Content pruning is all about removing any unnecessary content from your website, which can help your website rank higher in search engine results and can also improve user experience.

In this article, you will learn how to do content pruning for SEO, from identifying what needs to be pruned to taking steps to ensure that it’s done correctly. Keep reading to find out more.

What is Content Pruning?

Content pruning involves a thorough review of all content on a website to identify any content that could be seen as irrelevant or low quality from the perspective of search engine algorithms. Once identified, content pruning involves removing those low-quality pages from the website or replacing them with better content. 

A part of regular website maintenance is making sure that all of the content on the website is up-to-date and relevant to the website’s goals. This can help ensure that a website has content that is useful to its visitors and provides value to users who arrive from search engines. 

By removing low-quality or outdated content, websites can see improved search visibility for their highest-value, highest-converting web pages.

Why Remove Content From My Website?

Content production takes time and resources. So you may be wondering: Why remove content from my website after all the work it took to create it?

Although it may feel counterintuitive to your content strategy, content pruning can actually have major benefits to your search engine performance. This is even more true for websites that have a robust SEO content strategy and are publishing new web pages on a regular basis.

Some of those benefits include the following:

• Improve a website’s visibility by allowing search engines to index your best and highest-converting web pages
• Ensure visitors are presented with the most up-to-date information
• Provide higher-quality content and a better user experience
• Prevent visitors from seeing any low-quality pages
• Ensure your crawl budget is spent on rank-worthy content

Any content that sits on your websites that doesn’t pull its weight in either traffic or conversions isn’t actually bringing value to your business.

By taking the time to regularly prune their content, content managers can ensure that their website is performing at its best. That’s why sometimes content pruning is the right choice for your content strategy.

What Makes a Web Page Prunable?

Here are some of the qualities to look for when searching for content on your website that may need to be pruned.

Low-Quality

Bad content can have a negative impact on a website’s rankings. Low-quality content can include pages with duplicate content, thin content, or other qualities. It can also include pages that are not user-friendly or are low on useful information. Content pruning can help to identify and remove such pages, allowing search engines to easily index the more relevant, more quality content on the website.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is web pages with the same content or similar content that search engine crawlers do not identify as distinct. Google does not want to see duplicate content on a website unless it has been clearly identified as such via a canonical tag.

Thin Content

Thin content is often short-form content that doesn’t provide any real value to the user. Although there is no exact content length that Google privileges in search engine results, experiments have shown that longer, in-depth content tends to rank higher.

Most often, thin content can be combined with other pages on your website to provide a more comprehensive, in-depth answer to a topic, question, or keyword query. Combining content, or redirecting thin pages to more in-depth ones, are also a part of the content pruning process.

Outdated Content

The reality is, the content on our website will become outdated over time. This is why creating evergreen content is important, however, it’s unlikely that your long-form content will last forever without the need for updating. Trends, technologies, and knowledge will change, and web pages should include the most up-to-date, useful information for search engines. 

Also, outdated information can be confusing for visitors and lead to a poor user experience. Removing outdated content can ensure that visitors are presented with the most relevant and useful information.

Under-performing Content

If you have a web page on your website that does not get traffic or conversions, what value is it bringing your business? If the web page does not rank in search results, convert users, or is not a vital part of the buyer journey, it doesn’t really have a place on your website unless you take the time to improve its content.

How to Find Pages for Content Pruning

You can use the Page Pruning tool in the SearchAtlas dashboard to discover pages that may be eligible for content pruning.

To find the tool, navigate to Site Auditor > Page Pruning. 

This tool will show you any pages that are eligible for pruning due to a variety of reasons:

• Low organic impressions
• Low clicks
• Indexability
• Total ranking keywords
• Average position
• Content quality/scores

Remember, just because a page appears on this list doesn’t mean that it has to be pruned/deleted, but that it may be eligible based on its performance metrics.

Next Steps for Page Pruning

Once you have reviewed the software’s suggestions and confirmed that the pages are eligible for pruning, here are the next options for you to take.

1. Improve the Content on the Page

The underperformance of the page may rest in the fact that the content is thin or is not providing a comprehensive answer to the user’s questions. 

You can look to the “Boostable,” tab in the Page Pruning tool to identify those pages that just might need a slight content score boost.

The URLs that are listed here are already earning organic impressions but are not seeing as much success in organic traffic. Most likely, Google sees those pages as relevant but is not ranking them on the first page as a result of the content.  

You can use the SEO Content Assistant in your SearchAtlas dashboard to discover ways to strengthen and improve your content. Or, use the on-page audit tool to see what on-page elements may be impacting your performance.

Follow the guided suggestions for focus terms, headings, questions, and internal links. Include them on the page to make the content more rank worthy. 

2. Update the Content to be More Evergreen

If your content covers trends or keywords that have seasonal search volume, that may impact their underperformance.

Consider updating the content with more evergreen information so the content has a longer shelf life in the SERPs.

Also, make sure that the information on the page is up-to-date with accurate, relevant information. Over time, links may break or content may become outdated. Updating your blogs and articles every 1-2 years should be a part of your regular website maintenance.

3. Build Backlinks to the Page

If both the SEO Content Assistant and on-page content school confirm that your content has high scores and is rank-worthy, you may just need a bit more of a link boost.

Backlinks are Google’s number one ranking factor. If you don’t have very many backlinks pointing to your web page, that may be a reason why it is not ranking on the first page.

You can use the backlink research tool in your dashboard to see which of your web pages have the least amount of link equity.

Consider investing in a link-building campaign in order to improve the off-site signals of the content. Doing so is likely to improve the overall keyword rankings, impressions, and organic clicks.

4. Reoptimize the Page for a Different Keyword

Another possible explanation for your content’s poor performance may be keyword related. 

Some keywords are more competitive than others. If you optimized the page for a keyword that is out of reach, reoptimization may be your next step.

When choosing keywords for SEO, you want to make sure your website has a realistic chance of ranking for the target keyword. Websites with higher Domain Authority will stand a better chance of ranking for competitive keywords.

At LinkGraph, we suggest keywords that are less than or equal to your website’s Domain Authority.

So once you find a more realistic goal, optimize for that keyword instead. This will likely involve changing metadata, website copy, and headings on the page. But it can make a huge difference in improving organic performance.

5. Redirect the Page to a More High-Quality One

A page may be flagged for pruning because Google is ranking a more helpful piece of content on your website.

This is known as keyword cannibalization. It happens when two pieces of content are very similar and Google doesn’t know which to promote. If there is a page that is ranking less often but is similar in relevance, you can do your “content pruning,” by adding a 301 redirect from the less comprehensive page to the better performing. 

6. Combine Thin Content into a More Comprehensive Resource

If you have a series of pages that are thin on content but relate to a similar cluster of keywords, consider combining those pages into a more useful, long-form resource.

Why? Because Google likes to promote content that satisfies users’ search intent. That means not only answering their initial questions but all of the additional questions that might follow regarding that primary topic. 

So before giving up on that set of keywords entirely, combine those various pages into one page. Then, see if the overall keyword rankings improve.

7. Consider Removing the Page Entirely

This is the last step you want to consider after you have concluded that none of the above steps help to elevate content performance.

The reality is, if a piece of content is not driving website traffic, converting users, or an essential part of the buying journey, it doesn’t really deserve space on your website. 

Take the ultimate step and trim that content branch off your tree.

Conclusion

Making content pruning a regular part of your website maintenance is a good habit to get into. This is especially true for websites that publish a lot of content and have a robust SEO strategy.

You can also use the same SearchAtlas tools to scale up your content marketing and blog strategy. Connect with one of our product managers to learn more about our enterprise SEO software platform.

The post Content Pruning Guide for Content Managers and SEOs appeared first on LinkGraph.

Need proof? Check out these stats…

• 96% of people use a search engine to seek legal advice.
• 38% of people use the internet to find an attorney.
• 62% of legal searches are non-branded (for example, Miami car accident attorney).

Additionally, your law firm website is a great spot to generate new leads for your firm. 74% of consumers who visit a law firm’s website end up taking action, such as contacting the firm by phone.

Also, the lawyer SEO competition doesn’t necessarily reflect the legal market you’re in. Only 35% of law firm websites have been updated in the last 3 years, and 40% of law firms don’t even have a law firm website.

In short, by applying an effective law firm SEO strategy, you’ll leap ahead of most of your competitors.

To help you put together your own SEO campaign, I’ll show you how to rank your law firm #1 in Google – step-by-step.

ARTICLE CONTENTS

TECHNICAL SEO
Step 1. Determine Website Structure
Step 2. Setup Your GMB Listing
Step 3. Improve Your Site Speed
Step 4. Mobile Optimization
Step 5. Implement SSL
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Step 6. Understand Search Intent
Step 7. Find the right keywords
PAGES & CONTENT
Step 8. Identify User Content Goals
Step 9. Format Your Pages Properly
Step 10. Optimize Your Home Page
Step 11. Create Practice Pages
Step 12. Rank Better with Blog Posts
Step 13. Fix Zombie Pages
DOMINATE LOCAL SEARCH
Step 14. Tailor Pages to Markets
Step 15. Legal Directory Citations
Step 16. Claim & Manage Reviews
LINKS
Step 17. Outbound Links
Step 18. Inbound Links
MEASURE RESULTS
Step 19. Tools to Use
Step 20. KPIs

TECHNICAL SEO FOR ATTORNEYS

Step 1. Determine Your Website Structure

Structure your own website so your users (and Google) can find everything. Your website needs to have a defined structure. Without one, it’s difficult for users to navigate and difficult for search engines to crawl and discover your web pages.

Structuring your site for your users

Users need to be able to easily find what they’re looking for. This means that you need to understand what information people seek out when visiting your law firm’s website and put that important information  on the homepage or make it easy to access from the navigation bar.

For example, if a prospective client is looking for a personal injury attorney in Miami, they may search your firm’s website for practice areas, office location, reviews, and the about section.

Look at how this law firm’s website quickly addresses those needs with their navigation bar.

EXAMPLE 1

• Practice areas, either directly on your navigation menu or as a dropdown if you have multiple services. This gets your law firm’s services based keywords on every page of your site, sending strong relevancy signals to Google crawlers.
• Location information, either directly on your navigation menu or as a dropdown if you have multiple locations. This gets your location-based keywords on every page of your site, sending strong relevancy signals to search engine algorithms about the geographic area you serve.
• A link to your attorneys or about page, which should give an overview of the years of experience of your whole legal team.
• A link to your reviews or testimonials page – to build trust.
• A link to your “Contact Us” clearly labeled with a unique color where visitors can contact you via phone number, email, or an embedded contact form. This is a call to action.
• Your phone number. This is another call to action. Even if you already have a “contact us” button that links to a contact page, 74% of people who land on a law firm’s website are likely to contact you via phone, so making this form of contact as simple as 1 click is to your advantage.

If you’re unsure about what users are likely to look for on your website, search Google for your practice areas and look at the top ranking competitors sites to get ideas for your navigation and site layout.

Finally, it’s important to make sure your navigation menu is usable both on desktop and mobile.

In fact, 31% of all law firm related website traffic comes from mobile, so a large amount of your leads are likely to come from a mobile device.
Take a look at how this law firm’s website made their navigation menu easy to access and use on mobile phones.

This is referred to as the “tap area” of a button and is a key component of converting on mobile devices. Make sure this is sized appropriately for phones and fingers of all sizes. Users can become easily frustrated if they have a difficult time tapping the correct button on a mobile device and may leave your site.

Structuring your site for Successful SEO

Google also uses your law firm’s website structure to determine what website content is important and relevant information. Here are a few ways to help Google crawl your law firm website in a more effective way.

Use proper page and URL Structure

Ideally, your website as a whole should be structured like a pyramid, with your home page at the top, your category pages (the ones in your navigation menu) beneath that, and your individual pages beneath your category pages.

Not only does this make it very easy for users to find relevant content on your site, but also makes it easier for search engines to index each page of your website.

This means that they should only have one slash after the .com, .net, etc (aka. the “top-level-domain”).

So, your about page should look like https://yourdomain.com/about

Any individual pages that are a subset of your category pages, like blog articles, should only have two slashes after the top-level-domain.

For example, blog articles would look like this: https://yourdomain.com/blog/how-to-hire-a-personal-injury-lawyer

Clear URL structure makes it easy for search engine crawlers to find pages on your law firm website.

Clear linking and navigation titles

The placement of navigation items is an important factor for users and search engines alike. While users are more likely to pay attention to navigation titles, search engines use the anchor text of these navigation items to determine the topical relevance of a page.

What is anchor text?
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink.
Here’s what it looks like in your site’s code

If we inspect the code on Harell & Harell’s site, we can see this in action. Here’s the navigation menu item’s anchor text for the user.

These same link signals can be leveraged in the footer of your law firm website as well. Adding links to pages such as to your blog, privacy policy, or sitemap in the footer can help boost the link signals to these pages without taking up space in the main navigation menu.

Proper use of H tags – How to use H tags for SEO

Header tags (commonly called H tags) outline the structure of your page. Often times, an H tag is used as the title displayed on the page, while the page title is what’s displayed in the organic search results.

Common H tag page formatting looks like this:

Notice the difference between these 2 articles. One is using H tags properly, while the other is writing their headlines in plain text.

Header Tags Used Properly

When writing your H tags, keep a few things in mind:

• Only use 1 H1 tag on your page.
• Use H2, H3, and other H tags to segment out the content of your page.
• Use related keywords in your HTML tags.

Step 2. Create and optimize your law firm’s Google My Business listing

85% of people use online maps, such as Google Maps, to find legal services.

Google Maps is a huge part of local SEO. If your firm largely targets local clients, then getting listed on Google Maps is a must.

How to add your law firm to Google Maps

So, how do you get listed on Google Maps?
By creating a Google My Business listing.

Here’s how.

Google My Business best practices

Google uses information from Google My Business to display information for searches that have local area intent.

Clearly, it’s important that this information is up-to-date, accurate, and fully optimized.

How to optimize your law firm’s Google My Business listing

Here’s how to optimize your firm’s Google My Business account:

• Enter your business information correctly on the map so users can easily find you.
• List the official website of your law firm.
• Include your opening hours.
• Make sure your business name, address, and phone number is EXACTLY the same as listed on your website. Google aggregates this information from across the web.
• Choose the most appropriate and specific category for your firm so that you show up in the right search terms.
• Add photos of your office, staff or anything else you’d like that’s relevant and professional.
• Describe your law firm. Include links and relevant keywords in the introduction.

If you’re interested in seeing how users behave with your listing, check out Google My Business insights.

Step 3. Make your law firm website as fast as possible

Google is now mobile-first, which means they assume users are accessing your site with a 5G connection.

They want to provide users with a great page experience. Presenting users with slow websites doesn’t accomplish this, so if you want higher rankings, your website needs to be fast.

Due to its impact on user experience, website speed is one of the most important SEO ranking factors.

If a website takes a long time to load, the user will click back to Google to find a better choice. Google will simply think the user didn’t find what they were looking for and your website rank will drop.

Amazon found clear correlations between page speed and bounce rate. Just a few seconds too long, and your users are 32% more likely to leave.

To make your site as fast as possible, use Google’s PageSpeed Tool to see how your site loads on desktop and on a 5G connection. This tool is a simple way to discover any issues that you can address to make your site faster.

Step 4. Make sure your site is mobile friendly

Consider this – you’re a personal injury attorney, and a potential client just got into a car accident.

They try to access your site to call you, but they have a poor mobile connection.

Or worse, they’re nervous – their adrenaline is pumping – and they’re having trouble tapping their screen with accuracy.

Your website takes too long to load, and when it finally does, the user pushes the wrong button on accident, so they move on to the next listing in Google.

This is why mobile optimization is important for attorney websites.

At a minimum, you should make sure that:

• Your website loads quickly on mobile.
• Your buttons are sized well enough that people with small screens or big fingers can tap them without accidentally tapping a different button.
• Keep important information above the fold – i.e. keep your call to action visible without requiring users to scroll down.
• Have a click to call button for mobile.

Check out Lawrence Law Group’s site as an example of doing this correctly.

This, and Google prioritizes mobile experiences when ranking websites.

Step 5. Secure your law firm’s website with SSL (Secure Socket Layer)

Ever come across a website and see something like this?

As an attorney, you know that trust between you and your target audience is important, so why would this be any different online?

This is what happens when a website isn’t secured with an SSL certificate.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and is essentially a form of validation for your website that confirm there aren’t any intermediaries between a page and the web host that could potentially steal a users information.

Basically, an SSL certificate proves that a website is who they say they are. This is shown by a site having https instead of http at the beginning of their domain.

Google has also confirmed that it is, in fact, taken into consideration for rankings.

Often times, you can get an SSL certificate through your web hosting provider. They’re usually available for an annual fee, and will fix all of the issues associated with “website not secure” popups or messages.

If you prefer to go the route of free, or would rather have your SSL certificate not tied to your web hosting provider, you can use a service like Let’s Encrypt instead.

Once you get your certificate set up, plug your homepage https URL into Why No Padlock? to have their tool crawl your site and make sure it’s implemented correctly.

A few things to note about getting your site SSL certified:

• Google will treat this as if you’re moving your site to a new domain name, which means you may temporarily lose search rankings and organic traffic until Google crawls your site again and reindexes your new https pages.
• You could end up with a lot of broken links, so it’s important to make sure you properly 301 redirect your http links to your new https links when migrating to https.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Step 6. Understand searcher intent and keyword types

Before you start optimizing your law firm’s website, you need to know what kind of keywords you’re going to go after.

In attorney SEO, as in all SEO, a keyword is really just a search term that Google’s users type to find what they’re looking for.

What they’re looking for is described as searcher intent – and can be broken down into three categories:

• Awareness
• Evaluation
• Purchase

Searcher intent addresses the question “what are the searchers really looking for?”
Let’s assume a musician is trying to copyright their music. Here are some search terms they might use in each stage.

• Awareness – This is where the musician is looking for answers, resources, educational material, and insights. Example search terms (or keywords) may include:

• • • How can I protect my music?
    • Do I copyright or trademark a song?
    • How to copyright a song

• Evaluation – This is the middle stage where the musician knows what needs to be done and is researching options. Example search terms (or, again, keywords) in this stage may include:

• • • Music lawyers near me
    • Who are the best copyright lawyers in Nashville
    • Copyright lawyer reviews

• Purchase – This is the final stage where the musician is figuring out what it would take to become a customer. Keywords used in this stage are likely to be very specific:
  • Law firm name contact info
  • Lawyer name contact info

In this example, the musician wanted to protect their music, learned more about what’s involved, then narrowed down the options until they found the best one for them, then took steps to contact the appropriate firm.

The closer a user gets to a purchase, the longer the keywords usually are. This is where the phrase long-tail keywords comes from.

Step 7. Find the right keywords

Now that you understand searcher intent and know about how people use Google to make purchases, let’s dive into some keyword research.

To find new keyword phrase ideas, just head over to Google’s Keyword Planner, log in, and click “Discover new keywords.”

Next, enter your website or a keyword of your choice to get started. For this example, I’m going to enter a keyword.

You’ll notice that you have columns that show you the monthly search volume and the cost-per-click bid range if you were to run ads.

If a keyword has a high bid, that means advertisers are bidding high amounts for that search query in PPC advertising campaigns –likely because it drives sales.

That means these keywords are likely to have high purchase intent. These are the keywords that you’ll likely want to target with pages that have lots of call-to-actions.

If you want more keyword ideas, you can leverage Google. Just take one of your chosen keywords, plug it into Google’s search box, and look at the “People also ask” section.

If you click one of the questions, Google automatically generates more of them.

When you find your keywords, remember to use your primary keyword within the H1 and title tags of your page. This gives the search engines a clear indication as to what the page is about. For more information on keywords and keyword research check out Keywords 101: A Beginner’s Guide.

PAGES & CONTENT

Step 8. Understand Google’s content preferences

Google prioritizes pages based on how it views search intent for different terms. You won’t be able to effectively rank a product page for an informational search.

Google often prioritizes long-form content, but content that meets a user’s need always wins out.

It’s the difference between “how to find a good accident lawyer” and “accident lawyer near me” searches. One will land on a blog post/long form content, the other on a directory or services page.

