That’s why you need to know the on-page, technical, and off-page elements that influence how your content will perform in the search results—plus the best practices you need to follow. Doing this will help you avoid publishing content that doesn’t help you achieve your business objectives.

Here is a guide on WordPress SEO best practices to help you avoid making mistakes that will affect your website’s performance and improve the likelihood of high-ranking content.

Why Use WordPress Over Other CMS Tools?

Even with other CMS solutions available, WordPress is still the most popular CMS tool. There’s nothing simpler than navigating the WordPress dashboard and block editor that comes default with the platform.

Founded in 2003, it has won numerous awards, including “Best Open Source Software”, and powers most of the world’s websites. In fact, it powers around 43% of all websites.

What makes WordPress the go-to option for most website owners? Its flexibility. WordPress allows you to customize your website to fit your exact needs, including adding SSL, meta description, alt text, sitemap, breadcrumbs, and even schema markup – everything you need to optimize for the SERP.

For example, from a user experience perspective, you can buy WordPress themes that you can customize to align with your brand strategy and deliver content dynamically to different devices. Your web visitors will have a smooth browsing experience as they interact with your content because they can easily find what they’re looking for.

From an SEO perspective, WordPress allows you to use different plugins to optimize your content and improve website performance. Popular SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, RankMath, and Meta Sync SEO are perfect for content optimization. You can also add an analytic SEO plugin such as Google Analytics or Bing Webmaster Tools.

WordPress SEO Best Practices

WordPress allows you to manage all your content in one place easily. Optimizing your WordPress site increases the chances of driving more organic traffic to your website and achieving your SEO strategy objectives.

While we could publish a WordPress SEO guide article about basic SEO practices such as using the Yoast SEO plugin, connecting Google Analytics, using a focus keyword, or writing a meta description, we’ll focus more on the concepts of WordPress SEO you should focus on to perform better on the search engine.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

1. Create and Publish Content that Satisfies User Intent

Since content is the vehicle you’re using to achieve your business objectives, it needs to be relevant to what your potential buyers are looking for in the search results.

Your readers might land on your blog post at any stage of their buying journey, which means you’ll need to stand out by providing the answers they need when they enter the search query. Then, point them to the solutions they’re looking for.

You could start this process by performing keyword research. SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush provide SEO expert information to help find a specific keyphrase to focus on.

Publishing content that satisfies your reader’s intent requires you to start with the end in mind. This means creating a content strategy that helps you clarify your objectives and identify your ideal readers.

For example, let’s say your ideal readers are furniture vendors. A furniture vendor has two challenges when running their business: acquiring more customers and managing their product information. Suppose you are trying to sell a product information solution. In that case, content for this furniture vendor audience needs to teach how to solve their initial challenge (customer acquisition) before introducing a solution to their second challenge (managing product information).

This approach makes your content relevant and helpful, which is exactly what Plytix, a product information management tool, has done.

Their content helps the reader tackle both challenges by creating a furniture marketing strategy and then introducing their product with a specific page to navigate at the end of their post. As they get more customers, they’ll need to manage their product information better. Hence, their content ensures that the business owner knows what solutions to look for when they want to manage their product information effectively.

2. Make Your Content Accessible

In addition to making your content relevant and helpful, you must ensure that it’s easily accessible to both search engines and website visitors. Making your content accessible includes creating and submitting an XML sitemap to Google in Google Search Console so that its bots can crawl and index your content to ensure that it appears in search results.

Your HTML sitemap also needs to make site navigation easier so that your web visitors can find the information they’re looking for on your WordPress website. When using a WordPress sitemap, your content appears in a user-friendly format so readers won’t have trouble finding their way around your content.

You can use the SearchAtlas Site Auditor to ensure that there are no technical issues with your sitemap.

In addition, you also need to write a descriptive SEO title telling a potential reader what the web page is about. When writing descriptive page titles, be clear and direct. If your reader doesn’t understand what your page is about, they won’t click through to read your content. Instead, explain how readers will benefit from your content once they click on your meta title.

Your readers are intelligent, and making it easier for them to find what they need is a cornerstone of content accessibility. Use header tags that break down different sections of your content to help the reader self-select what sections to read and what to skim.

For accessibility, it’s also important to add alt text to your images. The alt tag not only helps visitors using screen readers, it’s also a ranking factor for image SEO.

One other aspect of accessibility is ensuring your SSL is up to date. This is important for both the search engine and potential visitors to trust your WordPress site. Luckily, it is pretty easy to generate a free SSL certificate from many major hosting platforms.

3. Use User-Friendly URL Structures

The URL structure of a webpage is easy to overlook, especially if you haven’t changed your permalink settings inside WordPress to have a custom URL structure for your content.

In addition to making your site crawlable, reader-friendly URL structures improve user experience. They do this by telling readers what the page behind the URL is about. This makes it easier to decide whether it is relevant to them or not.

When creating your permalink structure, narrow it down to your primary keyword. Then, get rid of any other information that makes it longer than it needs to be. This includes numbers and symbols.

You can also add keyword modifiers to your URL to align it with the searcher’s intent. Modifiers can be based on niche, location, or topic. For example, if your primary keyword is “local SEO,” modifiers might include: “how to,” “real estate,” or “New York SEO.”

These modifiers will appear in your title tags, so you’ll need to include them in your URL. This way, you’ll match with specific searches that readers will run when looking for information related to your primary keyword.

Lastly, ensure this final permalink is set as your canonical URL, which you can do in Yoast SEO or AIOSEO. Otherwise, the crawler might not be able to distinguish duplicate content. Properly mapping redirects and schema markup will also help avoid this duplicate content issue.

4. Add Internal Links

As you publish more content, you’ll need to create more internal links to relevant pieces of content. This means internal linking is another task you need to cross off your to-do list before you publish your post. Internal and external links are important in SEO for passing page rank, or “link juice” to relevant pages. These backlinks also tell the search engine where important pillars and trusted sources are.

We have three types of internal links: navigational, in-text, and sidebar links.

• Navigational links help your visitors move from one place to another on your website.
• In-text links help readers access similar topics within your content.
• Sidebar links help users access related content.

When publishing a blog post, you need to focus on in-text links to improve the chances of ranking on Google. If you have a huge library of content, use a WordPress SEO plugin such as Rank Math or Link Whisper to help identify relevant content to link to.

If you’re just getting started, create a content structure and choose topics that align with this structure. In addition, make sure you use relevant anchor text for your internal links. This makes it clear to both readers and search engine crawlers what the content on the next page is about.

5. Optimize your Site for Mobile

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Your web visitors access your site from different devices. More than 58.9% of traffic is attributed to mobile users, so there’s a high likelihood that one of your web visitors will access your site using a mobile device.

Mobile users expect to navigate the site smoothly, find the content they need, and take the actions they need to take.

For this to happen, your website needs a fast page speed and render properly on a mobile device.  Use WordPress themes that dynamically deliver content across different devices. Also, avoid full-screen pop-ups that decrease your site speed and prevent mobile web visitors from accessing your content.

We suggest you turn on the Google Accelerated Mobile pages plugin in WordPress and test using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Are WordPress Plugins Good for SEO?

Being an open-source software, WordPress offers a plugin library to expand and improve different use cases related to search engine optimization, website performance, and security. For example, you can choose an all-in-one plugin such as AIOSEO or Yoast SEO plugin, a cache plugin and an SSL plugin (to add an SSL certificate to your WordPress site.

However, due to the huge number of plugins, you need to ensure the plugin you choose meets your needs without compromising on website performance, security, or the functionality of other plugins you’re using.

When choosing the best plugin, get it from the list of plugins on WordPress.org. Read through user reviews to learn about the experiences other users had and also make sure that the plugin provider provides support for their customers.

Once you buy your plugin (or decide on a free plugin) and install it, monitor it to see if it negatively impacts website performance and address any emerging issues.

Use WordPress SEO to Boost your Content Rankings

Done right, WordPress SEO will move you closer to your content and SEO objectives. It’ll ensure your content shows up in search results for your readers.

It also helps you stand out among your competitors. If your content keeps showing up in the top search results, then readers know the solutions you provide must be what they need.

You’ll need to publish content that satisfies reader intent, make it accessible, create user-friendly URLs, optimize your site for mobile devices, and internally link your content to relevant content that readers need.

Along the way, you’ll need plugins to make your work easier. If you’re unsure which SEO plugin to start with, consider scaling your SEO campaign with Linkgraph’s SEO Content Assistant to help you implement the best practices we’ve covered.

About the Author:

Alex Birkett is the co-founder of Omniscient Digital, a premium content marketing & SEO agency. He lives in Austin, Texas with his dog Biscuit and writes at alexbirkett.com.

The post WordPress SEO Best Practices: 5 Tips for More Organic Traffic 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.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing web content to rank in search engines. The on-page SEO process encompasses keyword research, SEO copywriting, meta tag optimization, page experience, and more.

Site owners who implement on-page SEO across their web pages will likely see more keyword rankings and higher ranking positions for valuable keywords in their industry.

What’s Different about On-Page SEO in 2022 compared to 2021?

Although the best practices of on-page SEO for the most part remain the same, search engine technology grows more advanced every year, changing the way we execute optimization across our web pages.

For 2022, there are some key updates that site owners should be aware of so they can leverage them to achieve higher rankings and organic traffic.

Here are some of the top SEO trends for 2022:

• People also ask: A recent study showed that Google’s “People also ask,” feature now shows up for approximately 48.6% of all searches, and often above position 1.
• Core Web Vitals: Since the Page Experience update, Core Web Vitals are officially a Google ranking factor. Fast-loading, responsive web pages now perform better in the SERPs
• AI Copy Generation: More SEO software engineers are incorporating GPT-3 into their tools and applications to help content marketers create SEO content more quickly and at scale.
• Keyword Clusters: It’s estimated that Google processes over 63,000 keyword searches a second. There are hundreds to thousands of ways that users are searching, and keyword clustering is a more effective strategy for getting a web page to rank for all of those variations.

