When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Andrew Seidman, COO/Co-Founder of Digital Reach Agency will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Andrew your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
Paid media’s main job is to increase visibility and drive traffic for your brand.
And as digital marketing evolves, so, too, will your strategy.
In the current state of paid, the main overarching theme is, you guessed it, AI and machine learning.
As paid media platforms get smarter and constantly find ways to infuse AI into campaign workflows and optimizations, marketers must find a way to keep up with the platforms.
The other side of the coin is maintaining user privacy all the while trying to use AI effectively.
So what major changes should you make to your paid media marketing strategy in 2024?
Here are seven changes you should incorporate without a second thought.
In January 2024, Google made an update to its Consent Mode for its Google tags, which will, for now, affect any marketers who run ads targeted to users in the European Economic Area (EEA).
This update requires marketers to take action by March 2024 in order to keep using ad personalization and remarketing features in Google Ads.
Simply speaking, the Consent Mode will need to be updated to adjust its tracking behavior based on how a user interacts with a website’s consent banner.
The two new parameters introduced to Consent Mode are:
ad_user_data: This controls whether user data can be sent to Google for advertising purposes.
ad_personalization: This controls whether personalized advertising (remarketing) can be enabled for the user.
As privacy measures continue to become stricter in the United States, it would not be surprising if this becomes required for US advertisers in the somewhat near future.
Keep in mind that in 2024, we’ll have to get comfortable being uncomfortable with imperfect data because of privacy regulations.
2. Make Influencers Part Of Your Marketing Model
Small and large influencers alike are an awesome resource at your fingertips, just as long as your audiences align.
Even brands with a few thousand followers can utilize influencer marketing to make a big difference and gain traction in the market.
Go on a hunt to find the top influencers in your space. Then, figure out the cost per acquisition (CPA) for working with each of them (because you have to court influencers, especially the bigger ones).
From there, you can create a win-win partnership that gets you more leads while the influencer earns income.
Pro Tip: You can use influencer marketing tools to help you in your journey to integrate core influencers into your business model. Some of the most popular include AspireIQ, BuzzSumo, Upfluence, and NeoReach. Whichever you choose, make sure the influencers you find are big enough to provide real value to your brand — and that you’re paying a CPA that makes sense for your budget and overall goals.
3. Strategic Audience Management On Multiple Platforms
2024 is the year to nail your audience management strategy, both from a holistic perspective and within each encapsulated platform.
That means before building your audiences, you need to understand at a high level who your target customer is.
Further, identify what platforms those types of user-profiles spend their time on.
Once you’ve identified your ideal target customer, then it’s time for the first step in this process:
Building audiences.
From there, you must set up a strategy to target folks within every stage of the funnel – from upper to lower – and decide which networks make the most sense for the different audience cohorts.
Perhaps the most crucial part of this process is analyzing and refreshing your audiences as the year goes on.
You should definitely plan on retargeting and testing new audiences throughout the year.
If you fail to incorporate this part, you run the risk of targeting the wrong sector of people, ultimately throwing money down the proverbial drain.
However, if you retarget and refresh your approach, you’re bound to find a dynamic audience that correlates with your vision.
In the end, audience management alone can be worth its weight in gold.
4. Prepare For Video Content Dominance
You’ve likely heard this phrase before in marketing: content is king.
With a slight tweak for 2024, the new hot phrase should be: video content is king.
Not only is video taking over social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, but it’s also asserting its dominance in YouTube Ads. YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-form video offering, is booming.
With this new form of video comes a new ad format: vertical video ads.
Not only should marketers focus on video marketing in general – 2024 is the year to get more sophisticated with video strategy.
Marketers should prioritize creating engaging and high-quality video content that’s appropriate for each platform on which it will be delivered.
If the thought of creating video content for multiple platforms scares you, just remember that a little goes a long way.
Start by creating evergreen content about your brand and test those with different lengths.
These can be used and recycled on multiple platforms and can be used for organic and paid video content simultaneously.
Just remember to create a variety so that your users don’t see the same message or content on the same platforms, which can reduce the effectiveness of video marketing.
5. Don’t Sleep On Microsoft Ads
Microsoft Ads continues to enhance its advertising platform year after year.
Not only does it have many of the same coveted features as Google Ads, but it has added features that are unique to the platform.
As a marketing professional, your brand will surely benefit from digging into it more in 2024.
Some of the most notable updates Microsoft Ads launched in the last twelve months include:
Video and CTV ads: Microsoft unveiled these new ad types on its platform in September of 2023. Advertisers can choose from online video ads or connected TV ads that are non-skippable while a user is streaming content. This gives advertisers big and small a leg up on what once used to be a very complicated process of buying TV ads.
Three new generative AI solutions: Also announced in September 2023, Microsoft came out with three new AI features to help grow and scale. These include Compare & Decide ads, ads for Chat API, and Copilot campaign creation.
Data-driven attribution reporting: Gone are the days of last-click measurement! Microsoft Ads enhanced its UET tagging solution and implemented data-driven attributing modeling. It uses machine learning to calculate the actual contributions of each ad interaction.
While Microsoft still holds a lower share of the available search engines, just remember that you’re leaving a whole slew of potential customers behind by not considering this underestimated ad platform.
6. Focus On Optimizing The User Experience
Between a mix of shorter human attention spans and limited marketing budgets, every interaction and website experience counts.
If you find that your pre-sale metrics are favorable – such as high engagement or high CTR – but never result in a sale, you likely don’t have an ad problem. You have a user experience problem.
In 2024, consumers expect more from brands, especially if they’re spending their hard-earned money with that company.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you sat down and went through your website’s checkout process through the lens of a customer?
If you’re not sure where to start on optimizing your website experience for users, here are some ideas to get you started:
Use tools like Hot Jar or User Testing to get real-life analytics of how your customers are interacting and what their pain points are.
Review the website landscape on desktop and mobile. While this may be a no-brainer, many websites still forget to optimize for mobile!
Make sure that any relevant call-to-actions (CTAs) are above the fold – yes, on mobile, too!
Check your site speed.
These are items that should continuously be monitored and not a “set and forget,” which unfortunately happens quite a bit.
Optimizing the website user experience can have a positive impact on those paid media campaigns and can make those dollars go further in the future.
7. Use AI Tools To Your Advantage
Let’s face it: Machine learning and AI aren’t going anywhere.
For marketing leaders, 2024 really is the time to lean into its advantages instead of running away from the inevitable advances.
It’s not a question of whether to use AI or not. It’s a matter of how to use AI to your advantage.
While companies are tightening their budgets and scaling back staff, PPC marketers are constantly being asked to do more with less.
This is where AI comes in.
In fact, using AI can strengthen your ROI for paid media campaigns of all kinds (whatever channel you prefer).
Just make sure you don’t sacrifice your brand’s personality for a little efficiency.
One way you can do this is with Google’s generated AI assets (currently in beta). Using its Gemini-powered AI solution, the tool allows for more streamlined campaign creation and generated ad assets, including images, headlines, and descriptions for ads, and more.
Additionally, you’re likely already using one of Google’s Smart Bidding strategies to automate the bidding process.
With a combination of creativity and machine learning, your ads have the potential to go farther than ever before.
Your 2024 Plan Should Not Be Static
If the past year(s) have taught us anything in marketing, it’s to be fluid.
In some cases, tactics that used to be tried and true are now more volatile than ever.
Take advantage of advances in AI to boost your strategic advantage, and keep in mind platforms that you’ve typically shied away from – the time may come to incorporate them into your 2024 strategy.
What changes are you most excited to try this year?
More resources:
Featured Image: Sutthiphong Chandaeng/Shutterstock
SEO Twitter reacted strongly when I shared Sundar Pichai’s statements about Search Generative Experience (SGE) from Alphabet’s Q1 earnings call (bolding mine):
“Based on our testing, we are encouraged that we are seeing an increase in search usage among people who use the new AI overviews as well as increased user satisfaction with the results.”
“People question whether these things would be costly to serve, and we are very, very confident we can manage the cost of how to serve these queries. People worried about latency. When I look at the progress we have made in latency and efficiency, we feel comfortable.”
“There are questions about monetization. And based on our testing so far, I’m comfortable and confident that we’ll be able to manage the monetization transition here well as well.”
I get it. Our perception of SGE doesn’t match the CEO of Alphabet suggesting that SGE is ready for prime time. There are only two options: We live in a bubble or it’s PR talk.
The book, “The Facebook Effect: The inside story of the company that is connecting the world,” has a story about how users complained about Facebook’s newsfeed but heavily engaged with it anyway. The public perception was the complete opposite of what eventually happened. There is a real chance the same phenomenon is happening with SGE.
Life taught me that outraging things are often not the way they seem at first. Surprises bear learnings. I’m naturally quick to judge situations and people, but I’m always happy when I pause and take a closer, second look. This could be one of those situations.
Maybe Sundar knows more than we do. If that’s true and users actually enjoy SGE, we, in the SEO community, have a larger disconnect with the average Google user than we might think.
However, there is also a real chance that Pichai’s comments are PR based on Google’s trust-eroding misses over the last 24 months.
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Friction
Google’s position and public perception are head-butting in several departments:
Lawsuits
The Department of Justice’s 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Google surfaced documents that prove the heavy use of user signals for ranking, which Google vehemently denied for decades.
Another lawsuit filed the same year about Google tracking user data in Chrome’s incognito mode just settled with Google deleting billions of data points, improving its disclosure and stopping to track when users switch to incognito mode.
For years, SEOs suspected user behavior to matter for Google’s Search ranking systems, but Googlers either denied or belittled the point. Internal documents that surfaced in the 2020 US vs. Google anti-trust lawsuit prove the elephant’s existence.
We now have track records, footprints, and photos of the elephant. The house owner doesn’t need to acknowledge it exists. But the biggest takeaway is that we had our mental model of how Search works upside down.
AI Fumbles
Then, there are fumbled AI product launches.
Google’s first reaction to ChatGPT’s stunning success was a stunning failure. The introduction of Bard in February 2023 cost Alphabet $100 billion in market value due to false facts in the announcement.
In December 2023, an impressive demo of Gemini turned into a PR disaster when it turned out to be fake.
In March 2024, Alphabet’s shares dropped by -5% when it turned out Gemini delivered heavily biased and obscure historical images.
Google wants to get AI right so badly that it’s willing to cut corners. It’s not something you’d expect from the company that invented the underlying LLM technology (Transformers) in the first place.
Algorithm Updates
Then, there is communication around algorithm updates. First called out by The Verge, Google’s SEO documentation is quite broad for how search evolved:
There’s an inherent contradiction in what Google promises is the best way to succeed on Search. Publicly, Google representatives like search liaison Danny Sullivan give a simple, almost quaint answer to business owners who want help: you just need to make great content for people, not Google’s robots.
At the same time, Google’s SEO Starter Guide is nearly 9,000 words long with dozens of links to additional material.
To be fair, I do appreciate the work Danny Sullivan, Martin Splitt, John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and others do. I know it’s a tough and thankless job. You can’t really win.
I also acknowledge that The Verge is not a big fan of SEOs, a.k.a. Content Goblins. And yet, there is something to be said about the critique of the SEO guidelines.
We’re also experiencing a growing disconnect between what we hear from Google spokespeople and what we see.
In November, Sullivan came to Brighton SEO San Diego and announced to “buckle up” because “major changes to search ranking” are coming.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
We had the longest Core Update ever in March 2024, with a 45-day roll-out time that apparently overshot its goal of reducing low-quality results by 5 percentage points. But the effect is barely noticeable.
Google also said this helped reduce low-quality and unoriginal content in search results by 45%, which is up from their estimate of 40%.
What stung was that Google’s official X (Twitter) account announced the completion of the update 7 days late.
Now, you could argue that Google can do whatever it wants and has no obligation to notify SEOs (timely). And that’s correct.
But a couple of years ago, that wouldn’t have happened – especially since Google’s updates have become more hardcore, and owners of negatively affected sites desperately wait for updates.
It seems the transparency between Google and the SEO community has changed.
Public Complaints
Then, we have the (not new) critique of big domains dominating search results.
The Verge published an article about the “best printer” that’s clearly optimized with old-school SEO techniques. But it works and proves that big sites get away with much more than small ones.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
In the last 12 months, we’ve seen more complaints from marketers and owners of small sites like Housefresh and Retro Dodo for being on the brink of death because of Google.
To be fair, it’s difficult to say whether Google truly prefers big brands or whether users do, and if small publishers are missing something important that matters for SEO.
But brands publishing blog articles about how Google is killing them is new and doesn’t help with Google’s image.
Church And State
Lastly, the separation between church and state seems to fall.
Google now allows ads to appear below the top organic results for specific queries, which would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
It doesn’t help that internal emails surfaced in the DOJ lawsuit, showing how Google’s ads team put significant pressure on the organic search team to make changes that would result in more searches.
We don’t know whether that happened or not, but it doesn’t look great. Neither does the testimony that Google raised cost-per-click (CPC) prices.
Journalist Ed Zitron recently published a story titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search” on his blog that went viral. It’s an extreme take, but it resonates so strongly because of the long list of Google’s misses over the last years paired with record-breaking earnings.
Unbiased Referee
On top of it all comes the growing disconnect between our subjective perception of search quality and Google’s statements (also subjective).
Jeff Bezos wrote, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied…” in his 2016 annual shareholder letter.
It’s possible that we all have gotten used to search and are baseline dissatisfied. But it’s also possible that search has become worse, and we just lack an objective way to measure it.
“An overall downwards trend in text quality in all three search engines” despite Google’s regular updates targeting low-quality content, which has only a short-lived impact.
“Higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality.”
2. A Google satisfaction score based on a survey (n=~8,000) shows a downward trend.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
3. A Semrush zero-click study from 2022 found more than half of users refine their queries, indicating potential dissatisfaction with results.
We can see that about 55% of the times two searches are performed in a user’s journey contain keywords with a similarity rating of 0.6 (60%) or more, which could mean that many users aren’t satisfied with the results of the first SERP and need to refine their queries.
We need an unbiased referee on the field. But it’s unlikely we’ll get one.
Way Forward
The disconnect with Google leads us to three conclusions:
Guidance around algorithm updates and data about what’s going on in search is unlikely to become more specific.
The search results landscape and how it changes is increasingly complex.
Businesses that rely on organic traffic for survival have a high risk.
We, as SEOs, made two mistakes: saying organic traffic is reliably sustainable and free.
I remember one of the big arguments for SEO that sounded like this: “When you turn ads off, you don’t get any more traffic. When you turn SEO off, traffic keeps coming in.” I’ve used it, too.
But the quickly changing search landscape plus Google’s intransparency make SEO a volatile channel that can bring traffic to our site but doesn’t guarantee that well to keep pouring water.
Rather, we should think about how to bring organic visitors to channels where we can build deeper relationships with our audience.
One way to build closer relationships is to incentivize users to sign up for our email list, download our app(s), and create log-ins.
Then, we need to answer the question of how to nurture them by building trust over time with exclusive, high-quality, and personalized content. What is the second-click experience on your site?
Today, SEO is anything but free. It has much lower variable costs compared to advertising, but fixed costs nonetheless. Those fixed costs have skyrocketed since the bar for high-quality content is so much higher than we think.
Driving traffic takes original research, graphic assets, high-quality writing, and experts who need to be paid.
Tighter SEO unit economics can manage expectations and alleviate volatility because bigger investments lead to higher chances of thriving in search.
We might be disconnected from Google, but we can still connect with our audience.
Wix announced a new a feature that allows businesses to create business proposals and manage payments, streamlining the process of converting prospects into clients and setting up payments.
Proposals Powered By Prospero
The new feature, called Wix Proposals, is powered by the Prospero business proposal platform which streamlines the process of creating a professional-looking proposal and automates invoices and contracts.
There are three key features
Proposal Design There are templates that Wix users can use or build their own.
Payment Scheduler This makes it easy to create multiple ways to pay such as one-time payments or multiple payments.
Digital Signature Support
Helps Businesses Convert More Clients
Wix Proposals features are designed to help businesses be more successful by streamlining tasks related to winning more business and receiving payments.
According to the announcement:
“‘Wix Proposals offers business owners the tools needed to create, manage, and finalize proposals with ease,” said Asaf Remler, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Wix. “By empowering businesses to take control of their long-term financial engagements, and with a focus on user-friendly design and powerful features, we believe it will redefine the way professionals across various industries approach proposal creation and management. We’re enabling users to manage long-term financial engagements with several payments milestones, ultimately helping Wix to capture new GPV that was usually being processed offline”
“At Prospero, we believe proposals are more than just documents – they’re the first handshake, the elevator pitch, the decisive turning point in a crucial business negotiation. Wix Proposals helps businesses to tell their stories with captivating proposals built for conversion,” said Tomer Aharon, Prospero Co-Founder and CEO. “Through the seamless integration of Wix’s innovative platform and Prospero’s industry-leading expertise, businesses in any industry can unlock a potent competitive advantage, ensuring their proposals not only stand out but win the deal. We are thrilled about this partnership and proud that our platform is included in Wix’s offering, empowering users with cutting-edge tools to elevate their proposal game.’”
Read more on how to get started with Wix Proposals
HTML meta tags have been called one of the most important aspects of SEO for quite a long time. And you know what? This is still true.
You may (and should) write good content, attract backlinks, and do your best in page layout design. But all of the above is hardly useful without HTML tags.
Huh, just like meta tags are useless if the page itself is awful…
Google’s John Mueller said that Google uses HTML meta tags to form SERP snippets, not for rankings. But in this statement, he admits that a good search snippet makes people visit your page. So, meta tags are definitely what you must care about to get traffic.
HTML tags tell Google about the page’s content in the most digestible way, so it is a crucial component for SEO success.
In addition, Google can lower your positions if you misuse HTML meta tags – intentionally or not. This is one more sign that meta tags are essential.
So, let’s dive in. Here are the top 10 HTML meta tags for you to use on your site. Read carefully and borrow best practices.
1. Title Tags
The title tag is your main and most important anchor.
The
element typically appears as a clickable headline in search engine results pages (SERPs) and also shows up on social networks and in browsers.
For example, if you view the HTML for this article, you’ll see the title is:
10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO
Title tags are placed in the
of your webpage and are meant to provide a clear and comprehensive idea of what the page is all about.
But do they have a major impact on rankings as they used to for many years?
Over the past few years, user behavior factors have often been discussed as logical proof of relevance and thus a ranking signal – even Google representatives admit its impact here and there.
The page’s title is still the first thing a searcher sees in SERPs, and it helps them decide if the page is likely to answer the search intent.
A well-written one may increase the number of clicks and traffic, which has at least some impact on rankings.
A simple experiment can also show that Google no longer needs your title tag to include an exact match keyword to determine the topic the page covers.
For instance, a couple of years ago, a Google search for [how to build brand awareness] would bring up 2 out of the top 5 results with titles exactly matching your query.
Today, though, we see a different picture:
Screenshot from search for [how to build brand awareness], Google, April 2024
Not a single exact match.
And yet, not a single irrelevant result either; every single one of the pages given here explains how to build awareness, and the titles reflect that.
Search engines are looking at the whole picture, and they tend to evaluate a page’s content as a whole, but the cover of a book still matters – especially when it comes to interaction with searchers.
Best Practices
Give each page a unique title that describes the page’s content concisely and accurately.
Keep the titles up to 50-60 characters long (so they do not get truncated in the SERPs). Remember that long titles are shortened to about 600-700px on the SERP.
Put important keywords first, but in a natural manner, as if you write titles for your visitors in the first place.
Make use of your brand name in the title. Even if it ends up not being shown on the SERPs, it’ll still make a difference for the search engine.
Tip: Use Your Title To Attract Attention
The title tag is precious not only because it’s prime SERP real estate but also because it functions as a tab title in your web browser.
This can be used to attract a user’s attention. For example:
Screenshot from author, April 2024
It’s the exact approach used by Facebook and LinkedIn to show you that you have notifications, and it can be used to pretty good effect.
2. Meta Description Tags
Meta description also resides in the
of a webpage and is commonly (though not always) displayed in a SERP snippet along with a title and page URL.
For example, this is the meta description for this article:
Although meta description is not a direct ranking factor, it requires your optimization effort to attract users’ (and Google’s) attention.
The meta description is what people see in the search snippet together with the title, so it is one of the aspects that makes them decide if your page is worth clicking.
The description impacts the number of clicks you get and may also improve CTR and decrease bounce rates if the pages’ content fulfills the promises. That’s why the description must be as realistic as it is inviting and distinctly reflect the content.
If your description contains the keywords a searcher used in their search query, they will appear on the SERP in bold. This goes a long way in helping you stand out and inform the searcher exactly what they’ll find on your page.
If Google considers your description to not match the content of your page, it can generate its own one in a suitable way. So make sure your meta description contains the main keyword and is topically relevant.
There is no way to put every keyword you want to rank for in the meta description, and there is no real need for that – instead, write a couple of cohesive sentences describing the gist of your page, with some keywords included.
A good way to figure out what to write in your meta description, what works best for your particular topic right now, is to do some competition research.
Look up how your top-ranking competition fills out their own descriptions to get a feel for the best use cases in every particular case.
Best Practices
Give each page a unique meta description that clearly reflects what value the page carries.
Google’s snippets typically max out around 150-160 characters (including spaces).
Include your most significant keywords so they can get highlighted on the actual SERP, but be careful to avoid keyword stuffing. Don’t make your description just a combination of keywords you’re targeting.
Optionally, use an eye-catching call-to-action, a unique proposition you offer, or additional hints on what to expect – ‘Learn,’ ‘Buy’ constructions, etc.
Do not use quotation marks, as Google will cut your snippet there.
Meta Tip
The meta description doesn’t have to be just a sentence that repeats the first paragraph of your page’s text.
Be creative — add call to action (CTA) to encourage action if relevant, use keyword variations (i.e. not the keyword you’ve used in the title), and keep search intent in mind.
For example, if you have an informational page about scallops, it’s a nice idea to make your meta description a definition of scallops. If your page tells you how to cook scallops, then think up a tasty, crusty description for your recipe.
If you’re a fishmonger selling fresh scallops, describe how fresh they are and encourage people to buy them ASAP with some CTA.
3. Heading Tags (H1-H6)
Heading tags are HTML tags used to identify different sections of a page’s content and act as mini-titles for different parts.
The usage of heading tags these days is a source of some debate.
While H2-H6 tags are considered not as important to search engines, proper usage of H1 tags has been emphasized in many industry studies.
Although H2-H6 tags were initially used for UX purposes, the introduction of passage indexing in 2021 made them pretty valuable. Like, Google can index and rank a part of your page if the query matches with, say, the H3 heading and the paragraph it is related to.
What we should be thinking about instead is that headings are crucial for text and content organization, and we should take them seriously.
For search engines, it’s easier to read and understand well-organized content than to crawl through structural issues.
For users, headings are like anchors in a wall of text, navigating them through the page and making it easier to digest.
These factors raise the importance of careful optimization, where small details add up to the big SEO- and user-friendly picture and can lead to ranking increases.
Best Practices
Keep your headings relevant to the chunk of text they describe. Just because they aren’t a ranking factor doesn’t mean search engines don’t take them into account.