Think about it like this – someone with a broken faucet is looking for contact info for an available plumber, not a long-form article on plumbing.

Step 9. Format your pages properly

When formatting your page, there are a few things that need consideration.

• Formatting your titles
• Using H tags
• Writing meta descriptions
• Formatting your content

Let’s go over each of these.

How to write your page titles for SEO

The page title is the clickable headline of your page that appears on search engine results pages (commonly referred to as SERPs).

When writing your title tags, keep a few things in mind.

• Keep your titles about 55-60 characters long. Too short and they aren’t detailed enough, but too long and they’ll be cut off at the end in search engines, meaning people won’t be able to read them.
• Use your target keyword in the title as close to the beginning as possible.
• Describe your page content in the best way possible.
• Keep your titles unique to the specific page. Otherwise, multiple pages may compete for the same keyword.
• Use your brand name wisely. In most cases, your brand name should be left to the end of the title.

Here are some examples of well formatted page titles, and one that’s not as well formatted:

• Their title is too long, which made it cut off at the end.
• They didn’t use a searchable keyword in the beginning of the title. Instead, they used their brand name.

How to write your page descriptions for SEO

Page descriptions are the short paragraph of text placed in the HTML that describe the contents of a page. These are known as “meta descriptions” and will show under your page in the organic search results.

Google has specifically stated that they do not use the meta description as a ranking signal. However, the number of people who click on your website vs. others is a ranking signal, and the meta description influences a user’s decision to click on your website.

Because of this, the meta description indirectly influences your rankings.

So, when writing your meta descriptions, do so with the goal of convincing users to click on your listing rather than stuffing keywords in there.

Here are a few things that can accomplish this:

• Keep your description between 135-160 characters so that it doesn’t cut off at the end.
• Don’t duplicate your meta descriptions. Write unique ones for every webpage.
• Use your keyword in the description. This is important not because search engines use this as a ranking signal, but because the keyword is often highlighted in bold, which can draw attention to your organic listing.
• Treat the meta as an advertisement for your page. Make it compelling and relevant. It should match the contents of your page while being as appealing as possible.

Step 10. Create a winning home page

Your homepage is the most valuable page on your site. Here are some ways to make it have a better chance of securing top rankings.

Optimize for the most competitive terms

As far as search engines are concerned, your home page carries the most weight in terms of value. Because of this, it’s best to optimize the page for your most competitive keyword.

Boyd Law does this very well.

Your page may not rank right away, but as you build your domain authority and visibility, it will climb closer to the top of the search results.

Feature reviews to build trust

You need to establish credibility and trust as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is featuring reviews or testimonials on your homepage.

Take a look at how Morgan & Morgan features powerful video testimonials on their homepage.

Use images or videos to boost engagement

Google uses dwell time as a ranking factor, so it’s in your best interest to keep users engaged on your homepage as long as possible. Using videos or other visual graphics accomplish this.

Look at how The Law Offices of Peter C. Bronstein does this.

Craft a compelling call-to-action (CTA)

A clear, consistent call-to-action is what generates leads.

When writing your CTA, you want to keep 3 things in mind.

1. Use action words and be specific – Phrases that encourage users to do something are much more powerful than generic phrases. A CTA like “Call Now for a Free Consultation” is much more compelling than “Click Here to Call.”
2. Create a sense of urgency – By simply telling users to do something now or that time is running out, suddenly your CTA seems more urgent. You can accomplish this without hard-selling by using the word “Now” or pointing out that users can “reap the benefits today.”
3. Use contrast in your design – If your CTA is the same color as the rest of your website, it isn’t going to stand out. Use a contrasting color so users are quickly drawn to it.

Let’s look at an example of a good CTA vs. one that could use some work.

Step 11. Create practice area pages

After your homepage, your practice area pages are going to be the next most valuable in your SEO efforts.

It’s important to make individual pages for each practice area because it gives you more opportunity to go after keywords related to those practice areas by addressing the specific needs of that audience.

If we look at Morgan & Morgan’s website, we’ll see that they have a dropdown listing all of their practice areas.

• The purchase intent keyword related to this practice area as identified in your keyword research (discussed above in steps 6 and 7).
• Page titles and meta descriptions with the keyword’s searcher intent in mind (discussed above in step 9).
• Answers to common questions about this practice area. You can identify common questions by typing your target keyword into Google and looking at the “People also ask” suggestions. Each question you address on this page should use an H tag so that search engines understand the structure of your page.
• Testimonials from clients that you’ve helped in this specific area of practice.
• A call-to-action that’s specific to this area of practice.

Step 12. Become an authority with epic blog content

You already have lots of legal info in your head from your experience. Creating high-quality content on your site that communicates this effectively to potential clients positions you as an authority in your legal space.

Consider your practice areas and think about how you can create great content and super-detailed blog articles that help potential clients.

Things like step-by-step guides, simplifying otherwise complex topics, or even simple blog posts on key pain points your audience may face are great examples of this.

Look at how Peterson Watts Law Group does this with their music copyright article.

You can come up with content marketing ideas by:

• Looking into your clients most commonly asked questions.
• Reviewing Google’s “People also ask” questions for related search terms.
• Reviewing questions on Quora in your space.
• Using tools like Google Trends to find topics that are trending online.

When you create your content, keep in mind that you’re writing for the internet – which means you should make your content easy to skim. Here’s how:

• Write short, concise sentences using simple language. Try and keep your writing at a 10th grade reading level or less. Tools like Hemmingway can help you determine the readability of your content.
• Use lots of white space by keeping your paragraphs 1-3 sentences long.
• Use the right font size. A 22 point font provides the best reading experience online.
• Use bullet points whenever possible.

When writing your content, while it is important to intersperse your keywords throughout, Google algorithms are getting better at understanding language and will understand synonyms related to the topi. It’s more important that the topic is covered in full, and keyword stuffing won’t work. The primary objective should be that your content fully addresses the needs of its audience.

Step 13. Fix zombie pages

What are zombie pages, and why are they bad for SEO?

Zombie pages are those that exist on your website but provide no value whatsoever – meaning they don’t bring you any traffic.

They usually take on one of the following forms:

• Duplicate content (ex. News stories copy and pasted from other sites – don’t do this. It can actually make your site appear more spammy and can cause your rankings to drop.)
• Outdated blog posts
• Aging press releases
• Pages that shouldn’t be indexed
• Archive pages
• Category and tag pages (often found on WordPress blogs)
• Search result pages
• Old press releases
• Thin content (<50 words)
• Boilerplate content

These pages are often indexed by Google, but rank poorly because they provide no value to users.

Because search engines use metrics like pages viewed per session and dwell time on a page, thin pages and zombie pages can give Google the impression your site is low-quality.

Should you delete zombie pages?

If you can’t bring a zombie page to life by improving the content and making these pages useful to users, then redirecting the page to more useful content may be the best alternative.

Redirects are especially important if a page your are deleting has any links pointing towards it from other websites.

Links pointing to your site from others are referred to as backlinks. We’ll touch more on these later, but in short, Google counts links as votes of confidence to your site and uses them to help determine rankings for a page or pages of a domain. Any high ranking web page likely has lots of links pointing to it.

You can check backlinks to a page with tools like Ahrefs, SemRush, or Majestic.

In most cases, since zombie pages provide little to no value to your users, it’s unlikely you’ll find any backlinks pointing to them.

However, if you do, you should redirect these pages to another relevant page on your site to retain whatever search equity the page had acquired.

How to redirect pages

The best way to redirect pages on your site is using 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. They essentially send visitors and search engines to a different URL than what they clicked on from a search engine page or typed into their browser.

Let’s put this into practice.

If you click on either of these URLs, you’ll be directed to www.google.com:

• https://www.google.com
• https://google.com

That’s because google.com 301 redirects to www.google.com, since Google wanted that to be their primary domain.

Here’s a step-by-step video showing you how to set up 301 redirects in WordPress.

How to properly delete pages

If you don’t have any pages on your site that you can redirect your pages towards, and the page in question has no backlinks, then deleting those pages may be your best option.

When you delete a page, make sure you set the HTTP header to “410 content deleted.”

This tells users – and search engines – that you intentionally deleted the content, and will result in Google removing it from their index sooner.

You can use this plugin to do this on WordPress.

Use Lawyer SEO to dominate local search

Step 14. Create pages for specific markets

71% of people looking for an attorney believe it’s important to have a local one.

This means that they’re likely looking for lawyers within their specific geographic area using the name of a town or county that may otherwise be underserved.

If other law firms aren’t targeting these smaller towns or counties, this could be a great opportunity for you.

Just look at how Morgan & Morgan creates specific pages for the small town of Tavares just outside of Orlando, Florida.

You won’t receive as much traffic for these pages as you will on your homepage, but if you target enough areas, it adds up.

Just look for nearby cities, counties, or towns and create pages tailored specifically to each of them with a customized page title, meta description, and page copy.

Do this with 5 surrounding areas for 10 practice areas and that’s 50 new pages that can attract a very targeted audience!

Finally, make sure other pages on your site link to these pages to help improve their link signals. For example, if you write a blog post about car accidents in Los Angeles, California, link to your “Los Angeles Car Accident Attorney” page.

Step 15. Get citations in popular legal directories

If you serve local clients, quality citations – mentions of your business name, address, and/or phone number – are important.

Google considers citations from relevant, reliable websites when as an important ranking factor in local search results.

Not only that, but lots of people still find lawyers through online directories.

In fact, legal directories often rank for competitive search terms in the legal industry.

Getting citations from targeted directories add credibility, context, and authenticity to your law firm, and allow you to be found by search engine users who click the directory listings in the search results.

How to find citation sources

The best places to get cited in are prominent legal directories and data aggregators.

Legal directories

A good way to think about directory placements is to go after ones that you think you can actually get clients from.

The best way to find these directories is to type all of your target keywords into Google and simply look at the directory listings on the first page. Anything here is worth getting listed in because you can potentially grab second-hand search traffic – i.e. people will click the directory listing in Google, then find your firm

Some of the most popular legal directories worth getting listed in are:

• Avvo
• FindLaw
• Lawyers.com (paid)
• Justia
• Hg.org
• Nolo

For a full list of directories, check out this page from Moz that organizes citation sources by city. Remember to look at nearby cities as well

Data aggregators

You also want to make sure your information is correct with all key data aggregators because search engines pull data from these sources.