The Best On-Page SEO Tips for 2022

For 2022, on-page SEO is all about combining SEO best practices with newer strategies that help your web pages meet the quality signals Google crawlers are looking for.

1. Make Core Web Vitals Top Priority

Last summer, Google rolled out one of the largest algorithm updates in years — the Page Experience Update. In addition to security, mobile-usability, and page speed, Google considers a web page’s Core Web Vitals when ranking content.

Although load times and speed have not traditionally been viewed as “on-page seo” priorities, the reality is, a web page with high-quality content doesn’t mean much if it takes too long to load or items shift while the user scrolls or clicks.

Optimizing Core Web Vitals should now be a part of your fundamental SEO practice. To get a better understanding of where your web pages stand, use the Site Auditor tool in GSC Insights, or run your pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool

2. Answer Common Questions

A recent study of 2.5 million search queries showed that Google’s “People also ask” feature now shows up for about 48.6% of searches. 

With its prominent placement at the top of the SERP results (and often above position 1), getting your content ranking in this coveted feature is the next great way to improve site visibility and generate organic clicks.

To get there, your writing team needs to provide answers to common questions in your content. Utilize questions in your h2s-h6s, and make sure your answers are detailed and comprehensive.

By providing answers to those questions on the page, your content can show up at the top of page one, even if your traditional SERP result appears lower on the page (or even sometimes on page 2)! 

Watch this tutorial on how to optimize for People also ask using the SEO Content Assistant.

3. Use Content Optimization Software

With more advanced natural language processing technology, Google is not just looking for your target keywords on the page anymore.

Crawlers are looking for related terms, subtopics, synonyms, and other semantic SEO signals. Original insight an analysis, topical-depth, and expert authorship are also quality signals that can help improve the ranking potential of content.

To better meet all these signals, a content optimizer tool like the SEO Content Assistant can give you the “cheat codes,” to better ranking content. The tool recommends Focus Terms, outbound links, word count, and can even generate content using GPT-3 technology.

4. Leverage AI-Powered Content Generation

With GPT-3 now widely available, more software engineers are incorporating this powerful NLP model into their applications. That means you are not only competing with the content writers of your competitors, but the robots they may be utilizing to help generate more content, more quickly, than you.

AI copywriting tools still have some way to go before replacing our writers entirely. Also, some tools are far better than others. Still, content marketing teams are already using these tools to speed up ideation, outlining, drafting, and on-page SEO optimization so they can scale up their content development.

Those brands that leverage these technologies, but still keep the human touch, are likely to scale up their SEO content strategy quickly this year.

5. Write Longer Content

Although not officially a Google ranking factor, there is a strong relationship between longer content and higher ranking positions. By improving the topical depth and length of your content, you can signal Google higher quality and more comprehensive exploration of the content.

How long should your content be? There is no magic number, but tools like the SEO Content Assistant will suggest a target word count based on the top ranking content for your target keywords.

6. Review your Content on Mobile

More searches are completed from mobile devices than desktop. That’s why search engines are now prioritizing content by what best suits their predominantly mobile user-base.

To rank better in today’s mobile-first world, you need to be focusing on how your content serves mobile users (even if your current site traffic is predominantly desktop users).

The first place to check for mobile usability issues is within your own Google Search Console. These are issues that Google has already flagged for your site, which means Google is already factoring “mobile usability issues” into your search rankings.

Here are things to look for:

• Are images and assets fitting on the screen?
• Are images and assets resizing appropriately for the screen size?
• Can users easily access all of the page content?
  • Is the page short enough to scroll through easily?
  • Are large/unnecessary page elements taking up all the space?
  • Does the user have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get through the page?
• Are any page elements overlapping in a way that hinders the user viewing content?
• Do you have huge blocks of unbroken text?
• Does the design still look clean?

What you can do:

• Get the user to relevant content faster
  • Hide unnecessary images on mobile
  • Reduce the font size of headers on mobile
  • Move important content to the top of the page
  • Add jump links for longer content
• Make content easier to view/read on a smaller device
  • Make sure images and graphics are resizing responsively
  • Adjust your navigation so mobile users can see all options
  • Break up text into 2-3 sentence blocks
  • Use more whitespace!
• Increase tap areas so it’s easier to scroll to relevant content
• Use a sticky nav so users can always find a “next step” if they get stuck

For more information on mobile SEO check out our Comprehensive Guide to Mobile SEO.

7. Use More Rich Media

Mobile users spend heavy portions of their time on social media feeds, YouTube, and Apps. There are all beautifully designed platforms heavy on visuals and multimedia content.

Multi-media keeps people scrolling, conveys concepts at-a-glance, and helps users interact more fully with content. Multi-media makes blog and page content more engaging.

With images and video pulling in at the top of SERPs now, that content is yet another way to get onto the first page.

8. Meet the User’s Search Intent

BERT helped Google better understand the intent behind search queries and launched at the end of October 2019. BERT-related refreshes and advancements still matter in 2022.

As Google continually refines its understanding of the intent behind search queries it will be serving better results, especially for long-tail queries and never-before-seen queries. This means that you should be hyper-focused on creating content that helps a user find the product, service, information, or entertainment that they’re looking for with a search.

To learn more about recognizing search intent, and indicators for informational vs. commercial oriented keywords, take a look at our What are Keywords in SEO Guide.

9. Write for Humans and Robots

Readability is understood differently by SEO professionals. In general, though, simpler sentences are easier to read and less prone to grammatical errors. In voice search specifically, Google avoids overly-complex language.

It is much easier to understand a badly formulated written answer than an ungrammatical spoken answer, so more care has to be placed in ensuring grammatical correctness.

Keeping your sentences simple can also make your content more accessible to a wider range of users. Although SaaS, software, or technologies companies may have more technical content by nature of their products of service offerings, it’s still important to write in a way that is not too academic or jargon-ridden.

A survey of 15,000 searches across 3 device types found the average reading level for voice responses was 8th grade. For reference, Harry Potter is about the same reading level.

10. Link Strategically

Google pays attention to what resources you share with your users. As Google puts it, outbound links matter because they:

• Show that you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject manner

• Make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics

• Build relationships with other domain experts. For example, sending visitors can get you on the radar of other successful bloggers and begin a business relationship.

“Link Neighborhood” is a term coined by the SEO community. It refers to the type of sites that you link out to, and the type of sites that link back to you, and how they link to each other.

For example, if you were to look at the “link neighborhood” for a celebrity site, you’d probably see a lot of streets to gossip magazines, social media groups, fan sites, and concert venues. If you were to look at the “link neighborhood” for an MIT lab, you might see a lot of streets going to scientific publications, tech news, grant organizations, etc.

Internal links also matter because they keep users navigating across your site. Also, they help crawlers understand your site hierarchy, and spread PageRank across your web pages.

Link neighborhoods help give context for the topical focus of a site, and the relative authority of a site; is harvard.edu linking to the site, or is bestcrystalsforhealing.com linking to the site?

Your link neighborhood is a combination of your outbound links and inbound links coming back to your site and web pages.

Recap: Tips for On Page SEO in 2022

• Make Core Web Vitals Top Priority
• Answer Common Questions
• Use Content Optimization Software
• Leverage AI-Generated Content
• Write Longer Content
• Review your Content on Mobile
• Use More Rich Media
• Meet the User’s Search Intent
• Write for Humans and Robots
• Link Strategically

The post 10 Tips for On Page SEO in 2022 appeared first on LinkGraph.

The Google algorithm is constantly changing. In 2018 alone, Google ran 15,096 Live traffic experiments, and launched 3,234 updates to its search algorithm.

Not all updates have significant impact on the search results. This page covers the top 150 updates to how search results function from 2000-2019. Updates are a blend of changes to:

• Algorithms
• Indexation
• Data (aka Data Refreshes)
• Google Search UIs
• Webmaster Tools
• Changes to ranking factors and signals

Before we get into the timeline of individual google updates, it’s going to be helpful to define a handful of things upfront for any SEO newbies out there:

Google’s Core Algorithm

SEO experts, writers, and audiences will often refer to “Google’s Core Algorithm” as though it is a single item. In reality, Google’s Core Algorithm is made up of millions of smaller algorithms that all work together to surface the best possible search results to users. What we mean when we say “Google’s Core Algorithm” is the set of algorithms that are applied to every single search, which are no longer considered experimental, and which are stable enough to run consistently without requiring significant changes.

Google Panda (2011-2016)

The Panda algorithm focused on removing low quality content from search by reviewing on-page content itself. This algorithm focused on thin content, content dominated by ads, poor quality content (spelling/grammar mistakes), and rewarded unique content. Google Panda was updated 29 times before finally being incorporated into the core algorithm in January of 2016.

Google Penguin (2012-2016)

The Penguin algorithm focused on removing sites engaging in spammy tactics from the search results. Penguin primarily filtered sites engaging in keyword stuffing and link schemes out of the search results. Google Penguin was updated 10 times before being integrated into Google’s core algorithm in September of 2016.

RankBrain (2015-Present)

This machine-learning based AI helps Google process and understand the meaning behind new search queries. RankBrain works by being able to infer the meaning of new words or terms based on context and related terms. RankBrain began rolling out across all of Google search in early 2015 and was fully live and global by mid-2016. Within three months of full deployment RankBrain was already the 3rd most important signal contributing to the results selected for a search query.

Matt Cutts

One of the first 100 employees at Google, Matt Cutts was the head of Google’s Web Spam team for many many years, and interacted heavily with the webmaster community. He spent a lot of time answering questions about algorithm changes and providing webmasters high-level advice and direction.

Danny Sullivan

Originally a Founding Editor, Advisor, and Writer for Search Engine Land (among others), Danny Sullivan now communicates with the SEO community as Google’s Public Search Liaison. Mr. Sullivan frequently finds himself reminding the community that the best way to rank is to create quality content that provides value to users.

Gary Illyes

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst who often responds to the SEO community when they have questions about Google algorithm updates and changes. Gary is known for his candid (and entertaining) responses, which usually have a heavy element of sarcasm.

Webmaster World:

Frequently referenced whenever people speak about Google algorithm updates, webmasterworld.com is one of the most popular forums for webmasters to discuss changes to Google’s search results. A popular community since the early 2000’s webmasters still flock to the space whenever major fluctuations are noticed to discuss theories.

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2021 Google Search Updates

2021 December – Local Search Update

From November 30th – December 8th, Google runs a local search ranking update. This update rebalances the various factors used to generate local results. Primary ranking factors for local search remain the same: Relevance, Distance, and Prominence. 

Additional Reading:

• Google Also Had a Local Search Update from November 30 Through Decemeber 8

2021 November – Core Quality Update

From November 17th – November 30th, Google rolls out another core update. As with all core updates, this one is focused on improving the quality and relevance of search results. 

Additional Reading:

• Google November Core Update is Over — What Happened?

2021 August – Title Tag Update

Starting August 16th, Google starts rewriting page titles in the SERPs. After many SEOs saw negative results from the update, Google rolls back some of the changes in September. Google emphasizes that it still uses content with the <title> tag over 80% of the time. 

Additional Reading:

• Google’s Title Tag Update and the Future of Meta Tags in SEO

2021 July – Link Spam Update

Google updates link spam fighting algorithm to improve effectiveness of identifying and nullifying link spam. The update is particularly focused on affiliate sites and those websites who monetize through links.

Additional Reading:

• A Reminder on Qualifying Links and Our Link Spam Update
• How Affiliates Can Work With Google to Reduce Link Spam

2021 June – Page Experience Update

Google announced in late 2020 that its upcoming 2021 Page Experience update would introduce core web vitals as new Google ranking factors. Core web vitals are a set of user experience criteria that include page load times, mobile responsiveness, visual responsiveness, and more. Google evaluates these metrics through the following criteria:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – The time it takes a web page to load the largest piece of content on the page
2. First Input Delay (FID) – A measurement of the users first interaction with the page from interactivity and responsiveness.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures visual stability and how stable the website is when loading and scrolling

This update makes it so Google will evaluate page experiences signals like mobile friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines when ranking web pages.

Additional Reading:

• The Page Experience Update: New SEO Ranking Factors for 2021
• Evaluating Page Experience for a Better Web

2021 February – Passage Ranking

Google introduces Passage Ranking and starts indexing passages of web content. Google now hones in on a specific passages of long-form content and ranks those passage in the SERPs. Google highlights the relevant passage and takes the users directly to the relevant passage after clicking on the blue link result. 

Additional Reading:

• The 2021 Guide to Google Passage Ranking

2020 Google Search Updates

2020 October – Indexing Bugs

From early September to the beginning of October, Google experienced multiple bugs with mobile indexing, canonicalization, news-indexing, top stories carousel, and sports scores breaking. The bugs impacted about .02% of searches. Google fully resolved all impacted urls by October 9th.

Additional Reading:

• Is it Google Search Ranking Updates or Instability Over Bugs?

2020 August 11 – Google Glitch

On Tuesday, August 11th, Google experienced a massive, worldwide indexing glitch that impacted search results. Search results were very low-quality or irrelevant to search queries, and ecommerce sites in particular reported significant impacts on rankings. Google resolved the glitch within a few days.

Additional Reading:

• Google Suffers Massive Indexing Glitch

2020 June – Google Bug Fix

A Google representative confirmed an indexing bug temporarily impacted rankings. Google was struggling to surface fresh content.

Additional Reading:

• Google: The Search Indexing Issues are Now Resolved

2020 May – Core Quality Update

This May 2020 core update was one of the more significant broad core updates with the introduction of core web vitals and increased emphasis on E.A.T. This update was a continuation of an effort to improve the quality of SERP results with COVID related searches. The update most significantly impacted those sites with low-quality or unnatural links. However some sites with lower-domain authority did appear to see positive ranking improvements for pages with high-quality, relevant content. 

Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 4, 2020

Many SEOs reacted negatively, particularly because of the timing of the update, which occurred at the height of economic shutdowns to slow the spread of coronavirus. Some concerns about the May 2020 core quality update ranged from social media SERP domination and better SERP results for larger, more dominant brands like Amazon and Etsy. Some analysis noted these changes may have been reflecting user intent from quarantine, particularly because the update focused on providing better results for queries with multiple search intents. Google’s responded to the complaints by reinforcing existing content-quality signals. 

Additional Reading:

• An Intensive Analysis of the May 2020 Google Update by MHC
• Google May 2020 Algorithm Update: 4 Key Changes and how to Adjust

2020 March – COVID-19 Pandemic

Although not an official update, the coronavirus outbreak led to an unprecedented level of search queries that temporarily changed the landscape of search results. Google made several changes to adjust to the trending searches such as:

• Increased user personalization to combat misinformation
• Removed COVID-19 misinformation across YouTube and other platforms
• Added “Sticky Menu” for COVID related searches
• Added temporary business closures to the Map Pack
• Temporarily banned ads for respirators and medical masks
• Created COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports
• Temporary limited certain Google My Business listings features

Additional Reading:

• Google My Business Changes Due to COVID-19
• Remarkable Impacts of COVID-19 on Google SERPs

2020 February 7 – Unannounced Update

In February of 2020, many SEOs reported seeing significant changes to rankings, although Google had not announced and denied any broad core update. Various analysis of the update showed no clear pattern between websites that were impacted. 

Additional Reading:

• Google Update February 2020: Background and Analysis
• Google responds to February 2020 update saying: “We do Updates all the Time”

2020 January 22 – Featured Snippet De-duplication

Prior to this January 2020 update, those sites that earned the featured snippet, or “position zero,” also appeared as the subsequent organic search result. This update de-duplicated search results to eliminate this double exposure. This impacted 100% of searches worldwide and had significant impacts on rank tracking and organic CTR.

Additional Reading:

• January 2020 Featured Snippet Google Update
• Google Featured Snippets: A 2020 SEO Guide

2020 January – Broad Core Update

On January 13th, 2020, Google started rolling out another broad core update. Google did not provide details about the update, but did emphasize existing webmaster guidelines about content quality.

Additional Reading:

• Google January 2020 core update is rolling out
• Google January 2020 core update almost done rolling out

2019 Google Search Updates

2019 November Local Search Update

In November of 2019 Google rolled out an update to how local search results are formulated (ex: map pack results). This update improved Google’s understanding of the context of a search, by improving its understanding of synonyms. In essence, local businesses may find they are showing up in more searches.

In early November, we began making use of neural matching as part of the process of generating local search results. Neural matching allows us to better understand how words are related to concepts, as explained more here: https://t.co/ShQm7g9CvN

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 2, 2019

 

2019 October 26 BERT

In October Google introduced BERT a deep-learning algorithm focused on helping Google understand the intent behind search queries. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) gives context to each word within a search query. The “bidirectional” in BERT refers to how the algorithm looks at the words that come before and after each term before assessing the meaning of the term itself.

Here’s an example of bi-directional context from Google’s Blog:

In the sentence “I accessed the bank account,” a unidirectional contextual model would represent “bank” based on “I accessed the” but not “account.” However, BERT represents “bank” using both its previous and next context — “I accessed the… account” — starting from the very bottom of a deep neural network, making it deeply bidirectional.

The introduction of BERT marked the most significant change to Google search in half a decade, impacting 1 in 10 searches — 10% of all search queries.

Additional Reading:

• BERT: Google’s Largest Update in Years
• Google BERT Update – What It Means SEJ

2019 September – Entity Ratings & Rich Results

If you place reviews on your own site (even through a third party widget), and use schema markup on those reviews – the review stars will no longer show up in the Google results. Google applied this change to entities considered to be Local Businesses or Organizations.

The reasoning? Google considers these types of reviews to be self-serving. The logic is that if a site is placing a third party review widget on their own domain, they probably have some control over the reviews or review process.

Our recommendation? If you’re a local business or organization, claim your Google My Business listing and focus on encouraging users to leave reviews with Google directly.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog: Making Review Rich Results More Helpful
• Google Help Center: How to Get Reviews on Google

2019 September – Broad Core Update

This update included two components:First, it hit sites exploiting a 301 redirect trick from expired sites. In this trick users would buy either expired sites with good SEO metrics and redirect the entire domain to their site, or users would pay a 3rd party to redirect a portion of pages from an expired site to their domain.Note: Sites with relevant 301 redirects from expired sites were still fine.

Second, video content appears to have gotten a boost from this update. June’s update brought an increase in video carousels in the SERPs. Now in September, we’re seeing video content bumping down organic pages that previously ranked above them.

 

We can see this at an even greater scale looking at two purely text and purely video sites – YouTube and Wikipedia. We can see that for the first time, YouTube has eclipsed Wikipedia in the Google search results.

 

Additional Reading:

• Search Metrics Google’s September 2019 Update

2019 June – Broad Core Update

This is the first time that Google has pre-announced an update. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, stated that they chose to pre-announce the changes so webmasters would not be left “scratching their heads” about what was happening this time.

What happened?

• We saw an increase in video carousels in the SERPs
• Low quality news sites saw losses

What can sites do to respond to this broad core update? It looks like Google is leaning into video content, at least in the short-term. Consider including video as one of the types of content your team creates.

Additional Reading:

• Search Engine Land – Google Pre-Announces June 2019 Core Search Algorithm Update

2019 May 22-26 – Indexing Bugs

On Wednesday May 22nd Google tweeted that there were indexation bugs causing stale results to be served for certain queries, this bug was resolved early on Thursday May 23rd.