Always have your headings reflect the sentiment of the text they are placed over. Avoid headings like “Chapter 1… Chapter 2… Chapter 3…”.
Don’t overuse the tags and the keywords in them. Keep it readable for users.
Should Your Title Tag & H1 Match?
According to Google’s recommendations, you are encouraged to match your page’s title and H1, changing the order slightly and changing it up here and there.
So, if you are struggling to come up with the perfect H1, simply use your title again.
4. Image Alt Attributes
The image alt attribute is a tag you add to an image in order to provide a written description. In practice, it may look like this:
Alt attributes are important in terms of on-page optimization for two reasons:
Alt text is displayed to visitors if any particular image cannot be loaded (or if the images are disabled).
Alt attributes provide context because search engines can’t “see” images.
For ecommerce sites, images often have a crucial impact on how a visitor interacts with a page.
Google also says it outright: helping search engines understand what the images are about and how they relate to the rest of the content may help them serve a page for suitable search queries.
Remember, though, the importance of relevance: it’s not just that the alt text, titles, and captions need to be relevant to the image, but the image itself should be placed in its proper relevant context, as well.
Best Practices
Do your best to optimize the most prominent images (product images, infographics, or training images) that will likely be looked up in Google Images search.
Add alt text on pages where there’s not too much content apart from the images.
Keep the alt text clear and descriptive enough, use your keywords reasonably, and ensure they fit naturally into the whole canvas of the page’s content.
Naturally, these are used to refer to proven sources, point people towards other useful resources, or mention a relevant site for some other reason.
These links matter a lot for SEO: they can make your content look like a hand-crafted comprehensive piece backed up by reliable sources or like a link dump with not so much valuable content.
Google is well-known for its severe antipathy to manipulative linking tactics, adhering to which can result in a penalty, and it doesn’t get any less smart at detecting them.
Apart from that, in the age of semantic search, Google may treat the sources you refer to as the context, to better understand the content on your page.
For both these reasons, it’s worth paying attention to where you link and how.
By default, all hyperlinks are followed, and when you place a link on your site, you basically “cast a vote of confidence” to the linked page.
When you add a nofollow attribute to a link, it instructs search engines’ bots not to follow the link (and not to pass any link equity).
In HTML, the nofollow link attribute looks like this:
In addition to the traditional nofollow, Google has introduced two more options to specify a nofollow link, rel=“sponsored” for paid links and rel=“UGC” for user-generated content like forum comments:
Keeping your SEO neat, you would preserve a healthy balance between followed and nofollowed links on your pages but would normally set the following kinds of links to nofollow:
Links to any resources that in any way can be considered as “untrusted content.”
Any paid or sponsored links (you wouldn’t want Google to catch you selling your “vote”).
Links from comments or other kinds of user-generated content which can be spammed beyond your control.
Internal “Sign in” and “Register” links following, which is just a waste of crawl budget.
6. Robots Meta Tag
A page-level robots meta tag with content=“noindex” attribute instructs the search engines not to index any given page.
A nofollow attribute instructs not to follow any links on that page.
While these tags don’t correlate with rankings directly, in some cases, they may have some impact on how your site looks in the eyes of search engines overall.
For instance, Google highly dislikes thin content.
While it might not be intentional, your site could have pages that offer little value to users yet are necessary for certain reasons.
Additionally, there may be “draft” or placeholder pages that need publishing before they are fully optimized.
Ideally, you wouldn’t want these pages to be considered when assessing the overall quality of your site.
In other cases, you may want certain pages to stay out of SERPs as they feature a special deal that is supposed to be accessible only by a direct link (e.g., from a newsletter).
Finally, if you have a sitewide search option, Google recommends closing custom results pages, which can be crawled indefinitely and waste bot’s resources on no unique content.
In the above cases, noindex and nofollow tags are very helpful, as they give you certain control over your site’s appearance to search engines.
Best Practices
Close unnecessary/unfinished pages with thin content that have little value and no intent to appear in the SERPs.
Close pages that unreasonably waste crawl budget.
Make sure carefully you don’t mistakenly restrict important pages from indexing.
