I want to express my deep gratitude to all of you. Whether you’re a user of our software, a fellow SEO enthusiast, a colleague, or a member of our vibrant community, you’ve made my time at Yoast truly special. I’ve always been passionate about our mission of “SEO for everyone,” and it’s been an absolute joy to work towards this goal with all of you.

I’ve loved every moment of my journey at Yoast. From our deep dives into technical SEO, to exploring emerging technologies, to reacting to Google’s constant changes and updates, it’s been a wild ride.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done – particularly in the field of structured data. We’ve done incredible work in making structured data more accessible and understandable for everyone. I strongly believe that our approach to schema.org has had a significant positive impact on the web. Seeing how our work has helped websites improve their SEO and reach a wider audience has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.

But as much as I’ve loved my time at Yoast, I believe it’s time to explore new horizons. I’m unsure what’s next for me, but I look forward to finding out. It’s safe to say that I’ll still be involved in the world of WordPress and technical SEO consulting and cheering on the Yoast team from the sidelines.

Before I sign off, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone at Yoast. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the industry’s most talented and dedicated people, and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together.

So, here’s to the next chapter. I’m excited about what the future holds, and I wish you all well. Remember, SEO is for everyone, and I can’t wait to see how Yoast continues to make the web a better place.

The post Jono Alderson is leaving Yoast appeared first on Yoast.

On-page and off-page SEO: what’s the difference?

Every SEO strategy is focused on ranking as high as possible in the search engines. To do this, we all try to design and develop a website that Google’s algorithm — and people! — will love. That’s basically what SEO is about. The factors in Google’s algorithm can be divided into two categories that will determine the ranking of your website: on-page factors and off-page factors.

On-page SEO factors all have to do with elements on your website. For instance, things you work on to improve your E-E-A-T also fall in this category. Some of the most important on-page SEO factors are:

• Your site set-up and technical features, site speed in particular
• The quality of your content and use of keywords
• How do you use additional media, such as images and videos
• Your site structure and internal linking
• Structured data and search appearance
• Your URL structure
• User experience

Meanwhile, off-page SEO looks at what happens away from your website. Some off-page SEO factors include:

• Relevant links from other websites leading to your site
• Social media activity
• Business and map listings
• External marketing activities

Pro tip: Find out more about on-page SEO with our front-end SEO inspector! You can use the front-end inspector tool in Yoast SEO Premium to explore the SEO data, metadata and schema output for pages on your site. It’s a great way to get to grips with your on-page SEO.

Importance of on-page SEO

On-page SEO consists of all the elements of SEO that you have control over. If you own a website, you can control the technical issues and the quality of your content. We believe you should be able to tackle all of these factors as they’re in your own hands. Remember: if you create an excellent website, it will start ranking.

Focusing on on-page SEO will also increase the chance that your off-page SEO strategy will be successful. Link building with a crappy site is very tough. Nobody wants to link to poorly written articles or sites that don’t work correctly.

How to optimize on-page SEO factors

1. Make sure search engines can crawl and index your site

If you’re unfamiliar with crawlability and indexing, here’s a quick explanation of what it is and what it has to do with Google. To show your page in the search results, Google must first know about that page. It has to be indexed by Google, meaning that this page has been stored in their index. And for that to be possible, you must ensure you’re not blocking Google from indexing your post or your whole site. So check if you’re not unintentionally doing that (we still see this happening!), and ensure your site is indexed.

Although this isn’t technically a ranking factor, getting your site into the search results requires it, so we thought it should be included here.

2. Invest time in creating quality content based on solid keyword research

Why do you think people visit your site? Most likely because it contains the information they’re looking for. Therefore it’s essential to write excellent content that corresponds with their needs. Search engines like Google also read your text. Which site ranks highest for a specific search term is primarily based on a website’s content. That’s why your content should be informative, easy to read, and focused on the right keywords that your audience uses.

Aside from creating quality content, you must remove or remedy low-quality pages. So-called thin content can harm your SEO. Take time to find these pages and do something with them occasionally to keep your content in good shape.

Learn about writing high-quality content in our Ultimate guide to SEO copywriting, or take our SEO copywriting training course.

3. Improve your site speed

A significant on-page ranking factor is site speed. Users don’t want to wait for pages to load, so Google tends to rank fast-loading sites higher. If you’re unsure how fast (or slow) your site is, check out your Core Web Vital scores using the report in Google Search Console. This helpful tool will point out areas where your site speed can be improved so you know what to work on.

If you’re tech-savvy, you can probably handle this on your own. If you’re unsure where to start, our Technical SEO training can help you.

4. Get your site structure and internal linking right

A good site structure helps Google (and users) understand your site and navigate your content. And when it comes to making that site structure, internal linking is the way to do it. Firstly, you must channel many internal links to your most important content. We call those pages cornerstone content. Secondly, you should tidy up pages that aren’t getting many (if any) internal links. Those pages are what we refer to as orphaned content. It would be best if you decided whether to improve those pages and add more internal links pointing to them or remove them altogether.

Yoast SEO Premium has two SEO workouts to help you improve your site structure and internal linking. Using the workouts can help you to make big improvements quickly, so give them a go!

5. Optimize your use of images and videos

You’ll want to include images on your site to make it attractive, and maybe some videos too. Doing that wrong can harm your SEO, but doing it correctly comes with some SEO benefits.

High-quality images are usually large files that can slow your site down, and that’s a problem. Using smaller image files and giving them descriptive names, captions, and alt tags will favor your SEO. Plus, there are additional benefits. For one, you’ll make your site more accessible, so it’s helpful for a wider audience. And for another thing, you’ll have a chance of your images ranking in the Google Image search results. Read more about these topics in our posts about image SEO and alt tags.

Adding videos to your site is a bit more complicated than images. And ranking your videos on Google (or YouTube) comes with its own set of challenges. We’ve got a great series of posts all about video SEO, if you’d like to learn more about optimizing in this area. There’s also a dedicated Yoast Video SEO plugin, if you’re serious about getting your videos ranking.

6. Create a persuasive search appearance

How your site looks in the search results is vital for SEO. While the search results aren’t part of your site, the things you do to optimize your search appearance are. Therefore, we consider SEO titles, meta descriptions, and structured data part of on-page SEO.

Optimizing the text for your search snippets is fairly straightforward. Adding structured data can be trickier. Good to know: Yoast SEO can help with all these tasks. With checks and previews to help you, getting your SEO titles and meta descriptions right couldn’t be easier. And when it comes to structured data, Yoast does all the hard work for you — all you need to do is select the content type and fill in the blanks.

7. Make your URLs SEO-friendly

A well-crafted URL structure helps your on-page SEO — it’s like giving your web pages a good road map. Think of it as a friendly address that guides search engines and invites users to explore your content. Creating SEO-friendly URLs makes it easier for humans and search engines to understand what your page is all about. Opt for concise and descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords, as they provide a clear signpost. A clean and organized URL structure enhances navigation, making it easier for everyone to understand your website. Don’t forget to keep it short and readable.

8. Design an excellent user experience

The last thing we want to mention is user experience. Simply put, users need to understand your website easily. They should be able to find what they want in a heartbeat. They should know where to click and how to navigate through your site. And your site should be fast! A beautifully designed website is nice, but you should make it your top priority to create a user-friendly website first.

If you want to learn more about combining SEO and UX to get more people to your site, we’d advise you to look at our other articles on user experience. Or check out our all-around SEO training course.

To conclude

We’ve talked about the most important on-page SEO factors. First, ensure that your website works correctly and that your technical SEO is up to par. Secondly, create content that is user-centered and focused on the right keywords. Thirdly, work on the usability and speed of your site to help users and search engines around your website.

As these factors are all a part of your site, you can work on them to ensure your on-page SEO is top-notch! That being said, do remember to also work on your off-page SEO. Although you may not have total control over these factors, you can still put some effort into creating that exposure on other sites too!

Read more: What is off-page SEO? »

The post What is on-page SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

A brand-new support section

At Yoast, we deeply value our users and understand the importance of reliable, responsive support. With Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve made it easier for you to access the help you need, empowering you to optimize your website and achieve outstanding results confidently.

The latest release of Yoast SEO offers a new support page. Here, you’ll find options to get answers to all your burning questions quickly. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced pro, you’ll find a wealth of resources on our site to guide you through the intricacies of SEO optimization.

If you subscribe to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find an option to contact our support team instantly. Unlock unlimited 24/7 premium support and take your SEO to new heights by signing up for Yoast SEO Premium now!

Fixes and enhancements

In Yoast SEO 20.10, we’ve squashed numerous bugs that might have been causing a few hiccups along the way. Building stable foundations is crucial for your success, and we’re committed to providing you with a top-notch, bug-free experience. Of course, we’ve also added some interesting enhancements to our product.

For instance, we’ve expanded the list of HTML elements excluded from the content analysis to ensure these don’t influence the scores. In addition, we’ve introduced more robust HTML processing for the competing links, keyphrase in introduction, image keyphrase, and images assessments. Lastly, you can find a new option in the crawl optimization settings. This new one lets you block AdsBot crawling when enabled.

Update now to Yoast SEO 20.10

Upgrade to Yoast SEO 20.10 today and experience the updated stability and fine-tuned enhancements. We appreciate your feedback, and we’re confident that this release will bring you peace of mind and increased optimization capabilities. Let’s take your SEO goals to new heights together as we continue to refine and perfect Yoast SEO.

The post Yoast SEO 20.10 brings a brand-new support/FAQ section appeared first on Yoast.

Why set up your Google Analytics 4 now?

A few years ago, Google first mentioned Google Analytics 4. The reason for creating this new type of analytics is the complexity of collecting and analyzing data. People’s online journeys are becoming more intricate (and spread over several platforms or devices). In addition, privacy is becoming increasingly important in how you collect data.

It’s good to know this new property can happily coexist with your current Analytics property. Getting started with Google Analytics 4 doesn’t mean you won’t be able to use your Universal Analytics anymore. This property will continue to function and collect data until the data we mentioned above. But from that date on, you will have to make the switch, so let’s dive into what this new version of Analytics (formerly known as “App + Web”) entails.

As we mentioned, you can use Universal Analytics until July 1, 2023. From that day on, it will no longer process any data. But that doesn’t mean you should wait until that date to create your new Google Analytics 4 property. We strongly advise you to create it now to ensure your property is set up in time. Ideally, you would have set it up months ago. This will also allow you to start collecting data on your new property. The earlier you start, the more historical data you have to give you context when making decisions regarding your website.

What to expect from Google Analytics 4

Google calls this “the next generation of Google Analytics”. On their help center page, they name a few advantages over Universal Analytics:

• It’s durable for the future and privacy-focused
• It uses machine learning to get you insights into customer journeys across platforms and devices
• It has enhanced integrations with Google’s advertising platform to optimize campaign performance

However, it is good to know that this newest version of analytics seems to have been built with data analysts in mind. Where Universal Analytics was a tool for marketers, this new generation seems more difficult for the average user. Ecommerce expert Luke Carthy did an interesting talk on Google Analytics 4 during YoastCon 2023, in which he also explained how to make it work for marketers:

Interested in hearing the rest of what Luke says? Go to Yoast SEO academy and watch his talk on Using GA4 to boost ecommerce conversions. You can find ten more talks by SEO experts we invited to YoastCon there. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for free to watch these videos and check out our other courses!

How to prepare yourself…

There’s no way around it; Universal Analytics is being replaced by Google Analytics 4. Google encourages people to set up this new property (alongside your current one) as soon as possible. So how can you prepare yourself? We’ll discuss setting it up when you’re already using Analytics. But also how to set it up when you’re not using Analytics yet.

When you’re already using Analytics

The very first step is to create a Google Analytics 4 property for your website. This can be done from your Google Analytics account. Setting up this new property doesn’t mean losing access to your analytics setup. This setup will remain the same and functional. The new property will collect data next to your existing property; you can access them both.

To help you set up your new property, Google has introduced a GA4 Setup Assistant wizard. You must have an editor role on your Google Analytics account to use this wizard. The steps to get to this wizard are thoroughly described on Google’s page on how to add a Google Analytics 4 property (to a site that already has Analytics).

When you’ve created your new property, there are a few more things you can do to ensure you’re getting the most out of it. This new version is focused on giving you more insight into the complex customer journey and improving your marketing efforts. Google’s page on how to switch to Google Analytics 4 gives a great overview of what you can do to properly set up Google Analytics 4. If you want to learn even more, you can take their Skillshop Course to discover what’s new with Google Analytics.

When you’re new to Analytics

If you aren’t using Analytics, you must start by setting up an account. Go to google.com/analytics and click ‘Get started today’. When logged in, you can go to Admin (the cogwheel in the bottom left corner) and click the blue button ‘Create Account’ in the top left corner. You must set an account name and decide on what data you want to share with other Google services.

After that, you click ‘Next’ and add a property to your new account. Google explains how to do this on their page on setting up Analytics for a website and/or app. After you’ve set up your new account and property, you can start getting familiar with Analytics and dive into the data to get more insights into your site visitors and their behavior. Of course, it can be overwhelming at first. But you can find loads of information and training in Google’s training and support section.

To summarize

Now is the time to add a GA4 property to your account. This helps you get used to this new way of analyzing your data, and it comes with new features that give you more insight into your audience and the performance of your marketing campaigns. Adding this new Analytics property won’t change anything in your current Analytics setup; you can use and view both properties until July 2023. After that, your old property won’t process any new data, and you will have to switch to Google Analytics 4. So start immediately and get the most out of this new version of Google Analytics!

The post How to prepare yourself for Google Analytics 4 appeared first on Yoast.

What is quality content?

That is the million-dollar question. Knowing how to write good content helps you get more visitors, higher conversions, and lower bounce rates. But who determines the quality of your content? The easy answer: your users. However, this also makes creating the right content more difficult. Because every user is different and has a different search intent. But they have one thing in common: every user knows what they want. Meanwhile, you’re still figuring out what your audience wants to read about!

That’s not how you would expect an article about writing quality content to start, is it? Don’t worry, we’re not done yet! Although the quality of your content is eventually determined by your users, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you end up with well thought-out, readable, and attractive content. In other words: content that’s eligible to be considered as high-quality by your users and search engines. And yes, this will take some time. But it’s time well spent.

Yoast SEO helps you create quality content!

The content analysis in Yoast SEO Premium is designed to help you create quality content:

 

• Optimize your text for related keyphrases and synonyms
• It recognizes different forms of your keyphrase, so you can focus on writing naturally
• It recognizes singular and plurals, and also tenses of verbs
• Check if your keyphrases are well distributed through the text

Yoast SEO Premium also gives you access to all the Yoast SEO academy courses, including our expert SEO copywriting training! Want to know more? Take an in-depth look the Yoast SEO Premium analysis.

Why is quality content important?

First and foremost, you should make good content for your users. People are unlikely to stick around for long if your website is full of bad content. But that’s not the only reason; low-quality content is bad for SEO too.

Google is getting smarter all the time. Recently, they said they’ve figured out a way to detect low-quality content. With the ‘helpful content update‘, Google wants to start measuring the amount of low-quality pages on your site. If the overall quality is not good enough, all of your pages could end up ranking lower. So you need to focus on making quality content now more than ever.

How to create quality content

1. Write for your readers, not yourself

If you have an ecommerce site, you want readers to know about the products or services you offer. If you’re a blogger, you want readers to get to know you and the topics that interest you. However, it’s also important to take into consideration what your users actually want to read about. What interests do they have? What events or news do they follow that you can relate to your business?  And what ‘problems’ are they trying to fix that have led them to your site?

The first step in creating high-quality content is to make sure that it contains the information your audience is looking for. To find out what information your users are looking for, you have to conduct proper keyword research. This will help you determine what subjects to write about and what words your audience uses. Keyword research also helps your rankings, as more visitors and lower bounce rates tell Google that your page is a good result to show in their search results.

2. Make your content readable and engaging

Do you want to get your message across? And do you want people to read your entire blog post or page? Then make your content easy to read. This means that you should:

• Think about the structure of your text and the words you use. Too much text without any headings or paragraphs tends to scare people off, so make sure you use them. It will give your readers some air while reading.
• Try to limit the use of difficult words and be cautious of the length of your sentences. Both can make your content harder to understand, which in turn will slow down your reader.
• Use variation in your text to make it engaging. Use synonyms, and alternate longer sentences with shorter ones.

Another important thing to focus on: Have fun! And be personal in your writing. This helps you write quality content that’s different from your competitor’s, and it helps users get to know you and your brand. Want to know more? In this article, we dive deeper into these tips for writing readable blog posts.

