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3 Things You Can Do Today to Make Your Magento Website More SEO-Friendly

May 5, 2019

If your e-commerce store is on Magento, then you probably already know it’s arguably the most powerful, most customizable shopping cart platform out there. The trade-off, of course, is that Magento is not very intuitive, and while it has the potential for strong technical SEO, its out-of-the-box settings are far from optimal. Here we’ll cover a few quick things you can quickly implement today on your Magento e-commerce website to boost your store’s SEO. Note that these recommendations apply to both Magento 1.X and 2.X installations.

1. Canonical Tags

Canonical tags tell search engines what the original, representative page is supposed to be for any given piece(s) of content. It’s imperative that you use canonical tags to prevent the duplicate content situations that Magento’s default settings are prone to creating. Out of the box, Magento has canonical tags disabled and also has many different URL parameters – most for specifying and sorting categories – that are crawled and potentially indexed. This creates thousands of possible permutations of similar or even identical pages – a duplicate content nightmare! Another common problem is that Magento automatically generates multiple URL’s for a single product based on which categories that product resides in. A canonical tag tells the crawler that for any set of similar pages, the specified canonical URL is the single representative page for that content. Thankfully, enabling canonical tags for categories and products in Magento couldn’t be easier. Simply go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations and set both Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories and Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products to “Yes”. Then save the configuration.

magento canonical tags

Bonus – How to manually add a canonical URL tag to any page:

The above setting does not apply to CMS pages, and there may be instances where you want a category or product to canonicalize to a different URL, in which case you’ll need to define the tag manually by going to the Design tab on any page and entering the following in the Layout Update XML section, replacing “YOUR URL” with the URL on your website:

<reference name=”head”>
<action method=”addLinkRel”>
<rel>canonical</rel>
<href>YOUR URL</href>
</action>
</reference>

Save the page, and go check the head section in the source code for the page you just edited (note that you may have to clear the Magento cache and/or your browser cache to see the changes reflected) and look for a snippet that looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="YOUR URL" />

2. Robots.txt

A website’s robots.txt file contains directives that tell web crawlers which URL’s they should not access. Again, this is useful for safeguarding against all the potential duplicate content issues described above, as well as blocking things like Magento system files and checkout pages that could potentially be crawled and indexed. You can also set crawl delays in the robots.txt file if necessary. Magento’s default robots.txt file is empty, which is not ideal.

Here is the robots.txt file we wrote up for our client frogg toggs®, which is also shown below. Note that some of your category URL parameters will not be the same as the ones we’ve used. We aimed to block crawlers from Magento system directories and files, in-site search results pages, customer account pages, any URL’s with session ID’s appended, URL’s with the aforementioned query parameters used for category sorting and filtering, and any default non-SEO-friendly URL patterns. With the extensive product catalog that frogg toggs® has, these directives help eliminate tens of thousands of pages from being crawled that would be seen as duplicate content, and prevent sensitive pages and files from being indexed in search engines.

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
 
# Directories
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /phpserver/
Disallow: /setup/
Disallow: /update/
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /vendor/
 
# Paths
Disallow: /*index.php
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/
Disallow: /control/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customize/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /order-status/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /wishlist/ 
 
# Files
Disallow: /composer.json
Disallow: /composer.lock
Disallow: /CONTRIBUTING.md
Disallow: /CONTRIBUTOR_LICENSE_AGREEMENT.html
Disallow: /COPYING.txt
Disallow: /Gruntfile.js
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /nginx.conf.sample
Disallow: /package.json
Disallow: /php.ini.sample
Disallow: /RELEASE_NOTES.txt 
 
# Session IDs
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*?SID=
 
# Sorted and filtered categories
Disallow: /*?dir
Disallow: /*?limit
Disallow: /*?mode
Disallow: /*?lifestyle
Disallow: /*?order
Disallow: /*?series
Disallow: /*?price
Disallow: /*?q
Disallow: /*?size
Disallow: /*?color
Disallow: /*?trueweight 
 
# CVS, SVN directory and dump files
Disallow: /*.CVS
Disallow: /*.Zip$
Disallow: /*.Svn$
Disallow: /*.Idea$
Disallow: /*.Sql$
Disallow: /*.Tgz$

3. Disable category paths for product URL’s

By default, Magento includes categories in product URL’s. This becomes a problem when a single product resides in multiple categories. For example, if our product “Widget” is in both the “Blue” category and the “Red” category, the system will generate 2 different URL’s that look something like this:

Yourstore.com/blue/widget
Yourstore.com/red/widget

Both of those URL’s would resolve to the same page, which is an example of duplicate content. To preemptively prevent this, we want the system to strip the category from the product URL before it’s generated, resulting in a URL that looks like:

Yourstore.com/widget

To do this, simply go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations and set Use Categories Path for Product URLs to “No”.

magento category path in url setting

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here. Go check it out.