Most search engines get their data from:

• Acxiom
• Factual
• Infogroup
• Localeze

…who pull their data from:

• Twitter
• Foursquare
• Yellowpages
• Facebook
• Bing Places for Busines

So it’s important to make sure your information is always up-to-date in these sources. Otherwise, your rankings can drop if any out-of-date information is passed along.

Step 16. Get reviews on Google, Yelp, and law directories

Reviews are important for Google rankings, click through rates, and creating a perception of trust.

This is true for your Google listings and your law directory listings.

According to Bright Local’s Customer Review Survey:

• 85% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
• 73% of people trust a business more because of a review.
• Yelp and Google are some of the review sources people trust most

Needless to say, reviews are an essential part of your law firm’s SEO strategy

Here are some ways you can get reviews on Google, Yelp, and law directories of your choice.

Ask your clients

If you’ve given excellent service to a client, a great way to earn reviews is to simply ask!

Amazon does this through email, so why not do this with your clients as well?

Just send them an email explaining how you want to hear more about their experience with a link to your preferred review source. If you’ve given them great service and have developed a strong relationship with the client, they’ll see your request as a good thing and be more than happy to do this.

Keep in mind that you want to make sure you ask happy clients for reviews since they’re more likely to leave good ones.

Add review links to your site

In some areas of legal practice, clients are likely to revisit your website frequently

In these cases, leaving links to your preferred review sources can encourage repeat clients to share their experiences.

Take a look at how Johanson Law Group does this.

Just link the “write a review” button on your site to Google, Yelp, Avvo, or whatever your preferred directory is.

Use review generation tools

There are tools that can help automate the customer feedback process to make it easier.

• GatherUp
• BirdEye
• Podium

These tools handle client follow-ups on your behalf via text or email which frees you up to handle more important things.

While these are great, if your firm is relatively new, I’d recommend calling or emailing each client individually until you have a consistent inflow of clients to ask for reviews.

LINKS

Step 17. Link to authority sources from your site

Linking out is a great way to show Google that you’re interested in providing value to your users.

When Google analyzes links, they look at them like neighborhoods. If you’re linking out to lots of high quality, high domain authority sites in your industry, and lots of high quality sites are linking to you, Google considers your site as part of a good “link neighborhood.”

The opposite can also be true. If you link out to low quality sites and lots of low quality sites are linking to you, this is a bad “link neighborhood.”

Linking to non-competing legal sites can help enhance a reader’s understanding of a topic you may be writing about on your own site.

This will improve user experience on your site – which will lead to better SERP rankings.

For example, Yavitch & Palmer’s site links out to a number of legal resources related to their areas of practice.

The rel=“nofollow” tag

The rel=”nofollow” tag is a value that can be added to a URL that tells search engines not to follow the URL.

In the code for a URL, it looks like this:

This was introduced in 2005 by Google to stop people from blog comment spamming in an effort to get links to their site that would influence their rankings.

This tag should only be used if a link is paid for or can be easily added by the public (such as in comments or reviews).

Otherwise, you don’t really need to worry about it.

Increase dwell time with outbound and internal links

If people can find what they’re looking for on your site, they’re more likely to stick around.

This includes when you give them what they’re looking for by linking to it.

So if you’re writing a blog article and mention a resource that readers may want to learn more about, link to it!

Peterson Watts Law Group does this regularly in their blog articles.

When you do link out, make sure the pages you link to open in a new browser tab when clicked so users can easily come back to your site. Here’s how to do this in WordPress

Follow these same guidelines with internal links – links from one page on your site to another – to help search engines better understand the structure of your site and rank it on an ongoing basis.

Step 18. Increase your rankings with backlinks

One of the best ways to increase your Google search results is to get other sites to link to yours.

Google counts links as votes of confidence. If other reputable sites are linking to you, Google trusts your site more and pushes you up in the search results pages.

These are known as backlinks (i.e. another site is “linking back” to you), and the process of trying to get these backlinks is known as “link building.”

A lot of sites pay for backlinks, but this is against Google webmaster guidelines and is known as “black hat” SEO.

“White hat” link building is done leveraging methods that follow google’s guidelines. Often, these methods require a lot of time and hard work, like creating new content like guest blogs or long-form articles that includes links back to your website, and then pitching that content to other webmasters to publish on their site. This is the safest way to build links, and even more so when working with a reputable SEO agency.

Two of the best ways to get high-quality backlinks for your site are guest posting and HARO.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is the easiest way to get other sites to link to you. It basically works like this.

1. You find other sites that accept guest articles.
2. You pitch them an idea.
3. You write it and send it to them with a link to your site in the body of the content.

Simple, right?

Let’s break down the steps.

Find other sites that accept guest posts

To find sites that accept guest posts, we’ll use Google.

Simply enter search terms like these:

• Your keyword + “write for us”
• Your keyword + “guest post by”
• Your Keyword + “contribution by”

Make sure you maintain the “”. This tells Google to only find pages that contain this exact phrase.

When you find a site that looks like a good fit, you’re ready to craft your pitch.

Pitch 3 article ideas

For each of the sites you find, look around at the types of articles they write and come up with 3 similar ones that they haven’t covered yet.

Once you have your article ideas, send them an email that looks something like this:

My name is [Your Name] and I’m [Your Company and Role]

I’m contacting you because I’d love to contribute a guest post on [Website].

Here are some ideas I’ve come up with that I think your readers would get a ton of value from:

[Idea #1]

[Idea #2]

[Idea #3]

I’ll make sure the piece overflows with information that can’t be found anywhere else.

To give you an idea of the quality I’ll bring to your site, here’s a link to a guest post that I recently published on [Other Website].

Cheers,

[Your First Name]

Once you hear back from a site, the next step is to write and send your article to them!

When you write your article, make sure it provides real value to their readers and isn’t just an article written in an attempt to get a link. Any good site will see right through this and will reject your article once they get it.

Make sure you link to your site within the body of the content – ideally to a blog post you have. Most sites will link to your site in your bio, but Google usually doesn’t count these.

If you do a good job, they may ask you to contribute content about your main practice area or a specific topic on a monthly basis. This means lots of long term SEO success for your law firm website and elevating you and your team of lawyers as industry experts.

HARO

HARO (or Help A Reporter Out) is a great source of links and press mentions.

Basically, they send you 3 emails each day with a list of topics reporters are writing about for news sites and need some help with – like this:

All you need to do is scroll through the list of topics, pick one out where you can offer value, and write your reply.

Here’s an example of one that’s fit for attorneys.

Just click on the query to be taken down to the section of the email where you can read it in full.

Finally, just click the email address listed with the query and draft your response!

Remember, with HARO, the more helpful information you can provide, the better. Often times, reporters will take only part of what you say, so giving them more to work with gives you more of a chance at landing a placement. In some cases, they may include a website link with your comments.

MEASURING RESULTS

Step 19. Make sure you have the right tools.

In order to measure your SEO results, you need to install the correct analytics tools.

Google Analytics is important because that lets you see how much organic traffic you’re getting and gives you insight into how your users are using your website. You can leverage this data to make improvements to your user experience.

Here’s a video that walks you through how to set up Google Analytics for your website.

These tools let you analyze ranking data and give you a look at your position for different keywords as well as how many impressions and clicks you’re getting from search.

Here’s a video that walks you through how to set it up for your website.

Step 20. Understand how to measure SEO performance

Once you have your tools installed, it’s important to start measuring your SEO performance over time.

Specifically, you want to look at the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Rankings – How many keywords and keyword phrases are you ranking for? How have your rankings changed for those keywords over the last few months?
• Traffic – How many visitors are you getting from organic search?
• Conversions – How many new leads are you getting from organic search traffic?

Here’s how to look at each of these.

Use Google Search Console to monitor keyword rankings

The best way to look at your keyword rankings is with Google Search Console.

If you log in to Google Search Console, click “Search Results” on the left. This will show you a report of all the keywords you rank for and your position over time for those keywords.

Don’t look at rankings over weeks – look over a period of months. Legal SEO work takes a while to kick in.

Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic and conversions

Traffic can be measured in Google Analytics.

If you open your Google Analytics account and go to Audience -> Overview, then scroll down and select the “Organic Search” option, you’ll be able to see all of the traffic that comes from search engines.

Again, make sure you measure this over a period of months – not days. The nature of good SEO is that it takes time for search engines to react to your efforts, especially in a competitive landscape or given keyword phrase like car accident lawyer, divorce lawyer, or dui lawyer.

As well as simply looking at the traffic, you’ll also want to look into a variety of factors:

• What website pages visitors are landing on.
• Visitor demographics.
• What they’re doing on your site.
• How frequently they’re revisiting.
• Monitor site speed.
• Check for any differences in behavior between mobile and desktop users.

CONCLUSION

There you have it – a 20 step action plan to dominate the search results! Whether you’re a car accident lawyer, divorce attorney, criminal defense lawyer, family law, or other type of attorney, lawyer SEO is the fastest way to break into competitive markets by securing top rankings for your law practice website.

Hopefully this gave you lots of valuable insight into the inner workings of search engine optimization and how they prioritize organic results for sites that give users what they’re looking for.

A solid SEO strategy is something that every digital marketing campaign should include. These strategies have worked for hundreds of other websites, so they’ll work for yours too! If you need help, working with an SEO company and SEO experts can help you build domain authority and site visibility faster through comprehensive digital marketing strategy. reach out to one of our law firm SEO experts to learn more.

The post Law Firm SEO – A 20 Step Action Plan for Attorneys appeared first on LinkGraph.

As of 2020 over 58% of site visits now come from mobile search traffic. If you aren’t taking mobile into account heavily enough, it’s likely hurting your business.

The use of mobile devices is rapidly changing the way customers are searching, engaging, and buying. Consumers have access to faster Internet while they’re on-the-go. That means Internet traffic is increasing through mobile devices. Beyond social engagement and consuming content, they’re also making buying decisions.

Mobile Search is Often the First Step for Purchases

According to Morgan Stanley, 91% of adults keep their smartphones within arm’s reach. That’s ninety-one percent of ALL adults, and it’s shifting both business culture and research practices. Rather than dedicating time to research a topic, users now perform micro-searches on the go, and then follow-up on those initially discovered options or solutions later on.