3. Think about search intent and your goal

Let’s start with the basics. What does search intent mean? Search intent is the reason why someone conducts a specific search. It’s the term used to describe their purpose. For example, do they have a question they need answered? Or do they want to buy something online? Someone’s search intent makes a difference in how they consider the quality of your content. If it fits their need at that moment, then they will stay on your page longer. But if they need an answer to a question and the page they land on only tries to sell them products, they’ll be gone before you know it.

Match goals to different search intents

It’s important to take search intent into consideration while you’re creating the content for a specific page. That’s why we advise you to match your goals to the different search intents users might have. Is one of your goals to get more subscriptions to your newsletter? Then you should add that subscription button to pages where users with an informational intent land.

Does a visitor have a transactional intent (meaning: they want to buy something)? Make sure they land on the right page. If someone searches for the term “Product x”, you don’t want them to land on a blog post discussing a topic related to that product. Ideally, you want them to land on a page dedicated to “Product x”. However, a category page when you have multiple variations of “Product x” works too.

Of course, experience tells us it’s not always that black and white. Still, it’s good to consider the search intent your users might have. It will help you determine the focus of your content and what call-to-actions you want to add to a specific page or post. A great way to get started is by adopting a content design mindset. This mindset helps you produce user-centered content based on real needs. Also, for some input, we recommend having a look at the search results to create great content.

4. Be trustworthy

When people land on your page, it’s also important to build trust. Especially when they’re not familiar with your site yet. You have to show your audience that you’re trustworthy. How? By doing the following three things:

1. Write in a clear and user-oriented way.
2. Try to stay away from stock photos, as genuine photos create more trust and give your site a personal feel. The same is true for your ‘About us’ page. Try to use actual photos of your team. 
3. Add ratings to Google, testimonials to the right pages, and set up HTTPS. This will help your users and Google to understand that your site belongs to an actual business or person, which allows them to happily and safely browse your site.

Do you own an ecommerce site? Then have a look at these 7 ways to increase sales by creating trust.

5. Keep your content up to date

Another key element of writing quality content is making sure it’s up to date and relevant. This means you have to update your content from time to time to make sure people are able to find the right information. But why is this so important? Because it shows your users that you’re on top of recent developments and can always provide them with accurate information. In other words: it builds trust and keeps your audience coming back to your site.

Keeping your website and blog posts up to date is also important for SEO, as this shows Google that your site is ‘alive’ and relevant. So, make sure you schedule in a time to update your content regularly.

Read on: 10 tips to improve the quality of your page »

Bonus: Invest time in site structure

The five steps we’ve discussed so far will help you write content that is easy to read and user-centered. Next, we’d like to highlight an extra step that is equally important: working on your site structure. It’s important, because it will help users and search engines find your quality content.

Site structure refers to the way you organize your site’s content. It’s a vital part of any solid SEO strategy. When you structure your site well, search engines will be able to index your URLs better. It helps Google determine the importance of your individual pages and which pages are related to each other. Additionally, a good site structure will allow users to find their way around your site more easily. It will help them find your quality content in the search results and on your website. That’s why there’s quite a lot to gain from perfecting your site structure. Read more on how to work on your site structure and the importance of doing so.

A quick recap on quality content

Although well structured and readable content might not instantly take you to the top position in Google, it’ll definitely have a positive effect on your SEO in the long run. So, before you start publishing post after post (or page after page), it’s worth it to consider a few steps.

Make sure to write for your readers, make your content readable, match search intent with your goals, be trustworthy, keep your content up to date and work on your site structure. The end result? Attractive content that your readers will appreciate. This will have a positive effect on your number of visitors, bounce rates and conversions. If you want to find out if there are still areas of content SEO you can improve, you can take this short test. Or take a look at our guide to SEO copywriting for more tips and tricks!

Keep on reading: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post What is quality content and how do you create it? appeared first on Yoast.

Enhancing the Wincher rank tracking integration

A while ago, Yoast SEO and Wincher joined hands to allow you to track your website’s ranking status in Google straight from the plugin. Wincher is a third-party tool that offers advanced rank tracking, in-depth keyword analysis, and other features that can help improve your website’s visibility in search engines.

The Wincher integration in Yoast SEO provides an easy way to track how your content is performing right from the post editor. You get critical ranking data in one place, which helps you monitor your website’s performance. On Wincher’s website, you’ll get many extra options to go in-depth with your data. You can also find great opportunities for untapped keywords!

In Yoast SEO 20.9, we’ve added a Wincher widget to the dashboard. This shows your top keywords added to Wincher via Yoast SEO. It also doubles as a connection button, so if you haven’t connected to your Wincher account, yet, you can from this widget.

Improvements in Yoast SEO 20.9

In the Crawl optimization settings, you’ll find a new pattern to help you prevent crawling from internal search results. We’ve added the line "/page/*/?s=" to the robots.txt. The asterisk * represents any numeric value, while ?s= is most websites’ typical query parameter to identify internal search URLs.

This addition will help improve websites’ crawlability by ensuring search engines do not index unnecessary pages, such as internal search result pages. This can help consolidate the website’s crawl budget, declutter the search results, and improve the website’s overall SEO performance.

Background indexing

Our latest update introduces scheduled indexing that creates the necessary database structure without requiring you to click on the SEO optimization button in Yoast SEO. With this feature, even websites not optimized previously will slowly receive automatic optimization of their databases. This process will be done gradually in chunks to ensure a smooth experience. Indexing might take some time for larger sites, but the scheduled indexation feature ensures that websites are continually optimized without user intervention.

Update now to Yoast SEO 20.9!

Yoast SEO 20.9 is out today, so download the latest update of your favorite SEO plugin. In this release, we expanded the possibilities of the Wincher integration. In addition, we did some regular bug fixes and made some enhancements to our database system.

The post Yoast SEO 20.9: Improving the Wincher integration appeared first on Yoast.

What is the appeal of social media as a search engine?

With the internet being as chaotic as it is, young people (and particularly Gen Z) use social media as a way to easily find what they’re looking for. So what are they looking for? Genuine content. Videos made by real people who share their experiences about a certain topic, product, or service.

But young people also love short content. Both TikTok and Instagram have a limit on how long videos can be, which means you get more relevant content in a short time. Just think about it. Would you rather comb through a wall of text that is the Google search results, or watch a video of under a minute? The latter is definitely more efficient. 

How important is social media anyway?

To answer this question, we need to look at some facts. Let’s start with the most obvious one: how many people use social media anyway? The answer: around 56% of the world’s total population. Which is more than half, but not by much. The average person spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media every day. So there’s no denying that there are benefits to being present on social media as a company. However, compared to the whopping 6 hours and 37 minutes that people spend on the internet, you might think that social media is not as valuable as having a website and optimizing for search engines.

During YoastCon 2023, SEO expert Jes Scholz also spoke about the importance of social media in today’s search landscape. During this talk, she explained why, in today’s day of age, you need to optimize beyond search. Check out a short snippet of her talk right here:

Trust goes an even longer way

But it’s not just about sales. Research has shown that brand image has become increasingly more important to consumers. In 2022, consumers stated that they would pay more to purchase from a brand they trust, and what better way to build that trust than by using TikTok or Instagram, an app that requires businesses to show the faces behind their company? So while social media might not be your main venue, it can certainly be a good one to leave a positive impression on your audience.  

Search engines are no longer just for search

When you really think about it, is it so strange that social media is becoming more popular as a search engine when Google has become more like a social network? A few years ago, Google started to fundamentally change the way they work. And one of these changes was going from text to visual. Have you noticed that when you search in Google, you’re shown more visual results? Videos, images, reviews with photos attached. Instead of a wall of text that no one wants, Google now shows you authenticity.

And it makes you wonder: if Google thinks social media are a big enough threat that they changed the fundamental way Google worked, should you?

Everything is changing

Social media becoming search engines, conversational search gaining popularity, and AI tools taking over the internet… All that change can feel scary. The good news? You’re not alone in that feeling. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or tired because of the changing online world (even though many businesses use the slogan “the only constant is change” on their site, so really, what did you expect?), then so are many other people. And those people might prefer that you’re still doing things the old way. 

Is changing your strategy even a choice?

But let’s be realistic: many companies will follow in Google’s footsteps. They’ll utilize social media and Google’s new functionalities to stay in the game. And those people that also felt overwhelmed or tired? They’ve gotten used to the new functionalities. So while it might not sound fun to learn a new way of doing business, it’s the only way you’ll be able to move forward. Or move at all. Luckily, you can always hire a young person to help you navigate the highly addictive landscape of social media.

Read on: 10 copywriting tips for social media »

The post Are social media platforms becoming the new search engines? appeared first on Yoast.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What is Shopify?
• What is Shopify SEO?
• SEO basics for Shopify
• Technical SEO for Shopify
• How to increase sales in Shopify
• Learn more? Try the Yoast SEO for Shopify training course
• Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Get it now! »

Introduction

Launching an online store has become increasingly popular due to several economic and technological trends driving growth. The e-commerce market has been growing steadily, and with increased accessibility to the internet, entrepreneurs can connect with a broader global audience and start businesses from anywhere. The low cost of starting and operating an online store makes it easier for small business owners or start-ups to enter the market. With most internet traffic from mobile devices, a mobile-friendly online store is critical for success.

Advancements in e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce have made launching an online store easy. The platforms simplified managing store operations and enabled businesses to conduct digital marketing campaigns. The global COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the shift to online shopping, and the trend is expected to continue as e-commerce businesses evolve and adapt to changing consumer behavior and technologies.

One of the most apparent successes in the meteoric rise in online shopping is Shopify. And with the following SEO tips for Shopify, you can also benefit from that rise.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an online tool that helps you easily build and maintain an online store. It is a managed platform, meaning the software is hosted on their servers so you won’t need separate hosting. Shopify will take care of all of this for you. You take out a subscription to use it to build your online shop. Currently, Shopify has several plans:

• The Basic Shopify plan starts at $39 per month.
• The Shopify plan is $105.
• While the Advanced Shopify plan is $399.
• In addition, there’s also the enterprise-grade Shopify Plus plan.

The differences between the plans mainly consist of having more options or different discounts on various costs. For instance, you’ll get better shipping rates and lower payment costs. You can find the biggest difference in the selling internationally section: only the higher plans will let you set up an international domain and let you set up specific pricing for these countries. Also, the basic plan does not come with reporting options.

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to consider when considering SEO. As with all content management systems, you must optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use Shopify SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in. The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your Shopify store!

Does Shopify have good SEO?

Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly, and customers and search engines can reach it. Shopify already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for a lot of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers of Shopify allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be sub-optimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to have covered and how Shopify and Yoast SEO for Shopify can help you.

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with some finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store.

Most SEO issues with Shopify arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Shopify products can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, Shopify adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is canonical. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about this but be aware of the limitations.

Another thing people have an issue with is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, making for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a Shopify store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they will keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. Some apps help ship your products, design your store, and offer customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re a bit biased, but we think Yoast SEO for Shopify is the one that stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your Shopify SEO expert

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify not only helps store owners improve their site in a technical sense, but it also comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will help you enhance your product page descriptions by suggesting improvements. These suggestions help you make the best product descriptions.

In addition, these analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO for Shopify app helps you write high-quality, readable content that resonates with potential customers.

The best structured data for your store

To enhance your Shopify store’s organic traffic, it’s crucial to capitalize on the benefits of rich results, which increase search visibility and edge out competitors. Yoast SEO provides rich structured data/Schema.org output in JSON-LD format, supporting various types such as Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Yoast SEO also ties all its structured data together in a single graph, which helps search engines understand your store.

Additionally, Yoast SEO has integrated with the popular Shopify review apps Judge.me, Loox, Ali review, and Opinew, to generate the necessary AggregateRating schema to show your reviews in Google. Furthermore, the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block can conveniently be added to Shopify themes v2.0 to increase your store’s structured data and help boost its organic traffic.

Of course, that’s not all the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your Shopify SEO.

Read more: How to become a Shopify expert »

SEO basics for Shopify

Shopify is a great platform to host your online shop on, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive to potential customers. In this ultimate guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful!

Define who you are and what you stand for

We need you to think about who you are to kick things off. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of explaining what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for your online store’s SEO and marketing strategy. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

Start with keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found for. Doing keyword research will give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. Do it well, and you get to fill in your SEO strategy for your Shopify site instantly.

Various tools out there can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. You can even use generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Chat, or Google Bard to inspire you. Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Remember that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

You should also look at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey goes through a whole number of steps. You need to provide content for those steps.

Look at what the competition is doing

When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that?

Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or strategy you might use. Or, you can find something that inspires you to work from. Carefully look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on?

Write unique and high-quality product descriptions

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means; the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

7 tips to write better product descriptions

Writing excellent product descriptions is crucial for online stores as it can significantly impact the products’ success in driving sales. Here are some expert tips on how to write product descriptions that will help you attract customers and make money:

1. Know your target audience: Before writing any product description, understand your target audience’s needs and preferences. Compile a consistently elaborate and compelling answer to the three core questions, “What is the problem?”, “How will my product solve this?”, “What will you get by buying this?”
2. Focus on benefits: Emphasize the benefits of the products as opposed to just the features. Benefits tell customers what they stand to gain from buying your product, while features describe what the product does.
3. Use sensory language: Use descriptive language to paint a picture of what the product looks, feels, smells, or tastes like. Invoking the sensory love of your target audience enhances the chances of them making a purchasing decision, which is crucial for converting visitors to buyers.
4. Keep it short and skimmable: Online shoppers bounce between different tabs or windows. Make your product descriptions short but informative and easy to scan so that they can be quickly absorbed. But don’t make it too short! The text has to have a certain heft to it.
5. Optimize for SEO: Be intentional about your keywords, headlines, and subheadings to ensure your product descriptions are optimized for search engines. Include descriptive terms to make it easy for potential customers to find your products.
6. Address pain points: Mention common pain points that the product can solve so that the product description speaks to your customer’s pain and provides them with a solution.
7. Use social proof: Including reviews or testimonials from happy customers can increase the credibility of your product’s quality and effectiveness, increasing the likelihood of purchases.

By implementing these expert tips, you can create persuasive product descriptions that drive conversions and attract customers, increasing sales and revenue. We have more tips on improving your product descriptions in your online store in general, plus we have an article on how to do that, specifically in Shopify.

Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and tips to help you improve both readability and SEO.

Keep reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO »

Write great titles and meta descriptions

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. The title and meta descriptions are essential aspects you can focus on to improve Shopify SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click.

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings. Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview in Shopify. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular title and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages.

You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO for Shopify makes this process much more manageable. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables. Using variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself, but this allows you to automate some parts, which can be helpful when you have many products.

How to create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify

SEO-friendly URLs are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, Shopify is inflexible, and there isn’t much wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters

The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest.

Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation

One of the most impactful tips to improve your Shopify SEO is fine-tuning your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system in Shopify should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal links are essential

Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site.

For your navigation, keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations; your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base, right?

Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them.

Make products findable with an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are like a map detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also goes for your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. You’ll find product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages in your Shopify XML sitemap.

You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps.

To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results by adding a noindex. In addition, you can decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will probably be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can.

Don’t add a bunch of Shopify apps you won’t use

While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest.

Properly working with images on your store to improve Shopify SEO

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can’t get a good feel for the product without great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as it is one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest. So what should you look for?

1. Use high-quality images: Use high-resolution images that are clear and visually appealing. This will highlight your product features and attract customers to your website.
2. Use consistent image sizes: Maintaining image consistency throughout your website will give your store a more professional look and make it easier for customers to compare products.
3. Use multiple images: Use multiple images to show different angles of the product, including close-ups of essential features, which will help customers easily understand the product.
4. Develop lifestyle images: Contextual lifestyle images, such as images of people using your product, will help customers visualize how they might use it.
5. Optimize your images: Optimize images for faster loading times, improving your website loading speed and preventing customers from leaving before seeing your products. Platform feature like Shopify automatically optimizes images for the online store.
6. Consider getting professional help: Working with a professional photographer or graphic designer to create high-quality images to make your products stand out and attract more customers.

Optimize the file sizes

One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

Average product pages have around five or more images. If these product photos are enormous, high-res files, your product page’s loading times will increase. You need to keep your file sizes in check. There’s no need to upload 3MB photographs. Be sure to size them and run them through an optimizer properly. You can find several tools in the Shopify App Store to help you do this.

