Common Mobile-Friendly Issues That Need to Be Corrected

Common Mobile-Friendly Issues That Need to Be Corrected

Apr 4, 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes
Common Mobile-Friendly Issues That Need to Be Corrected

We’ve been hearing for a while now that mobile-friendliness is a must for any website. It’s vital for anyone who wants their website to rank well with search engines because Google has been using a mobile-first approach since 2018, which means that it indexes the mobile version of a website first over the desktop version.

Despite the importance of mobile-friendliness for SEO, there are still some common mistakes that people are making with their websites.

What Is a Good Page Speed for SEO?

Page speed is one of the most important mobile-friendly factors for SEO. This is because how fast your website loads plays a major role in the first impression your users get of your site. If your site takes too long to load on a mobile device, then users won’t have the patience to stick around and wait for it to finish loading. The optimal page speed is three seconds or less. It’s at four seconds that users start to tap away.

How Do I Optimize Images for SEO?

Image optimization is also important for SEO. If images are too large, they’re not very user-friendly. No user wants to spend ages scrolling through massive images that they can’t see in their entirety because they’re larger than the size of a smartphone’s screen. When optimizing for mobile, your images should be an appropriate size for the size of the screen on which users will be viewing them. Decreasing image size will also decrease the amount of bandwidth the images use when loading, which also improves your page load speed.

What Size Should Font Be on Mobile?

Readability also plays a vital role in making a website mobile-friendly. If your users can’t read your content because it’s too big, too small, or even just poorly written, they’re not going to stay on your website for long. The font should be around 16 pixels, which is readable without forcing users to zoom in and out a lot. 

What Is High-Quality Content?

Don’t forget that readability doesn’t just mean how the content looks but also includes the content’s substance. If your content is too industry-specific, you’re excluding a lot of readers. If your sentences are too long or difficult to understand, that also decreases the readability of your content. High-quality content doesn’t just provide users with useful information or information that they want to read. It’s also content that is easily readable to a larger number of people. When it comes to SEO, readability plays a large role in how well your site ranks.

Is My Web Page Mobile-Friendly?

The best way to know if your site is mobile-friendly is to ask Google. Google has a Mobile-Friendly Test Tool that will let you know the status of your web page. All you have to do is enter a URL into the tool’s box and after a few minutes, the tool will let you know whether or not your web page is mobile-friendly. Google’s tool will also let you know about any issues it finds that make your web page not mobile-friendly so you can address them.

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SEO in 2022

SEO in 2022

Jan 3, 2022

Reading Time: 3 minutes
SEO in 2022
As we leave 2021 behind us and move into the new year, it’s important to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Things change as Google makes updates and tweaks to its algorithm and the new year is a good time to start fresh. Check out these trends that are likely to play a major role in SEO in 2022.

Is EAT Still Important in 2022?

EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Together, these three factors function as one of the most important ranking factors. Google’s aim is to provide users with the most relevant and useful websites possible based on their search query. The greater your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, the more relevant and useful Google will see your site, and therefore, the higher your site will rank on SERPs.

What Is EAT?

EAT is such an important part of SEO that it bears repeating. If you’re not already focused on EAT, you should be.

  • Expertise – show your expertise with accurate, in-depth information
  • Authority – show your authority with high-quality citations of your content
  • Trustworthiness – show your trustworthiness by having good brand perception with high standards for quality content

All three of these are important, but authority may be the most difficult to obtain because it requires others to link to your site. In 2022, a content promotion campaign can help to draw awareness to your content and, so long as your content is high-quality, encourage the links and social media shares that will boost your authority.

How Important Is Link-Building in 2022?

Link-building remains an important part of SEO as we move into 2022. Link-building, as long as the links in question are high-quality links, will help to improve your website’s authority. This, in turn, will help to boost your rankings. On top of that, the more people that link to your site, the more opportunities there are for people to find your content.

Is It Still Necessary to Optimize for Desktop?

Google has been using a mobile-first optimization approach for many years now in order to encourage people to make their websites more mobile-friendly. This was important because so many people were starting to use mobile devices for searching. However, that doesn’t mean that desktop computers should be ignored, either. User experience for all users, whether mobile or desktop, is important for SEO.

Should You Optimize for Voice Search?

In 2022, if you haven’t already optimized for voice search, you should strongly consider doing so. Voice search is becoming more and more common as users take advantage of voice search capabilities and AI like Siri and Alexa. With each year, voice search optimization becomes more important. To optimize for voice search, focus on longer key phrases, especially in the form of questions. Most people use voice search in a conversational way, asking questions of the AI like they would another person.

What SEO Mistakes Should You Avoid in 2022?

Google gets smarter and smarter every year about punishing websites for black hat SEO tactics. These are shady tactics that prioritize gaming search engines over the experience of actual Internet users. Things like keyword stuffing, ad-heavy sites, pop-up ads, low-quality link schemes, duplicate content, videos that automatically start playing, and more are all examples of things to avoid. Think about what you as a user find annoying when visiting websites.

