & sources

Google news

Microsoft Bing

WordPress

Social media

Other tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – February 28, 2023

Topics & sources

Bing news

Google news

WordPress news

Social media news

Industry and tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – January 31, 2023

Topics & sources

Google news

Bing news

WordPress news

Social media news

Industry & tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – December 20, 2022

Topics and sources

Google news

Social media news

Other tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – November 22, 2022

Topics & resources

Google news

WordPress news

Social media news

Other tech news

Yoast SEO news webinar – October 25, 2022

Why you should watch this replay

Google news

Microsoft news

WordPress news

Social media news

Other tech news

Yoast news

Interview and Q&A

Free webinar: Is your SEO ready for Black Friday?

Webinar recap

7:06 – 6 optimization categories to work on

Optimization for product pages

Optimization for structured data

Getting your content strategy in check

Speed and mobile optimization

Create a buzz

Analyze

Questions during the webinar

Resources and further reading

Yoast SEO news webinar – September 27, 2022

Why you should watch this replay

Topics & sources

Google news