When uploading, Shopify already compresses images but not to a massive extent. In addition, Shopify automatically converts your images to the next-gen WebP image format and serves those smaller files to browsers that support these.

Do your image optimization before you upload the images to Shopify. If you already have them uploaded to Shopify, you can use an app to fix them. Compressing thousands of images is tedious, and there are better ways to spend your time than going through them individually. Luckily, some tools can help you speed this up. In the Shopify App Store, you’ll find multiple apps that take care of the compression and optimization of your photos. You could try TinyIMG or Crush.pics to get started.

Lazy loading images

Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should never lazy load all your images as you want the images at the top of your browser window to be always visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice.

While Shopify does some lazy loading by default, you might have to check if your theme has incorporated it. In the past, you needed to use JavaScript libraries to get this done. Today, you don’t have to use those for lazy loading — use native lazy loading. This works in almost all major browsers, with Safari being the last hold-out. For Apple devices, you must turn this on manually in Safari as of now (for the curious: Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features > Lazy image loading). It shouldn’t be too long before Apple rolls it out for everyone.

<img src="screenshot.jpg" loading="lazy">

Preventing CLS

While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign for Google that your user experience is lacking. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site.

<img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200">
<img
  alt="{{ image.alt }}"
  src="{{ image.src }}"
  width="{{ image.width }}"
  height="{{ image.height }}"
>

Add alt text and good file names

Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number. Additionally, including relevant keywords in the tag can improve your website’s visibility in SERPs and drive more traffic to your site. However, avoiding keyword stuffing and keeping the tag short is essential. Lastly, you should always follow best practices for accessibility, ensuring that the alt tag is descriptive and accurate and can be used by screen readers to describe the image to people with visual impairments.

File names also help Google make sense of your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. So, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 14, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_14_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

Just as with the proper compression of images, give your pictures an appropriate file name before uploading them to Shopify, as it’s hard to fix once they’ve been uploaded. Of course, you can also delete the image you’ve already uploaded and re-upload the proper one.

Can you create a blog on Shopify?

You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, Shopify has a basic blogging engine that functions appropriately, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way of enhancing your SEO strategy, trying to reach an audience via search engines. It’s a beautiful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company.

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, Shopify has a blog called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your Shopify store. Check it out!

If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post you choose to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data.

Is blogging good for my Shopify store?

Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog allows you to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize.

First, you have to determine what the goal of your blog is. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

Blog on WordPress or Shopify?

WordPress is the king of blogs, while Shopify has a basic but competent blogging feature. Wouldn’t to use WordPress to build a blog and tie that into your Shopify store? While WordPress does give you more tools to create a perfect blog, combining these two is probably not worth the hassle. You would be running WordPress on a subdomain which isn’t always the best option. Unless you have particular hard-core needs, the ease of using the built-in blogging tool in Shopify makes a lot of sense for most people.

If you already have an excellent WordPress site, you can integrate your Shopify store with a plugin like WP Shopify. This makes handling your store different from how you would typically do it. Primarily if you use any third-party apps, many of these won’t function correctly in this manner due to the limitations of the Shopify API. You can use Yoast SEO on WordPress and Shopify to optimize your store and site.

Another option to effortlessly integrate ecommerce functionality into your WordPress site using Shopify is the Shopify Buy Button feature. With this feature, you can quickly sell products on your WordPress site for $5 per month.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now!

Start your trial today! »

How to pick a good Shopify theme

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Shopify Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store.

Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

• Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
• Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
• Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these in several collections, like the catalog size or the type of industry, like clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on the homepage of a shop. Now, there are over 80 themes available in the Shopify Theme Store.
• Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it.
• Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
• Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
• Try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The Shopify theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run these through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
• Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme.
• Test the user experience: The Shopify theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
• Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

Having your own Shopify theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. You need to plan to ensure you don’t encounter issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to learn more about building and adapting store themes.

Technical SEO for Shopify

Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights.

Optimize your Shopify store for speed

Being a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide users a speedy experience. There’s a lot of focus on speed at Shopify to help customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts!

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, Shopify has performance high on the list of priorities. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has an Online Store Speed report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance.

While Shopify provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps you hardly use.

How to prevent duplicate content in your Shopify store

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might be confused about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your performance in search.

Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs:

https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

and:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. Recent themes, like the Dawn Shopify theme, have improved and now automatically output the correct URL.

Working with product variants

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get these to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

Of course, you must provide sufficiently different product descriptions if you want them to turn up individually in Google.

Faceted navigation or product filters

Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store — no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways of getting more filters in your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage it.

The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. In addition, they also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically.

Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

Here’s an example of a faceted URL :

https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool

Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines

Shopify hired top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve the platform’s capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over the robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do on your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues SEOs have with Shopify.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

You can find your robots.txt file on https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this well; most users don’t have to touch this file. But for more complex or expansive sites, it might make sense to add some rules to ensure that more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results.

You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click create template, and you can start editing.

Structured data for your products

Structured data is essential in this day and age. This data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org — that search engines read to better understand your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products.

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings a rich result in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the Shopify App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app, so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details.

You must go through some steps to get Yoast SEO to output Schema. A lot of structured data is added automatically — like Product on product pages, but we need your input other details. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo, and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock.

Schema structured data for your articles and pages

Yoast SEO for Shopify does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google about your business — the name, logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. For pages, you can now describe them in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

This also goes for articles. By default, Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article, but you can easily change this. There are news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and more options. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less.

Curious about how the implementation works? We’ve documented all the Schema structured data Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs.

How to manage redirects in Shopify

Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. You can use this when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links.

Shopify has a redirect feature built-in. For one, Shopify automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. You can upload CSV files with your redirects if you need to do large-scale work on your site. Or use the URL redirect feature in the navigation section of the admin settings. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want to old one to point to.

Add your Shopify store to Google Search Console

With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into your store’s performance in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must.

A quick rundown

Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated:

• Open Search Console and log in,
• Add a new property
• Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party
• Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works)
• Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed)
• Enter your domain name (including https://)
• Copy the HTML file
• Open your site theme settings
• Click Actions > Edit code
• Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag
• Save and wait for Google to verify your site

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes adding the verification code to your ecommerce store easy. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings, and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste in the verification code you received. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added.

How to increase sales in Shopify

When you have your store up and running, the next thing will be getting those customers — and getting them to return and spend more and more. For fledgling stores, ranking products in the search results is complex. It would be best to do more to get noticed, and marketing your Shopify store can get you there. Also, improving the UX can help you get those conversions up.

Marketing, in addition to SEO

Every online store needs marketing. You can do many things to get people interested in your products and get them to your shop. In this part of the Shopify SEO ultimate guide, we’d like to highlight some options quickly.

Paid ads and Google Shopping

Many Shopify stores get their first customers from paid ads. Paid ads are a great way of gaining visibility quickly. You get to carefully target who you want your ads to appear for based on terms and outcomes of your choosing. There’s no limit to what you can do with paid ads — the only limiting factor is what you want to pay for those ads.

Then there’s Google Shopping, where you can also get your products noticed. Getting listed there doesn’t cost money if you’re in selected countries. There’s a Google channel app that makes connecting your Shopify store to that boundless platform easy.

Read on: How to get your Shopify store on Google »

Social media marketing

Social media is vast — use it to your advantage! There are a ton of well-known platforms out there, like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but also more niche ones, like Reddit. Get creative and find out where your audience lives. Find out what they need and connect! Build your brand, your voice, and push your store.

Video marketing

Buying something is delicate; the more you can support your customer, the better. Video is an excellent way of getting your customers to learn more about your products. Video is booming, so don’t forget to invest in a proper video SEO strategy. We have a ton of great content if you want to learn how to do video SEO. And if you’re looking to add video content to your Shopify store, check out our quick guide.

Email marketing

A good email newsletter is essential for your store. It is one of the most successful ways to connect people to your store. You can use email marketing to keep customers up to date with the latest products and sales. In addition, you can also use it as part of your content marketing strategy — getting your content noticed by the right people.

Shopify has a dedicated email campaign app that lets you get started quickly. The first 2,500 emails per month are free of charge. Designing an email is picking a template and customizing it to your liking. You even get data to track the success of your newsletters.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing might be an option for you. In most niches, you’ll find influencers who’d like to talk about or promote your product. Influencer marketing is an exciting way of getting your name out there, and it might make sense for your industry.

Offline marketing

Don’t forget old-school offline marketing for your Shopify store. You must consider offline marketing if you are a local store catering to a local audience. Think of advertising in the local paper, printing flyers, or doing a guerrilla sticker campaign. The options are endless.

Keep on reading: Get more sales on Shopify with these 14 tips »

Conversion rate optimization in Shopify

Your store should have great products, good content, an excellent design, and proper SEO to make the most of it. But even then, the chances are that you are still not getting the most out of your store. Getting customers is one thing — getting them to convert, and return is a whole different thing.

Besides improving your store, you should also improve the experience a customer has in your store. You should remove any bump in the road that might keep a visitor from becoming a customer. These could be technical things — your shopping cart loads poorly. Or it might be related to your content — is the text on that CTA explicit enough? Can you find ways to improve your product pages?

This is the domain of conversion rate optimization. Start thinking about the user journey and see if you’ve missed a step. Test different setups of your shopping cart to see which performs better. Put your product pages through the wringer. Track, test, change and improve!

Internationalization

Expanding your online store to markets outside your country has always been a chore. Things get complex fast, even with Shopify, getting everything set up — from international domains to hreflang, localization, and targeting. But there’s money to be made in the world, and why wouldn’t your shop have a piece of the pie?

To make selling a more viable option for online stores internationally, Shopify has Markets. Shopify Markets takes the guesswork out of internationalization. It comes with automatic solutions for payments in local currencies, translation of content and interfaces, fulfillment and shipping, and even tax and custom handling.

For SEOs, the beautiful thing about Shopify Markets is that it is part of the international domain. You can pick your proposed global domain setup using subfolders, subdomains, or top-level domains. A new Geolocator app helps redirect customers to the proper domain in their respective countries. Shopify will automatically add the appropriate hreflang tags to the pages so search engines can also make sense of the setup.

How to move from WooCommerce to Shopify

One of the biggest competitors of Shopify is WooCommerce — we’ve compared them both in an article on this site. If you are looking to move from WooCommerce to Shopify, you can rest assured, as the process of migrating is pretty straightforward. First, you need to export your data from WooCommerce. Then, import your data into Shopify through the Store Importer app. Lastly, carefully check and review the imported data. Missing products or customers can be added manually. Check Shopify’s store migration guide for more information.

The Yoast SEO for Shopify training improves your skills!

In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your Shopify store. Of course, there’s more to Shopify — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. Our SEO solutions come with training courses, and Shopify is no different. You’ll find an ecommerce SEO online course and training explicitly showing how to properly set up Yoast SEO for Shopify. Be sure to check out Yoast SEO academy. Please try the ecommerce and Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.

Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Shopify is a popular platform to run your online store on. Rightly so because it is easy to use and performs well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. This ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gives you an excellent place to start.

Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and start your FREE Yoast SEO trial now!

Read more: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »

The post Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

Table of contents

• Local SEO vs. SEO — what’s the difference?
• Small business SEO and local search ranking factors
• Step 1: Make a good website
• Step 2: Let Google know your location
• Step 3: Write content about what you offer
• Step 4: Share your expertise and reputation
• Step 5: Keep your online information up to date
• What the Yoast Local Premium bundle can do for your small business SEO

Note: This guide is about SEO for small/medium businesses, particularly those with a specific region to target and a limited budget. If your business has multiple locations, you might want to check out our article about creating local landing pages instead. Alternatively, if your website is aimed at a wider audience, you’re probably better off with our regular SEO guide. Our local search guide has more insights on how it works in the background.

Local SEO vs. SEO — what’s the difference?

The key difference between SEO and local SEO is which search results you want to appear in. SEO is about ranking in search results that don’t depend on a specific location (i.e., national or international search results). On the other hand, local SEO is about optimizing pages and sites for region-specific results, such as ‘near me’ searches. These searches enable users to find products and services available in their area.

Of course, optimizing your small business website for local searches involves many of the same steps as regular SEO. Our guide will help you through the SEO basics in a way that makes sense for a smaller website, plus the extras you need to know about local SEO.

Small business SEO and local search ranking factors

When search engines are deciding what to rank in a local search result, there are four main factors they take into consideration:

1. Is your website up to scratch?
2. Where are you (or your store/services) located? Is that near to the person who is searching?
3. What do you offer, and is it relevant to the person searching for?
4. Do you have a good (online) reputation?

If you want to optimize your website to rank better but are unsure where to start, you might want to look at our free SEO course for beginners. In the rest of this guide, we’ll cover the most important factors for succeeding at local SEO in more detail.

Keep reading: Local ranking factors that help your small business SEO »

Step 1: Make a good website

Let’s be honest; your site is probably not the ‘Mona Lisa’ of websites. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to meet certain standards. For instance, site structure, loading speed, and security are important for SEO and user experience. Look at our article about what makes a good website to ensure yours will meet expectations.

If you don’t already have a website, you can start with WordPress. Other options are available, but our SEO plugins work best with WordPress. Of course, we have Yoast SEO for Shopify if you run an ecommerce store on said platform. You might also be interested in following our free WordPress for beginners training.

Learn more: Holistic SEO: Improve every aspect of your website »

Low-budget branding for small business SEO

We have talked about this repeatedly: branding is very important for SEO. Branding means stuff like your logo and tagline. Do they represent your company without further explanation? What do your logo and tagline reveal about your values and your field of expertise? It’s all about recognition, and it’s just as important for small business SEO as it is for big companies.

You can work on your branding without investing a lot of money. Yes, low-budget branding is a thing, even if you’re a non-profit organization. When working on your branding with limited resources, there are several budget-friendly tips to consider. One of the most crucial steps is to claim and optimize your Google Business Profile listing. This helps ensure you provide accurate information, such as your name, address, and phone number. Consistency is also key across all platforms, ensuring your NAP information remains consistent on online directories and social media profiles. We’ll dive into this later.

Develop a unique brand language that sets you apart from your competitors. Make sure it is consistently used across all platforms, including social media. Blogging provides a cost-effective way to build brand identity while establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. Attending local events allows you to network with potential customers while establishing your trusted authority in the field.

Encouraging online reviews can significantly boost your visibility. It’s worth encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. By implementing these tips, you can work toward building a strong brand presence without breaking the bank. It allows you to showcase your business in the best possible light while capturing the attention of your target audience.

Read more: Low budget branding tips for small businesses »

Step 2: Let Google know your location

To help Google understand where your business is located and put you in the right local results, it’s essential to have up-to-date contact information in all the right places. So it’s very important to align your info on all the platforms you operate on. Search engines will check and double-check your details to ensure everything adds up.

Make a contact page

Aside from search engines, your (potential) customers must know how they can contact you, too. You should always add your contact details in places where users would expect to find them — for example, in your website footer — and, of course, on your contact page.

Local business structured data

Many factors influence small business SEO, but one very obvious is your NAP. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. In the case of a local business, details like addresses, phone numbers, geo-coordinates, opening hours, etc., should be correct at all times. The best way to present these details to search engines is by using local business structured data. Yoast SEO has a lot of options for adding structured data.

Structured data is an essential component of local SEO. LocalBusiness structured data, in particular, provides an excellent opportunity for local businesses to improve their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By incorporating localBusiness structured data, you can provide search engines with details about your business. Details include your name, address, phone number, and opening hours. This information helps search engines better understand your business, making listing your business in relevant search results easier.

Structured data also provides a better user experience for potential customers. Customers can easily find you by providing accurate information about your business, such as your location. Search results that include rich snippets, such as business ratings and reviews, can help customers decide to visit your business. These factors improve your click-through rate (CTR) and drive more traffic to your website and physical store. By incorporating localBusiness structured data into your website’s code, you’re providing search engines and potential customers with valuable information that can help boost your visibility and generate business.

Read on: Putting local stadiums, aquariums, and museums on the map with Yoast Local SEO »

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile, formally known as Google My Business, is a free profile you can set up to help promote your business in the search results and on Google Maps. This official Google tool can help you to rank in your specific geographical area. Not only that, but the tool also gives you many options to manage and improve your listings. By making a GBP listing, you can connect with your customers better. You’ll get insights about how they interact with your business on Google. You can add extras like photos and opening hours to your profile too.

Always use the same name, address, and phone number on your website and your Google Business Profile listing. Be sure to include your website link in your GBP listing too! This is the only way for Google to understand the relationship between them.

Keep on reading: Improve local SEO with Google My Business a.k.a. Google Business Profile »

Step 3: Write content about what you offer

When you want to rank for a search term, it’s important to provide relevant content for that search. Google is a bit like a matchmaker — ultimately, they’re just trying to connect users with what they want. So, you need to clarify what your business does, and you can do that by writing about it. Of course, for local businesses, that also means talking about your local environment.

Before diving in and writing, consider your niche and which keywords you want to target. That way, you can focus on making the strategic content you need.

Find your niche and your long-tail keywords

Alright, you can do more to make your business stand out. Determining your niche is vital for local or small businesses. When you know your niche, you can emphasize what makes your brand or products unique, improving your chances of ranking well for them. If you have a clear niche, you can compete locally with large national brands – despite their multi-million dollar advertising budgets.

Find out who your customers are and which words they use to describe your product or service because people will use the same terms to find your website. These terms can help you optimize your local business SEO when you turn them into long-tail keywords, and these keywords should be as specific as possible. Once you’ve done all this, regularly assess your niche as it evolves with your company’s growth.

Start making great content

Your small business SEO will get a significant boost from the right content. Too many small business owners just put their products and contact details on their website and leave it at that. But there is so much more to tell and share!

Focus on making an awesome first impression on your potential customer. Write about your business, your business goals, how great your products are, and things like that. You could also discuss market developments or events that relate to your business. These are just a few tips for your local SEO content strategy.

When writing your content, be realistic about the chances of getting that content to rank in search. If you are in a highly competitive market, content works very well as a marketing tool and as input for social media, but it probably won’t get you that number-one spot in Google, and that’s OK. Manage your expectations.

Picking the right keywords to optimize for is very important. Usually, it’s a good idea to pick mid-tail keywords, including the local area you are targeting. It doesn’t matter if you add this content to your site as a page or blog post. Just make sure you write about things people want to discuss or things that make people positively talk about your business.

Keep reading: What is quality content and how do you make it? »

Write great local-oriented content for small business SEO

Creating local content is a powerful way to improve your business’s visibility in local search results. Here are a few ways you can create compelling, locally-focused content:

1. Include local keywords: Use local keywords in your blog posts, meta tags, and other website content. For example, if you own a coffee shop in Tacoma, including keywords like “Tacoma coffee shop” and “best coffee in Tacoma” can help attract local customers searching for a coffee shop in that area.
2. Highlight local events: Showcase your business’s involvement in local events by creating content about upcoming festivals, holiday celebrations, or other local events. This content engages local readers and helps search engines recognize your business’s relevance in the community.
3. Create location-specific landing pages: Make landing pages that target specific neighborhoods or regions within your city. This allows you to create content that speaks directly to that area’s interests and needs.
4. Provide local news and updates: Stay on top of local news and events to create useful content that appeals to your local audience. For example, if a new park is opening up nearby, write about it and include information about how your business can benefit.
5. Use local imagery: Incorporate photos and images of your local area to showcase your business’s connection to the community. This helps your audience feel more connected to your brand and helps search engines understand your business’s relevance to the local area.

Creating local content requires effort and time, but the payoffs can be significant, including improved search engine visibility, increased website traffic, and a more engaged local audience. Keep your content relevant, engaging, and shareable to maximize its impact. Remember that good local-oriented content can earn you valuable links from relevant sources.

Step 4: Share your expertise and reputation

Once you have all that set up, there are a few very good reasons you should reach out and get involved with your business community and customers. Getting people talking about you and your business will help your website grow, whether directly or indirectly.

Firstly, when other people link to your website from their pages, this can signal to search engines that you’re well known, and your website will be a good choice for them to put in their search results. Secondly, you can increase your website traffic significantly with a great social media strategy. And thirdly, ratings and reviews help to build trust with your customers, meaning they’re more likely to buy from you (and hopefully come back for more, too!).

Links from related sites

Social ‘proof’, like the ratings and reviews mentioned below, should be backed up with links from relevant sites. Getting links to your business site is still important in local SEO. You should work hard to get mentions or citations of your business on other sites. How and where you do that differs in every industry, but these include Yelp, Bing Places, Yahoo! Local, Apple Maps, among many other sites and services. Moz has a handy tool that checks your online presence.

You should get a listing on these sites because you also get a link to your website. If you can get some links from other related local websites, that will also help your site’s findability. Note that links from other local websites should be from sites in a related profession. Having your bakery website linked to an accountant’s website is useless.

If your small business is closely related to other businesses not located in the same area, you should also ask those businesses for a link. Google crawls the web link by link, so if your business is linked to a website in the same field of business, that link is extra valuable to you.

Social media

While you can sell your products on social media platforms, in most cases, we recommend using social media for brand awareness or to lead potential customers to your website for sale. Using social media as a small business is all about promoting your brand, your company, and your products to establish your image and get the right traffic to your company website. When used in this way, social media can really help small business SEO.

I like to compare social media to a market where all the stall owners know each other, and customers browse the products. At some point, someone will tell other visitors where to go for a product: “The cheese over there is delicious,” “You should check out the fruit over there,” that kind of thing. So make sure people start talking about you. And start talking about yourself online to make others talk to you on social platforms. Lastly, actively engage in social media conversations to let people know you are listening. 

Read more: Learn how to use social media to increase your sales »

Ratings and reviews

Google Business Profile, like Facebook, allows others to leave a review of your company. If your company has a good rating, people will be more likely to click through to your website from either of these two platforms. Make sure you monitor and maintain these reviews.

If you get a negative review, respond by solving your customer’s problem. Then, once you have, ask them to change their review afterward. In other words, turn that dissatisfied customer into a brand ambassador!

It’s easy to make use of these reviews and ratings. If you need some tips, find out more in this article:

Read on: Get local reviews and ratings »

Step 5: Keep your online information up to date

Building a website for your business is just the first step toward establishing a strong online presence. Once your site is up and running, it’s important not to forget about it. Regularly checking your site to ensure everything is running smoothly and it hasn’t been hacked can save you from potential headaches later on. Don’t forget to add fresh content regularly or improve your already existing content.

In addition, it’s crucial to keep your contact information up-to-date across all the different platforms and tools you’re using for local SEO. Even if you think you may not need the website in the future, your customers could still be Googling you. They might need directions to your store, want to make a special request, or leave a positive review. By keeping your contact information up to date, you won’t miss out on any potential opportunities that could come your way. Don’t let opportunity knock on the wrong door; ensure your correct contact information is visible to your customers and search engines.

Have you found this article helpful? We have lots more articles about Local SEO you can read. Don’t forget to check out the Yoast Local Premium bundle — designed to make local SEO easier and quicker!

The Yoast Local Premium bundle helps small business SEO

Now you know the recipe for success, let’s take a quick look at some of the ways our dedicated plugin bundle can help:

• Automatically convert your contact info (and more) to the Schema.org structured data format
• Automatic configuration of Google Maps on your website with your store location and a route planner
• Tools to help with keyword research and optimization
• Tools to help you make quality, targeted content
• Previews for Google search results and social media shares
• A year of free access to 24/7 support plus full access to all Yoast SEO academy courses

Enjoy these features and loads more when buying the Yoast Local Premium bundle!

Show ’em what you’re made of!

Make a bigger impact in your local search results with the Local SEO plugin from Yoast

Get the Local bundle »Only $145 USD / year (ex VAT)

The post Small business SEO and local search: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

History of WordPress

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little started and announced WordPress on May 27, 2003. In those days, it was a simple blogging platform built on the b2/cafelog software. Its popularity grew due to its user-friendly interface, customizability, and flexibility, letting users easily create custom themes and plugins. This made it a top choice for bloggers, freelancers, and small businesses. This was when competitors like Joomla and Drupal were doing pretty well.

WordPress 1.5 was launched in 2005. In this release, users could change the design of their blogs without needing to know HTML or CSS. Over time, WordPress further grew in versatility. The 2010 release of WordPress 3.0 added custom post types. Users created various content types beyond posts and pages thanks to custom post types. The feature enabled SEO experts to design custom landing pages and product pages. They could also optimize URLs for better search engine visibility. Additionally, WordPress 3.0 allowed site owners to create multiple sites using a single installation with its multi-site feature.

In 2018, the Gutenberg editor debuted with the release of WordPress 5.0. This new editor has improved the user experience by introducing drag-and-drop blocks. Thanks to these blocks, users create visually appealing and engaging content that gets more website traffic and engages visitors. Today, the block editor powers the full site editing feature slowly rolling out in WordPress.

The importance of open source

We can partly explain WordPress’s success due to its open-source license, which is core to its development philosophy. The license allows users, designers, and developers to access, modify, and improve WordPress’s source code. As a result, it created a vibrant and inclusive community that propels its growth and accessibility.

Thousands of developers worldwide contribute to WordPress, creating plugins and themes that enhance the platform’s functionality. This approach has made WordPress the preferred platform for businesses of all sizes. It also helped stimulate best practices among its users and developers.

The open-source model has become the foundation of WordPress’s success as a leading content management system. The community working together to create a powerful, easy-to-use, and adaptable platform for everyone has made it one of the most recognizable open-source projects in the world. The philosophy of openness and inclusivity will continue to drive WordPress’s growth and development into the future.

Key moments in the history of WordPress

Let’s take a closer look at some of the significant moments in the history of WordPress.

The initial launch of WordPress (2003)

WordPress launched in 2003, marking a pivotal moment in the history of the web. It also started a new era of sites. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little co-founded it as a fork of the b2/cafelog blogging system. They wanted to offer something more user-friendly and flexible than what was already out there.

Designed to be modular and adaptable, WordPress gained popularity as a CMS for bloggers of all skill levels. Developers were attracted to it to create custom themes and plugins. Its simplicity set it apart. The intuitive interface and basic features made publishing and managing content online easy, even for users lacking technical skills.

Although it had its initial issues, the efforts of Mullenweg and Little paid off. The WordPress community grew, improving the platform’s flexibility and refining updates to fix bugs. Developing plugins and themes further enhanced its capabilities and drove its popularity.

The launch of WordPress 1.5 (2005)

2005 saw the release of WordPress 1.5. This significant update introduced themes, revolutionizing how users could personalize their WordPress sites. Before themes, altering a site’s appearance required creating CSS stylesheets, a time-consuming and elaborate process only feasible for expert users.

Themes introduced an accessible and practical way for WordPress users to modify their sites’ designs without learning HTML or CSS. The update marked a turning point in WordPress’s history, further boosting its popularity and user-friendliness.

The update came with a default theme, Kubrick, by Michael Heilemann. This became the go-to choice for users due to its groundbreaking design and easy customization. Additionally, WordPress 1.5 had a new database structure that offered better performance and scalability. This allowed faster, more efficient handling of more extensive data storage.

With the introduction of static pages, users could create pages beyond the prior limit of posts in chronological order. Now, we see the addition of standard pages like About us, Contact us, and more. Themes empowered non-developers to personalize their sites, making WordPress 1.5 more accessible than ever.

Launch of the WordPress plugin repository (2005)

The concept of plugins was introduced in WordPress 1.2. The launch of the WordPress plugin repository in 2005 marked a turning point for the platform. The repository vastly expanded its capabilities and popularity. Before the repository, WordPress users were limited in customization options, relying on built-in functions alone.

The plugin repository changed everything. It enabled developers to create and share their plugins with the WordPress community. This opened up limitless possibilities for expanding and personalizing functionality. The library now offers users a broad range of plugins, from social media integration to eCommerce, to enhance their WordPress sites.

The plugin repository streamlined the installation process. It replaced the considerable effort of downloading files and transferring them through FTP with a single-click installation from the WordPress dashboard.

One plugin that greatly impacted site owners was WordPress SEO, later called Yoast SEO. After all these years, our plugin is still the most important tool for optimizing on-page content and doing SEO. This plugin provides features like content analysis, XML sitemaps, and social integration to enhance visibility and increase website traffic.

The plugin repository also fostered and strengthened the WordPress community by encouraging sharing, communication, and collaboration between enthusiasts. Today, it is a vital cornerstone of the WordPress ecosystem. It has a broad selection of over 60,000 plugins, continuing to enrich WordPress’s capabilities and development community.

The first ever WordCamp is held (2006)

The WordPress community is very active online but also loves to come together offline. Instrumental in this was the introduction of WordCamps, which are events that focus on everything related to WordPress. WordCamps are informal conferences that are organized all over the world, by people from the community. And this is still very much happening to this day.

During these events, WordPress enthusiasts come together to meet like-minded people, share ideas and work together on improving WordPress. And one of the reasons for its ongoing popularity is that everyone’s welcome, from developers to casual users. Every contribution is welcome and everyone can contribute!

WordPress 3.0 (2010)

WordPress 3.0 was a significant moment in the platform’s history. This release featured many new tools that gave users greater website control and flexibility. Custom post types were among the most critical introductions, removing the previous post and page limitations. This made creating product pages, event listings, and the like easier. It reduced the complexity or requirement of hacking the platform. 

Multi-site functionality was another significant update, allowing users to create multiple sites with a single WordPress installation. This made site management more accessible and more centralized for owners. Additionally, WordPress 3.0 offered an improved menu system. A more sophisticated site design is now possible, giving users greater control over arranging individual menus. The update enhanced performance and security, providing better caching, response time, and security features.

The WordPress Foundation was founded (2010)

In 2010, Matt Mullenweg founded the WordPress Foundation, a charitable organization to further WordPress’ mission. Which is to democratize publishing through open source. The goal was (and is) to keep ensuring free access to the software projects that WordPress supports. To create a stable platform for future generations and to make sure the source code doesn’t disappear when the current contributor base changes.

This means that the foundation is responsible for the protection of the WordPress and WordCamp trademark (and related trademarks). But it also focuses on educating the public on WordPress and the importance of open-source software.

Five for the Future is launched (2014)

The Five for the Future project is an initiative that promotes contributions to the WordPress platform. It encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development. Being the open-source project that it is, WordPress benefits from and relies on people all over the world contributing to it. Five for the Future helps make this happen, with participation more than quadrupling since its launch in 2014.

As is often (if not always) the case with WordPress, everyone can contribute. There is always a way to get involved, regardless of your experience level. This gives people the opportunity to learn alongside other, more experienced contributors who enjoy sharing their knowledge. It’s possible to contribute to Five for the Future as an individual or with your organization.

The Gutenberg/block editor (2018)

In 2018, WordPress 5.0 brought the revolutionary Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg introduced a block-based system to replace the traditional WYSIWYG editor, improving accessibility and democratizing website creation.

The block editor broke down content creation into blocks, allowing better template design and layout precision, separate from content styling. This enabled customization options like images, heading, and shortcode blocks to easily create complex content like charts, forms, and call-to-actions.

Initially, the rollout met some resistance due to significant change, but people slowly learned to accept it due to its superior user experience and versatility. It has since become a staple feature with the release of custom block-building capabilities. The block editor provides limitless design possibilities and improves website designs.

The platform has undergone further development with the release of reusable blocks, block patterns, and full-site editing, expanding customization options. Reusable blocks allowed the saving of frequently used blocks, while block patterns provided a selection of pre-designed blocks with customization options. Finally, full-site editing allowed users to create site designs using the block editor seamlessly.

The transformative addition of Gutenberg brought unprecedented ease, customization, and adaptability to WordPress, making it an essential tool for website creation and evolution. With its current state and potential for updates, Gutenberg will continue to play a crucial role in WordPress’s future growth and success.

All-women & nonbinary release squad (2020)

Every new release of WordPress comes with its own release squad. In 2020, the squad for the WordPress 5.6 release only consisted of people who identify as women or nonbinary. This was done to increase the number of women and nonbinary people who have experience on a release squad and also return as a contributor to WordPress. The WordPress 5.6 release, named “Simone”, was the first ever to have an all-women & nonbinary release squad and this was quite a success!

It’s also good to mention that right now, the community is preparing for the next women & nonbinary release squad. So if you’re interested, make sure to sign up!

Full site editing and the future of WordPress (2022 and beyond)

The main focus of the WordPress project is to build a full-site editing feature. With this, users create sites visually using the block editor. Full site editing debuted in WordPress 5.9. Users could choose visual options such as font combinations and image filters through the adaptive navigation block.

WordPress 6.0 followed and improved the user experience by introducing a block-locking UI and improved export theme functionality. Meanwhile, WordPress 6.1 brought improvements to the full-site editing functionalities. The latest release, WordPress 6.2, introduced a new Site Editor and additional functionality.

While ongoing concerns over stalling adoption rates, the legacy codebase, and UX issues, among others, exist, the WordPress project remains optimistic about the future. Performance has also become a new focus, making WordPress faster, with support from Google. Despite challenges, the WordPress community remains committed to enhancing the platform, cementing its position as a leading CMS.