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How to Optimize for the Featured Snippet

How to Optimize for the Featured Snippet

Oct 8, 2021

Reading Time: 2 minutes
How to Optimize for the Featured Snippet (1)

The Featured Snippet on Google’s SERP (search engine results page), often referred to as position #0, is the new #1 slot. Millions of Google searches return results with a Featured Snippet on the SERP, which means that it’s something you should aim for in your SEO strategy. But how do you properly optimize your content for the Featured Snippet?

How Does Keyword Research Impact the Featured Snippet?

Keyword research is important in SEO for a variety of reasons, but it’s also vital to ranking as the Featured Snippet. Keyword research is how you discover where your Featured Snippet opportunities are. The goal is to find out which keyword searches have a Featured Snippet in the results. Keywords that don’t return a Featured Snippet shouldn’t be abandoned, however, as you can still aim for the #1 spot.

How High Do You Have to Rank to Get the Featured Snippet?

Featured Snippets are pulled from the top ten search results. If you’re not on the first page of the SERP, then you won’t have a shot at getting the Featured Snippet. To start, you can focus on trying to get the Featured Snippet with keywords you already rank highly on. For other keywords, you should focus first on getting onto the first page because you try going after the Featured Snippet.

How Do I Write a Featured Snippet?

The Featured Snippet isn’t just your overall web page ranking highly. You can be the #1 result on the SERP and still not be the Featured Snippet. Your page needs to have what is called snippet bait. Snippet bait is a paragraph, table, or list formatted for being the Featured Snippet. Take a look at the existing Featured Snippets for your target keywords. You can use these for inspiration when it comes to the size and type of content that looks good as a Featured Snippet.

What Is Snippet Bait?

Snippet bait is a paragraph, list, or table that’s designed to be a Featured Snippet. To create one, create a subheader on your page that is a question that includes the keywords you’re targeting. Then, in the paragraph below the header, answer that question as concisely as you can. Snippet bait should be a part of a larger web page rather than a web page on its own. One webpage can actually have multiple snippet baits so long as they fit well with the overall topic of the page.

How Does Google Choose the Featured Snippet?

There isn’t someone working for Google whose job is to read through all of the contenders and choose the perfect Featured Snippet. Instead, Featured Snippets are chosen automatically by Google’s algorithm. Typically, the algorithm is looking for a specific answer to a particular query. For example, if the search query is a question, the Featured Snippet would be a concise paragraph, list, or table that accurately answered that question. For this reason, you should look for opportunities to answer questions that include your target keywords.

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Taking Your Website’s Temperature: The Vitals that Google Looks for to Measure User Experience

Taking Your Website’s Temperature: The Vitals that Google Looks for to Measure User Experience

Jul 2, 2021

Reading Time: 3 minutes
The Vitals that Google Looks for to Measure User Experience
User experience is very important to Google. Even from the earliest days of the company’s history, Google sought to improve user experience online. Its algorithm updates have all been to that effect, to stop website owners from manipulating the system at the expense of Internet users (so-called Black Hat SEO tactics).

 

Now, websites that offer a better user experience tend to rank higher than those that don’t. But how does Google know that users have a good experience on one website and a bad experience on another? What does it use to measure user experience?

What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Just like humans have vital signs that provide signals to doctors about a patient’s well-being, so do websites. These Core Web Vitals are signals to Google that a website is offering a good user experience (or not). As of May 2021, these Core Web Vitals an official part of Google’s ranking factors, so it’s important for webmasters to pay attention to them.

These Core Web Vitals are:

  • Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
  • First input delay (FID)
  • Largest contentful paint (LCP)

What Is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)?

Cumulative layout shift (CLS) occurs when content on a webpage shifts position. It happens when the content of a webpage isn’t loading in a synchronized manner. CLS can also occur when new content is loaded on top of existing content. It’s annoying to users because they may lose their place while reading your content or because a link they were about to click on has moved.

What Is First Input Delay (FID)?

First Input Delay (FID), is a measure of how quickly your website responds to an action from a user. For example, if a user clicks on a link, FID measures how long it takes to load the page that link leads to. A good FID score is 100 milliseconds or fewer. If a web page takes a long time to process a user’s action, that user may leave the website.

What Is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric that measures how long it takes for a webpage to load the largest object on the page. This largest object could be an image, a video, or a block of text. If this object takes a long time to load, a user can’t start enjoying the content on the page and may therefore click away.

What Other Vital Signals Does Google Use to Measure UX?

These three core vital signs aren’t the only signals Google looks for when it comes to measuring user experience. Google also looks for:

  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Safe browsing (no malware)
  • HTTPS (not HTTP)
  • Lack of pop-ups

Google also measures your click-through and bounce rates. If there’s something not in either list above that affects user experience negatively, users will click off your site, increasing your bounce rate, which in turn negatively affects your SERP rankings. 

Think of your own experiences as a user on the Internet. Try to emulate websites that you liked, on which you easily found what you were looking for and where the content was informative. Try to avoid features that you found annoying or that made you want to click away.

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