How big is this trend? An IDG Global Solutions survey found 92% of senior execs own a smartphone used for business, 77% of those research business purchases from their mobile device with 95% then finalizing related purchases via laptop/desktop. That’s a huge portion of the B2B purchase pool starting their journey from mobile. Missing a user during their initial mobile-based exploration may mean your business is losing out on a huge portion of the market.

Mobile Search is Often Location-Oriented

This trend is even more compounded for local businesses, as 58% of mobile users search for local businesses daily. What’s more? 89% of those users search for a local business at least once per month. We also learn from HubSpot that, when consumers do a local search, 72% of them visit a store within five miles. What does this mean for business with an Internet presence? It’s time to make it mobile-friendly.

What Does the Rise of Mobile Search Mean for Businesses?

Websites now need to be responsively designed so they can serve mobile users just as well as desktop users. Responsive design is a design that adapts to the size of the users viewport (i.e. screen), by changing font sizes, adjusting images, and even collapsing page elements to make navigation simpler. Responsive websites that follow modern design standards help users access and understand the information they need more quickly.

Because mobile users comprise an increasing number of searches and site visits, they now represent the largest source of traffic in a slew of markets (new industry segments falling into this bucket each month). Our clients regularly pick up market share with simple mobile-friendly design updates, especially within industries that are traditionally late-adopters.

Your Website is Now Your Storefront

Your site is now your storefront. If your site looks terrible or functions poorly, users will leave instead of working to get at your information – it costs a user nothing to click the next result in search.

Google Prioritizes Mobile-Optimized Sites

Google has switched over to mobile first indexing. Mobile-first indexing prioritizes mobile friendly sites over other sites in the organic search results. Even if your target consumers aren’t heavy mobile-users yet, your site still needs to be mobile-optimized if you want to show up higher in the search results (even for desktop-based searches).

Users Are Making Purchase Decisions from Search Alone

With mobile devices rapidly changing the way consumers access information your offsite optimizations are also becoming critical. For example most users performing local searches never go past the search results themselves (aka they don’t actually click into websites anymore). Local search users are typically able to surface the information they want directly within the search results through features like the local Map Pack.

How Can I Improve My Mobile SEO?

The first step toward reaching mobile users is having a mobile-friendly website. Currently, in 2021, responsive web design is the best design approach for mobile-friendliness. Responsive design is the best approach for mobile design because:

• You will serve the same content to both mobile and desktop users
• The content will adapt responsively to all screen sizes and mobile device types
• Search equity is centralized to a single URL for all pages
• It’s a better user experience
• Google prefers responsive design

What exactly is responsive design?

Responsive design in an approach for creating web pages where layouts and content dynamically adapt to the size and orientation of the screen or viewport being used.

In the example below you can see that the desktop version of this responsive site the text and video are displayed side-by side, and in the mobile version of the site those elements have been stacked.

Desktop	Mobile

This responsive theme adjusts to the width of different devices from smartphones to tablets, even large wide-screen viewports, by rearranging and resizing the design elements.

There have been a few ways to handle mobile sites since the invention of smartphones, the first two mobile design waves were plagued with usability issues, and hard to maintain. Let’s take a look at what didn’t work, and why you should consider migrating to a responsive design if you’re still employing one of these outdated mobile design tactics.

Outdated Approach #1: Mobile Subdomain, Separate Mobile Website

This approach required setting up canonical tags for every page, as each mobile web page contained content duplicative to the desktop page. This approach also split the search equity for each page as desktop users interacted with the desktop site, and mobile users interacted with the mobile website.

When users shared pages from the site, creating backlinks they were split between the mobile subdomain and the regular site domain as separate URLs were being served to each user group. It also meant that every time an edit was made to content on the desktop site, a second round of edits had to be made on the separate mobile site. Mobile pages under this paradigm often provided a worse user experience as they typically served less content than the full desktop site did for desktop users.

Outdated Approach #2: Dynamic Serving of Mobile Sites

The next wave of design consolidated pages under a single URL, but dynamically served cached pages based on the user’s device type using a vary http response header.

This iteration of mobile design allowed sites to consolidate search equity between their desktop site and mobile site. It also did away with the need for canonical tags on virtually every site page.

However, it meant that every time a device came out with new dimensions, a new instance of the site had to be spun up, formatted, and tested to be served to users. This system became increasingly impossible to maintain as the market diversified and the dimensions for mobile screens became rapidly non-standard. Dynamically serving a mobile version of your site was plagued with issues including a repeated issues with serving the desktop version to mobile users.

Current Best Practice: Responsive Design

Responsive design consolidates the mobile version of a webpage and the desktop version of a webpage under a single URL. It also serves the same instance of code, regardless of the size of the mobile screen or desktop viewport.

Instead all elements fluidly rearrange to suite mobile visitors and desktop visitors as needed. If a user switches from full screen to half-screen with their browser, the design elements will shift accordingly so the user experience is largely unchanged.

How to Check If Your Mobile Site is Google-Friendly

In July 2019, there were over 1.69 billion more mobile searches than desktop searches performed in the US alone (source, source). Search itself has become mobile-first. The first place you’ll start when checking your site for mobile optimization is checking out how Google views your site.

Mobile SEO Strategy is All About Google

Google holds over 90% of the market share for mobile search traffic in the U.S., because Google has spent years optimizing search specifically for mobile users. Many of Google’s search results are so well optimized, that mobile users don’t even need to click into an actual result to find the information they need.

Rich snippets and rich results now display enough information for users to take action based off of the search results alone, from finding movie times to the addresses of local businesses, to how to troubleshoot tech problems.

How did Google get so far ahead of the competition with mobile search? They started testing and prioritizing mobile features years ago, and as mobile search volume overcame desktop search volume, Google shifted to prioritizing mobile users over desktop users.

A Brief History of Google’s Mobile Search Results

In 2015 Google rolled out mobile-friendly search results, serving a separate set of search results to mobile devices. This update, often called Mobilegeddon, prioritized mobile-friendly websites in the search results.

Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

In 2016 Google began to experiment with mobile-first indexing, cataloguing the mobile version of page content, rather than the desktop version.

In March of 2018 Google formally began rolling out mobile-first indexing, and migrating over to the mobile-version of pages for sites that it had already indexed as desktop versions. To quote Google themselves, “Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.” Essentially the entire index is going mobile-first. This process of migrating over to indexing the mobile version of websites is still underway. Website’s are being notified in Search Console when they’ve been migrated under Google’s mobile-first index.

In July of 2018 Google rolled out page speed as a mobile ranking factor, ranking sites with slow load times lower in the search results.

Figuring Out Which Trends Will Last

Over the past decade Google has also continually rolled out additional data-rich mobile-first search features from movie times, to reviews, to product images. Google often pivots when rolling out new features, as it continually tests and then prioritizes what works best for serving users the most valuable information.

For example, Google originally published a guide helping webmasters create separate mobile sites under the m.domain.com URL – a tacit approval of the process, only to pivot within a year to formally recommending responsive design under a single unified URL.

Sites using AMP pages are often managing two sets of page content, with one set slimmed down to meet the AMP standard. There are also challenges with AMP pages being served from a Google URL rather than the site’s own domain. While Google recently addressed some of these concerns with signed exchanges, but it’s still causing questions around whether link equity is being split between the AMP viewer URL, the original AMP source, and the AMP cache URL.

Trends that are here to stay? Responsive design, quality content that gets right to the point, making sites as fast as humanly possible.

Check if Google is Flagging Mobile Issues

So what should you pay the most attention to in terms of Mobile optimization? If you already have a website, start with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. This tool will give you an aggregate rating for whether or not Google thinks your site is mobile-friendly. The tool will also prompt you to view a full usability report in Google Search Console.

If you want to access this report on your own directly from Search Console, login to your account for the domain, and use the left-hand navigation to click into “mobile usability” under Enhancements.

Check if Google Is Indexing Your Webpages

Google can’t serve pages in the search results that it can’t see. Make sure that Google is indexing your pages for search.

Enable Crawl by Googlebot

To check if your robots.txt file is blocking Googlebot, you can either use a free robots.txt tester, or use the link inspection feature in search console.

NoIndex

A few years ago you could check blocked resources straight from google console in a consolidated view, but as these issues became less prevalent google has dropped the aggregate view. Secondary tools like screaming frog can still give you a full list of NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW pages from your site. Alternatively you can check the status of individual links straight from Search console using the URL inspection tool.

Checking if Your Mobile Site is User-Friendly

Now that you’ve resolved a majority of the technical usability issues, it’s a good idea to check for issues mobile users face that may not have caught by Google.

How Does Your Site Appear on Mobile?

Start by taking a look at how your site appears on different devices, this free tool will let you select from a variety of mobile devices and desktops to give you a full sense of how your site looks on different devices.

You should quickly be able to see any major issues with formatting that could be hindering the mobile user experience, or making your site look unprofessional. Examples include poorly formatted text, grainy or stretched images, or overlapping page elements.

Work with your webmaster or web development team to clean up any design elements that aren’t displaying well on mobile. Once your site layout is mobile optimized, you’ll want to check that your site is compelling to mobile searchers on the Google search results page.

Are the Visible Portions of Page Titles and Metas Compelling?

Users only click into a site from search if the rich snippet, page title, and/or meta description are compelling. Your title tag for your page needs to front-load your target keyword(s), and your meta description should include the most pertinent information about your page first.

Page titles can be very similar between pages, so meta descriptions can often make the difference for which result or results site visitors click.

If you’re seeing a good amount of organic traffic from your target keywords, the next step is to make sure that traffic is actually seeing your mobile optimized content.

Are You Losing Visitors to Page Speed?

Over half of mobile searchers will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Separately, for every additional second it takes a page to load, conversions fall by 12% (Google, 2018).

To check your mobile page speed use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool, and see how quickly your site loads on a 4G connection. This tool will give you a granular breakdown of all speed issues you can address to improve your site speed.

Do Any Pages Have Super High Mobile Bounce Rates?

Bounce rates are a great indicator that a page is not providing value to users. If you see bounce rates are much higher on specific pages for mobile users than for desktop users this is a sign that the page may have some issues with either mobile formatting, mobile load times, or that the relevant content may take too long to scroll to on mobile.