By the evening of Thursday May 23rd Google was back to tweeting – stating that they were working on a new indexing bug that was preventing capture of new pages. On May 26th Google followed up that this indexation bug had also been fixed.

Additional Reading:

• The Webmaster May Indexing Bugs
• SEJ – New Google Indexing Issues

2019 April 4-11 De-Indexing Bugs

In April of 2019 an indexing bug caused about 4% of stable URLs to fall off of the first page. What happened? A technical error caused a bug to de-index a massive set of webpages.

Additional Reading:

• Google April Deindexation Tweets
• The Webmaster April De-Indexation Summary

2019 March 12 – Broad Core Update

Google was specifically vague about this update, and just kept redirecting people and questions to the Google quality guidelines. However, the webmaster community noticed that the update seemed to have a heavier impact on YMYL (your money or your life) pages.

YMYL sites with low quality content took a nose-dive, and sites with heavy trust signals (well known brands, known authorities on multiple topics, etc) climbed the rankings.

Let’s take two examples:

First, Everdayhealth.com lost 50% of their SEO visibility from this update. Sample headline:Can Himalayan Salt Lamps Really Help People with Asthma?

Next, Medicinenet.com saw a 12% increase in their SEO visibility from this update. Sample headline: 4 Deaths, 141 Legionnaires’ Infections Linked to Hot Tubs.

This update also seemed to factor in user behavior more strongly. Domains where users spent longer on the site, had more pages per visit, and had lower bounce rates saw an uptick in their rankings.

Additional Reading:

• Search Metrics – Winners and Losers of the March 2019 Core Algorithm Update

2019 March 1 – Extended Results Page

For one day, on March 1st, Google displayed 19 results on the first page of SERPs for all queries, 20 if you count the featured snippet. Many hypothesize it was a glitch related to in-depth articles, a results type from 2013 that has long since been integrated into regular organic search results.

Additional Reading:

• Moz – The Mysterious Case of the 19-Result SERPS

2018 Google Algorithm Updates

2018 August – Broad Core Update (Medic)

This broad core update, known by its nickname “Medic” impacted YMYL (your money or your life) sites across the web.

SEOs had many theories about what to do to improve rankings after this update, but both Google and the larger SEO community ended up at the same messaging: make content user’s are looking for, and make it helpful.

This update sparked a lot of discussion around E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for page quality, and the importance of clear authorship and bylines on content.

Additional Reading:

• SEO Roundtable – Nice Breakdown of 300 Impacted Sites
• SEMrush – EAT and YMYL

2018 July – Chrome Security Warning

Google begins marking all http sites as “not secure” and displaying warnings to users.

 

Google views security as one of their core principles, so this change makes sense as the next step to build on their October 2017 update that began warning users about unsecured forms.

 

Looking forward, Google is planning on blocking mixed content from https sites.

What can you do? Purchase an SSL certificate and make the move from http to https as soon as possible. Double check that all of your subdomains, images, PDFs and other assets associated with your site are also being served securely.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Marking HTTP Not Secure
  
• Google Blog – No More Mixed Messages about HTTPS

2018 July – Mobile Speed Update

Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, making page speed a ranking factor for mobile results.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Using Page Speed In Mobile Search

2018 June – Video Carousels

Google introduces a dedicated video carousel on the first page of results for some queries, and moves videos out of regular results. This change also led to a significant increase in the number of search results displaying videos (+60%).

Additional Reading:

• GSQI – Trapped in Google Video Carousels

2018 April – Broad Core Update

The official line from Google about this broad core update, is that it rewards quality content that was previously under-rewarded. Sites that had content that was clearly better than the content of it’s organic competitors saw a boost, sites with thin or duplicative content fell.

2018 March – Broad Core Update

March’s update focused on content relevance (how well does content match the intent of the searcher) rather than content quality.

What can you do? Take a look at the pages google is listing in the top 10-20 spots for your target search term and see if you can spot any similarities that hint at how Google views the intent of the search.

Additional Reading:

• Danny Sullivan’s Broad Core Update Announcement

2018 March – Mobile-First Index Starts to Roll Out

After months of testing Google begins rolling out mobile-first indexing. Under this approach, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of website pages when adding them to their index. If content is missing from mobile versions of your webpages, that content may not be indexed by Google.

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.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• Google Blog – Rolling Out Mobile-First Indexing
  Mobile SEO – The Complete Guide (2019-2020)

2017 Google Search Updates

2017 December – Maccabees

Google states that a series of minor improvements are rolled out across December. Webmasters and SEO professionals see large fluctuations in the SERPs.

 

Barry Schwartz gave this set of updates the Maccabees nickname as he noted the most fluctuation around December 12 (occurring during Hanukkah). However, updates occurred from the very beginning until the very end of December.

 

What were the Maccabees changes?

Webmasters noted that doorway pages took a hit. Doorway pages act as landing pages for users, but don’t contain the real content – users have to get past these initial landing pages to access content of any value. Google considers these pages barriers to a user.

A writer at Moz dissected a slew of site data from mid-december noted one key observation. When two pages ranked for the same term, the one with better user engagement saw it’s rankings improve after this update. The other page saw its rankings drop. In many instances what happened for sites that began to lose traffic, is that blog pages were being shown/ranked where product or service pages should have been displayed.

A number of official celebrity sites fall in the rankings including (notably) Channing Tatum, Charlie Sheen, Kristen Stewart, Tom Cruise, and even Barack Obama. This speaks to how Google might have rebalanced factors around authoritativeness vs. content quality. One SEO expert noted that thin celebrity sites fell while more robust celebrity sites (like Katy Perry’s) maintained their #1 position.

Multiple webmasters reporting a slew of manual actions on December 25th and 26th, and some webmasters also reported seeing jumps on the 26th for pages that had been working on site quality.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Google Defines Doorway Pages: Pages for Ranking for Keyword Permutations
• Moz – An Investigation into Google’s Maccabees Update

2017 November – Snippet Length Increased

Google increases the character length of meta descriptions to 300 characters. This update was not long-lived as Google rolled back to the original 150-160 character meta descriptions on May 13, 2018.

2017 May – Quality Update

Webmasters noted that this update targeted sites and pages with:

• Deceptive advertising
• UX challenges
• Thin or low quality content

Additional Reading:

• SEJ – May Algorithm Update

2017 March – Fred

In early March webmasters and SEOs began to notice significant fluctuations in the SERPs, and Barry Schwartz from SEJ began tweeting Google to confirm algorithm changes.

The changes seemed to target content sites engaging in aggressive monetization at the expense of users. Basically sites filling the internet up with low-value content, meant to benefit everyone except the user. This included PBN sites, and sites created with the sole intent of generating AdSense income.

Fred got its name from Gary Illyes who suggested to an SEO expert asking if he wanted to name the update, that we should start calling all updates without names “Fred.”

Fred it is https://t.co/aEE7sfm7X5 @i_praveensharma @JohnMu

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) March 9, 2017

 

The joke, for anyone who knows the webmaster trends analyst, is that he calls everything unnamed fred (fish, people, EVERYTHING).

What those who aren’t friends with @methode don’t realize is that he calls EVERYTHING un-named, fred. Fish, people, whatever.

— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) March 9, 2017

 

The SEO community took this as a confirmation of recent algorithm changes (note: literally every day has algorithm updates). Validating them digging into the SERP Changes.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Google Fred Update Targets Ad Heavy, Low Value Content Sites

2017 January 10 – Pop Up Penalty

Google announces that intrusive pop ups and interstitials are going to be factored into their search algorithm moving forward.

“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

This change caused rankings to drop for sites that forced users to get past an ad or pop up to access relevant content. Not all pop ups or interstitials were penalized, for instance the following pop ups were still okay:

• Pop ups that helped sites stay legally compliant (ex: accepting cookies, or verifying a user’s age).
• Pop ups that did not block content on load.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Helping users easily access content on mobile

2016 Google Search Updates

2016 September – Penguin 4.0

The Google announcement of Penguin 4.0 had two major components:

• Penguin had been merged into the core algorithm, and would now have real-time updates.
• Penguin would be more page-specific moving forward rather than impacting entire domains.

SEOs also noted one additional change. Penguin 4.0 seemed to just remove the impact of spam links on SERPs, rather than penalizing sites with spammy links. This appeared to be an attempt for Google to mitigate the impact of negative SEO attacks on sites.

That being said, today in 2019 we still see a positive impact from running disavows for clients who have seen spammy links creep into their backlink profiles.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Penguin is Now Part of Our Core Algorithm
• Moz – White Board Image Penguin 1.0-3.0 vs Penguin 4.0

2016 September – Possum Update

This update targeted duplicate and spammy results in local search (Local Pack and Google Maps). The goal being to provide more diverse results when they’re searching for a local business, product, or service.

Prior to the Possum update Google was filtering out duplicates in local results by looking for listings with matching domains or matching phone numbers. After the Possum update Google began filtering out duplicates based on their physical address.

Businesses who saw some of their listings removed from the local pack may have initially thought their sites were dead (killed by this update), but they weren’t – they were just being filtered (playing possum). The term was coined by Phil Rozek

SEOs also noted that businesses right outside of city limits also saw a major uptick in local rankings, as they got included in local searches for those cities.

Additional Reading:

• Rank Ranger – Google’s New Local Search Algorithm Update
  
• SEL – Everything You Need to Know About Possum

2016 May – Mobile Friendly Boost

Google boosts the effect of the mobile-friendly ranking signal in search.
Google took time to stress that sites which are not mobile friendly but which still provide high quality content will still rank.

Additional Reading:

• Marketing Land – Google to Boost the Mobile-Friendly Ranking Factor in May 2016
• Google Blog – Continuing to make the web more mobile friendly

2016 February 19 – Adwords Change

Google Removes sidebar ads and ads a fourth ad to the top block above the organic search results.
This move reflects the search engine giant continuing to prioritize mobile-first experiences, where side-bar ads are cumbersome compared to results in the main content block.

2016 January – Broad Core Update + Panda Is Now Core

Google Confirms core algorithm update in January, right after confirming that Panda is now part of Google’s core algorithm.

Not a lot of conclusions were able to be drawn about the update, but SEOs noticed significant fluctuations with news sites/news publishers. Longform content with multi-media got a boost, and older articles took a bit of a dive for branded terms. This shift could reflect Google tweaking current-event related results to show more recent content, but the data was not definitive.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Panda Now Part of Google’s Core Algo Update

2015 Google Search Updates

2015 December – SSL/HTTPS by Default

Google starts indexing the https version of pages by default.

Pages using SSL are also seeing a slight boost. Google holds security as a core component of surfacing search results to users, and this shift becomes one of many security-related search algo changes. In fact, by the end of 2017 over 75% of the page one organic search results were https.

2015 October 26 – RankBrain

in testing since April 2015, Google officially introduced RankBrain on this date. RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm that filters search results to help give users a best answer to their query. Initially, RankBrain was used for about 15 percent of queries (mainly new queries Google had never seen before), but now it is involved in almost every query entered into Google. RankBrain has been called the third most important ranking signal.

Additional Reading:

• SEJ – Google Algorithm History – RankBrain

2015 October 5 – Hacked Sites Algorithm

Google introduces an algorithm specifically targeting spammy in the search results that were gaining search equity from hacked sites.

This change was significant, it impacted 5% of search queries. This algorithm hides sites benefiting from hacked sites in the search results.

 

Interactions with Gary Illyes at #pubcon and on twitter suggest that this algo only applies to search queries traditionally known to be spammy.

 

@rustybrick yesr. That’s what we’re aiming for.

— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) October 9, 2015

 

The update came right after a September message from Google about cracking down on repeat spam offenders. Google’s blog post notified SEOs that sites which repeatedly received manual actions would find it harder and harder to have those manual actions reconsidered.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – An Update on How We Tackle Hacked Spam
• Google Blog – Repeated Violations of Webmaster Guidelines

2015 August 6 – Google Snack Pack

Google switches from displaying seven results for local search in the map pack to only three.

Why the change? Google is switching over (step-by-step) to mobile-first search results, aka prioritizing mobile users over desktop users.

On mobile, only three local results fit onto the screen before a users needs to scroll. Google seems to want users to scroll to then access organic results.

Other noticeable changes from this update:

• Google only displays the street (not the complete address) unless you click into a result.
• Users can now filter snack pack results by rating using a dropdown.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Switched to Local 3-Packs: Is There Cause for Alarm?

2015 July 18- Panda 4.2 (Update 29)

Roll out of Panda 4.2 began on the weekend of July 18th and affected 2-3% of search queries. This was a refresh, and the first one for Panda in about 9 months.

Why does that matter? The Panda algorithm acts like a filter on search results to sort out low quality content. Panda basically gets applied to a set of data – and decides what to filter out (or down). Until the data for a site is refreshed, Panda’s ruling is static. So when a data refresh is completed, sites that have made improvements essentially get a revised ruling on how they’re filtered.

Nine months is a long time to wait for a revised ruling!

2015 May – Quality Update / Phantom II

This change is an update to the quality filters integrated into Google’s core algorithm, and alters how the algorithm processes signals for content quality. This algorithm is real-time, meaning that webmasters will not need to wait for data refreshes to see positive impact from making content improvements.

What kind of pages did we see drop in the rankings?

• Clickbait content
• Pages with disruptive ads
• Pages where videos auto-played
• How-to sites with thin or duplicative content (this ended up impacting a lot of how-to sites)
• Pages that were hard to navigate/had UI barriers

In hindsight, this update feels like a precursor to Google’s 2017 updates for content spam and intrusive pop ups.

Additional Reading:

• NBC News – Google’s Phantom Algorithm Update

2015 April 21 – Mobilegeddon

Google boosts mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results.

This update was termed Mobilegeddon as SEOs expected it to impact a huge number of search queries, maybe more than any other update ever had. Why? Google was already seeing more searches on mobile than on desktop in the U.S. in May 2015.

In 2018 Google takes this a step further and starts mobile-first indexing.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Rolling Out the Mobile-Friendly Update
• Mobile SEO – The Complete Guide (2019-2020)

2014 Google Algorithm Updates

2014 December – Pigeon Goes International

Google’s local algorithm, known as Pigeon, expands to international English speaking countries (UK, Canada, Australia) on December 22, 2014.

In December Google also releases updated guidelines for local businesses representing themselves on Google.

Additional Reading:

• Google Guidelines – Representing Your Business On Google

2014 October – Pirate II

Google releases an “improved DMCA demotion signal in Search,” specifically designed to target and downrank some of the sites most notorious for piracy.

In October Google also released an updated report on how they fight piracy, which includes changes they made to how results for media searches were displayed in search. Most of these user interface changes were geared towards helping user find legal (trusted) ways to consume the media content they were seeking.

 

—————————–Additional Reading:

 

• Google Blog – Continued Progress on Fighting Piracy
• Google Report – How Google Fights Piracy
• SEL – After More Than Two Years, Google Finally Releasing New “Pirate Update” To Fight Piracy

2014 October 17 – Penguin 3.0

This update impacted 1% of English search queries, and was the first update to Penguin’s algorithm in over a year. This update was both a refresh and a major algorithm update.

2014 September – Panda 4.1 (Update 28)

Panda 4.1 is the 28th update for the algorithm that targets poor quality content. This update impacted 3-5% of search queries.

To quote Google:

“Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signal to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.”

Major losers were sites with deceptive ads, affiliate sites (thin on content, meant to pass traffic to other monetizing affiliates), and sites with security issues.

2014 September – Known PBNs De-Indexed

This change impacted search, but was not an algorithm change, data refresh, or UI update.

Starting mid-to-late September, 2014 Google de-indexed a massive amount of sites being used to boost other sites and game Google’s search rankings.

Google then followed-up on the de-indexing with manual actions for sites benefiting from the PBN. These manual actions went out on September 18, 2014.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Targets Sites Using Private Blog Networks With Manual Action Ranking Penalties

2014 August – Authorship Removed from Search Results

Authors are no longer displayed (name or photo) in the search results along with the pieces that they’ve written.

Almost a year later Gary Illyes suggested that sites with authorship markup should leave the markup in place because it might be used again in the future. However, at a later date it was suggested that Google is perfectly capable of recognizing authorship from bylines.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Google Authorship Take Back
• Google Support – Authorship Markup No Longer Supported

2014 August – SSL becomes a ranking factor

Sites using SSL began to see a slight boost in rankings.

Google would later go on to increase this boost, and eventually provide warning to users when they were trying to access unsecure pages.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – HTTPS as a Ranking Signal

2014 July 24 – Google Local Update (Pigeon)

Google’s local search algorithm is updated to include more signals from traditional search (knowledge graph, spelling correction, synonyms, etc).

Additional Reading

• SEL – Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal

2014 June – Authorship Photos Removed

Photos of Authors are gone from SERPs.

This was the first step towards Google decommissioning Authorship markup.

2014 June – Payday Loan Update 3.0

Where Payday Loans 2.0 targeted spammy sites, Payday Loans 3.0 targeted spammy queries, or more specifically the types of illegal link schemes scene disproportionately within high-spam industries (payday loans, porn, gambling, etc).

What do you mean illegal? We mean link schemes that function off of hacking other websites or infecting them with malware.

This update also included better protection against negative SEO attacks,

Additional Reading:

• Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To Target Spammy Queries

2014 May 17-18 – Payday Loan Update 2.0

Payday Loan Update 2.0 was a comprehensive update to the algorithm (not just da data refresh). This update focused on devaluation of domains using spamy on-site tactics such as cloaking.

Cloaking is when the content/page that google can see for a page is different than the content/page that a human user sees when they click on that page from the SERPs.

2014 May – Panda 4.0 (Update 27)

Google had stopped announcing changes to Panda for a while, so when they announced Panda 4.0 we know it was going to be a larger change to the overall algorithm.

Panda 4.0 impacted 7.5% of English queries, and led to a drastic nose dive for a slew of prominent sites like eBay, Ask.com, and Biography.com.

 

Sites that curated information from other sources without posting info or analysis of their own (aka coupon sites, celebrity gossip sites) seemed to take a big hit from this update.

 

@mattcutts I hope it is not too painful pic.twitter.com/VUmBJ59IEG

— Steven Broschart (@optimizingexp) May 21, 2014

 

2014 February 6 – Page Layout 3.0 (Top Heavy 3.0)

This is a refresh of Google’s algorithm that devalues pages with too many above-the-fold ads, per Google’s blog:

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

The Page Layout algorithm was originally launched on January 19, 2012, and has only had one other update in October of the same year (2012).

 

2013 Google Algorithm Updates

2013 December – Authorship Devalued

Authorship gets less of a boost in the search results. This is the first step Google took in beginning to phase out authorship markup.

2013 October – Penguin 2.1

Technically the 5th update to Google’s link-spam fighting algorithm, this minor update affects about 1% of search queries.

Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree. More info on Penguin: https://t.co/4YSh4sfZQj

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 4, 2013

 

2013 August – Hummingbird

Hummingbird was a full replacement of the core search algorithm, and Google’s largest update since Caffeine (Panda and Penguin had only been changes to portions of the old algorithm).

Humminbird helped most with conversational search for results outside of the knowledge graph — where conversational search was already running. Hummingbird was a significant improvement to how google interpreted the way text and queries are typed into search.

This algorithm was named Hummingbird by Google because it’s “precise and fast.”

 

Additional Reading:

 

• Google Blog – Hummingbird Announcement

2013 July – Expansion of Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph Expands to nearly 25% of all searches, displaying information-rich cards right above or next to the organic search results.

 

 

Additional Reading:

• Moz – The Day the Knowledge Graph Exploded

2013 July – Panda Dance (Update 26)

Panda begins going through monthly refreshes, also known as the “Panda Dance,” which caused monthly shifts in search rankings.

The next time Google would acknowledge a formal Panda update outside of these refreshes would be almost a year later in May of 2014.

2013 June – Roll Out Anti-Spam Algorithm Changes

Google rolled out an anti-link-spam algorithm in June of 2013 targeting sites grossly violating webmaster guidelines with egregious unnatural link building.

Matt Cutts even acknowledged one target – ‘Citadel Insurance’ which built 28,000 links from 1,000 low ranking domains within a single day, June 14th, and managed to reach position #2 for car insurance with the tactic.

By the end of June sites were finding it much harder to exploit the system with similar tactics.

@screamingfrog very natural…. @mattcutts

— Jamie Knop (@JamieKnop) June 21, 2013

 

@JamieKnop @screamingfrog yup, we saw that. Multi-week rollout going on now, from next week all all the way to the week after July 4th.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 22, 2013

 

2013 June 11 – Payday Loans

This update impacted 0.3% of queries in the U.S., and as much as 4% of queries in Turkey.

This algorithm targets queries that have abnormally high incidents of SEO spam (payday loans, adult searches, drugs, pharmaceuticals) and applies an extra filters to these types of queries specifically.

We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries. See 2:30-3:10 of this video: https://t.co/KOMozoc3lo #smx

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 11, 2013

 

2013 May 22 – Penguin 2.0

Penguin 2.0 was an update to the Penguin algorithm (as opposed to just a data refresh), it impacted 2.3% of english queries.

What changed?

• Advertorials will no longer flow pagerank
• Niches that are traditionally spammy will see more impact
• Improvements to how hacked sites are detected
• Link spammers will see links from their domains transfer less value.

One of the biggest shifts with Penguin 2.0 is it also analyzed linkspam for internal site pages, whereas Penguin 1.0 had looked at spammy links specifically pointing to domain home pages.

This marked the first time in 6 months that the Penguin algorithm had been updated, and the 4th update to Penguin that we’ve seen:

• April 24, 2012 – Penguin 1.0 Launched
• May 25, 2012 – Penguin 1.1 Data Refresh
• October 5, 2012 – Another Penguin Data Refresh

 

Additional Reading:

 

• Matt Cutts Blog – Penguin 2.0 Rolled Out Today

2013 May – Domain Diversity

This update reduced the amount of times a user saw the same domain in the search results. According to Matt Cutts, once you’ve seen a cluster of +/- 4 results from the same domain, the subsequent search pages are going to be significantly less likely to show you results from that domain.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• SEL – Domain Clustering Change

2013 May 8th – Phantom I

On May 8th, 2013 SEOs over at Webmaster World noticed intense fluctuation in the SERPs.

Lots of people dove into the data – some commenting that sites who had taken a dive were previously hit by Panda, but there were no conclusive takeaways. With no confirmation of major changes from Google, and nothing conclusive in the data – this anomaly came to be known as the “Phantom” update.

2013 March 14-15 – Panda Update 25

This is the 25th update for Panda, the algorithm that devalues low quality content in the SERPs. Matt Cutts confirmed that moving forward the Panda algorithm was going to be part of a regular algorithm updates, meaning it will be a rolling update instead of a pushed update process.

2013 January 22 – Panda Update 24

The 24th Panda update was announced on January 22, 2013 and impacted 1.2% of English search queries.

New Panda data refresh rolling out today: 1.2% of English queries affected. Background: https://t.co/EMBEJqGZ

— Google (@Google) January 22, 2013

 

2012 Google Algorithm Updates

2012 December 21 – Panda Update 23

The 23rd Panda update hit on December 21, 2012 and impacted 1.3% of English search queries.

2012 December 4 – Knowledge Graph Expansion

On December 4, 2012 Google announced a foriegn language expansion of the Knowledge Graph, their project to “map out real-world things as diverse as movies, bridgets and planets.”

 

2012 November – Panda Updates 21 & 22

In November 2012 Panda had two updates in the same month – one on November 5, 2012 (1.1% of English queries impacted in the US) and one on November 22, 2012 (0.8% of Enlish queries impacted in the US).

2012 October 9 – Page Layout Update

On October 9, 2012 Google rolled up an update to their Page Layout filter (also known as “Top Heavy”) impacting 0.7% of English-language search queries. This update rolled the Page Layout algorithm out globally.

Sites that made fixes after Google’s initial Page Layout Filter hit back in January of 2012 saw their rankings recover in the SERPs.

2012 October – Penguin Update 1.2

This was just a data refresh affecting 0.3% of English queries in the US.

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Details: https://t.co/Esbi2ilX

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

 

2012 September – Panda Updates 19 & 20

Panda update 19 hit on September 18, 2012 affecting 0.7% of English search queries, followed just over a week later by Panda update 20 which hit on September 27, 2012 affecting 2.4% of English search queries.

Panda update 20 was an actual algorithm refresh, accounting for the higher percentage of affected queries.

2012 September – Exact Match Domains

At the end of September Matt Cutts announced an upcoming change: low quality exact match domains were going to be taking a hit in the search results.

Up until this point, exact match domains had been weighted heavily enough in the algorithms to counterbalance low quality site content.

Additional Reading:

• Moz – Google’s EMD Algo Update

2012 August 19 – Panda Update 18

Panda version 3.9.1 rolled out on Monday, August 19th, 2012, affecting less than 1% of English search queries in the US.

This update was a data refresh.

Panda data refresh this past Monday. ~1% of queries noticeably affected. More context: https://t.co/nSjVRWGb

— Google (@Google) August 22, 2012

 

2012 August – Fewer Results on Page 1

In August Google began displaying 7 results for about 18% of the queries, rather than the standard 10.

Upon further inspection it appeared that google had reduced the number of organic results so they’d have more space to test a suite of potential top-of search features including: expanded site links, images, and local results.

This change, in conjunction with the knowledge graph, paved the way for the top-of-search rich snippet results we see in search today.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Showing Fewer Results
• Moz – Secrets of the 7-Result SERP

2012 August 10 – Pirate/DMCA Penalty

Google announces they’ll be devaluing sites that repeatedly get accused of copyright infringement in the SERPs. As of this date the number of valid copyright removal notices is a ranking signal in Google’s search algorithm.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog: An Update to Our Search Algorithms

2012 July 24 – Panda Update 17

On July 24, 2012 Google Announces Panda 3.9.0 – a refresh for the algorithm affecting less than 1% search

2012 July 27 – Webmaster Tool Link Warnings

Not technically an algorithm update, but it definitely affected the SEO landscape.

On July 27, 2012 Google posted an update clarifying topics surrounding a slew of unnatural link warnings that had recently been sent out to webmasters:

• Unnatural link warnings and drops in rankings are directly connected
• Google doesn’t penalize sites as much when they’re the victims of 3rd party bad actors

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – New Notifications About Inbound Links

2012 June – Panda Updates 15 & 16

In June Google made two updates to its Panda algorithm fighting low quality content in the SERPs:

• Panda 3.7 rolled out on June 8, 2012 affecting less than 1% of English search queries in the U.S.
• Panda 3.8 rolled out on June 25, 2012 affecting less than 1% of queries worldwide.

Both updates were data refreshes.

2012 June – 39 Google Updates

On June 7, 2012 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the course of May. Highlights included:

• Link Spam Improvements:
  • Better hacked sites detection
  • Better detection of inorganic backlink signals
  • Adjustments to Penguin
• Adjustments to how Google handles page titles
• Improvements to autocomplete for searches
• Improvements to the freshness algorithm
• Improvements to rankings for news and recognition of major news events.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Search Quality Highlights 39 Changes for May

2012 May 25 – Penguin 1.1

A data refresh for the Penguin algorithm was released on May 25, 2012 affecting less than 0.1% of search queries.

Additional Reading:

• SEW – Google Penguin 1.1 Pushed Out As Some Sites Report Recovery

2012 My 16 – Knowledge Graph

On May 16, 2012 Google introduced the knowledge graph, a huge step forward in helping users complete their goals faster.

First, the knowledge graph improved Google’s understanding of entities in Search (what words represented — people, places, or things).

Second, it surfaced relevant information about these entities directly on the search results page as summaries and answers. This meant that users in many instances, no longer needed to click into a search result to find the information they were seeking.

Additional Resources:

• Watch – Introducing Knowledge Graph
• Read – Google Blog – Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

2012 May 4 – 52 April Updates

On May 4, 2012 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the course of April. Highlights included:

• 15% increase in the base index
• Removed the freshness boost for low quality content
• Increased domain diversity in the search results.
• Changes to Sitelinks
  • Sub sitelinks
  • Better ranking of expanded sitelinks
  • Sitelinks data refresh
• Adjustment to surface more authoritative results.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April

2012 April – Panda Updates 13 & 14

In April Google made two updates to its Panda algorithm fighting low quality content in the SERPs:

• Panda 3.5 rolled out on April 19, 2012
• Panda 3.6 rolled out on April 27, 2012 affecting 1% of queries.

Panda 3.5 seemed to target press portals and aggregators, as well as heavily-templated websites. This makes sense as these types of sites are likely to have a high number of pages with thin or duplicative content.

Additional Reading:

• Winners and Losers from Google Webspam Update

2012 April 24 – Penguin

The Penguin Algorithm was announced on April 24, 2012 and focused specifically on devaluing sites that engage in spammy SEO practices.

The two primary targets of Penguin 1.0? Keyword stuffing and link schemes.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Another Step to Reward High Quality Sites
• Search Console Help – Webmaster Answers: Link Schemes

2012 April 24 – Penguin

The Penguin Algorithm was announced on April 24, 2012 and focused specifically on devaluing sites that engage in spammy SEO practices.

The two primary targets of Penguin 1.0? Keyword stuffing and link schemes.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Another Step to Reward High Quality Sites
• Search Console Help – Webmaster Answers: Link Schemes

2012 April – Parked Domain Bug

After a number of webmasters reported ranking shuffles, Google confirmed that a data error had caused some domains to be mistakenly treated as parked domains (and thereby devalued). This was not an intentional algorithm change.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Parked Domain Classifier Error Blamed for Lost Search Rankings

2012 April 3 – 50 Updates

On April 3, 2012 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the course of March. Highlights included:

• Sitelinks Data Refresh
• Better handling of queries with navigational and local intent
• Improvements to detecting site quality
• Improvements to how anchor text contributes to relevancy for sites and search queries
• Improvements to how search handles synonyms

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Search Quality Highlights: 50 Changes for March

2012 March – Panda Update 12

On March 23, 2012 we saw the Penguin 3.4 update, a data refresh affecting 1.6% of queries.

Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6% of queries noticeably affected. Background on Panda: https://t.co/Z7dDS6qc

— Google (@Google) March 23, 2012

 

2012 February 27 – Panda Update 11

Panda Update 3.3 was a data refresh that was announced on February 27, 2012.

2012 February 27 – Series of Updates

On February 27, 2012 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the course of February. Highlights included:

• Travel related search improvements
• international launch of shopping rich snippets
• improved health searches
• Google changed how it was evaluating links, dropping a method of link analysis that had been used for the past several years.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – 40 Changes for February

2012 February – Venice

The Venice update changed the face of local search forever, as local sites now up even without a geo modifier being used in the keyword itself.

Additional Reading:

• SEJ – Venice Algorithm Update

2012 January – Page Layout Update

This update devalued pages in search that had too many ads “above-the-fold.” Google said that ads that prevented users from accessing content quickly provided a poor user experience.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Page Layout Algorithm Improvement

2012 January 10 – Personalized Search

On January 10, 2012 Google announced Search, plus Your World. Google had already expanded search to include content personally relevant to individuals with Social Search, Your World was the next step.

This update pulled in information from Google+ such as photos, profiles, and more.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Search, plus Your World

2012 January 5 – 30 Google Updates

On January 5, 2012 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the course of December of 2011. Highlights included:

• Landing page quality became a signal for image search, beyond the image itself
• Soft 404 detection (when a page returns a different status code, but the content still wont be accessible to a user).
• More rich snippets
• Better infrastructure for autocomplete (ex: spelling corrections)
• More accurate byline dates
• Related queries improvements
• Upcoming events at venues
• Faster mobile browsing – skipped the redirect phase of sending users to a mobile site m.domain.com

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – 30 Search Quality Highlights

2011 Google Algorithm Updates

2011 December 1 – 10 Google Updates

On December 1, 2011 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made the two weeks prior. Highlights included:

• Refinements to the inclusion of related queries so they’d be more relevant
• Expansion of indexing to include more long tail keywords
• New parked domain classifier (placeholder sites hosting ads)
• More complete (fresher) blog results
• Improvements for recognizing and rewarding whichever sites originally posted content
• Top result selection code rewrite to avoid “host crowding” (too many results from a single domain in the search results).
• New verbatim tool
• New google bar

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – New Monthly Search Updates</a
  
• Google Blog – New Verbatim Tool
• Google Blog – Google Bar Update

2011 November 18 – Panda Update 10

The Panda 3.1 update rolled out on November 18th, 2011 and affected less than 1% of searches.

 

2011 November – Panda 3.1 (Update 9)

On November 18th, 2011 Panda Update 3.1 goes live, impacting <1% of searches.

 

2011 November – Automatic Translation & More

On November 14, 2011 Google posted an update providing insight into search changes made over the couple preceding weeks. Highlights included:

• Cross language results + automatic translation
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors (referring to google-generated page titles, when they ignore html title tags because they can provide a better one)
• Extending application rich snippets
• Refining official page detection, adjusted how they determine which pages are official
• Improvements to date-restricted queries

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Ten Recent Algorithm Changes

2011 November 3 – Fresher Results

Google puts an emphasis on more recent results, especially on time-sensitive queries.

• Ex: Recent events / hot topics
• Ex: regularly occurring/recurring events
• Frequently updated/outdated types of info (ex: best SLR camera)

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Giving You Fresher More Recent Search Results

2011 October – Query Encryption

On October 18, 2011 Google announced that they were going to be encrypting search data for users who are signed in.

The result? Webmasters could tell that users were coming from google search, but could no longer see the queries being used. Instead, webmasters began to see “(not provided)” showing up in their search results.

This change followed a January roll out of SSL encryption protocol to gmail users.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Making Search More Secure
• Moz – Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation

2011 October 19 – Panda Update 8 (“Flux”)

In October Matt Cutts announced there would be upcoming flux from the Panda 3.0 update affecting about 2% of search queries. Flux occurred throughout October as new signals were incorporated into the Panda algorithms and data is refreshed.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Panda Update 3.0 & Flux

2011 September 28 – Panda Update 7

On September 20, 2011 Google released their 7th update to the Panda algorithm – Panda 2.5.

2011 September – Pagination Elements

Google added pagination elements – link attributes to help with pagination crawl/indexing issues.

• Rel=”Next”
• Rel=”prev”

Note: this is no longer an indexing signal anymore

2011 August 16 – Expanded Site Links

On August 16, 2011 Google announced expanded display of sitelinks from a max of 8 links to a max of 12 links.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• Google Blog – Evolution of Sitelinks Expanded and Improved

2011 August 12 – Panda Update 6

Google rolled out Panda 2.4 expanding Panda to more languages August 12, 2011, impacting 6-9% of queries worldwide.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – High Quality Sites Algorithm

2011 July 23 – Panda Update 5

Google rolled out Panda 2.3 in July of 2011, adding new signals to help differentiate between higher and lower quality sites.

2011 June 28 – Google+

On June 28, 2011 Google launched their own social network, Google+. The network was sort of a middle ground between Linkedin and Facebook.

Over time, Google + shares and +1s (likes) will eventually become a temporary personalized search ranking factor.

Ultimately though, Google+ ended up being decommissioned in 2019

Additional Reading:

• Wikipedia – Google+

2011 June 16 – Panda Update 4

According to Matt Cutts Panda 2.2 improved scraper-site detection.

What’s a scraper? In this context, a scraper is software used to copy content from a website, often to be posted to another website for ranking purposes. This is considered a type of webspam (not to mention plagiarism).

This update rolled out around June 16, 2011.

2011 June 2 – Schema.org

On June 2, 2011 Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced a collaboration to create “a common vocabulary for structured data,” known as Schema.org.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Introducing Schema.org

2011 May 9 – Panda Update 3

Panda 2.1 rolled out in early May, and was relatively minor compared to previous Panda updates.

2011 April 11 – Panda Update 2

On April 11, 2011 Panda 2.0 rolled out globally to English users, impacting about 2% of search queries.

What was different in Panda 2.0?

• Better assessment of site quality for long-tailed keywords
• This update also begins to incorporate data around sites that user’s manually block

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback

2011 March 28 – Google +1 Button

Google introduces the +1 Button, similar to facebook “like” button or the reddit upvote. The goal? Bring trusted content to the top of the search results.

Later in June Google posted a brief update that they made the button faster, and in August of 2011 it also became a share icon.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• Google Blog – Introducing the +1 Button

2011 February – Panda Update (AKA Farmer)

Panda was released to fight thin content and low-quality content in the SERPs. Panda was also designed to reward unique content that provides value to users.

 

Panda impacted a whopping 12% of search results, and virtually wiped out content farms, sites with low quality content, thin affiliate sites, sites with large ad-to-content ratios and over optimization.

 

As a result sites with less intrusive ads started to do better in the search results, sites with”thin” user-generated content went down, as did harder to read pages.

Per Google:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.”

Additional Reading

• Moz – Farmer Update Analysis of Winners vs Losers

2011 January – Attribution Update

This update focused on stopping scraper sites from receiving benefit from stolen content. The algorithm worked to establish which site initially created and posted content, and boost that site in the SERPs over other sites which had stolen the content.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Google Search and Search Engine Spam

2011 January – Overstock.com & JCPenney Penalty

Overstock and J.C. Penney receive manual actions due to deceptive link building practices.

Overstock offered a 10% discount to universities, students, and parents — as long as they posted anchor-text rich content to their university website. A competitor noticed the trend and reported them to Google.

JC Penney had thousands of backlinks built to its site targeting exact match anchor text. After receiving a manual action they disavowed the spammy links and largely recovered.

Additional Reading:

• SEW – Overstock Lands In Google’s Penalty Box
• NYT – J.C. Penney the Underbelly of SEO

2010 Google Algorithm Updates

2010 December – Social Signals Incorporated

Google confirms that they use social signals including accounting for shares when looking at news stories, and author quality.

<h3style=”font-size: 18pt;”>2010 December – Negative ReviewsIn late November a story broke about how businesses were soaring in the search results, and seeing their businesses grow exponentially – by being as terrible to customers as possible.

Enraged customers were leaving negative reviews on every major site they could linking back to these bad-actor businesses, trying to warn others. But what was happening in search, is all those backlinks were giving the bad actors more and more search equity — enabling them to show up as the first result for a wider and wider range of searches.

Google responded to the issue within weeks, making changes to ensure businesses could not abuse their users in that manner moving forward.

Per Google:

“Being bad is […] bad for business in Google’s search results.”

Additional Reading:
NYT – Bullies Rewarded in Search

2010 November – Instant Visual Previews

This temporary feature allowed users to see a visual preview of a website in the search results. It was quickly rolled back.

 

Additional Resources:
Google Blog – Beyond Instant Results, Instant Previews

 

2010 September – Google Instant

Google suggest starts displaying results before a user actually completes their query.

This feature lived for a long time (in tech-years anyways) but was sunset in 2017 as mobile search became dominant, and Google realized it might not be the optimal experience for on-the-go mobile users.

2010 August – Brand Update

Google made a change to allow some brands/domains to appear multiple times on page one depending on the search

This feature ends up undergoing a number of updates over time as Google works to get the right balance of site diversity when encountering host-clusters (multiple results from the same domain in search).

2010 June – Caffeine Roll Out

On June 10, 2010 Google announced Caffeine.

Caffeine was an entirely new indexing system with a new search index. Where before there had been multiple indexes, each being updated and refreshed at their own rates, caffeine enabled continuous updating of small portions of the search index. Under caffeine, newly indexed content was available within seconds of being crawled

Per Google:

“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Our New Search Index Caffeine

2010 May 3 – MayDay

The May Day update occurred between April 28th and May 3rd 2010. This update was a precursor to Panda and took a shot at combating content farms.

Google’s comment on the update? “If you’re impacted, assess your site for quality.”

Additional Resources:

• Watch – Matt Cutts and Recovering Rankings

2010 April – Google Places

In April of 2010 Local Business Center became Google Places. Along with this change came the introduction of service areas (as opposed to just a single address as a location).

Other highlights:

• Simpler method for advertising
• Google offered free professional photo shoots for businesses
• Google announced another batch of favorite places

By April of 2010, 20% of searches were already location-based.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Introducing Google Places

2009 Google Algorithm Updates

2009 December – Real Time Search

Google announces search features related to newly indexed content: Twitter Feeds, News Results, etc. This real time feed was nested under a “latest results” section of the first page of search results.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• SEL – Google Launches Real Time Search

2009 August 10 – Caffeine Preview

On August 10 Google begins to preview Caffeine, requesting feedback from users.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Help Test Some Next Generation Infrastructure

2009 February – Vince

Essentially the Vince update boosted brands.

Vince focused on trust, authority and reputation as signals to provide higher quality results which could push big brands further to the top of the SERPs.

Additional Resources:
Watch – Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?
Read – SEO Book – Google Branding

2008 Google Search Updates

2008 August – Google Suggest

Google introduces “suggest” which displays suggested search terms as the user is typing their query.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature

2008 April – Dewey

The Dewey update rolled out in late March/early April. The update was called Dewey because Matt Cutts chose the (slightly unique) term as one that would allow comparison between results from different data centers.

2007 Google Algorithm Updates

2007 June – Buffy

The Buffy update caused fluctuations for single-word search results.

Why Buffy?Google Webmaster Central product manager and long-time head of operations, Vanessa Fox, notoriously an avid Buffy fan, announced she was leaving Google.

Vanessa garnered an intense respect from webmasters over her tenure both for her product leadership and for her responsiveness to the community – the people using google’s products daily. The webmaster community named this update after her interest as a sign of respect.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Buffy Update
• SEL – Vanessa Fox Leaves Google

2007 May – Universal Search

Old school organic search results are integrated with video, local, image, news, blog, and book searches.

Additional Reading:

• SEL – Google Universal Search

2006 Google Search Updates

2006 November – Supplemental Update

An update to how the filtering of pages stored in the supplemental index is handled. Google went on to scrap the supplemental index label in July 2007.

Additional Reading:

• Nobs – Supplemental Update
  

2005 Google Search Updates

2005 November – Big Daddy

This was an update to the Google search infrastructure and took 3 months to roll out: January, February, and March. This update also changed how google handled canonicalization and redirects.

Additional Reading:

• Matt Cutts – Indexing Timeline
• Matt Cutts on Webmaster Radio

2005 October 16 – Jagger Rollout Begins

The Jagger Update rolled out as a series of October updates.

The update targeted low quality links, reciprocal links, paid links, and link farms. The update helped prepare the way for the Big Daddy infrastructure update in November.

Additional Reading:

• SER – Jagger Update

2005 October – Google Local / Maps

In October of 2015, Google merged Local Business Center data merges with Maps data.

2005 September – Gilligan / False Alarm

A number of SEOs noted fluctuations in September which they originally named “Gilligan.” It turns out there were no algorithm updates, just a data refresh (index update).

Given the news, many SEOs renamed their posts “False Alarm.” However, moving forward many data refreshes are considered updates by the community. So we’ll let the “Gilligan” update stand.

Additional Reading:

• Matt Cutts – What’s an Update

2005 June – Personalized Search

Google relaunches personal search. This time it helps shape future results based on your past selections.

Additional Reading:

• Google My Activity
• SEW – Google Relaunches Personal Search

2005 June – XML sitemaps

Google launches the ability to submit XML sitemaps via Google Webmaster tools. This update bypassed old HTML sitemaps. It gave Webmasters some influence over indexation and crawling, allowing them to feed pages to the index with this feature.

Additional Reading:

• SEW – New Google Sitemaps Web Page Feed Program

2005 May – Bourbon

The May 2005 update, nicknamed Bourbon seemed to devalue sites/pages with duplicate content, and affected 3.5% of search queries.

2005 February – Allegra

The Allegra update rolled out between February 2, 2005 and February 8, 2005. It caused major fluctuations in the SERPs. While nothing has ever been confirmed, these are the most popular theories amongst SEOs for what changed:

• LSI being used as a ranking signal
• Duplicate content is devalued
• Suspicious links are somehow accounted for

Additional Reading:

• Ryte Wiki – Allegra Update

2005 January – NoFollow

In early January, 2005 Google introduced the “Nofollow” link attribute to combat spam, and control the outbound link quality. This change helped clean up spammy blog comments: comments mass posted to blogs across the internet with links meant to boost the rankings of the target site.
Future Changes:

• On June 15, 2009 Google changed the way it views NoFollow links in response to webmasters manipulating pages with “page rank sculpting”.
• Google suggests webmasters use “nofollow” attributes for ads and paid links.
• On September 10, 2019 Google Announced two additional link attributes “sponsored” and “ugc.”
  • Sponsored is for links that are paid or advertorial.
  • UGC is for links which come from user generated content.

Additional Reading:

• Wikipedia – NoFollow

2004 Google Algorithm Updates

2004 February – Brandy

The Brandy update rolled out the first half of February and included five significant changes to Google’s algorithmic formulas (confirmed by Sergey Brin).

Over this same time period Google’s index was significantly expanded, by over 20%, and dynamic web pages were included in the index.

What else changed?

• Google began shifting importance away from Page Rank to link quality, link anchors, and link context.
• Attention is being given to link neighborhoods – how well your site connected to others in your sector or space. This meant that outbound links became more important to a site’s overall SEO.
• Latent Semantic Indexing increases in importance. Tags (titles, metas, H1/H2) took a back seat to LSI.
• Keyword analysis gets a lot better. Google gets better at recognizing synonyms using LSI.

2004 January – Austin

Austin followed up on Florida continuing to clean up spammy SEO practices, and push unworthy sites out of the first pages of search results.
What changed?

• Invisible text took another hit
• Meta-tag stuffing was a target
• FFA (Free for all) link farms no longer provided benefit

Many SEOs also speculated that this had been a change to Hilltop, a page rank algorithm that had been around since 1998.

Additional Reading:

• SEJ – The Latest Update On Austin

2003 Google Algorithm Updates

2003 November 16 – Florida

Google’s Florida update rolled out on November 16, 2003 and targeted spammy seo practices such as keyword stuffing. Many sites that were trying to game the search engine algorithms instead of serve users also fell in the rankings.

 

Additional Reading:

 

• SEW – What Happened to My Site on Google?

2003 September – Supplemental Index

Google split their index into main and supplemental. The goal was to increase the number of pages/content that Google could crawl and index. The supplemental index had less restrictions on indexing pages. Pages from the supplemental index would only be shown if there were very few good results from the main index to display for a search.

When the supplemental index was introduced some people viewed being relegated to the supplemental index as a penalty or search results “purgatory”.

Google retired the supplemental index tag in 2007, but has never said that they retired the supplemental index itself. That being said it’s open knowledge that Google maintains multiple indices, so it is within the realm of reason that the supplemental index may still be one of them. While the label dissapeared, many wonder if the supplemental index has continued to exist and morphed into what we see today as “omitted results”Sites found they were able to move from the supplemental index to the main index by acquiring more backlinks.

Additional Reading:

• Cognitive SEO – Omitted Results

2003 July – Fritz (Everflux)

In July, 2003 Google moved away from monthly index updates (often referred to as the google dance) to daily updates in which a portion of the index was updated daily. These regular updates came to be referred to as “everflux.”

2003 June – Esmerelda

Esmerelda was the last giant monthly index update before Google switched over to daily index updates.

2003 May – Dominic

Google’s Dominic update focused on battling spammy link practices.

2003 April – Cassandra

Google’s Cassandra update launched in April of 2003 and targeted spammy SEO practices including hidden text, heavily co-linked domains, and other low-link-quality practices.

Google began allowing banned sites to submit a reconsideration request after manual penalties in April of 2003.

Additional Reading:

• Google Blog – Hidden Text and Links

2003 February – Boston

Google’s first named update was Boston which rolled out in February of 2003. The Google Boston Update improved algorithms related to analyzing a site’s backlink data.

2002 Google Algorithm Updates

2002 September – 1st Documented Update

Google’s first documented search algorithm update happened on September 1, 2002. It was also the kickoff of “Google Dance” – large-scale monthly refreshes of Google’s search index.

SEOs were shocked by the update claiming “PageRank [is] DEAD”, this update was a little imperfect and included issues such as 404 pages showing up on the first page of search.

Additional Reading:

• Search Engine Showdown – Google Dance Begins

2000 Google Search Updates

2000 December – Google Toolbar

Google launches their search toolbar for browsers. The toolbar highlights search terms within webpage copy, and allowed users to search within websites that didn’t have their own site search.

Additional Reading:

• Google Toolbar

 

The post Google Algorithm Update History 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.