Yoast and WordPress

Yoast and WordPress have a deep-rooted history, and their future is interdependent. Without WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin and Yoast, the company, may not have existed. Joost de Valk, Yoast’s founder and ex-CEO, created the SEO plugin for WordPress. He actively contributed to the WordPress project and community from early on. Today, Yoast has a team of dedicated WordPress developers who have been prolific contributors to WordPress, closely following Automattic’s contributions.

We do everything we can to improve WordPress. For instance, we formed the WordPress Performance team with a team from Google. The team identified and addressed common performance issues to put performance front and center. The goal is to keep WordPress from falling behind competitors in performance. Making WordPress faster benefits everyone, from website owners to visitors, leading to increased engagement and revenue opportunities.

Of course, Yoast played a critical role in WordPress’ success in the SEO industry. Today, our plugin has over 14 million active downloads. It provides technical improvements, on-page optimization, content analysis, XML sitemaps, social media integration, and much more, simplifying SEO processes and enhancing online visibility. By sponsoring numerous WordCamps and meetups, we demonstrate our commitment to the WordPress community.

WordPress’s open-source platform allows us to create user-friendly products that meet the community’s needs. The dependency on the WordPress project and Yoast continue to shape our futures, evident in our commitment to the ecosystem. Yoast and WordPress are intertwined in history and remain pivotal to each other’s future. Together, we’ll continue to drive innovation, and growth, and develop the community.

Thanks for 20 good years, WordPress, and here’s to the next 20!

WordPress has evolved incredibly since its inception. It’s now a dependable CMS that powers over 43% of the internet. Regular updates and new features continue to make it the best tool for publishing and optimizing content for search engines.

As WordPress celebrates its 20th birthday, we’d like to congratulate everyone who has participated in this success — whether as a contributor, a developer, or a user. At Yoast, we are particularly proud of our contributions to the success of WordPress and its community. WordPress has significantly impacted the internet by simplifying the process of developing, publishing, and promoting online content. We can only hope that the future is just as bright!

Read on: Yoast & WordPress »

The post WordPress at 20: The CMS that revolutionized the web! appeared first on Yoast.

This complete guide to SEO copywriting takes you through the process of keyword research and the different stages of the writing process. It will also help you write the readable and SEO-friendly articles your website needs! And last but not least, we’ll give you some insights into creating SEO content for international sites and the challenges that come with that.

This guide to writing SEO content covers the following:

SEO copywriting and holistic SEO

At Yoast, we practice what we call ‘holistic SEO’. Our primary goal should be to build and maintain THE BEST possible website. Ranking in Google will come easier if your website is exceptionally high quality and your content is unique and helpful. The reason for that: Google wants to serve its customers what they want. Their mission is: to index all the world’s information and make it universally accessible.

In addition to this, Google, of course, wants to make money, but they’ll have to show people the results they are looking for – otherwise, people will stop using Google. We can agree that Google wants to show people the best results. If your website is the best in your niche market, Google wants to rank it high in the results.

What is SEO copywriting?

SEO copywriting is one of the most powerful tools people use to get ahead of their competition. By creating high-quality content that’s carefully optimized for search engines and tailored to the needs and interests of their target audience, people can increase their visibility, drive more organic traffic to their website, and ultimately grow their revenue.

It’s like the perfect blend of art and science, where a little creative flair and strategic optimization techniques can work wonders for your online presence. Whether you’re a small business just starting or a larger enterprise looking to dominate your industry, SEO copywriting can help you succeed in the search result pages.

Holistic SEO

Holistic SEO is an interdisciplinary marketing strategy to make the best website in a niche market. To do so, the technical design of your website should be excellent, the UX of your website flawless, and all security aspects covered. Most important, however, is that the content of your website should be well-written, appropriately marketed, and targeted at the audience your website serves. This approach requires relatively advanced SEO writing skills.

Do you want to learn all about SEO copywriting? In our SEO copywriting training, which is part of Yoast SEO academy Premium, we’ll teach you how to write copy that ranks!

Write the best copy!

To ensure your website is the best in your sector, the text on your website should be easy to read. Without making any concessions to the quality of your SEO content, you should tweak and fine-tune your text to the specific demands of search engines. SEO copywriting is very much like the process of writing anything else, so it’s hard work, and inevitably, some of us have more writing talent than others. Unfortunately, we can’t all be Ernest Hemingway, but anyone can write better SEO copy with some training.

Read more: 5 tips to write readable blog posts! »

SEO copywriting in the age of generative AI

Generative AI is like a machine that can effortlessly create content for SEO purposes. It can be trained to analyze keywords and other factors to generate new and optimize existing content. However, we must remember that the human touch is still vital in ensuring that the generated content is of good quality, without factual errors, and relevant to a target audience.

Due to the design of its technology, you must also remember that generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard can not give you original writing yet — but it is very good at reusing stuff already out there. Still, it cannot come up with things itself.

Generative AI will be a handy tool for creating SEO content in the future. However, it’s essential to use it wisely and ensure the content meets brand guidelines and target audience needs. Please use generative AI responsibly. Use AI as a guide, not as a fully automated content factory.

Before writing: always start with keyword research

The very first step of SEO copywriting has little to do with writing. First, you need to decide what you’re going to write about. Which topics do you want to be found for? You’ll need to use the keywords you want to rank for in your copy, so keyword research is the first step of SEO copywriting. Keyword research is what you do to list the keywords and keyphrases for which you want to rank for.

Proper keyword research consists of these three steps:

1. Formulate a mission statement

Before starting the actual keyword research, think about your mission statement. This is what makes you stand out from the crowd. While formulating your mission statement, consider who you are and what your blog is about. What makes it unique? Take your time to develop and write down your mission statement. For more information on creating mission statements, read our post on how to write a mission statement for your website.

2. Make a list of relevant keywords

Once you have formulated a clear mission statement, you can start listing all the search terms (keywords) you want your website to be found for. If your mission is clear, you should be able to develop search terms that apply to your niche market and your unique selling points. These will be the keywords you’d like to be found for.

To come up with good terms, you have to get inside the heads of your audience. How are they most likely to find you? What would they search for on Google? At the end of your keyword research, you should have a list of all the relevant search terms people might use. Also, think of combinations and variations of these terms. You can also use tools to help you in the keyword research process. For example, Yoast SEO integrates with the Semrush related keywords research tool. After you’ve made a list, you may have trouble deciding which keyphrase to use. If so, read our post about choosing your perfect focus keyword.

Create an overview

Eventually, you should have a helpful overview, which will significantly help your SEO copywriting process. It helps to create a table of your keywords to summarize the information. Try to devise combinations of keywords, then order the keywords by some priority. Which keywords are essential to rank for and closest to your mission statement, and which are less so? When choosing which keywords to tackle, you should also consider how likely your pages will rank for that specific keyword. Focusing on less popular and less competitive keywords can be a good strategy at first. Please read our posts about why you should focus on long-tail keywords if you’d like to know more about the importance of less competitive keywords.

3. Look at search intent

Nowadays, SEO strategies should largely revolve around answering people’s questions. Whenever someone enters a search query into a search engine, they are on a quest for something. There are four kinds of intent searchers can have:

• Informational intent: to find information on a specific topic.
• Navigational intent: to access a specific website by entering the term in a search engine.
• Commercial intent: to buy something sometime soon and research before purchasing.
• Transactional intent: to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.

In your keyword research, you need to find out which kinds of intent apply to your keywords and try to match these search intents. You can use the search results to determine which intent applies to your keywords and create great content matching this intent. Which intent you’re targetting should also affect your writing style; we’ll go into that later in this guide.

4. Create landing pages for searchers

The final step of keyword research is to create awesome posts or pages for the keywords you want to be found for. The SEO content should be tailored to attract visitors who found your blog through a specific keyword. This could be a dedicated page or a blog post optimized for a specific keyword. Ensure visitors can navigate your blog through the menu or internal links. And make sure you have a page for every relevant keyword you come up with.

If you’ve found an excellent format for these kinds of posts or pages, you can use Yoast Duplicate Post to use that format for similar pages. With it, you can clone a post and easily fill it with the content your page will be about.

Your keyword research will give you a good idea of what to blog about. Then, you’ll have to unlock content around a specific word. A word is not a topic, though. Next to a keyword (or keyphrase), you will need an angle, a specific story around that keyword. Read our tips on coming up with ideas for your blog if you want to know more.

Three phases of writing an article

Once you’ve decided upon a topic or a story you want to write, SEO copywriting begins! The SEO writing process consists of three stages: preparing, writing, and correcting (or editing).

Phase 1 of the writing process: Preparing your text

The first phase of the actual SEO copywriting process is planning your piece. Before you put pen to paper (or fingers on the keyboard), take some time and think about what you will write. You’ll have a topic in mind by now, but before you start writing, you should have clear answers to the following questions as well:

1. What’s the purpose of your article? Why are you writing? What do you want to achieve?
2. What will be the main message of your post? What’s the key question you want to answer?
3. Who is your audience? What are they looking for?
4. What information do you need to write your piece?
5. In what order will you present your information? What will be the structure of your article?

In our post about preparing a blog post, you can read all about how to come up with proper and clear answers to these questions.

The purpose of your text and search intent

The first question in the list is: what’s the purpose of your article. Thinking about that beforehand is essential because it affects how you should write your article. Do you want to inform users? Amuse them? Or persuade them to do something on your site? The preparation step is also when you should consider your visitor’s intent. If your keyword research shows that the intent behind a particular query is informational, you would like to write a persuasive, sales-focused page for that keyword. In that case, that could be a better match. Of course, this will be fine if you’ve thought about your keyword strategy.

In any case, you need to think about your user’s intent before you start writing, simply because an informative text differs from a persuasive text. The language you’ll use when writing an informative text should be clear and focused, whereas persuasive language will usually be very positive, focusing more on the reader. And amusing texts use more informal language, wordplay, or exaggerations.

Keep reading: Why the purpose of your text is important for SEO »

Text structure

An important element of planning your article is setting up its structure. The structure of the text on your site is vital for SEO copywriting. If your content has a clear structure, you have a better chance of ranking well on Google. You can use mind-mapping techniques to help grasp topics and find connections between the different parts of your subject.

It pays off to think about the structure of your piece before you begin. Because the structure is the skeleton of your text, it will help the reader grasp the article’s main points.

Posts and pages with a clear structure will also increase conversions on your website. You have a better chance that your visitors will buy your products or return to your website if they understand your message correctly. For practical tips on how to set up the structure of a piece of writing, you should read our post on how to create a clear blog post structure.

Generative AI can help you structure content and describe topics

You shouldn’t use generative AI like ChatGPT to automatically generated full articles for you. You can use them to get a better grasp of a topic, to get more context, and to be inspired. Generative AI can also help with structuring text, like:

1. Automating content outlines: Generative AI can suggest content outlines based on the identified topic or keywords. This can help you create articles, posts, and other types of content by providing you with a text structure and writing guidance.
2. Identifying key phrases and topics: Generative AI can access large amounts of data to identify key phrases or topics that recur in a particular field. This can help you include important information in your content and structure it to follow a cohesive narrative or theme.
3. Providing content recommendations: Generative AI can suggest related content that you can use to structure your writing. It can analyze the content available and identify related information that would be relevant to the topic at hand.
4. Offering writing assistance: Generative AI can suggest sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation to help produce well-structured content. This can help you create high-quality, readable content that is easier for audiences to engage with.
5. Formatting and layout suggestions: This feature can help your content planning and optimize it for user engagement, providing the most effective structure based on the type of content that needs to be created.

These helpful features enable you to create high-quality, optimized content that drives more traffic and engagement, but be critical and remember the human touch.

Phase 2 of the writing process: Writing your text

Now you can start the actual SEO writing process! This only takes about 20% of your time on your article.

Just write!

The most important tip for this phase of SEO copywriting is to just write. People often have trouble formulating the first sentence (or the first paragraph). But, at this stage, you can skip writing that first paragraph altogether. Just write a few words referring to the content your first paragraph should contain and start writing the second paragraph. Beginnings and endings are easier to write once you’ve fleshed out the main body of your post.

If a sentence isn’t grammatically correct or sounds awkward, keep going, and don’t worry. You can rewrite these things in the next phase, which is editing. In the writing phase, staying in the flow of writing is crucial.

Stick to the structure of your text

While writing, use the structure you created in the preparation phase as an outline and write the paragraphs according to that plan. Make sure you write clear paragraphs. Start each paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate. Your readers will be able to grasp the most important content from your article by just reading the first sentences of your paragraphs.

Make sure your text is readable

Reading from a screen is hard, so if you want your readers to read your entire blog post, you must make it easy to read. Posts that are easily read will result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. Most importantly, make sure your text is pitched right for the audience you’re writing for.

To read more tips on writing readable texts, read our post with tips on how to make blog posts more readable and our post with tips on how to improve your blog’s typography. These tips will help you fine-tune your SEO copywriting process.

A few ways to improve your writing style

Some people are natural writers and don’t need any tips for their SEO copywriting – they can write an attractive, fun, readable article in a few minutes. Others lack that skill. But while attractive writing is a matter of talent, practice surely helps! Let’s look at some tips to improve your writing style and two writing styles to experiment with.

Tip: Read a lot!

If you want to develop an attractive writing style, it helps to read a lot. Reading (novels, blogs, magazines, whatever) will inspire you to write excellent articles. It will teach you how other people form their sentences and build their paragraphs. It teaches you how to use humor and how to play with language. Plus, it allows you to develop a gut feeling about what makes a nicely readable article. If you want more tips on developing your writing style, read our blog post about achieving an attractive style.

The inverted pyramid style

A well-known writing style in journalism, the inverted pyramid means you put your most important information upfront. You don’t bury your key point halfway down the third paragraph but tell the complete story in the first paragraph. Of course, you can elaborate in the following paragraphs. But you get your main message across right away. This writing style holds up pretty well for some types of articles. It especially comes in handy now that web content is increasingly used to answer every question a searcher might have.

Read on: Writing content with the inverted pyramid style »

Storytelling

Everyone loves a good story, and most people can also tell a good story – especially from personal experience. Great news: you can use the power of stories in your SEO copy! Whether in blog posts or product pages, including a (relevant) story will go a long way in catching your reader’s interest. Stories can provide more clarity and help your readers remember you more easily.

Keep on reading: What is storytelling and why should you use it? »

Take a break now and then

SEO copywriting can be a fairly intense process. If you write for long periods, you’ll find that concentrating becomes harder. The exact time, however, will be different for every individual. If your mind has started to wander, that’ll be the time to take a break.

Many people find writing hard for more than twenty minutes at a time — attention spans can be quite short! At that point, people should step away from the computer to do something else. Even a minute-long break can be enough to return to your writing with fresh and renewed concentration and creativity.

Phase 3 of the SEO copywriting process: Editing your text

Once you’ve finished writing your piece, you’ll have the first draft of your article. You will improve upon this first draft in the final phase of writing. The last step will still take quite a lot of time.

The editing phase is the phase of the SEO copywriting process in which you should ‘kill your darlings’. Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out. You should read and re-read and re-re-read your post and correct any awkward sentences, unclear phrasing, and jumbled paragraph structures. Make your content marketing stand out.

Here are five steps to take to edit your article thoroughly.

Step 1: Read slowly (and out loud)

You can start this phase by reading your piece slowly (and even out loud, this can help). Each sentence should be grammatically correct, and the spelling must be flawless. You need to be very critical of your work. You can have your computer read the text out loud for you — make sure it doesn’t stumble.

Step 2: Focus on sentences

Start by making sure every sentence is correct. Focus on the spelling of words and rephrase awkward formulations. Ensure sentences are grammatically correct and check for readability: ensure your sentences aren’t too long.

Step 3: Focus on paragraphs

If all sentences in one paragraph are approved, look at the structure within a paragraph, focusing on that first sentence. Does that first core sentence capture what you wanted to say in that paragraph? Are the sentences within a paragraph presented in a logical order? Do you use transition words to make the connection between sentences clear?

Step 4: Check the text structure

Check whether the structure between paragraphs is clear. Are your article’s topics presented logically, or do you need to make changes?

You should also check your headings and subheadings. Make sure your focus keyword is in one of those headings and subheadings. But equally important, ensure the headings help your readers grasp your text’s structure. In the article on how to use headings on your site, we explain how to use them.

Step 5: Ask for feedback

The final step in your SEO copywriting process is getting feedback. After editing your text, you should ask people for feedback. At Yoast, all the posts we write are read by at least two of our colleagues before we publish them. Feedback allows for the perspective of someone other than the writer and almost always leads to vast improvements in the post.

It would also be useful to let someone from your audience proofread your post to test whether the message is communicated properly. Also, feedback from someone with professional writing and grammar skills, such as an editor, will help you improve your blog post even further.

Use Yoast SEO

While editing your text, you will find our Yoast SEO plugin useful for SEO copywriting because it helps to optimize your text for search engines and to make your text more readable. For a detailed overview of how to use Yoast SEO when optimizing your content, you should read our post about the content analysis feature in Yoast SEO. The plugin analyzes content in various languages, so you can benefit from using the plugin even if you are not writing in English!

Read more: 10 copywriting tips – from experts to experts »

SEO copywriting for international sites

Writing well is hard; writing your content marketing efforts in multiple languages is even more challenging! This is true if you own websites for multiple regions and languages. Translating content can be a tricky business because of the phenomenon of false friends in different languages. False friends refer to words that look alike in two languages but mean something different.

Creating content for your multilingual sites is not easy. It’s doable, though, and we think there are three ways to go about this:

• translate the content;
• create new content for that market;
• transcreate content: a combination of both.

Getting translations probably is the easiest. But it’s also the most tricky one. Are you sure your translation sends the same message and has the same tone of voice as your original article? That’s hard to judge if you’re not a native speaker. Therefore: always have a native speaker check the copy. At least.

Creating new content by your local team is the safest choice, with probably the highest quality result. However, it is very time-consuming, and you’re not taking full advantage of the available content.

Therefore we’d advise to “transcreate”: take what you already have as a basis, but rework it to fit the local target group. Make sure native speakers that know the local market create this content. If you’d like to know more about this, read our article on creating great copy in multiple languages.

Conclusion: SEO copywriting is a process

SEO copywriting works best when you follow a defined process and ensure your text is as good as possible. While not everyone is a natural writer, SEO writing is something everyone can get better at with practice. Don’t forget to maintain your content over time to avoid it getting outdated and stale!

Keep reading: The ultimate guide to content SEO »

The post SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

Improved language analysis

Content is vital for successful SEO. Yoast SEO’s language tools assist in creating quality articles. The update to the SEO analysis improves the keyphrase density assessment feedback. The feedback used to be specific to the focus keyphrase, but it now refers to the keyphrase in general, making the feedback more comprehensive and valuable.

Additionally, this update improves the accuracy of content analysis by excluding texts within textarea tags from the analysis. This exclusion ensures that the analysis is based solely on relevant text and produces more accurate results.

Monitoring your inclusive language scores

Not long ago, we introduced the inclusive language analysis. The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO works similarly to our readability and SEO analyses. It uses red, orange, and green lights to guide you. You can write any post or page as usual, and the inclusive language feature will assess your content.

The feature provides feedback divided into categories such as age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. This valuable feedback helps you improve your content, making it appealing to a broader audience. You can create more relevant and inclusive content that resonates better with your readers or viewers through the inclusive language feature.

With the latest version of Yoast SEO Premium, we have introduced a new feature that simplifies finding and improving your content in WordPress. You’ll now notice an additional column in the post overview, represented by a heart in a speech bubble icon. Different colors signal if a post needs work on the inclusive language part. Green, of course, is good. You can filter your posts list by clicking the icon, making the entire process even more straightforward. This feature aims to simplify your workflow and streamline your content management experience.

Bugfixes in Yoast SEO 20.8

This Yoast SEO update resolves several issues. First, it fixes several bugs in our indexable database system. These fixes make the system more robust. We’ve also fixed a bug where the SEO and Readability score icon would not show a sad emoji when the post was empty or there was no set keyphrase. These issues have been addressed, and Yoast SEO offers a better user experience.

Security fix in Local SEO 15.0

We’ve improved the security of our Local SEO plugin. This update addresses a security vulnerability that the WordPress security service Patchstack and our security/development team identified and reported. With this update, we have addressed and fixed this issue. We recommend that all users update their Local SEO plugins to this latest version to stay protected from potential security threats.

Update now to Yoast SEO 20.8

Yoast 20.8 is out today, ready for you to download. In this release, we fixed several bugs, added some enhancements, and brought a new feature to Yoast SEO Premium, bringing inclusive language insights into the post overview of your WordPress site.

The post Yoast SEO 20.8: Fixes, enhancements, and a new Premium feature appeared first on Yoast.

YoastCon 2023 was a success!

YoastCon is an epic SEO conference we put together semi-regularly. At YoastCon, you get to learn all sorts of stuff about SEO, internet marketing, and content creation from the experts. It’s an excellent opportunity to connect with other people who are into digital marketing and upgrade your skills and knowledge.

One of the best parts of YoastCon is getting to hear from all these intelligent people who know a ton about SEO. They give talks, run workshops, and share tips and tricks for improving your website’s search engine rankings, creating excellent content, and which future developments to watch.

YoastCon is also a fun place to hang out, meet new people, and build relationships with other pros in the industry. So if you’re into digital marketing and want to keep up with the latest trends and strategies, YoastCon is an event you should check out. If you missed it this year, make sure to rewatch the videos!

Wondering what you missed?

YoastCon 2023 was indeed the event to attend if you’re seeking to boost your expertise in SEO and attain your business objectives. You got essential insights from the world’s leading SEO professionals, featuring the top two ranked SEO experts, Jes Scholz and Jono Alderson, who provided tons of wisdom and tactics on our main stage. Furthermore, we got to ask Google’s Thierry Muller questions during an interactive fireside chat. The topics discussed at YoastCon 2023 were comprehensive, ranging from news SEO to conversion copywriting and GA4 to user research.

Ten key takeaways from our speakers

You might have missed a talk because you were doing a workshop at YoastCon. Or maybe you were visiting the sponsor booths or simply mingling and networking. Or, perhaps you didn’t attend the SEO conference and want a recap. Whatever the reason, we’ve got you covered! Here are the ten most important takeaways for your SEO and online marketing:

1. Stop seeing Google as a search engine

Jes Scholz, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Swiss media giant Ringier, gave an epic overview of Google’s modern-day ecosystem and how every service it offers is connected. She conveyed that we are no longer in the website optimization business. When you zoom out, you’ll discover that Google isn’t just a search engine anymore. It’s become a colossal ecosystem that includes queryless search experiences like Discover, conversion-oriented ecommerce features, leisure activities on YouTube shorts, and much more.

This change from answering questions to providing journeys presents new ways to reach the right audience. Additionally, it’s radically transforming the user interface of Google SERPs. As a result, ranking at “position one” is no longer as significant. According to Jes, we need to shift our focus from competing for top search rankings to a larger, more holistic perspective and build your brand — as a brandfluencer! — into a trusted Google partner.

2. Yoast SEO does more than you know

The head of SEO at Yoast, Jono Alderson, offered us an incredibly in-depth, high-speed session on what happens behind the scenes of Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is among the world’s most sophisticated technical SEO tools. Still, its full potential is primarily hidden — only a few ventures beneath the surface to uncover what’s happening and exploit our powerful instruments.

Jono uncovered everything you didn’t know about Yoast SEO and much more! He paid particular attention to the metadata Yoast SEO adds, including the Schema graph it generates for your site. Not only does Yoast SEO do a ton of work for your site, but we’ve also thoroughly documented what it does to help you extend our offering to finetune it for your needs.

3. User research can lead to incredible insights — if done well

Els Aerts co-founded AGConsult, a Belgium-based conversion optimization and customer experience company. During her talk, she dove into the good, the bad, and the ugly of user research. We all know that we need good data to make better decisions. However, poorly developed or conducted user research often results in irrelevant data, leading to poor choices that can harm your bottom line.

Els identifies the pitfalls to keep in mind while performing user research. Among other things, define correctly what you want to achieve, identify the right audience to ask your questions, and, of course, how to ask the right questions without bias. She emphasizes the significance of avoiding these pitfalls to ensure that the data collected is relevant and valuable, leading to informed decisions.

4. Working with an SEO agency is all about communication

Having a successful relationship with your SEO agency is all about communication. Hannah Thorpe, Managing Director of London-based SEO agency Verkeer, shared her insights and strategies on structuring and growing an agency. She talked through what to do – and what not to do – while setting up your SEO team and how to tackle those common problems.

Hannah talked a lot about aligning your business correctly using the business framework VMOST. This helps align between different levels of the organization and helps achieve its goals. VMOST stands for:

• Vision: the overarching goals and aspirations of the company
• Mission: the company’s purpose and reason for being
• Objectives: specific, measurable goals that need to be achieved to make the vision a reality
• Strategies: broad approaches or methods the company will use to achieve its objectives
• Tactics: specific actions or initiatives the company will implement to support the strategies and achieve the objectives.

By following this framework, companies can create a clear roadmap that ensures that each level of operations works together and focuses on the end goals.

5. Batman knows a thing or two about local SEO

Local SEO is different, but many of the same optimizations and practices have worked for years. Google uses a different algorithm to display localized search results, but some marketers and business owners still cling to traditional SEO tactics. In his fast-paced session full of movie imagery and F-bombs, local SEO legend Greg Gifford explained how local SEO differs from traditional SEO, outlining which signals influenced local search visibility and how to optimize each signal.

We learned about local-oriented content, local link building, getting and managing customer reviews, and improving your all-important Google Business Profile. Not only did attendees leave with a detailed list of proven strategies and tactics to help them dominate local search results, but they also got a massive list of movies to watch.

6. The future of WordPress is in doubt

WordPress powers over 40% of the web, making it the most popular choice in CMSs. Endless growth solidified its position. However, there appear to be cracks in the surface. Growth is no guarantee for a bright future, and WordPress needs an innovative edge to retain its position as the leading CMS.

Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress Relations at Elementor, shows key points the WordPress project needs to solve to keep WordPress the leading CMS for many years. Two of the stand-out points consist of acronyms with an X in them: UX and DX. WordPress needs a better user experience (UX) and a better way of guiding users to become avid, recurring users. But WordPress also needs to improve the developer experience (DX) to help keep them around so they can keep suggesting WordPress as the go-to platform to build stuff on for their clients.

7. People love to buy stuff — get them to buy in your business

So much work goes into helping users through their buying journey that at the end of the journey, writers often forget to give potential customers that final push to get them to buy. Because most writers dislike selling stuff, conversion copywriter Kate Toon showed us that people love to buy things. And it’s okay to talk about something people need or solve a problem for them.

Kate’s talk was full of acronyms describing how to strategically think about selling your stuff. She explained how a well-written sales page, email series, chatbot, or video could sell products and services, making you much money without feeling bad.

8. Whether you like it or not, get ready for GA4

Google Analytics 4 is coming, and the world is not ready. But regardless of your feelings about GA4, for many, it will be the new home for their data reporting. Ecommerce SEO expert Luke Carthy showed us how GA4 could be used to collect custom and super-powerful data to boost conversion and grow sales — it just takes a bit (or actually a lot) more work. And leave your dashboard report to Google Looker Studio.

Hot tip: If looking for alternatives, keep GA4 collecting your data in the background. Should your alternative solution go out of business, you’ll still have a solid data set in your Analytics account.

9. Videos could be precious for your website

Video is enormous today, just look at the popularity of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. But the big challenge is where to start. That’s where video expert Phil Nottingham comes in. Phil is a freelance video SEO consultant who also advises — and writes about video SEO — for Yoast.

In his talk, Phil discussed the importance of video in improving website conversion rates and brand sentiment. He addressed the challenge of what to create, where to put it, and how to measure performance. Phil provided insights on the top five video types every business should create, how to use video to drive more traffic, and benchmarks for success that companies should keep an eye on.

10. Google needs a little help understanding your site

News SEO expert Barry Adams from Polemic Digital showed us how Google discovers, indexes, and ranks news content. News plays a significant role in Google’s ecosystem, as users expect to see the most up-to-date and relevant articles. To deliver this, Google must quickly crawl and index new articles, assess the quality and authority of news publishers, and reveal the appropriate stories in search results. By focusing on news SEO, we gain in-depth insights into Google’s crawling and indexing framework and the signals it employs to assess authority and expertise.

From these learnings, we can distill that you need to help Google’s understanding of your content. Make sure that you nail search intent for your content, optimize your entities, and build your knowledge graph. Using Schema structured data helps greatly, while proper internal linking is invaluable to boosting Google’s understanding of your site.

Google: We must keep working on performance

Google also made an appearance at YoastCon. Software Engineering Manager Thierry Muller from the Switzerland office dropped by for a fireside chat with the Yoast head of SEO, Jono Alderson. Muller has a WordPress and web performance background, so their conversation was big on these two topics. Muller helped form Google’s focus on WordPress.

Google is focused on improving the experience of people online, and one way of doing that is to make CMSes perform better. As WordPress is the most used CMS today, a lot of their time is spent helping bring performance to WordPress. One of the things that came from this was the WordPress Performance team that Google and Yoast started.

But Google is looking into other ways to improve CMSes and think much broader about performance improvements. One idea that Google toyed with was the ability to have Chrome recognize which CMS a site runs, so it can pro-actively optimize rendering based on its knowledge of that CMS. Google also works on things like Project Baseline, which helps developers pick what feature or API is safe to use in your site or web applications.

We all know the other controversial performance improver: AMP. While adoption has stagnated and the project seemed to die slowly, Muller assured us that it is anything but. There will be developments on this front, but we must stay tuned.

Watch the YoastCon stream for a recap

You can rewatch all the YoastCon talks right here, right now! Be sure to relive the inspiring keynote presentations from the comfort of your own home or office. This is a great opportunity when you’ve missed a talk or want to revisit and absorb all the information shared during the conference. Happy watching!

That’s it for YoastCon 2023!

Those were some of the important takeaways for this year’s YoastCon! We want to thank everyone who visited, in person and virtually. Hosting many guests, speakers, and thought leaders at our event was a privilege. We hope everyone learned something valuable, made new connections, and left inspired and motivated.

Don’t forget to share the video on YouTube with colleagues, and share your thoughts and feedback on social media using our conference hashtag #YoastCon2023. Or below this blog post! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

The post YoastCon 2023: 10 takeaways from the SEO conference appeared first on Yoast.

What is a bot?

Let’s start with the basics: A bot is a software application designed to perform automated tasks over the internet. Bots can imitate or even replace the behavior of a real user. They’re very good at executing repetitive and mundane tasks. They’re also swift and efficient, which makes them a perfect choice if you need to do something on a large scale.

What is bot traffic?

Bot traffic refers to any non-human traffic to a website or app. Which is a very normal thing on the internet. If you own a website, it’s very likely that you’ve been visited by a bot. As a matter of fact, bot traffic accounts for almost 30% of all internet traffic at the moment.

Is bot traffic bad?

You’ve probably heard that bot traffic is bad for your site. And in many cases, that’s true. But there are good and legitimate bots too. It depends on the purpose of the bots and the intention of their creators. Some bots are essential for operating digital services like search engines or personal assistants. However, some bots want to brute-force their way into your website and steal sensitive information. So, which bots are ‘good’ and which ones are ‘bad’? Let’s dive a bit deeper into this topic.

The ‘good’ bots

‘Good’ bots perform tasks that do not cause harm to your website or server. They announce themselves and let you know what they do on your website. The most popular ‘good’ bots are search engine crawlers. Without crawlers visiting your website to discover content, search engines have no way to serve you information when you’re searching for something. So when we talk about ‘good’ bot traffic, we’re talking about these bots.

Other than search engine crawlers, some other good internet bots include:

• SEO crawlers: If you’re in the SEO space, you’ve probably used tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to do keyword research or gain insight into competitors. For those tools to serve you information, they also need to send out bots to crawl the web and gather data.
• Commercial bots: Commercial companies send these bots to crawl the web to gather information. For instance, research companies use them to monitor news on the market; ad networks need them to monitor and optimize display ads; ‘coupon’ websites gather discount codes and sales programs to serve users on their websites.
• Site-monitoring bots: They help you monitor your website’s uptime and other metrics. They periodically check and report data, such as your server status and uptime duration. This allows you to take action when something’s wrong with your site.
• Feed/aggregator bots: They collect and combine newsworthy content to deliver to your site visitors or email subscribers.

The ‘bad’ bots

‘Bad’ bots are created with malicious intentions in mind. You’ve probably seen spam bots that spam your website with nonsense comments, irrelevant backlinks, and atrocious advertisements. And maybe you’ve also heard of bots that take people’s spots in online raffles, or bots that buy out the good seats in concerts.

It’s due to these malicious bots that bot traffic gets a bad reputation, and rightly so. Unfortunately, a significant amount of bad bots populate the internet nowadays.

Here are some bots you don’t want on your site:

• Email scrapers: They harvest email addresses and send malicious emails to those contacts.
• Comment spam bots: Spam your website with comments and links that redirect people to a malicious website. In many cases, they spam your website to advertise or to try to get backlinks to their sites.
• Scrapers bots: These bots come to your website and download everything they can find. That can include your text, images, HTML files, and even videos. Bot operators will then re-use your content without permission.
• Bots for credential stuffing or brute force attacks: These bots will try to gain access to your website to steal sensitive information. They do this by trying to log in like a real user.
• Botnet, zombie computers: They are networks of infected devices used to perform DDoS attacks. DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service. During a DDoS attack, the attacker uses such a network of devices to flood a website with bot traffic. This overwhelms your web server with requests, resulting in a slow or unusable website.
• Inventory and ticket bots: They go to websites to buy up tickets for entertainment events or to bulk purchase newly-released products. Brokers use them to resell tickets or products at a higher price to make profits.

Why you should care about bot traffic

Now that you’ve got some knowledge about bot traffic, let’s talk about why you should care.

For your website performance

Malicious bot traffic strains your web server and sometimes even overloads it. These bots take up your server bandwidth with their requests, making your website slow or utterly inaccessible in case of a DDoS attack. In the meantime, you might have lost traffic and sales to other competitors.

In addition, malicious bots disguise themselves as regular human traffic, so they might not be visible when you check your website statistics. The result? You might see random spikes in traffic but don’t understand why. Or, you might be confused as to why you receive traffic but no conversion. As you can imagine, this can potentially hurt your business decisions because you don’t have the correct data.

For your site security

Malicious bots are also bad for your site’s security. They will try to brute force their way into your website using various username/password combinations, or seek out weak entry points and report to their operators. If you have security vulnerabilities, these malicious players might even attempt to install viruses on your website and spread those to your users. And if you own an online store, you will have to manage sensitive information like credit card details that hackers would love to steal.

For the environment

Did you know that bot traffic affects the environment? When a bot visits your site, it makes an HTTP request to your server asking for information. Your server needs to respond, then return the necessary information. Whenever this happens, your server must spend a small amount of energy to complete the request. Now, consider how many bots there are on the internet. You can probably imagine that the amount of energy spent on bot traffic is enormous!

In this sense, it doesn’t matter if a good or bad bot visits your site. The process is still the same. Both use energy to perform their tasks, and both have consequences on the environment.

Even though search engines are an essential part of the internet, they’re guilty of being wasteful too. They can visit your site too many times, and not even pick up the right changes. We recommend checking your server log to see how many times crawlers and bots visit your site. Additionally, there’s a crawl stats report in Google Search Console that also tells you how many times Google crawls your site. You might be surprised by some numbers there.

A small case study from Yoast

Let’s take Yoast, for instance. On any given day, Google crawlers can visit our website 10,000 times. It might seem reasonable to visit us a lot, but they only crawl 4,500 unique URLs. That means energy was used on crawling the duplicate URLs over and over. Even though we regularly publish and update our website content, we probably don’t need all those crawls. These crawls aren’t just for pages; crawlers also go through our images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

But that’s not all. Google bots aren’t the only ones visiting us. There are bots from other search engines, digital services, and even bad bots too. Such unnecessary bot traffic strains our website server and wastes energy that could otherwise be used for other valuable activities.

What can you do against ‘bad’ bots?

You can try to detect bad bots and block them from entering your site. This will save you a lot of bandwidth and reduce strain on your server, which in turn helps to save energy. The most basic way to do this is to block an individual or an entire range of IP addresses. You should block an IP address if you identify irregular traffic from that source. This approach works, but it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Alternatively, you can use a bot management solution from providers like Cloudflare. These companies have an extensive database of good and bad bots. They also use AI and machine learning to detect malicious bots, and block them before they can cause harm to your site.

Security plugins

Additionally, you should install a security plugin if you’re running a WordPress website. Some of the more popular security plugins (like Sucuri Security or Wordfence) are maintained by companies that employ security researchers who monitor and patch issues. Some security plugins automatically block specific ‘bad’ bots for you. Others let you see where unusual traffic comes from, then let you decide how to deal with that traffic.

What about the ‘good’ bots?

As we mentioned earlier, ‘good’ bots are good because they’re essential and transparent in what they do. But they can still consume a lot of energy. Not to mention, these bots might not even be helpful for you. Even though what they do is considered ‘good’, they could still be disadvantageous to your website and the environment. So, what can you do for the good bots?

1. Block them if they’re not useful

You have to decide whether or not you want these ‘good’ bots to crawl your site. Does them crawling your site benefit you? More specifically: Does them crawling your site benefit you more than the cost to your servers, their servers, and the environment?

Let’s take search engine bots, for instance. Google is not the only search engine out there. It’s most likely that crawlers from other search engines have visited you as well. What if a search engine has crawled your site 500 times today, while only bringing you ten visitors? Is that still useful? If this is the case, you should consider blocking them, since you don’t get much value from this search engine anyway.

2. Limit the crawl rate

If bots support the crawl-delay in robots.txt, you should try to limit their crawl rate. This way, they won’t come back every 20 seconds to crawl the same links over and over. Because let’s be honest, you probably don’t update your website’s content 100 times on any given day. Even if you have a larger website.

You should play with the crawl rate, and monitor its effect on your website. Start with a slight delay, then increase the number when you’re sure it doesn’t have negative consequences. Plus, you can assign a specific crawl delay rate for crawlers from different sources. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t support craw delay, so you can’t use this for Google bots.

3. Help them crawl more efficiently

There are a lot of places on your website where crawlers have no business coming. Your internal search results, for instance. That’s why you should block their access via robots.txt. This not only saves energy, but also helps to optimize your crawl budget.

Next, you can help bots crawl your site better by removing unnecessary links that your CMS and plugins automatically create. For instance, WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed for your website comments. This RSS feed has a link, but hardly anybody looks at it anyway, especially if you don’t have a lot of comments. Therefore, the existence of this RSS feed might not bring you any value. It just creates another link for crawlers to crawl repeatedly, wasting energy in the process.

Optimize your website crawl with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO has a useful and sustainable new setting: the crawl optimization settings! With over 20 available toggles, you’ll be able to turn off the unnecessary things that WordPress automatically adds to your site. You can see the crawl settings as a way to easily clean up your site of unwanted overhead. For example, you have the option to clean up the internal site search of your site to prevent SEO spam attacks!

Even if you’ve only started using the crawl optimization settings today, you’re already helping the environment!

Read more: SEO basics: What is crawlability? »

The post Bot traffic: What it is and why you should care about it appeared first on Yoast.

What is generative AI?

To put it simply, generative AI creates content. Whether that’s text, images, or audio. But how does it do that? By using deep learning techniques and technologies in a machine-learning framework. This framework is a system that makes predictions based on data that it’s trained on. For example, if you give ChaptGPT a prompt, it’s able to produce content based on your input.

Some well-known examples of generative AI tools are the ChatGPT chatbot, the Midjourney image generator, and the Bard tool from Google.

What this means for how content creators work

Using generative AI tools for work can greatly improve your productivity because they can quickly generate content. They’re also fast and inexpensive. If you own a small business, AI tools can save you tons of money because you may not need to hire a content creator. Plus, since AI tools continue to learn, they’ll also be able to give you better results over time. 

Why this could cause problems

As is the case with most automated devices out there, generated AI content is not entirely fool-proof. And it also begs the question if it’s ethical to use AI, when these tools are trained on data provided by other people. Sometimes, without their permission. So let’s dive deeper into why AI tools might cause problems.

A cost-effective alternative isn’t necessarily better

One of the big benefits of using AI tools is their efficiency. They’re cheap and quick, meaning you don’t need to hire an entire marketing team. Which is precisely why AI tools might be a problem. They threaten to make certain jobs obsolete. And you have to wonder if it’s reasonable that AI will take over the arts, which one might consider the most human of all jobs. 

Bad data

Another problem is the data that generative AI tools are trained with. They need large volumes to learn, and some systems, such as ChatGPT, use a lot of the data on the internet to train itself. And that’s undoubtedly what might cause problems. Not all data is ‘good’ data. Most of it is biased because humans are biased. Sexist, racist, or homophobic ideas are littered throughout the content we create, so if an AI tool uses that data, it’ll become a biased tool. The result? Offensive content that can’t be used. Or worse, offensive content that people will accept as truth and therefore post online, strengthening a message that shouldn’t be spread across the globe.

Misuse of AI tools

Furthermore, the data AI tools are using to train themselves could belong to people who didn’t know their content would be used to teach an AI. It has raised numerous questions: When you put something online, is it still yours? And when you’ve generated content that uses other people’s illustrations, is it actually your art piece? Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers to these questions. 

You might think that it’s not relevant whether a piece has been drawn by an artist or generated by someone else. But what if the art piece won a big prize? Is that fair compared to the other contestants who actually put in the time and effort? And let’s look at the world of academia. If an academic paper was generated by AI, it might be based on human thought, but it doesn’t actually contain any human input. Is that okay? Do we want the place where people learn to develop their minds become a place where people learn how to craft great prompts, instead of learning how to think for themselves?

It’s not all bad

Luckily, there’s still hope. AI tools might be impressively smart, but they’re still ‘just’ tools. To generate content, they need content that was produced by people. And if we find a way to ethically give AI tools good data, we’re one step closer to creating a powerful tool that can help small businesses grow, so they can actually afford to hire a marketing team.

How to use AI to enhance your writing

Since AI tools are not completely ethical yet, should you refrain from using them all together? No, there’s no denying that AI tools can be a huge help. However, we suggest that you use them as guidelines, inspiration, and a way to boost your productivity on a day you might not feel like writing. 

Use it as an inspiration to start writing

Do you regularly write content for your website or blog? Then you probably know the feeling of staring at a blank document because you don’t know where to start. AI tools can resolve this issue. You simply prompt an AI tool to write an outline, specifying which topics you want to discuss. Or maybe you need the AI tool to write the first paragraph, just so there’s something on the page. While reading your generated paragraph, chances are ideas will start flowing. You’ll be writing in no-time!

Be critical!

Still, when you use AI tools to generate actual posts or texts, it’s good to be critical. Like we mentioned, AI tools can be biased. And they might be incorrect in their information. You should always read your generated piece, and fact-check any claims the text makes. In addition, you want to ensure the content meets your brand values by paying attention to what language is used, since it might not be inclusive. Luckily, if you use the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll be able to use the inclusive language feature to double-check your content. 

Give it a proper rewrite to make it yours

As mentioned before, AI tools can only imitate actual human thoughts and ideas. They generate based on existing ones. And while you might argue that that’s also how humans generate ideas and originality doesn’t exist anyway, you shouldn’t underestimate your personal opinion. It gives a unique flavor to your content. That’s why you should always rewrite (parts of) a generated piece of content.

Conclusion

Generative AI tools can be very useful for small businesses. But, like any technology, it has its drawbacks. It can be biased, or wildly incorrect. That’s why you should use AI as an inspiration to kickstart your creative process, and always read and rewrite your generated content. In our opinion, AI should augment, and not replace humans. 

The post Are we digging our own hole with generative AI? appeared first on Yoast.

The new General Manager: Kimberley Cole

Kimberley is Australian but considers herself more of a citizen of the world. She is a seasoned global executive with extensive experience in financial services and technology. With over 20 years of experience as a strategic go-to-market leader, she has helped customers across different regions identify solutions to succeed in a constantly disrupted world.

Kimberley has worked with big names such as Reuters and Thomson Reuters in various roles, from product management to sales and marketing. Most recently, she served as Chief Commercial Officer at Lynk, a successful knowledge as a service series B scale-up. In addition to her impressive professional background, Kimberley also founded Risky Women, a community aimed at inspiring and connecting women to be bold, extend themselves, and take risks. She’s incredibly passionate about empowering women from all walks of life.

Kimberley looks forward to guiding Yoast into this new chapter: “I am excited to be on board and about the journey we have ahead. Joost and Marieke built a fantastic company and we will continue to build on their incredible foundation. It is the start of a new chapter for Yoast, and with our talented team, I look forward to innovating and enhancing our products and service to continue as a market leader of SEO”.

Will there be any significant changes?

“As I’m new to the WordPress world, I will first be listening to and learning from the amazing Yoast team, our customers, and the community. My main focus will be to understand our customers’ needs, see how we can better serve them, and continue anticipating what will benefit the community, including some of our wonderful partners. It is definitely a new chapter for Yoast, which I will write with the team. Of course, our mission remains ‘SEO for everyone’ at the core but bringing the power of Newfold to provide even more to our customers, partners, and the community.”

The post Meet Yoast’s new leader: Kimberley Cole appeared first on Yoast.

From the moment we met, it was obvious there was something special about you. Your elegant design, user-friendly interface, and endless customization options drew us in and captured our hearts. We were all impressed by how easy it was to create a website with you, even as a complete beginner. You made it possible for people to express themselves, to share their passions and ideas with the world. You inspire us to be our best selves, to constantly strive for excellence. It felt like a perfect match right away!

But as we got to know you better, we realized that there was so much more to you than just your looks. You are endlessly versatile, allowing your users to create anything from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce site. You are always evolving, and constantly improving with every update and upgrade. You are reliable, secure, and trusted by millions of users around the world.

More than that, though, you have become a lifelong friend. You have brought us into a community of like-minded individuals with shared passions and interests. You have given us the tools to build meaningful relationships, reach out to others and make a real difference. You have supported me through thick and thin, always there to lend a helping hand or a listening ear.

WordPress, we love you. We love the way you challenge us to be our best selves, to push beyond limits, and to explore new horizons. We love the way you inspire us to grow, to stay curious and open-minded. We love the way you encourage us to connect with others who share our passions. You’ve introduced me to so many awesome people, and we’re forever grateful for the friendships and collaborations that came out of that.

Thank you for everything you do, WordPress. We cannot and will not imagine a world without you in it. Thank you for being a companion, mentor, and friend. Thank you for every line of code and every update. We solemnly promise to cherish you, honor your legacy, and build on your strengths for as long as we live.

Forever yours,
Yoast

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Yoast SEO Premium: Find your cornerstone content quickly

As you know, cornerstone content is the most critical content on your website. They are typically lengthy, informative pages that cover a topic from all angles. Cornerstone content helps to establish your website’s authority and expertise in your field, and it usually attracts a lot of traffic over time.

However, creating and managing high-quality cornerstone content can be daunting, and that’s where Yoast SEO comes in. Yoast SEO helps you optimize your cornerstone content for search engines, ensuring that it ranks well in the search results and attracts the right traffic. By leveraging Yoast SEO’s guidance and best practices, you can create compelling content that drives traffic and builds authority and reputation.

In Yoast SEO Premium 20.7, we’ve made it easier to find your cornerstone in the post overview of WordPress. An additional column, identified by the pyramid icon, highlights which posts you marked as cornerstones in Yoast SEO. Of course, you can filter the list by clicking on the pyramid icon.

In the screenshot, you’ll also notice the numbers and the icons with arrows pointing in and out of a document. This link counter tracks how many internal links point to a post and how many internal links point away from the post to other articles on your site.

Zapier integration ends today

In Yoast SEO 20.6, we gave you a heads-up about the upcoming end of the Zapier integration. With today’s release of Yoast SEO 20.7, we are formally ending support for our Zapier integration. This will impact you if you rely on the integration, as existing Zaps using the Yoast SEO integration will stop working for you if you update to version 20.7 or higher.

To continue using Yoast SEO and Zapier, you can transition to Webhooks by Zapier. Yoast SEO’s API documentation helps you with the configuration process. Also, on Zapier’s site, you can check which Zaps use Yoast SEO.

Learn SEO with Yoast SEO academy

Yoast SEO academy is an excellent resource if you want to learn how to optimize your site for search engines and to drive more traffic to it. And the best part is that you get free access to all the courses when you sign up for Yoast SEO Premium!

With Yoast SEO academy, you can access a comprehensive library of SEO courses and training materials. These resources cover keyword research, site structure, content creation, and more. You’ll learn the theory and practical application of SEO strategies essential for higher search engine rankings.

In Yoast SEO 20.7, we’ve made accessing and discovering all these excellent educational materials easier. You can find all your SEO courses in the new academy section in one spot. And with access included in Yoast SEO Premium, there’s no reason not to take advantage of this valuable resource!