To check bounce rates, simply login to your Google Analytics dashboard. You’ll be able to view aggregate bounce rates for your site, bounce rates by page, and track how bounce rates change as you make adjustments to webpage content.

Avoid Intrusive Popups

Intrusive pop ups, and poorly designed pop ups can increase your bounce rates on mobile and tablet devices. Intrusive popups can also hurt your organic search rankings, especially with Google. An update Google rolled out in 2016 devalues mobile pages that have intrusive pop ups, lowering the page’s rankings in the search results.

There are two major popup issues that can cause bounce rates and devaluing of a page in SERP. Pop ups that have not been optimized for mobile traffic can be impossible to close on small screens, and may cause mobile searchers to bounce from your site. Pop ups that prevent a user from accessing content on-load will hurt your mobile SEO especially with Google. Google considers pop ups that block site visitors from content to be “intrusive.”

Examples of intrusive pop-ups and interstitials:

• A pop up that displays immediately, or while the user is trying to read through content
• An interstitial that has to be exited before the user can access the main content
• A full-screen interstitial that has to be scrolled past to access the main content

That doesn’t mean you should abandon popups entirely. Used correctly, and designed with mobile UX in mind, pop ups can help improve your conversion rate. These pop ups are ones that help the mobile user along their journey, are contextually relevant to the content, or are a legal requirement. Pop ups that appear as a user is looking to complete the next step in their journey are generally fine as well.

Examples of pop-ups and interstitials that are okay:

• Pop ups that notify mobile searchers that a site uses cookies.
• Pop ups that confirm a user’s age for restricted content or services.
• Pop ups that take up a reasonable amount of room and are easy to dismiss.

Optimize Your Site for Voice Search

A report issued by PwC states that, compared to conducting a traditional search, 71 percent of respondents prefer voice searching. Now that we know users prefer voice search, let’s look at how we can optimize our websites to reach them.

1. BE CONCISE. The average voice response ANSWER is less than 30 words long. Avoid filler or unnecessary terms like “however” or “thus” and be as direct and straight to the point as possible while completely answering a question. Google actually has an entire guide outlining the type of responses selected for voice searches, and the biggest takeaway is that answers should be brief and direct.

2. Voice searches pull in part from “featured snippets.” That means, when someone asks a question using a voice search, Google pulls answers from approximately 30 percent of these snippets.

3. Consider the user’s intent. When crafting your content, ask yourself what users are searching for before landing on your site. Doing this will help enhance the content’s relevance. Therefore, if you’re optimizing your page for a specific featured snippet, your goal should be understanding your visitor’s intent and providing them with an answer immediately.

4. Use long tail keywords and questions in headers. Often, voice searches occur as though the user is speaking to a human. Short, choppy keywords are rarely in use. Long-tail keywords and phrases are how people talk. So, when optimizing your site, consider using these phrases in conjunction with questions. That way, your website will pop up more often when users are trying to solve a problem, find a product, or use a service.

5. Optimize for local searches. Users are going to search using local SEO. According to Small Business Trends, 58 percent of mobile users find local businesses using voice searches. Adding phrases to your content like, “near me” or your geographic area will help boost your rankings.

Are You Addressing the Customer’s Journey?

Mobile-friendly websites must think through the customer’s journey. Ask yourself these three questions:

• What types of users hit my site?(Who are they, how old are they, what are their roles)
• What would those users be want from my site?(ex: to establish pricing, to find my business location, to complete an online purchase, to share a story)
• Can each user easily complete their journey using only the main nav?

Your main navigation should help users quickly and easily get what they want from your site, without a user needing to use site search or “click around.” Once you have a handle on your audience segmentation and goals, you should confirm that your users are not facing any major barriers along each journey.

There are a few ways to do that, here are two:

• If you have a program like Hotjar or Lucky Orange installed that allows you to view your own users’ onsite journeys – you can watch user recordings to see if users are struggling to complete tasks.
  • Ex: Users abandon scrolling because information is too far down a page
  • Ex: Users have a lot of “U-Turns” – pressing back almost immediately because what they wanted wasn’t on the page they clicked into.
  • Ex: Users rage-click an element that’s not opening or functioning correctly.
  • Ex: You see error messages displayed to the user from your site.
  • Ex: You see users begin conversion, but abandon forms or carts.
• You can conduct direct user research:
  • Recruit users that you’re able to interact with directly
  • Request they complete specific tasks on the site
  • Have them explain their thinking and reactions as they interact with your site

Your marketing shouldn’t be only about what devices your potential customer is using, it should be about the journey they’re taking. What are their lifestyles, habits, and device preferences? Conduct research, surveys, and interviews with your current audience. This marketing tactic is an excellent opportunity to develop a relationship with your existing customer base. Offer incentives and prizes to those who choose to participate.

Create Journey-Driven Designs

Designing websites focusing on mobile users means we have drastically less real estate, so minimalism is critical. The last a user wants to do is scroll through or resize your pages. According to a scrolling and attention study the

Nielsen Norman Group conducted, 74 percent of users indicated their viewing time is spent on the first two screens of content. Therefore, responsive design is the solution. You can accomplish this in a variety of ways, including:

• Hiding content under sliders
• Using sticky live chat or feedback widgets
• Implementing mobile pop-ups
• Redirecting to social media
• Creating a bare-bones presentation
• Eliminating sidebars
• Taking advantage of banner space
• Replacing graphics with a search bar

Pro-Tip: For mobile-users, one often overlooked difference is that tap-areas need to be large enough for users to click on interactive elements (links, buttons, drop-downs) with precision.

Mobile User Experience Optimization Recap

For local business:

• Make sure to include NAP (name, address or service area, phone number) on your website.
• Claim and complete your Google My Business (GMB) listing and your Bing Places account.
• Optimize pages to include names of local cities and landmarks
• Focus on location-based rich snippets like the Map Pack

For all businesses:

• Make use of structured data to leverage google search’s rich snippet features.
• Confirm your responsive design is acting as-expected.
  • You can use a tool like this Responsive Design Checker to confirm how your site looks at the most common breakpoints
  • You can check out alerts and mobile feedback directly from Google through your site’s Google Search Console
  • Install a user-session recording software
  • Hotjar, for example, will let you see if your users are struggling in any areas (ex: pages are too long and users abandon before hitting content critical to conversion).
• Focus on SPEED:
  • • Optimize images for mobile (reduce file size)

  Pro-tip start out with a responsive design or theme and it should handle this for you.

• Minify CSS
• Leverage caching
• Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
• Switch anything you have on flash over to HTML5 instead

Final Thoughts

Mobile searching remains the leader because everyone loves the convenience of using their devices. Your audience is busy, on-the-go, and living in a digitally-driven world. As a result, their mobile queries will continue to be on an upward rise. Even though mobile searches are similar to those on a desktop, your site must be optimized for your audience’s visits. Your brand should be easy to use and support your customer’s journey. A mobile-friendly design that responds to the level of mobile searches you receive should be your goals.

The post Mobile SEO – The Complete Guide 2022 appeared first on LinkGraph.

We’ll walk you through the same basic SEO elements you’ve undoubtedly read about countless times before, but address their application for an ecommerce store. These practical SEO tips will help you significantly increase your new customers and online sales by making it easier to reach your target audience without spending a dime on PPC advertising.

How to Set IA for E-commerce Sites

Category-based information architecture (IA) and site architecture are critical for ecommerce sites, and this IA should inform your main navigation.

Online users have no patience. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’ll bounce back to the search results and try the next site in the search results.

Your site must have well-thought through UX (user experience) elements such as filters, navigation links, breadcrumbs, product categories and subcategories as well as clear URL structures and product naming conventions.

Ecommerce IA Is All About Product Categories

Good UX makes it easy for a user to understand where they are in your site, and what products and/or services your online store offers. For ecommerce SEO, site structure is typically based off of product categories, product collections, and products/product filters.

• Step 1: Determine Product Categories
• Step 2: Determine Product Sub-Categories and/or Collections
• Step 3: Determine Product Names

Product categorization for your e-commerce website may need to be different than your product categorization operationally. Your ecommerce SEO strategy needs to reflect how your consumers view your products, not how your business views your products.

IA Should Reflect How Your Customers Think

In general, your site structure should reflect how your customers think about your products and services, even down your actual product names.

A common mistake that e-commerce sites make is organizing their products online the way they view those products from a production or operational perspective.

For example, you may think of a piece your company makes as “Breville part #: BJE510XL/45” but your everyday shopper may search for “Breville Filter Basket Replacement”.

So how do you establish and/or close the gap between how you think about your products, and how your prospective customers search for your products?

When In Doubt, Ask Your Customers!

Pull from a usability best practice — have direct conversations with existing customers. Ask them how they’d describe your products or services, how they mentally categorize your offerings, or how they searched for your business to begin with. Their input will help you understand the language your customers are using, and how they think about your products or services.

If you need a starting place for understanding how your consumers view your products, you can have them complete a card sorting exercise. Card sorting is a UX (user experience) tactic that helps you prioritize and group information based on how your customer’s see it – by literally giving them all the elements and asking for their feedback.

Account for Broader Market Trends

Next, complete keyword research. Keep in mind a handful of responses can be very helpful for gaining insights, but they may not reflect the broader market. Spot check search volume for keywords using the language your customers use, the language you would use, and be open to discovering additional ways the market overall searches for your products/services.

How to Conduct Keyword Research for an E-commerce Store

Keyword research helps you understand how the market thinks about products and services, and which search terms are likely to convert if you can attract those shoppers to your ecommerce site.

Start With a Keyword Research Tool

There are a number of tools to help you with keyword research. If you already use adwords, you could use the google keyword planner tool as a starting point for establishing the best keywords (search terms) to target. You can also use LinkGraph’s keyword volume or keyword tracker tools.

Make a Starter List of Product-Specific Keywords

Your goal should be to identify a list of keywords that describe your products and have high search volume. This set of terms represents how your consumer base thinks about your products, and this is the language that you should use throughout your ecommerce website (ex: for product categories or collections).

You need to know what long-tail keywords, which specific terms, people use when searching for the exact products that you sell.