6 Reasons Why You Should Be Using an Affiliate Marketing Program (and 3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t)

May 5, 2019

Affiliate marketing can be an extremely cost-effective way to boost conversions by tapping into a previously undiscovered stream of warm leads, but is it a good strategy for your business?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing — sometimes called performance marketing — essentially means hiring people to bring you customers, and only having to pay them when a conversion happens. For example, you might get a $100 sale on your e-commerce website, and the affiliate may get $5 of that. To get an idea of the power of affiliate marketing, check out these stats:

  • Affiliates reportedly account for a massive 40 percent of Amazon’s $100 billion in annual sales.
  • Forrester Consulting estimates that U.S. affiliate marketing spend will grow by 10 percent in the next five years and reach $6.8 billion.
  • Over 80 percent of advertisers use some form of affiliate marketing.
  • Affiliate programs generate over 20 percent of an advertiser’s online sales on average.
  • The ShareASale affiliate network has more than 1 million affiliate accounts registered.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

  • Create your own in-house affiliate program manually, or use a popular affiliate network like CJ Affiliate, Rakuten Affiliate Network (formerly Rakuten LinkShare) or ShareASale. These networks connect businesses (called advertisers or merchants) and affiliates (called publishers) who want to earn commission by promoting products.
  • Solicit, review and approve affiliate applications. Affiliate networks have tools for auto-approval (or auto-rejection) based on certain criteria, or you can manually vet each one.
  • Approved affiliates promote your products or services on their website, blog, social channels, etc. and link to a page on your website using their uniquely tagged affiliate link URL.
  • If a sale is made, the affiliate is paid the predetermined commission on that sale, which all happens automatically when you use a network.
how to set up an affiliate marketing program

Why Use Affiliate Marketing?

1. Cost-Effectiveness

Affiliate marketing may be the most cost-effective form of advertising since you’re only paying for results. Once you figure out ongoing operating costs, it is fundamentally impossible for your affiliate program to operate at a loss because you know your cost per acquisition from the start.

2. Sales

An affiliate program allows you to tap into potential sources of traffic and revenue that you would otherwise not be getting. This is especially true of physical products, for which affiliates can do product review blog posts or videos, for example.

3. Brand Awareness

Not only can affiliates drive sales for you, but they can also boost brand awareness simply by reaching a larger audience and increasing your traffic and exposure. Even if visitors don’t buy anything, they may sign up for your newsletter — that means you’re growing your email list for free and can potentially get a sale by marketing to those visitors in the future. You can even drive offline conversions via something like an in-store voucher through the affiliate program, or you can drive consumers to offline retailers if you don’t sell direct.

4. SEO Value

Publishers (the affiliates) link to your website to send traffic your way. Provided they aren’t spammy, these links are usually beneficial for your off-page SEO efforts, since inbound links are a huge factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.

5. The “Industry” Is Growing

As previously mentioned, U.S. affiliate marketing spend is expected to grow 10 percent over the next five years to $6.8 billion, fueled by the enormous growth of e-commerce and social media.

6. Customer Data

Using an affiliate program provides you with valuable data and insight into how, where and why your customers are buying, which you can then use to make smarter marketing decisions in the future across other channels.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Obviously, you want to jump in immediately and add affiliate marketing to your online sales arsenal.

Hold your horses.

There are a few reasons why you may not want to do that …

1. Time

The initial setup and implementation of a successful, fully developed affiliate program takes some time. Similarly, huge results from affiliate marketing do not happen overnight; it is a long-term investment. Thinking it’s a one-time, set-and-forget strategy is the wrong approach. Affiliate marketing can provide massive results, but only if you’re willing to put in the time.

2. Cost

Beyond your time and patience, affiliate marketing implementation requires resources. Having a fully developed program dictates that you design creative and sales materials to provide to your affiliates, write guidelines and tip sheets, help those who may be less tech-savvy, alert affiliates to new products and promotions, etc. Once your program grows, you’ll also probably find it necessary to hire an actual program manager to run it. This, of course, doesn’t include the cost of commission to both the network/platform and the affiliates, which needs to be high enough to incentivize publishers to sign up for your program and promote your products.

3. Loss of Control

In a sense, you lose some control of your product and your brand when you take on affiliates. They will promote in different ways that may not necessarily fit your brand’s image or values (though, don’t be too concerned about this; the data doesn’t bear out brands’ usual fears here). A blogger may feature your brand alongside four others. It may be hard to monitor and control what affiliates are doing at all times, especially for a larger program.

It’s important that you establish thorough guidelines and rules for your program from the start, such as linking protocols, whether or not to let affiliates bid on your brand terms in PPC ads, and not allowing affiliates to create websites and content that mimic your own. Without strict guidelines and legal terms and conditions, advertisers can potentially be held liable for the actions of their affiliates, especially when proper disclosures aren’t in place. More on that below.

Affiliate Marketing vs. “Influencer Marketing”

There are some key differences between affiliate marketing and the new world of so-called “influencer marketing” with “brand ambassadors.” Influencer marketing, born with the rise of social media, refers to finding and reaching out to individuals you deem to be “influencers” in your space — bloggers, vloggers, journalists, experts, etc. — who have a strong online presence in your target market and who fit your brand well. By partnering with influencers, brands hope to increase exposure and subsequent sales via the influencers’ followings.

First, let’s discuss post-implementation cost. As you now know, an affiliate only gets paid when a conversion occurs, e.g. earning a commission on a sale on an e-commerce website. Influencers, however, are usually paid a flat monthly fee to promote the brand by using free merchandise from the advertiser, with no guarantees of performance. This can be a huge risk for advertisers who may see no return on their influencer investment, whereas performance-based affiliate marketing is considered to be very low-risk.

Then, there’s tracking to consider. From the advertiser’s perspective, it can be hard to measure meaningful analytics from influencer marketing. You’re mostly relying on referral traffic statistics to arrive at some sort of useful interpretation of whether or not that particular influencer has grown the awareness of your brand. It’s almost necessary to have full access to the influencer’s own analytics for their publishing platforms.

On the other hand, affiliate marketing provides a more robust framework for tracking, measuring and drawing reliable conclusions about ROI, since affiliates use unique tracking IDs appended to their affiliate link URLs when driving traffic to your site. You could, for example, compare conversion rate and average order value between affiliate traffic and organic search traffic, or see which affiliate is responsible for the most conversions. (Sometimes, a handful of “super affiliates” can be responsible for 50-70 percent of the entire program’s conversions.) Of course, you can use both forms simultaneously. Influencers are generally used more for brand awareness strategy, whereas affiliates primarily drive new sales. Get the best of both worlds by using them together.

Don’t forget about FTC regulations! The government agency has begun cracking down on brands that don’t enforce disclosure of an incentive-driven relationship between the advertiser and the publisher. This applies to both influencers and affiliates, and in the past it has been fairly common for neither group to disclose the proper information. However, influencers seem to be even less aware of the rules than affiliates. In these situations, the advertiser, not the influencer or affiliate, incurs the wrath of the FTC in the form of penalties, fines and bad press. One need only look at the Lord & Taylor fiasco from last year to see that this can indeed be a serious issue. The FTC charged that the brand “deceived consumers by paying for native advertisements … and Instagram pictures.”

Google also began to suggest that publishers should be “nofollow”-ing links to advertisers, or else the publisher’s site could get hit with a Google penalty. This can all be avoided by establishing clear guidelines, staying up to date with FTC disclosure laws (and vehemently enforcing those disclosures), and prohibiting misrepresentation of your endorsements.

Is an affiliate program right for your business? Only you can decide. Break out the ol’ pro/con list. One of the easiest ways for you to determine whether or not it’s a good idea is by checking to see if any of your competitors have one and seeing what commission they’re offering. Simply look for a link in their website’s footer that says something like “Affiliates” or “Become an Affiliate.”

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here. Go check it out.

The Case Against Keyword Rankings

May 1, 2019

Why they don’t reflect SEO success, and the superior stats that do…

Get out the shovel and your funeral attire. Let’s put keyword rankings reports down to rest forever. Clients famously love to ask, “Why am I [not] ranking on page [insert arbitrary page number] in Google for [insert arbitrary keyword phrase]?” – without realizing the flawed methodology in their cursory self-audit. The number of times I’ve had to explain to clients why keyword rankings aren’t really important would suggest that my job title should be crisis manager. Here, we’ll examine why individual keyword rank is largely an unreliable, un-actionable metric, and investigate some superior statistics to use instead.

SEOs have always used keyword rankings reports, and clients have always wanted them. But, have we ever stopped to ask “why?” Thankfully, Google’s ranking algorithm updates over the past few years have sparked this question, along with more curiosity about whether or not keyword rankings reports are actually useful. Furthermore, agencies have begun dropping these reports, though the recent shift in philosophy can also be attributed to the simple fact that rankings reports have always inherently had shortcomings.

Keyword Rankings Are Meaningless

We know that the world of SEO is not a place for speaking in absolutes, yet I would argue that per se keyword rankings are meaningless. Whether or not your site ranks on the first page of Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) for “blue widgets” – and 20 related keywords, for that matter – may not affect your traffic and subsequent conversions at all. Where traffic and conversions (sales/revenue in an e-commerce setting) are the signals, keyword rankings are the noise.

I know the feeling. You’ve compiled a long list of “money” / “golden” / “long-tail” / “focus” keywords (SEOs like to use nouns as weird adjectives), you’ve uploaded them to your nifty rank tracking tool, and within a few months of optimizing your content for your new keywords, you’ve actually seen some decent rank improvement and your site is on the first page of the SERPs for some of them. Woohoo! Proud and satisfied, you open up your Google Analytics dashboard with a huge smile on your face to see the sweet fruit of your labor, only to have that smile turned upside down when you realize not one of those keywords has brought in a single visitor.

Intuitively, it makes sense. What good is a #1 ranking for a particular keyword if it in no way contributes to your website’s traffic and conversions? The best way to start this conversation is with an illustrative example: The Brandon Agency’s own website ranks all over the first page of the Google SERPs for the long-tail keyword phrase “accredited brand strategy agency south carolina,” yet it should be obvious that no one is searching for this term. (We call this having zero search volume.) We are not getting any traffic from it, and we likely never will get any traffic from it. Showing a client an example like this is a good way to get them to begin understanding why their arbitrarily-thought-up keywords, and the rankings thereof, are usually of zero importance.

Keyword Rankings Are Unreliable

Not only are keyword rankings useless, they are also unreliable. Things like history-based personalized search, location, device type, CTR and auto-suggested searches, all of which influence and dynamically change a user’s search results, make keyword rankings extremely volatile and impossible to accurately derive. Those things combined with the fact that different tools use different rank-tracking methodologies mean you will never know the true rank for a particular keyword anyway, rendering any sort of comparison (even a comparison to competitors’ rankings) or meaningful interpretation impossible.

Moreover, Google’s ranking algorithm – called Hummingbird – now contains hundreds of different factors. Speculation on the cause of any sort of rank change is just that and can be likened to attempting to explain why an individual stock’s value will rise or fall in the immediate future.

Alternative, Superior Metrics to Use

If clients insist on seeing keyword rankings reports, I’ll oblige, but not without attempting to educate them on why they don’t mean much and giving them a huge grain of salt to take with them. This seeming obsession over keyword rankings is largely a philosophical and educational problem: “SEO” and “keyword rankings” unfortunately seem to be – and have historically been – inextricably linked in clients’ and even agencies’ minds. It is the job of SEOs to compensate for this phenomenon by explaining its futility and by introducing superior stats to use instead of keyword rankings. Simply telling clients ad nauseam that rankings don’t matter isn’t enough; SEOs must strive to offer alternative solutions that are more meaningful, impactful and actionable. So, let’s unpack those:

  • Organic Search Traffic Minus Brand Name – The first of our alternative metrics, this one looks at traffic from search queries (keywords that are actually bringing traffic to your website are specifically called “search queries”) that don’t include the brand’s name. This aggregates all non-branded keywords and provides a single number to track that will hopefully increase, meaning your SEO efforts are expanding the “reach” of your organic SERP listings. Specifically, for this metric to rise in value, your website would be ranking higher for existing search queries and/or your website would be showing up in the SERPs for more search queries. To get this metric, pull your organic search query traffic data from Search Console and sum up the clicks from queries that don’t include the brand name. The reason we don’t include branded searches here, of course, is that the brand will almost always rank #1 for a query containing its own name, and brand awareness is usually driven by other channels like social media, PR, and email marketing. Note that this metric can be very useful internally but still does not provide much insight for the client in an external report.
  • Keyword Groups – Building upon the metric above, you can segment those non-branded search queries into content-specific groupings. For example, if you sell shirts on your website, you could have keyword groups for different types of shirts – button-downs, polos, T-shirts, etc. – and track the change in traffic by group. Drill down as much or as little as you want, and this will give you an idea of which content groups are the most popular and which ones need some work. You may already have these groupings based on your PPC ad groups or campaigns.
  • Organic Search Traffic by Landing Page – Continuing on the shirts example, if your category page for button-downs has many different button-down-related search queries that bring in traffic, simply track the number of visitors landing on that page from organic search.
  • Conversions from Organic Search – While you can’t get reliable data for conversions at the search query level, we can look at conversions that originated from organic search in Google Analytics. You can also compare conversion rate across channels, and conversions and conversion rate by landing page.
  • Revenue, Average Order Value, and Revenue Per Visitor – Specifically for e-commerce, some important metrics to look at are obviously revenue, average order value and revenue per visitor. You can segment these by channel and look at how the organic search channel’s contribution compares to that of other channels, and you can also drill down on these to specific landing pages. Moreover, other oft-forgotten aspects of SEO are intrinsically intertwined with the above metrics: page load speed, user experience, content organization, etc., all of which obviously affect conversions, but all of which also happen to affect rankings.

SEO campaigns and the success or failure thereof need to be measured by traffic and conversions, not keyword rankings. Using per se rankings as an actual KPI is dead. An unfortunate lack of understanding of this simple concept has led many to view SEO as snake oil (think of all the spam emails you get promising #1 rankings) and has incidentally resulted in a lot of headache for SEOs from clients that could have been avoided with the proper education. Tracking actual traffic-generating search queries and their resulting conversions will yield much more significant, actionable data than keyword rankings.

This blog post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency’s blog here. Go check it out.

8 Important SEO Trends to Watch in 2018 and How to Capitalize on Them

May 1, 2019

seo trends 2018

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. New ranking factors emerge, old ones drop off, and the ones in between shift in importance. As Google, Bing and the rest attempt to improve their search results and drive ad revenue, here are 8 trends – and predictions thereof – that you can expect to see over the next year in Search. Presented complete with tips on how to prepare for and capitalize on them, all of these should dictate your SEO and digital marketing strategies.

1.  Mobile can no longer be ignored.

Google’s “mobile-first index” will necessitate mobile-focused design more than ever before, with desktop design becoming secondary. Website owners can no longer ignore mobile-friendly website design as it relates to SEO. Moreover, as people increasingly access websites and applications from smartphones and tablets, and as more of those websites and apps become more accessible, desktop traffic will continue to decline. Thankfully, content management systems like WordPress and e-commerce platforms like Shopify make responsive design relatively easy.

2.  Good user experience (UX) will mean good SEO.

Google has made it abundantly clear that its focus is on the user. Good UX obviously helps delight visitors and improve conversions, but good UX will begin to unequivocally mean good SEO as the Hummingbird algorithm and specifically the machine-learning piece called RankBrain get better at reading “user signals” like bounce rate and time on page. SEO specialists and website owners should be tracking these “signals” in Google Analytics both sitewide and for individual landing pages.

Content, design, landing page relevance and load speed will all fall under this user experience umbrella. Landing Page Quality Score, the oft-forgotten piece of a good AdWords campaign and a measure of what Google terms “experience,” also relates to this. In a general sense, it is imperative that SEO specialists work closely with web developers to improve these things and enhance UX as much as possible. Website owners should do regular usability testing, website speed testing and user behavior tracking to ensure they’re accomplishing that goal. Similarly, business owners should only hire developers who have verifiable knowledge of these SEO and UX concepts.

3.  Content will continue to be king.

As Google’s Hummingbird algorithm increasingly places a higher value on good user experience, relevant, well-researched, high-quality, long-form content will be crucial to SEO and SEM success, and will be the cornerstone of a solid 2018 SEO strategy. The aforementioned user signals like bounce rate and time on page further emphasize the need for good content. I would even guess that these user signals will likely be weighted more on mobile views.

