Daily SEO Tips

Send us Fan Mail

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today

With desktop-only content being dropped from Google's index by March 2021, and the fact that web core vitals will be a ranking factor in 2021, the SEO community is working hard to benchmark their site’s mobile usability and performance and create a plan for improvement. 

Now you can check your site’s mobile usability issues inside Google Search Console in the mobile usability report and there are plenty of tools on the market that will let you check mobile site speed, including tools like the new site speed comparison tool at Sandbox Web. It allows you to view the top results for a given query to see if you can see any patterns with page load speed for top ranking URLs. Super handy!

However, I’m interested in tools that can check sites for mobile usability issues in bulk. I’ve found a set that will let you check 50 - a couple hundred URLs or so, and that shortlist I’ve created includes: 

• https://www.experte.com/pagespeed
• https://batchspeed.com
• https://dashdash.com
• https://technicalseo.com/tools/mobile-friendly

So how about larger sites?

You can also look at the mobile rendered version of your site if you turn on JS rendering in Screaming Frog prior to your crawl, but it doesn’ export any sort of report that is helpful. 

You can use Deepcrawl, which will check to see if a mobile viewport is set, and that will find *some* of the issues, but I’ve seen clients just re-size their desktop into a mobile viewport and the text is still set for desktop - so too small to see and *not* clickable via a thumb. 

So IF you know of a tool that addresses this issue, please let me know.

However, your tip for today is to make sure that you don’t have any mobile usability issues - check inside Google Search Console and spot check using some of the tools above. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

Send us Fan Mail

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

I stumbled upon a few interesting SEO resources from Cloudflare that I thought I would share. They seem like an interesting effort by Cloudflare to market to the SEO community to me, but both of these are free tools that provide insights that are hard to come by elsewhere.

First up - their free privacy-first web analytics offering, which includes Web Vitals diagnostics.

I think it’s worth exploring, since it's free - including for non-customers, though limited options for marketers. 

And then let’s talk about their WordPress plugin.

As a solution to the potentially less than ideal web core vital scores you see in their free analytics, you can work to improve it automatically with their WordPress plugin. They're calling it “Automatic Platform Optimization” and it uses their Cloudflare Workers to cache dynamic content. Check it out: Cloudflare plugin for WordPress.

Those are your tips for today. If you’re looking for a sitewide way to measure web core vitals, check out Cloudflare’s free web analytics, and if you’re on WordPress you should check out their new plugin.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

Send us Fan Mail

Google’s YouTube Content Planning Guide

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google published a Youtube content strategy guide, which has some great tips for YouTubers and podcasters. And it starts with - finding you “why” - an approach that I LOVE. It aligns well with the Google Human Rater Guidelines question, “what is the purpose of this page?”. And then it breaks down the three types of content you should think about creating for your channel (Hero, Help, and Hub content) and the frequency of each. 

Here’s more from their guide:

Hero content would be: 

• Published infrequently and usually built around a major event, moment, or idea.
• Focus on mass appeal topics that are of interest to the general public at a specific point in time
• The audience would-be viewers who may be unfamiliar with your organization or content.
• The goal for the content would be driving visibility of your content at a specific period in time and converting those viewers into long-term subscribers.

Help content would be:

• Published more often than Hero content but not necessarily on a regular basis.
• It would focus on evergreen topics targeted toward specific questions or areas.
• The audience would be broad and would appear to more casual viewers who do not normally engage with your channel.
• The goal would be to gain viewers and convert subscribers at a steady rate.

Hub content would be:

• More frequent -- your channel’s “bread and butter.”
• It would be focused on your existing subscriber base, plus those viewers who’ve been watching but haven’t subscribed.
• The goal would be to keep your audience coming back with steady, consistent content that appeals to their expectations and desires as well as provides a bank of content for new viewers to explore after subscribing.
• The content would be focused on sustainable, targeted content that appeals to your subscribers’ tastes and expectations.  Here Google suggests the following formats;
  
  
  • Weekly Coverage
  • Behind the Scenes
  • Interviews
  • Explainers
  • Q&A
  • Listicles
  • Collaborations
  • Live Streams

I love this breakdown of content as I don’t think brands think through how they should create content with different goals in mind AND targeted at the different entertainment focuses of each audience that might come across your channel. I’ve seen plenty of tips around optimizing your videos to be found via YouTube search, or using YouTube Analytics to figure out what works for your subscribers and creating more of that, but not this focus on making sure that you’re creating content that resonates with brand new people to your channel and to folks that casually check out your channel but haven’t yet subscribed.

So that’s your’ tip for today. If you’re creating video content (or podcast content) think through how you are going to serve these different audiences - the newly landed viewer, the casual viewer, and your subscribers.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

Send us Fan Mail

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Izzi Smith @izzionfire recently interviewed Fabrice Cancel of the Bing Crawling and Indexing Team and I wanted to share the tidbits that they picked up during the interview.

1. Click-through rate (CTR) can be used to determine relevance for a query (if a query is perceived to require clicks for satisfaction) and therefore will affect rankings.
2. Featured Snippet satisfaction can be measured by how it reduces a SERP's CTR. As an SEO I agree with Izzi that if you work hard to get clicks from YOUR Featured Snippet, which would drop the CTR on that SERP might increase your chances of losing that Featured Snippet slot). 
3. Links matter less for Bing than they do for other search engines
4. Bing is aiming to assist a shift in how webmasters get new/updated content crawled and indexed. Rather than crawling the web to discover changed content (which can be very inefficient), they wish to rely more on their easy-to-use indexing API. In fact, I covered how limited Bing’s crawling is in my post on optimizing for Bing’s voice search.
5. When it comes to proving that deleted/broken/old content should be removed from the index, for Bing, the process is sped up by simply 301'ing those URLs to the homepage, rather than providing a 404/410.  Bing also has a Content Removal Tool.

So those are your tips for today -- measure your SERP click-through rate (especially for images and videos), make it easier for Bing to discover your content, and read more on my blog about how Bing is different from Google in relation to discovery, indexing, and ranking.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode. 

Send us Fan Mail

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

While G4 is an expansion and re-branding of the App + Web Property that was launched last year. It’s now officially released and when you set up new GA accounts, it’s the default option when you set up a new property and Google recommends that you set up both property types in parallel.

Here are the crib notes:

• • This new GA tracking does not track page views and instead is build around an event structure.
  • It’s more like an enterprise analytics tool (Adobe) where you have to set up the dashboard views you want to see (vs them being there by default).
• It’s a major departure from the current Universal Analytics and will require new training, tracking, and reporting to be successfully implemented.
• Deeper integration with Google Ads.
• Tracks users across devices and across web/app.
• It can automatically alert marketers to data trends based on AI predictions.
• The new layout is organized around the customer lifecycle.
• Even tracking (page scrolls and video plays) are tracked without additional code.
• There are additional options to comply with GDPR and CCPA (delete a user’s data). 
• You can’t yet filter out your company’s (or consultants) traffic, or track cross-domain.
• It currently does not have a link with Google Search Console.

If you’re looking for a quick overview of the differences, I would recommend this video.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode.