Do you know much of your direct traffic is actually Google Discover?

Are you suspicious that your direct traffic might instead be Google Discover traffic? Learn more about how to get a sense of this in today's tip.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Unfortunately, Google Discover is recorded as “Direct” in your analytics, though you can add a filter to your Google organic traffic in Google Analytics to find out how much. You can go to your traffic report, flip to Google as your traffic source, add the secondary dimension of Direct Session, and add the following: “include” direct session containing “no.” 

If you line up your Discover reporting from Google Search Console and it matches direct spikes in Google Analytics - that’s probably the source of your direct traffic spike. Also, until last month, when a user opens a Chrome tab on Android or iOS to use Google Discover, it was *not* shown in the Google Search Console reporting, and now will be.

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. 

Topical expertise and ranking

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google’s John Mueller said they could recognize if a site has a good reputation on a specific topic area. Websites should work to build a reputation within a particular topic area. Additionally, I’ve seen via the various search algorithm updates over the years that being too broad topically for a website could be more challenging from a ranking perspective.

If you’re curious about your current topical authority, it turns out that you can get a sense of your topical authority by looking at topical citation flow in Majestic. Majestic looks at the backlink profile that your website has had based on the types of websites linking to you.

So that’s your quick tip for today. If you are working on a brand new website, you need to be aware that you will need to build your authority and expertise in a specific niche topic. 

You do this through your overall real-life marketing efforts and by strategically building backlinks from websites that cover topics (or closely related topics) you’re an expert in. 

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. 

Let’s talk about the SEO tools and resources that I’ve recently discovered.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

So today’s tip is just going to be a quick rundown of the new tools and resources that I’ve discovered and bookmarked. Let’s get into it.

• I found a great case study around strategically allowing indexing of your faceted navigation based on search volume to increase organic traffic. 
• I also found case study from Deloitte on how improvements in mobile site speed positively affect a brand’s bottom line.
• Spark Content Optimizer. A quick (and free) one page at a time SEO audit tool (and a Chrome browser plugin). 
• Here’s a  software option called SpeedCurve to measure the Web Core Vitals for your site via synthetic testing. 
• Free Google Search Console Data Exporter - which allows you to export all of your GSC query data - code free. 
• Analytics Mania has some great Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager starter views on their YouTube channel that I would recommend.
• Labrika at Labrinka.com- This one was new to me.. machine learning-powered all-in-one SEO tool. It includes page-specific, machine learning powered content suggestions. 
• Ahrefs’ new Site Explorer 2.0. You can use it to show changes in pages and keywords impacted by algorithm updates.

That’s your roundup of new tools and resources. 

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. 

Let’s talk about Keyword Research Tips For YouTube Videos

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

This tidbit comes from the YouTube Creator Insider channel, where members of YouTube’s search and discover team answer questions from users. 

In their video about search and discovery, they shared the following. 

Here are their three recommended tactics for keyword research:

1. Audience Insights
2. Google Trends
3. Competitor Analysis

Audience Insights are found within YouTube Analytics and show creators what other videos your audience is watching. Smart optimizers would note the titles and thumbnails of those videos to see if there are enhancements that you can make to your videos.

Google Trends (filtered for YouTube), which most SEOs should be familiar with helps you spot trending topics in general which you can apply to your YouTube video creation. 

And Competitive analysis involves looking at which videos appear in YouTube search when you search. You should analyze how your competitors are optimizing the labeling of their video and their video format and how they are working to increase their overall watch time and engagement. 

I would also add that tools like Ahrefs and Keyword.io actually help you query the YouTube database and show you monthly averages for queries on YouTube.

So that’s your tip for today. Three areas you can use for keyword research for YouTube videos.

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. 

Finding missing URLs that need redirects during website migrations

We are going to talk today about all of the ways you can find URLs with backlinks to your site that might need redirects during website migrations.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

All week I’ve been living in spreadsheets over the past month-  tracking down the links that were missed during the original round of redirect mapping for a client’s recent website migration. This client site has been migrated quite a few times over the years and has seen various domain changes as well.

Here are all of the places that I’ve discovered additional backlinks that need mapping:

Ahrefs backlink tools - particularly the best pages by links report. I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the HTTP version of the site to make sure that I’ve captured everything.

SEMRush - particularly the ability to go back in time.

Bing Webmaster Tools - it turns out that Bing never forgets your URL structure, and you can find that in their Site structure reporting.

In all of these reports, if I spot a new domain that looks like it would potentially be an earlier version of this site, I've put that new domain in the various SEO tools to see if those sites have backlinks (or are ranking for some reason).

I’ve also pulled URLs that are still ranking from the old domains in Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools to troubleshoot any URLs that do not have active redirects or were missed. 

And I’ve gone into Google Analytics for the old site and have pulled URLs that are still getting human traffic that need redirects.

And when I load the final result URL, I use the Chrome Redirect Path plugin to make sure that the redirects are true 301 redirects and not some other version. I’ve also eyeballed the page, and many tools will only execute the first redirect, which could be a 301 but at the next hop, the URL could resolve into a 404. 

You want to make sure that your redirects are 301s and that they resolve to a page that is indexable, it’s not blocked by a meta noindex tag or a robots.txt directive. I quickly spot-check these types of issues with the SEO Minion Chrome plugin (my current favorite plugin).

Of course, you can do some of this checking in bulk with ScreamFrog, but sometimes you just need to look at what page is rendered to make sure that the final redirect makes sense.

So that’s your tip for today. Be a true investigator to map all of those redirects post-migration!

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. 

Tips around robots.txt file and workarounds

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Just last week a client asked me where the best place to put an XML sitemap file was, which made me curious as to whether there are best practices for robots.txt file locations as well.

When it comes to an XML sitemap file, the best practice is to have it at the root of the domain it covers, and usually, it’s at domain.com/sitemap.xml. BUT if you list the XML sitemap file and submit it via Google Search Console, Google doesn’t care where it’s located. So to repeat, you could load the sitemap file up into a subfolder, submit it to Google Search Console, and any URLs in there can be for any verified path on your account.

Related to robots.txt files, you also can host it anywhere, just as long as it 301 redirects to your domain (Source).

So that’s your tip for today - workarounds if you can’t host either your XML sitemap file or robots.txt in the “ideal” locations.

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. 

Today we are going to highlight a few stats focused on how important it is to be mobile friendly.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

So I wanted to share some great insights on our increasing mobile use here in the US from App Annie.

The highlights:

• We collectively spent 4.2 hours on our phones in 2020 (a 20% YOY increase).
• This increase is the greatest in the Gen X/Baby Boomer dynamic.

And as a reminder, Googlebot is crawling mobile-first, and all desktop-only content will be dropped sometime in March 2021 (so this month). 

Mobile friendly includes ensuring that your site is:

• Fast loading
• Elements don’t shift as the page loads
• Elements are clickable with a thumb, and 
• Images that are viewable/expandable on a mobile phone. 

I also check to ensure that my clients have navigation that is crawlable with JS turned off with their responsive websites (which is a common issue). 

To check to see if you have any pages that are not rendered to show well on a mobile device, you can use Screaming Frog by turning on the “Rendering ->JavaScript” mode under the spider configuration tab and turn on rendered page screenshots. You can also view mobile usability errors in Google Search Console. 

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. 

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Today’s tip is from Brody Clark. (or @BrodieSEO on Twitter)

There are now two reports in Google Search Console that reports on your site’s news performance, but they measure different things.

The first report is under the Search Results tab where you can filter to news queries. That will show you results returned in the “news” tab and will show a sampled version of these queries. 

The second separate Google News report you can see on the right rail inside Google Search Console is traffic from news.google.com or the Google news app. Both serve the user results based on their interest profile so the report for you as a webmaster does not have query data. 

Note that the top stories carousel in Google search also has news, but you can’t pull that reporting from Google Search Console.

So that’s your takeaway from today - keep in mind what each report measures if you’re working to improve your Google News performance.

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. 

Big Tech is using your voice to personalize

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Let’s talk today about how the big discovery algorithms might be using aspects of your voice to personalize to you and the impact on marketers.

Spotify was granted a patent (originally filed in 2018) for technology that analyzes listeners’ voices and background noise to suggest content based on their mood, gender, age, accent, or even social setting. 

The patent outlines that it uses the speaker’s pitch to determine gender and age and causes like the intonation, stress, and rhythm of speech to potentially determine specific emotions or personality attributes. 

They can use this information to personalize music recommendations in real-time and they are most likely going to leverage this data for the voice assistant that they are developing. 

It’s worth noting that Google and Amazon have both filed patents using the data provided by voice responses in similar ways, and YouTube allows you to search via voice as well.

This is why for my clients that have users who are searching during times of high emotion, I’ve encouraged them to revisit their personas and how they are presenting that information. We know a lot about how different emotional states impact our ability to view and interact with online information. I specifically encourage those clients to look at their CTAs and meta descriptions to make sure they are addressing the emotional state of the user. 

So that’s your tip for today. If you’re doing persona work, consider the emotional state of the user.

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. 

How to request that search bots index your content

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

After months of the “request indexing” tool being unavailable, the feature returned right before the end of 2020. Many SEO’s praised its return, but that was about it; SEOs went on about their day. We didn’t hear much about how the feature changed or any limitations it might now have.

You can submit about 10-12 a day before it throws you an error. Of course, both search engines also lean heavily on content discovery via clean XML sitemaps - especially when you submit them via your search accounts.

Now for Bing, you can submit 10,000 a day via their URL submission feature or you can submit URLs through the Bing Webmaster API. Botify has a feature where it will submit for you. 

In general, though, you should think about why Google or Bing has not found your content and indexed it in the first place. With the increasing popularity of JavaScript frameworks, there could be something else going on that is limiting the search engines in discovering and indexing your content. And of course, your content also has to be *worth* indexing in the first place.

Now for Bing, years ago we noticed that if a URL was tweeted, it was picked up faster (and Bing says it does use social links as signals), though I’m not sure if that tactic still works today.

So that’s your tip for today - how to manually submit URLs via Google and Bing.

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. 

Google’s Question Hub

Today, let's talk about Google's question hub.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google has released https://questionhub.google.com/. By creating a free account SEOs can use the tool for content generation. In their announcement, they said that:

“We collect unanswered questions directly from users to identify content gaps online.”

You sign in with your personal Gmail account (as it’s not available for Google Workspace users, just as an FYI).

And then, you browse the topics or search for topics you’re interested in, and you can then see unanswered questions where you can create a web copy. 

I searched for commercial fishing and found the following unanswered questions:

• Each nation-state can set commercial fishing operation law as far out as what region?
• What kind of ropes are used for commercial fishing?

Or my search for covid 19 brought up these unanswered questions:

• Is the covid-19 vaccine safe for long haulers?
• Are mutant strains of covid 19 checked in every test given out?

I have always thought SEO is more like a public service - answering the public’s burning questions, and now Google makes it even easier by surfacing those that are unanswered.

You can also export the questions into Excel to organize your writing process.

Once you have an answer, you can then click on “answer” and submit a link to your article. 

So that’s your tip for today. Create a Google question hub account and start submitting your answers.

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. 

Your entire website matters.

Today I’m going to talk through all of the ways Google looks at your ENTIRE website when it determines what type of search equity your site can expect. I often work with clients where different teams manage different parts of their website, and this tip is for them.

Hello! Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

I was inspired to create this tip based on Google’s John Mueller’s comment that slow URLs can potentially impact the ranking of other faster URLs on your site. 

If all of your slow URLs are on a subdomain, it might just group those URLs. 

Also, Google has recently announced that  Noindexed Pages Can Impact Core Web Vitals. Frankly, this was my WTF for the month. If you block the page from indexing, clearly you don’t want it included in evaluating your site’s ranking? All the more reason to not generate and try to orphan those pages when possible, so hopefully, Googlebot won’t find them in the first place.

Google has referenced other ways that parts of your site can impact the overall ranking of your site, like:

• Server errors, whether found on your main domain or subdomain.  If found on your primary domain, or If all of those subdomains are on the same server, and a subdomain has server errors, Googlebot will back off so that it doesn't tank your overall site.
• Doorway pages - if Google sees a high number of orphaned pages, that might be what they think you are doing, which could generate a penalty.
• A high number of broken internal links, as it’s a sign of a low-quality website.
• Large amounts of thin content. The Panda algorithm is domain-wide. Google source.
• You are linking to Penalized Sites. This is the "Bad Neighborhood" algorithm. Matt Cutts has said: "Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods.” Now has suggested using the rel="no follow" attribute if you must link to such a site because "Using no-follow disassociates you with that neighborhood."
• Crawl traps - If Googlebot gets caught on one part of your site, they often won’t reach all of your site’s pages. I’ve fixed crawl traps on sites that resulted in ranking lifts across the entire site. 
• Soft Error Pages. Google could treat “soft 404” pages as low-quality pages on your site, lowering your overall domain’s search equity. 
• Unmaintained subdomains that are on the same server as your primary domain. The low maintained websites *could* present a liability if Google sees them as being part of the main domain. Here's the guidance from the Google Human Rater guidelines around web maintenance:
  • "Some websites are not maintained or cared for at all by their webmaster. These “abandoned” websites will fail to achieve their purpose over time, as content becomes stale or website functionality ceases to work on new browser versions. Unmaintained websites should be rated Lowest if they fail to achieve their purpose due to the lack of maintenance. Unmaintained websites may also become hacked, defaced, or spammed..."

This is not an exhaustive list but highlights how neglected parts of your overall website can impact its ranking and search equity. 

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. 

Updates on free Google and Bing Tools

Let’s talk about the tools that have disappeared, and the new tools that are available.

Google temporarily disables issue validation in Search Console.
They are updating the criteria for the issues provided by the coverage report.

And here are a few that have come back:

'Request Indexing' is now back in Google Search Console.
You can find it under the URL Inspection navigation. Here’s Google’s announcement.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool - Moving to Schema.org in April 2021
SEOs were frustrated that Google discontinued the tool, and it seems like Google was listening. SEOs will be able to find a refocused version of the tool on Schema.org by April. In the meantime, I recommend using schema.dev.

And there are a few completely new tools available:

There is a new crawl stats report in Google Search Console.
This discovery was my SEO nerd excitement moment from last month. It’s hard to find in the navigation, and you can access your report here, but it’s Google log file analysis for your site. SUPER exciting for those that can’t get access to their log files regularly. Here’s more from Google’s announcement.

New Bing Webmaster Tools now has free heat mapping.
The data is powered by Microsoft Clarity and is free to activate inside Bing Webmaster Tools. It only requires you to add the tracking code to your site. 

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. 

Page Experience Update - How to audit, measure and improve

Page experience and performance (measured via the core web vitals) will be a ranking factor in May 2021. Here are some great resources on how to audit, measure, and create an improvement plan below.

How to audit your site’s Web Core Vitals 

This presentation by Rachel Costello from SEO Nerds Switzerland’s Meetup is excellent.

The deck is here, and the recording is here.

Her tips include:

• A list of areas you should check and add to your audit and tools to check those items.
• She also mentions URL Profiler, which you can use to query the Mobile-Friendly test API and Google's Safe Browsing API at scale. 

And as you're digging into solutions to improve your Core Web Vitals, loading CSS Asynchronously might help. Here’s the 411. And there’s another great article here on Search Engine Land that walks you through finding improvement recommendations.

Tools to measure + Case Studies to Persuade Others

Check out this sheet of tools from Aleyda Solis to help you measure and case studies to convince others to take these metrics seriously. It includes case studies like this one. You can also benchmark your site against competitors with the Core SERP Vitals tool over at defaced. Dev where you can See the Core Web Vitals directly in search results.

You can also push the Core Web Vitals into your GA (the code to use in GitHub), then use a Google Data Studio dashboard to report on that data. Or if you’re on WordPress, there’s a plugin.

You can crawl using Screaming Frog’s Pagespeed Insights API to track performance on your staging server before launching.

And you can spot-check using GT Metrix, which now has Core Web Vitals included as Google Lighthouse now powers it.

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. 

Stay up to date on the new tools inside your search engine accounts. Learn more in today's 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. 

Trying to up your video game? Listen to today's SEO tip to learn more about new tools and resources to help you pivot your video strategy.

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. 

Confused about 307 redirects? Listen to today's tip to learn more about why and how to fix these redirects.

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. 

Learn more about how to optimize your audio assets in today's 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. 

Creating a plan to rank in voice search 

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

In previous episodes, we talked about knowing the source of the answers is key to rank in voice search, and the vast majority of answers provided come from either Bing or Google search engines. Today we are going to talk about what it takes to rank once you’ve determined that your audience and query are being provided voice answers from Google’s ecosystem (keep in mind that with Alexa’s reliance on Bing, 41% of the time information based voice answers are pulled from that ecosystem instead).

Google voice ranking:

To be found in Google search for an information-based voice query, the result will be reliant upon:

1. The answer (URL, YouTube video, etc.) must be currently ranking #1 with a concise answer and a fast page speed (1.10 seconds). Most of the time this answer  is often in the Featured Snippet slot. One-third of the times a Featured Snippet will be used as a voice search answer. 
2. Or your brand has a strong Knowledge Graph presence.
3. Or you have Schema.org markup on your website that creates a Google action or custom Google Action that fulfills intent.

If it’s a query with commercial intent , you will need to have your product in Google’s product feed.

If it’s a local voice query, you need to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing.

How to creating a plan to rank for the Featured Snippet (if your query is info based)

To figure out if you’re already ranking in the Featured Snippet (or to track your progress), you would need an SEO Tool like GetStat, SEMRush, RankRanger, and/or Ahrefs.

If your ranking already on Google page one and want to shoot for that #1 slot, you need to ask yourself: 

• Do I have enough EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) to rank #1 for YMYL queries? 
• Does my content answer the searcher’s intent? 
• Does my content match the format Google is displaying? 
• Are my pages loading fast enough? For this you can measure your page using tools like GtMetrix and Google Lighthouse.

Creating a plan to improve your brand’s Knowledge Graph presence. 

Google and Bing’s Knowledge Graph are entity databases that are used in each algorithm. Getting your brand in the search engine’s Knowledge Graph involves ensuring that your brand and products are appropriately mentioned in databases that the search engine uses for the Knowledge Graph like Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Scholar/Microsoft Academic, Google My Business/Bing Maps, Wikinews, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Crunchbase, etc. as well as adding structured data to your pages that will help the search engine understand the entities associated with your brand.

When you add schema.org markup to your site, you’ll want to add links out (using sameas markup)  to your Google database references. 

Both search engines use schema.org markup, but Bing also uses plain HTML markup as a part of its process of understanding your site’s pages. 

A note about editing Wikipedia...

I would recommend you DON’T try to edit Wikipedia pages. If you do, they will lock you out and revert your edits. I recommend working with a Wikipedia coach (I have one

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. 

Page Experience Google update

We now have a deadline around when the Core Web Vitals measurements impact rankings - May of 2021. Let’s talk about how to prepare.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google has announced that the metrics measured in their Core Web vitals report data will impact rankings in May 2021, as well as previous metrics like web usability, web safety,  and interstitials.

It will be an aggregated ranking signal. 

Here's the announcement:

The new page experience ranking factor will include: 

• Load Speed (‘Largest Contentful Paint’ factor from Core Web Vitals)
• Responsiveness (‘First Input Delay’ from Core Web Vitals)
• Visual Layout Stability (‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ from Core Web Vitals)
• Whether URLs are mobile-friendly
• Safe and Clean Website Code (Safe Browsing with no Malware)
• Use of HTTPS Encryption
• No Intrusive Interstitials

What are the metrics, and what are good measurements?

The three core elements are a part of Google Lighthouse and include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the time it takes for a page’s primary content to load. According to Google, load times under 2.5 seconds are good, and over 4 seconds is poor.
• First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the amount of time it takes after loading the page for a user to be able to interact with the page. According to Google, 100 milliseconds or less is good, and anything over 300 milliseconds is poor.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures whether items shift while loading, and the lower the CLS, the better - Google says that .1 is good and higher than .25 is poor. 

How do you go about benchmarking your existing site?

You can find these metrics in:

• Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report

And in that report, you can find recommendations for improvement using Page Speed Insights and Chrome Lighthouse.  It’s essential to keep in mind that while the report shows you a range for “good” URLs, reports have demonstrated that URLs ranking #1 in Google search had average mobile page load times of 1.10 seconds. 

And how about new sites?

And if you’re working on a new site and need to measure Core Web Vitals before launch, I recommend the following:

• Screaming Frog with the Pagespeed API
• Or Deepcrawl

Both of which run off of lab data.

And if your site allows for crawling from unknown IPs, there are a bunch of other tools that can assist and let you check in bulk, including:

Continue reading here. . .

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.