We’re already seeing indications that traditional factors like keyword density and keywords in title tags, header tags, etc. will become less important than they have been in the past. The chart below from SEMrush’s study illustrates the fact that user-signal importance is on the rise. Website owners must take every opportunity to offer the visitor truly valuable content in as many forms as possible, from actual written copy to images to videos to interactive tools.

semrush ranking factors

 

4.  Voice search will grow as digital assistants become more accessible.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve definitely heard about the rise of voice search. As more people utilize Alexa, Cortana, Siri and other digital assistants, more queries will be asked by voice rather than with typed words. I think search queries will mostly be actual specific questions, e.g. “How do I pay my phone bill?” or “Which airline offers the cheapest direct flight from NYC to LA?” (Note that Google already has a rich result for the latter!)

This means SEO specialists need to hone in on long-tail keywords and create custom informative landing pages to handle these types of queries. Extending that argument, I suspect as digital assistants and the search engines they utilize are better able to parse and deliver relevant results for more of these voice queries, the length and types of voice queries will evolve as users realize they can use increasingly complex and detailed queries, assuming the results provided are satisfactory (i.e. that they effectively “answer” the user’s query). And since machine learning will be increasingly incorporated into the technologies of both the assistants and the search engines, it may not take long for that to happen.

I’m very much hoping that Analytics and Search Console will separate out voice queries and “traditional” typed queries in the near future, but Google may hold onto that data for a while before releasing it to website owners. Keyword research tools will hopefully begin to incorporate suggested voice queries that people are more likely to use, which should drive content and landing page strategy. This again relates to creating high-quality content in that these landing pages should be relevant to the user’s query and should match the user’s intent.

5.  “SERP Features” / “Featured Snippets” / “Rich Results” will grow in scope.

The SERP landscape is changing. While there seems to be a new name every week for “rich” data, we’ll see more of Google’s “rich results” in 2018. Google wants to feed you more information directly (think local pack, knowledge graph, featured snippets, etc.) in the SERP and do away with – or at least diminish the presence of – third-party data aggregators.

Nearly 30% of all search queries on Google now have featured snippets, and that figure is expected to increase rapidly, so structured data markup and Google’s ability to parse it will be more important going forward, especially in regard to personalized SERPs. SERP features should also inform content strategy, such as FAQ pages with answers to specific questions. This also means the structure and format of content is now just as important as its substance.

Similarly, local SEO via creating location pages, optimizing your local business listings/citations and maintaining consistent NAP data across platforms will be imperative to achieving top placement in the local pack.

6.  Page load speed will be an increasingly important factor.

Again, good UX will equal good SEO as Google pushes for improved user experience. People hate waiting. It’s 2018; users demand and expect a fast-loading web page, and the search engines realize this. I imagine every fraction of a second slower than Google’s benchmark for any particular page will result in a penalty factor, albeit small, being applied to that page’s rank, relative to the speeds of competing pages for any given query.

Speed will also become more important for conversions, with visitors bouncing if a page is too slow. When Walmart realized its e-commerce website wasn’t the fastest, it employed a dedicated team to tackle speed optimization. The illustrations below speak for themselves and are a compelling case for load speed optimization. Namely, speed drastically affects conversion rate, and speed and bounce rate are strongly correlated.

walmart-2.png#asset:7499walmart-5.png#asset:7500

GTmetrix is a good tool to use to examine the speed of your website; it provides speed scores and tips on how to improve them.

7.  Website security will be more significant.

Similarly, Google is also looking at website security as a ranking factor. Websites must get an SSL certificate and deliver content over a secure protocol (HTTPS). The Chrome browser has already implemented a warning label in the address bar for sites serving content or transmitting/receiving data over an insecure connection. This label will also appear when a user begins typing data into a field on an HTTP page (see screenshots below). For secure sites, Chrome displays a green lock icon and a “Secure” message. Thankfully, hosting platforms are making it easier and cheaper than ever to install and configure SSL certificates to achieve this goal.

chrome not secure message

chrome not secure data entry

 

8.  Links are still a major ranking factor.

Backlinks are and will continue to be a major ranking factor, even though Google likes to deny that fact. I think “implied links” – brand mentions without an actual hyperlink – will become a ranking factor. Business owners must utilize PR and Social Media efforts to reach out and engage consumers to both build brand authority/trust and ascertain links. Ideally, those links would come from a relevant, authoritative page and would be contextual and anchored.

2018 will be an interesting year for SEO. While traditional techniques are still effective, SEO specialists must embrace new ranking factors and subsequent new technologies in order to increase traffic and conversions. With the rise of structured data presentation, user signals and other CTR-influencing items, ranking well per se is no longer the only goal.

 

This post originally appeared on The Brandon Agency‘s blog here. Go check it out.

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