Narrowing Down Keywords By Search Intent

The types of keywords you would use to optimize an e-commerce site aren’t necessarily the types you would use in another niche. You want to attract users towards the bottom the purchase funnel. To do this, you need to identify a user’s search intent.

As the name implies, the term “search intent” refers to the reason someone is performing a search. This also influences the words they choose when performing a search. Search intent can be broken down into four categories: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional.

• Informational searches use keywords that indicate a user wants to learn about a particular topic.
• Navigational searches include the domain that results should be surfaced from such as The New York Times or Twitter.
• Commercial searches suggest a user is interested in a general product or service, but hasn’t chosen a specific option yet. This type of search might include keywords such as “best guitar for beginners” or “guitar reviews.” The person performing this search is clearly thinking about making a purchase in the future. They’re simply conducting initial research first.
• Transactional searches are usually performed when a potential customer knows precisely what they wish to buy. As such, words such as “buy” and “for sale” often show up in these searches. To continue with the example above, after conducting research and deciding which guitar to buy, the user in question might search for “buy Yamaha Gigmaker EG Electric Guitar Pack” or “Yamaha EG Electric Guitar Pack for sale.”

It’s important that you select keywords that have commercial or transactional search intent. These are the terms that will convert for your site. Do NOT simply pick keywords that have high search volumes. After all, your core goal is actual ecommerce sales. You want to attract more potential customers, not just generic organic traffic!

Select Keywords with Commercial Search Intent

In general, ecommerce keywords belong to the commercial and transactional categories. It’s easy to understand why you’d want to focus primarily on researching transactional (and, to some degree, commercial) keywords. These are simply the types of keywords people frequently use when they are ready to make a purchase. This makes them ideal for ecommerce websites.

Select Keywords That Are Very Specific

It’s also worth noting that ecommerce keywords are often very specific, or long tail. Long-tail keywords are keywords that have modifier terms around the basic keyword. Identifying these more specific keywords can be extremely valuable.

In the example below we see how more specific searches can have a higher cost per click. This is a market indicator that the term is higher-converting. You may also notice that there is less search volume on long-tailed, or specific, keywords. Broad searches have higher search volume because there is a much wider range of reasons those searches could be performed. Specific searches have much clearer intent.

A very specific search phrase, for example one that includes model type, size, brand name, or location indicates a user knows exactly what they want and they are ready to make a purchase. Very specific searches tend to be more high-converting, and more impactful on your bottom-line.

Select Keywords That Have High CPC

One more indicator that a keyword is likely to be used by potential customers and have a higher conversion rate is that the term has a high Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) value. These are terms that the market has already validated as conversion-oriented. However, you cannot rely on CPC alone, you still need to check for the relevancy of terms against your own product list and/or services. Converting for the market will not always mean converting for your specific site or business.

Set Up Your E-commerce Website Architecture

Once you understand the search queries your customers are using, at both a category and product level, you’re ready to finalize your site architecture. Use broad high-volume terms as product categories/product collections, and then more specific terms for sub categories and individual products.

You’ll use this architecture to set up the structure of your site, from your home page, to category-based landing pages, sub category landing pages, collection pages, and finally product pages. This architecture will also inform how your main navigation and sub navigations are structured.

Create Your Category Landing Pages

Once you’ve determined your product categories and subcategories, consider creating related landing-pages for each category and/or subcategory. A recent study has shown, that sites which increase their landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads. These pages can be used to target keywords that are broader than your product-specific keywords. For example, this page on Guitar Center for electric guitars:

This landing page (and URL) target the broader and higher-volume term “electric guitars.” Category pages help your site capture traffic from higher-volume terms while the individual product pages target much more specific long-tailed keywords (aka higher-converting keywords).

Set Up Your Main Navigation

Category-based site structures also help users navigate quickly to relevant products/services right from the homepage. For ecommerce websites of any size each category page can be a main nav or sub nav item. This strategy adds the related category keywords to every page on your site, as well as increases the page rank for these pages through internal linking, as the main navigation is repeated on every page of your site.

Take Guitar Center’s site for example, all of these sub-category pages for “guitars” are listed (linked) in the main navigation, and therefore all the terms you see here are “read” by search engines on every single page of Guitar center’s site — not just their homepage. This site structure also makes it very easy for users to find the exact product they’re looking for and even discover new products. This boosts your page’s odds of appearing in relevant search results.

Implement Category-Based Breadcrumb Navigation

For larger ecommerce sites, adding all product categories or subcategories to the main navigation may not be feasible. In this instance, breadcrumbs can provide an alternative method for leveraging internal linking and product pages to help users navigate deeper sites.

Guitar Center’s main nav does not display or internally link to any pages below the “electric guitars” category. However, there are additional product subcategories within the electric guitars product category. To improve usability and discoverability of these additional subcategory pages breadcrumb navigation has been added (highlighted in red below).

Breadcrumbs are especially useful on product pages, as they can help users discover a full product line, clarify the website structure, and provide a secondary navigation link to bounce a user back multiple site levels without having to press the back button multiple times.

Amazon, as another example, uses breadcrumbs to provide users with secondary navigation on almost every product page.

Employ Category-Based Redirects

Finally, category pages can be helpful for ecommerce sites, as you can set up category-based redirects. Category-based redirects allow out-of-stock products redirect to the main category page. This improves the user experience and reduces the chances of Google, Bing, or other major search engines reading any of your pages as 404ing.

Determine Your Site’s URL Structure

A well thought-through site structure will also enable you to programmatically generate custom product URLs that include relevant keywords (describe the product) and are easy for users to read/understand.

Use Plain-Language URLs

Keyword-based URLs are more “clickworthy” than URLs that consist of seemingly random characters such as product SKUs. URLs featuring keywords essentially “tell” a search engine algorithm more about what type of product is featured on the page.

URLs Should Include the Product Name

In ecommerce seo, the URL slug will typically be the main product keyword — usually the product name. Your main keyword for the product should also be included in your H1. Continuing with the earlier example of a user searching for a beginner guitar set, this page from GuitarCenter demonstrates the right way to generate a product URL:

The URL slug is the name of the product. It’s also the H1 (not just stylistically but also with the HTML H1 tag applied). The result? This is the first page to appear in a Google SERP when users search for “yamaha gigmaker eg electric guitar pack.”

Popular Ecommerce URL Formats

The URL also illustrates a popular ecommerce URL format: domain.com/category/product. Other options to consider include domain.com/collection/category/product and simply domain.com/product.

Determining which format to use requires deciding whether your products belong to specific categories and collections, or whether they stand on their own. The chosen format works in this example because the product is an electric guitar pack belonging to a specific brand.

Explore the traditional URL structure of various ecommerce platforms when reviewing your options, but keep in mind that you can often change the structure by choosing the right theme or directly editing the code.

Optimize Individual Product Pages

I’m sure you’ve spent time optimizing your homepage already, but did you know it’s even more crucial to optimize the SEO of your individual product pages? These are the pages that need to appear in relevant search results, and you want them to be strong enough that they convince guests to make a purchase.

Product-Focused Technical SEO Elements

Once you’ve done some preliminary keyword research, begin to optimize your individual product pages by addressing your Technical SEO:

• Page Title
• Meta Description
• H1
• Clear search intent

E-commerce Title Tags

Page titles, also known as title tags, need to accurately represent what a product is. They also need to feature the primary keyword for which you most want to rank. Make sure this keyword or phrase is front loaded in the title tag so it’s more noticeable on a small mobile screen, and the key information from the title tag still displays even in rich snippets.

Take a look at the examples below. In the first, only the first two words of the page title are visible in the first one. In the second we see subcategories highlighted.

E-commerce Meta Descriptions

You should also include relevant keywords in the meta description for your product page. Your meta description should encourage the user to click into the search result, clarify what the user can expect from the page, and include product-relevant keywords to help your page rank.

It’s important to keep in mind that Technical SEO is primarily about helping users navigate online. The meta information on your product pages (including page titles, descriptions, and headers) serve much the same purpose as highway signs or signage at an airport: They help users reach their intended destination. Thus, you should attempt to be as informative as possible, while also being brief and direct.

Improve Product Metas with “Modifier” Words

When thinking about what information to include in your title, meta description, and/or H1 it can help to think about product modifiers. These are terms (often included in long-tail keyword searches) that further describe the product. These often include include items such as:

• Price
• Size(s)
• Color(s)
• Material(s)
• Whether an item is for a particular gender and/or age group
• Discounts (you may want to include keywords like “as low as”)
• Shipping options

Remember, many of the users you’re targeting know exactly what they’re looking for in detail. You thus need to provide them with information demonstrating you’re selling exactly what they’re looking for.

Images Sell Products, Alt Tags Help

Including images of your products is crucial to ecommerce SEO.

• Images increase product sales exponentially, and help users form an idea of what they’ll be receiving for their money.
• Well-optimized images with fast load speeds help send signals to search engines that your site has been optimized for mobile users.
• Alt tags and image title tags can help your images show up in image searches as well as sending additional keyword-relevancy signals to search engines.
• Images are a prerequisite for being included in Google’s rich snippets at the top of the search results.

Images Provide Better Customers Context

Images allow you to display your products in dynamic ways. If you’re selling apparel, product images where items are being worn by models provide customers a better sense of how an article of clothing looks when worn.

Images can also provide context for products. For instance, maybe you sell furniture and fixtures. An image of a product in a room (ideally surrounded by a few other items) will give users a better idea of its size, and how it will look in their own homes.

Images Need to Be Size and Speed Optimized

Product images with small file sizes, which do not display page load speeds, and which adjust responsively – display well on mobile. Google is continuing to switch sites over to mobile-first indexing and both Google and Bing noticeably reward sites with images and rich media in search.

Notes on Drafting Alt Tags

Image ALT text tags are simply descriptions of images on your site. They also play a significant role in ecommerce SEO. Alt text tells a user what an image depicts when the image either doesn’t load, or when the user is blind, but it also provides search engines more information about what an image itself is relevant for in search.

Where appropriate, ALT tags should feature the keywords you want to rank for without adding confusion to the image description itself. Keep in mind the point of alt text is still to help people with accessibility issues, so keep alt text relatively short (no more than 125 characters) and try to be specific about any key product features highlighted in the image (such as product name, size, materials, and any other relevant information). This is another way in which you can tell a search engine what type of content appears on the page.

Lengthen Product Descriptions

Including a short product description right next to the product image is a smart way to capture a potential customer’s attention and improve the on page SEO. They’ll see both the product and the most important information about it at the same time.

How to Avoid Thin Content

Review this example to understand why this method is effective. The image shows off the product, while the copy provides a user with the basic essential information.

Scroll down, however, and you’ll find a lengthier product description. A longer product description section gives you the opportunity to include more keywords in your content and ensures you won’t be prevented from ranking for thin content.

Additionally, great content is more likely to engage customers and build brand awareness. When you only have thin content users spend less time on the page, and less time considering your product. Not only does more time spent on the page improve your rankings in the SERPs, but also great descriptions will help guests better understand why a product is valuable.

The right word count for descriptions depends on how much content exists on a blank product page. What this refers to is the sum of text in the navigation, header, footer, etc. before product information is added. Making sure product descriptions are longer than the sum of the base page content is a good starting point.

Never Use The Manufacturer’s Product Description

One thing to always note, though: never use the manufacturer’s product description. Ensure yours is unique and not copied from the manufacturer or another site. This is important because search engines won’t show the exact same content (duplicate content) from multiple sites. They instead only display content from the site that is deemed most “trustworthy.” This can end up being the site that has had the content up the longest, the site with the most traffic, the site with the most backlinks, or the site with the most users.

How to Avoid Duplicate Content

If you have multiple pages for essentially the same product (ex: the same product in different colors, or the same product in different sizes), you’ll need to make some choices so that search engines are not confused by what are essentially duplicative pages/duplicative content:

• Keep the product description on each page relatively the same, but set one page as canonical.
• Create entirely unique product descriptions/unique content for each page.
• Vary a percentage of the content under the descriptions using LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing keywords).

To avoid duplicate content when creating product descriptions, try breaking up the content into multiple sections. For example, one section could describe the story behind the product. Another could list its key features. Yet another could feature customer testimonials, just like the Biossance example above.

Include LSI Keywords

LSI keywords are terms that search engines expect to see on a page that is related to particular topic. Often called focus terms, LSI keywords help Google understand the focus of a page. Read more about focus terms and content optimization here.

LSI keywords can help you tailor each page to rank better for the longtail keyword or term you’ve selected. LinkGraph even has our own content optimization tool that you can use for free.

Break Product Descriptions Into Sections

You should also consider that different people care about different product features. Breaking your descriptions up into sections makes it easier to appeal to all users. For example, if you were selling a garment, various users might care about such information as size, durability, warranties, shipping options, color options, special features (such as water-resistance), and more. Use your longer product descriptions to provide all information you believe potential buyers would be interested in. If your product descriptions are exceptionally long, you can even use internal links called jump links to help users navigate down to relevant content more quickly.

Implementing Product Schema for an eCommerce Site

Schema markup – also known as rich snippets – refers to HTML tags you can add to your content. When used correctly, schema can increase CTR by as much as 677% and boost traffic 20-30%. By providing users with more valuable information about your content when it shows up in Google search results.

For example, maybe a user’s search results include one of your product pages. With schema markup, you could include customer ratings in your organic search result – or even show up in the product rich snippets that appear at the top of the search results. It’s also worth noting that Google’s own John Mueller has confirmed that schema is important to SEO.

How to Implement Product Schema

Product schema can substantially improve your SEO. It’s also fairly easy to implement. The following are two simple ways to do so:

Install a Plugin

Do you use a major platform like Shopify or WooCommerce to manage your ecommerce site? If so, you can simply install a plugin for schema markup. It will allow you to add the necessary schema with ease.

Other platforms, like WordPress, have their own plugins, too, like these. So does Squarespace. While these platforms don’t allow for extensive schema markup on their own, plugins can expand their capabilities.

Use a Schema Markup Platform

If you have a custom site that is NOT managed via WordPress, you could instead use SchemaApp, which allows you to organize your schema markup data on one platform. You can also use this tool if you host your e-commerce site through such platforms as Shopify, Woocommerce, BigCommerce, and Squarespace.

There’s also Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, which you can follow along with after selecting “Products” from the main screen.

Does your organization have substantial in-house technical resources? If so, you can coordinate with a web developer to add schema markup to your site via Schema.org. This allows you to exercise a greater degree of control over the purpose of the schema you wish to add. It’s not an option for all businesses, but it’s worth considering if you have the necessary resources.

Build Backlinks

Building a strong backlink profile is part of an effective SEO strategy for any site. Ecommerce sites are no exception. Inbound links (also known as backlinks) are critical for improving your SERP, and can help you bump terms stuck on the second search engine results page up to the first.

What are inbound links or backlinks? A backlink is when another (external) site links back to your site, referencing your products, services, or content. In essence it’s another site referring their own users to your site because your site provides value. Essentially, search engines view other sites linking to your site as a positive reference from a real person. Link signals are weighted heavily in SEO. Each backlink your site receives, increases the value of your site in the eyes of Google, and thus improves your rankings.

As more domains link back to your site, your own site’s domain authority will increase. As your domain authority increases, so does your site’s SEO value. Search engines use these ranking signals (backlinks) to determine which sites are most relevant online for related topics. Adding link authority boosts your page’s SEO value, and it’s ranking in the search results.

A strong backlink profile improves brand awareness and captures top of funnel web visitors who may encounter your site/brand via another initial source.

How to Build Backlinks

Link building starts with creating quality content that will be used and shared by people outside of your own site. Securing inbound links from reputable sites tells search engines your site is also reputable. These links may also provide additional opportunities for your products to display in rich snippets, and direct more traffic back to you.

There are several ways you can build backlinks for an ecommerce site. The following are a few methods we’ve found to be successful for e-commerce sites:

Submit Your Products to Product Lists & Pages

Many sites routinely post lists such as “Best Holiday Gifts for College Students,” “25 Life Changing Products under $25”, or “What to Get the Person Who Has Everything.” There are also sites specifically designed to help users discover new products (such as uncommon goods, product hunt, or pinterest). Submitting your products to these sites boosts your odds of showing up on such lists. Additionally, you may wish to submit your products to sites where users actively discover products, such as Pinterest, Product Hunt, or Wish.

Post Strong Blog Content

A blog featuring valuable content can be a very useful tool for building backlinks. We recommend starting by identifying a list of ideas for blog posts. Each blog post should be tailored to a frequently asked question, or frequently searched topic, relevant to your business and your target consumer. Popular blog content, such as “Top 10 Gift Ideas for Father’s Day 2020” can encourage others to link back to this type of entry if it was fairly comprehensive.

Additionally, you could submit guest blogs to other sites, linking back to your products in the content. For further reading, SEMRush has a great guide to guest blogging as a linking strategy.

Pitch Product Pages

A more advanced approach would involve pitching product pages. Think about the kind of sites and publications that are likely to cover your products. Check their writer profiles and masthead to find their contact information, and submit a product for review. Each site will have its own process, so research publications and influencers or discuss this with an editor or other relevant individual before submitting your products blindly.

Image Above: Example of a Product Write-Up Included in a List

You may also want to coordinate with influencers in your niche. This guide gives an excellent intro to reaching out to influencers. Search for social media influencers in your industry. If a popular Internet personality recommends your products, that will generate more backlinks and drive overall interest in your brand.

Next Steps

Once you’ve optimized the basics (product descriptions, URLs, schema, etc.), Make sure that your site has enough trust signals and social proof that consumers feel confident purchasing from your online store:

• Your site design needs to look professional, from the home page to your checkout page.
• You need to provide security indicators around payment portals such as SSL certificates (ex: https vs. http).
• Add product reviews to your site!

Customers typically trust user reviews through third-party platforms (such as reviews on Google My Business or Amazon) more than curated product reviews you post to your own site. However, testimonials from people where their full name is displayed can still be a great first step, or even an addition to pulling third party customer reviews onto your own site.

Depending on how you’ve set up your product schema, you’ll also be able to display your aggregate rating, or star rating directly in the search results (especially the Google search results).

These points are all important to keep in mind when developing an ecommerce SEO strategy for your site. The right combination of tools and techniques can be the key to ranking higher, attracting more organic traffic, improving your conversion rate, and ultimately increasing your e-commerce sales.

The post SEO for Ecommerce appeared first on LinkGraph.

LinkGraph is honored by Great Place to Work® and Fortune as one of the 2022 Best Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing. LinkGraph is ranked #27 on the list of 50 U.S. companies. Earning a spot means that LinkGraph is one of the best companies to work for in the country. LinkGraph was also Certified by Great Place to Work® in 2021. 

The analysis of survey responses from more than 9,000 workers of Great Place to Work-Certified organizations in the advertising and marketing sector served as the foundation for the Best Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing award. In that study, 93% of the workers at LinkGraph believed the company was a wonderful place to work. 

“This is the first year Fortune has created a category for this type of award and LinkGraph is proud to be one of the first recipients of this award,”  said Founder and CTO of Linkgraph, Manick Bhan.  “Here at LinkGraph, we really work hard to create an environment that supports and fosters creativity and productivity in an uplifting space.”

About LinkGraph

LinkGraph pairs award-winning SEO strategies with cutting-edge software to help professionals increase organic traffic and conversions. We specialize in technical SEO, link building, paid media management, and conversion rate optimization.

Using our enterprise SEO software platform, SearchAtlas, site owners can execute a comprehensive on-page and off-site strategy, all from the convenience of a single platform.

So whether you want to work with our SEO professionals or take ownership of your SEO with our powerful software, LinkGraph is here to help you take your website to the top of the SERPs.

For more information on LinkGraph’s award-winning campaign strategies, book a meeting with one of our SEO experts.

About the Best Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing

Great Place to Work® selected the Fortune Best Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing by gathering and analyzing confidential survey responses from over 9,000 employees from Great Place to Work-Certified companies in the advertising and marketing industry. Company rankings are derived from 60 employee experience questions within the Great Place to Work® Trust Index survey. Great Place to Work determines its lists using its proprietary For All methodology to evaluate and certify thousands of organizations in America’s largest ongoing annual workforce study, based on over 1 million survey responses and data from companies representing more than 6.1 million employees, this year alone.

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