Yoast SEO 20.7 is out now

Yoast SEO 20.7 is available for download as of now, so go get it! In this release, you can find several fixes and enhancements. In Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve added a new column to the post overview in WordPress to help you find your cornerstone content easily.

The post Yoast SEO 20.7: Keep track of cornerstones in Premium appeared first on Yoast.

Table of contents

• Importance for usability
• Importance of your site structure for SEO
• How to set up the structure of your site
• Contextual internal linking
• Landing pages
• Maintaining your site structure
• Internal linking with Yoast SEO
• The importance of site structure

What is site structure, and why is it important?

Site structure refers to organizing and arranging a website’s pages and content. It defines the information hierarchy within the site and serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers. A well-structured site facilitates easy navigation, enhances user experience, and helps search engines like Google understand and effectively index the site’s content. This, in turn, can improve the site’s performance by making it easier for users to find and engage with the content. Ultimately, an optimized site structure helps achieve higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates.

Importance for usability

The structure of your website significantly impacts the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, they’ll not likely become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.

Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to grasp what you’re writing about or selling instantly.

Importance of your site structure for SEO

A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:

a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site

The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site is mainly about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

b. It prevents you from competing with yourself

On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your content for high rankings. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you instead of against you.

c. It deals with changes on your website

The products you sell in your shop will likely evolve. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.

Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know the best strategy to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of the Yoast SEO academy. Access to Yoast SEO academy is included in the price of Yoast SEO Premium. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!

How to set up the structure of your site

So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure and then explain how to achieve this for your site.

What’s an ideal site structure?

Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: How should you organize your site if you’re starting from scratch? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with several levels:

1. Homepage
2. Categories (or sections)
3. Subcategories (only for larger sites)
4. Individual pages and posts

The homepage should be at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file your content under one of these categories. You can divide these sections or categories into subcategories if your site is larger. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your pages and posts.

Your homepage

On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:

1. Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
2. You show Google that these pages are important.

Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which pages are essential to your business.

Beware not to link too many pages from your homepage, which will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, you can do many other things. Read our article on homepage SEO to find out what.

Navigation

In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.

The menu

First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website, and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.

Furthermore, putting everything in just one menu is not always necessary. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, creating a second menu is perfectly fine.

For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and, in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that relate to the visitor’s account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.

Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. They will become less valuable for your users and search engines if you do.

Read about optimizing your website’s menu here, or enroll in our site structure training that includes many examples!

Breadcrumb trail

Adding breadcrumbs to your pages can make your site’s structure even clearer. Breadcrumbs are clickable links, usually at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve your site’s user experience and SEO, as you can read in our guide on breadcrumbs.

You can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins for your WordPress site. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.

Taxonomies

WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content; other CMSs have similar systems. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things — website pages, in this case — that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic can find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.

Categories

You should divide your site’s blog posts or products into several categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and sell shoes, you can divide this category into subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. These subcategories contain products, in this case, shoes, of that specific type.

Adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every page you write. Add your main categories to your site’s menu when implementing your category structure.

Read on: Using category and tag pages for SEO »

Tags

Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly concerns structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might interest a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.

Keep on reading: What is the difference between tags and categories? »

Try not to create too many tags. You’re not structuring anything if you add a new unique tag to every post or article. Ensure each tag is used at least twice, and your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.

Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Ensure your tags are available to visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for visitors wanting to read more about the same topic.

Read more: Tagging post properly for users and SEO »

Contextual internal linking

Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, navigation, and taxonomies. On the other hand, contextual links are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.

Your most important pages are often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.

Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always uses the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to value and rank your pages properly. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.

Contextual linking for blogs

For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — your cornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.

The following metaphor might help you understand this principle:

Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. Some roads (links) lead to these smaller towns, but not as much as the big cities.

Keep reading: Internal linking why and how »

Contextual linking opportunities for online shops

Contextual internal linking works differently on an online store with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.

There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to the product pages for your ecommerce SEO:

1. link from a product bundle page to the individual products
2. a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
3. a ‘customers also bought’ section
4. a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.

Learn all about setting up a great (internal linking) structure for your online store with our Site structure training, part of our Yoast SEO academy training subscription. We’ve included lots of examples from real websites!

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your regular pages.

Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.

Search intent

When setting up your site structure, you must consider search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?

Consider different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.

When you have an idea of the search intent, ensuring your landing page fits your audience’s search intent is essential. Pages can answer multiple search intents, but you need a clear view of at least your most important pages.

Read all about search intent and why it’s important for SEO.

Cornerstone content pages

Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic; their main goal is not to sell products.

Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when discussing cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.

This article explains what cornerstone content is and how to create it. Want to set up your cornerstone content strategy? Our Internal linking SEO workout makes the cornerstone content approach easy to implement!

Product landing pages

Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, whereas product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.

You want to rank with these pages, meaning they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up of thousands of words, a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.

Michiel listed all the essentials of your product landing page here.

Maintaining your site structure

Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority in everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you must do it, or your website might become messy. To prevent that from happening, you need to fix your site structure and keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should be part of your long-term SEO strategy.

Evaluate your menu

When your business goal or website changes, your menu must also change. Planning things visually will pay off when you start thinking about restructuring your site. Make a flowchart.

Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid but don’t seem relevant to your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.

Read on: Optimizing your website menu »

Rethink your taxonomy

Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories, and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode.

Do your product categories and subcategories provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or you wrote many blog posts on one subject and very few on others.

If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.

If you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.

Keep on reading: The structure of a growing blog »

Clean up outdated content

You might be able to update and republish some outdated articles to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated, but no one reads it anyway, you might delete it. This could clean up your site nicely.

What you should know, in that case, is that you should never delete a page or article without thinking. If Google cannot find the page, it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and, thus, bad for your SEO.

Be smart about this! You need to redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting properly so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!

Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.

Avoid keyword cannibalization

Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you optimize your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, making both pages rank lower.

You’ll have some work to do if you suffer from keyword cannibalization. In short, you should research the performance of your content and probably merge and redirect some of it. When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This allows you to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.

Internal linking with Yoast SEO

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.

Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. This tool can enhance your site structure by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links! You can identify your cornerstones by finding them in the column with the pyramid icon.

Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!

Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider cornerstone content on your site. Those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.

Read more: How to use Yoast SEO for your cornerstone content strategy »

The importance of site structure

As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. A good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top and keep your website from growing out of control!

Want to improve your site structure but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy, our Site structure training, and our SEO workouts!

Keep reading: WordPress SEO: The definitive guide to higher rankings for WordPress sites »

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Warning!

Any mistakes you make in your robots.txt can seriously harm your site, so read and understand this article before diving in.

Table of contents

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file is a plain text document located in a website’s root directory, serving as a set of instructions to search engine bots. Also called the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the robots.txt file results from a consensus among early search engine developers. It’s not an official standard set by any standards organization, although all major search engines adhere to it.

Robots.txt specifies which pages or sections should be crawled and indexed and which should be ignored. This file helps website owners control the behavior of search engine crawlers, allowing them to manage access, limit indexing to specific areas, and regulate crawling rate. While it’s a public document, compliance with its directives is voluntary, but it is a powerful tool for guiding search engine bots and influencing the indexing process.

A basic robots.txt file might look something like this:

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml

What does the robots.txt file do?

Search engines discover and index the web by crawling pages. As they crawl, they discover and follow links. This takes them from site A to site B to site C, and so on. But before a search engine visits any page on a domain it hasn’t encountered, it will open that domain’s robots.txt file. That lets them know which URLs on that site they’re allowed to visit (and which ones they’re not).

Read on: Bot traffic: What it is and why you should care about it »

Where should I put my robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file should always be at the root of your domain. So if your domain is www.example.com, the crawler should find it at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

It’s also essential that your robots.txt file is called robots.txt. The name is case-sensitive, so get that right, or it won’t work.

Yoast SEO and robots.txt

Our plugin has sensible defaults, but you can always change things as you see fit. Yoast SEO provides a user-friendly interface to edit the robots.txt file without needing to access it manually. With Yoast SEO, you can access and configure the robots.txt feature through the plugin’s settings. It allows you to include or exclude specific website areas from being crawled by search engines. When used in conjuncture with the crawl settings,

Pros and cons of using robots.txt

Pro: managing crawl budget

It’s generally understood that a search spider arrives at a website with a pre-determined “allowance” for how many pages it will crawl (or how much resource/time it’ll spend, based on a site’s authority/size/reputation, and how efficiently the server responds). SEOs call this the crawl budget.

If you think your website has problems with crawl budget, blocking search engines from ‘wasting’ energy on unimportant parts of your site might mean focusing instead on the sections that matter. Use the crawl cleanup settings in Yoast SEO to help Google crawls what matters.

It can sometimes be beneficial to block the search engines from crawling problematic sections of your site, especially on sites where a lot of SEO clean-up has to be done. Once you’ve tidied things up, you can let them back in.

A note on blocking query parameters

One situation where crawl budget is crucial is when your site uses a lot of query string parameters to filter or sort lists. Let’s say you have ten different query parameters, each with different values that can be used in any combination (like t-shirts in multiple colors and sizes). This leads to many possible valid URLs, all of which might get crawled. Blocking query parameters from being crawled will help ensure the search engine only spiders your site’s main URLs and won’t go into the enormous spider trap you’d otherwise create.

Con: not removing a page from search results

Even though you can use the robots.txt file to tell a crawler where it can’t go on your site, you can’t use it to say to a search engine which URLs not to show in the search results – in other words, blocking it won’t stop it from being indexed. If the search engine finds enough links to that URL, it will include it; it will just not know what’s on that page. So your result will look like this:

Use a meta robots noindex tag if you want to reliably block a page from appearing in the search results. That means that to find the noindex tag, the search engine has to be able to access that page, so don’t block it with robots.txt.

Con: not spreading link value

If a search engine can’t crawl a page, it can’t spread the link value across the links on that page. It’s a dead-end when you’ve blocked a page in robots.txt. Any link value which might have flowed to (and through) that page is lost.

Robots.txt syntax

A robots.txt file consists of one or more blocks of directives, each starting with a user-agent line. The “user-agent” is the name of the specific spider it addresses. You can have one block for all search engines, using a wildcard for the user-agent, or particular blocks for particular search engines. A search engine spider will always pick the block that best matches its name.

These blocks look like this (don’t be scared, we’ll explain below):

User-agent: * 
Disallow: / 

User-agent: Googlebot 
Disallow: 

User-agent: bingbot 
Disallow: /not-for-bing/ 

Directives like Allow and Disallow should not be case-sensitive, so it’s up to you to write them in lowercase or capitalize them. The values are case-sensitive, so /photo/ is not the same as /Photo/. We like capitalizing directives because it makes the file easier (for humans) to read.

The user-agent directive

The first bit of every block of directives is the user-agent, which identifies a specific spider. The user-agent field matches with that specific spider’s (usually longer) user-agent, so, for instance, the most common spider from Google has the following user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

If you want to tell this crawler what to do, a relatively simple User-agent: Googlebot line will do the trick.

Most search engines have multiple spiders. They will use a specific spider for their normal index, ad programs, images, videos, etc.

Search engines always choose the most specific block of directives they can find. Say you have three sets of directives: one for *, one for Googlebot and one for Googlebot-News. If a bot comes by whose user-agent is Googlebot-Video, it will follow the Googlebot restrictions. A bot with the user-agent Googlebot-News would use more specific Googlebot-News directives.

The most common user agents for search engine spiders

Here’s a list of the user-agents you can use in your robots.txt file to match the most commonly used search engines:

The disallow directive

The second line in any block of directives is the Disallow line. You can have one or more of these lines, specifying which parts of the site the specified spider can’t access. An empty Disallow line means you’re not disallowing anything so that a spider can access all sections of your site.

The example below would block all search engines that “listen” to robots.txt from crawling your site.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: / 

The example below would allow all search engines to crawl your site by dropping a single character.

User-agent: * 
Disallow: 

The example below would block Google from crawling the Photo directory on your site – and everything in it.

User-agent: googlebot 
Disallow: /Photo 

This means all the subdirectories of the /Photo directory would also not be spidered. It would not block Google from crawling the /photo directory, as these lines are case-sensitive.

This would also block Google from accessing URLs containing /Photo, such as /Photography/.

How to use wildcards/regular expressions

“Officially,” the robots.txt standard doesn’t support regular expressions or wildcards; however, all major search engines understand it. This means you can use lines like this to block groups of files:

Disallow: /*.php 
Disallow: /copyrighted-images/*.jpg 

In the example above, * is expanded to whatever filename it matches. Note that the rest of the line is still case-sensitive, so the second line above will not block a file called /copyrighted-images/example.JPG from being crawled.

Some search engines, like Google, allow for more complicated regular expressions but be aware that other search engines might not understand this logic. The most useful feature this adds is the $, which indicates the end of a URL. In the following example, you can see what this does:

Disallow: /*.php$

This means /index.php can’t be indexed, but /index.php?p=1 could be. Of course, this is only useful in very specific circumstances and pretty dangerous: it’s easy to unblock things you didn’t want to.

Non-standard robots.txt crawl directives

In addition to the commonly used Disallow and User-agent directives, there are a few other crawl directives available for robots.txt files. However, it’s important to note that not all search engine crawlers support these directives, so it’s essential to understand their limitations and considerations before implementing them.

The allow directive

While not in the original “specification,” there was early talk of an allow directive. Most search engines seem to understand it, and it allows for simple and very readable directives like this:

Disallow: /wp-admin/ 
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php 

The only other way of achieving the same result without an allow directive, would have been to specifically disallow every single file in the wp-admin folder.

The crawl-delay directive

Crawl-delay is an unofficial addition to the standard, and few search engines adhere to it. At least Google and Yandex don’t use it, with Bing being unclear. In theory, as crawlers can be pretty crawl-hungry, you could try the crawl-delay direction to slow them down.

A line like the one below would instruct those search engines to change how frequently they’ll request pages on your site.

crawl-delay: 10

Do take care when using the crawl-delay directive. By setting a crawl delay of ten seconds, you only allow these search engines to access 8,640 pages a day. This might seem plenty for a small site, but it isn’t much for large sites. On the other hand, if you get next to no traffic from these search engines, it might be a good way to save some bandwidth.

The sitemap directive for XML Sitemaps

Using the sitemap directive, you can tell search engines – Bing, Yandex, and Google – where to find your XML sitemap. You can, of course, submit your XML sitemaps to each search engine using their webmaster tools. We strongly recommend you do so because webmaster tools will give you a ton of information about your site. If you don’t want to do that, adding a sitemap line to your robots.txt is a quick alternative. Yoast SEO automatically adds a link to your sitemap if you let it generate a robots.txt file. On an existing robots.txt file, you can add the rule by hand via the file editor in the Tools section.

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/my-sitemap.xml

Don’t block CSS and JS files in robots.txt

Since 2015, Google Search Console has warned site owners not to block CSS and JS files. We’ve told you the same thing for ages: don’t block CSS and JS files in your robots.txt. Let us explain why you shouldn’t block these specific files from Googlebot.

By blocking CSS and JavaScript files, you’re preventing Google from checking if your website works correctly. If you block CSS and JavaScript files in yourrobots.txt file, Google can’t render your website as intended. Now, Google can’t understand your website, which might result in lower rankings. Moreover, even tools like Ahrefs render web pages and execute JavaScript. So, don’t block JavaScript if you want your favorite SEO tools to work.

This aligns perfectly with the general assumption that Google has become more “human.” Google wants to see your website like a human visitor would, so it can distinguish the main elements from the extras. Google wants to know if JavaScript enhances the user experience or ruins it.

Test and fix in Google Search Console

Google helps you find and fix issues with your robots.txt, for instance, in the Page Indexing section in Google Search Console. Select the Blocked by robots.txt option:

Unblocking blocked resources comes down to changing your robots.txt file. You need to set that file up so that it doesn’t disallow Google to access your site’s CSS and JavaScript files anymore. If you’re on WordPress and use Yoast SEO, you can do this directly with our Yoast SEO plugin.

Validate your robots.txt

Various tools can help you validate your robots.txt, but we always prefer to go to the source when validating crawl directives. Google has a robots.txt testing tool in its Google Search Console (under the ‘Old version’ menu), and we’d highly recommend using that:

Be sure to test your changes thoroughly before you put them live! You wouldn’t be the first to accidentally use robots.txt to block your entire site and slip into search engine oblivion!

Behind the scenes of a robots.txt parser

In 2019, Google announced they were making their robots.txt parser open source. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts, you can see how their code works (and even use it yourself or propose modifications).

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