7. rel=”canonical” Link Tag
The rel=”canonical” link tag is a way of telling search engines which version of a page you consider the main one and would like to be indexed by search engines and found by people.
It’s commonly used in cases when the same page is available under multiple different URLs, or multiple different pages have very similar content covering the same subject.
Internal duplicate content is not treated as strictly as copied content, as there’s usually no manipulative intent behind it.
Yet this may become a source of confusion for search engines: unless you indicate which URL you prefer to rank with, search engines may choose it for you.
The selected URL gets crawled more frequently, while the others are being left behind.
You can see that while there’s almost no penalty risk, such a state of affairs is far not optimal.
Another benefit is that canonicalizing a page makes it easier to track performance stats associated with the content.
According to Google, using a rel=canonical for duplicate content helps Google consolidate all your efforts and pass the link signals from all the page’s versions to the preferred one.
That is where using the canonical tag may help you steer the SEO effort in one direction.
Best SEO Practices
Pages with similar content on the same subject.
Duplicate pages available under multiple URLs.
Versions of the same page with session IDs or other URL Parameters that do not affect the content.
Use canonical tags for near-duplicate pages carefully: If the two pages connected by a canonical tag differ too much in content, the search engine will simply disregard the tag.
8. Schema Markup
Schema markup is a specific technique for organizing the data on each of your web pages in a way that search engines recognize.
It’s a great feature to implement because it’s a real win-win.
Having a structured schema markup:
Is a great boost to your UX.
Carries huge SEO value.
Improves content understanding.
Helps get into SERP features.
Increases chances of winning rich snippets.
SEO has grown far beyond just keywords and backlinks. Having relevant and properly implemented structured data on your pages is, in many cases, a must if you want to lure traffic and rank high.
For example, if your site is from an ecommerce niche, you will have no choice but to add product schema markup on your product pages. Otherwise, your snippet will just get lost.
The same is true for sites about cooking — search for any recipe, and you will look at nothing but the Recipes SERP feature.
Screenshot of search for [beef wellington recipe], Google, April 2024
Sure thing, you’d want your site to be there.
Note: Most of today’s popular content management systems, especially those related to ecommerce like Shopify, have relevant structured data built-in by default.
A “semantic web” is a “meaningful web,” where the focus shifts from keywords instances and backlinks alone to concepts behind them and relationships between those concepts.
Structured data markup is exactly what helps search engines not only read the content but also understand what certain words relate to.
The SERPs have evolved so much that you may not even need to click through the results to get an answer to your query.
But if one is about to click, a rich snippet – with a nice image, a 5-star rating, specified price range, stock status, operating hours, or whatever is useful – is very likely to catch an eye and attract more clicks than a plain-text result.
Assigning schema tags to certain page elements makes your SERP snippet rich in information that is helpful and appealing to users.
And, back to square one, user behavior factors like CTR and bounce rate affect how search engines rank your site.
Thoroughly test the markup to make sure it isn’t misleading or added improperly.
9. Social Media Meta Tags
Facebook initially introduced Open Graph to let you control how a page would look when shared on social media.
Twitter cards offer similar enhancements but are exclusive to X (Twitter).
Here are the main Open Graph tags:
og:title – Here, you put the title to which you want to be displayed when your page is linked.
og:url – Your page’s URL.
og:description – Your page’s description. Remember that Facebook will display only about 300 characters of description.
og:image – Here, you can put the URL of an image you want shown when your page is linked to.
Use the specific social media meta tags in order to boost how your links look to your following.
It’s not a huge tweak and doesn’t influence your rankings on the search engines.
However, by configuring how the links to your pages look, you can greatly boost your CTR and UX metrics.
Best SEO Practices
10. HTML5 Semantic Tags
HTML5 semantic tags belong to the latest HTML standard and are necessary to help Google and other search engines better understand a page’s content.
Here’s how HTML5 tags look like in the page source code:
10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO
Title tags are placed in the
of your webpage and are meant to provide a clear and comprehensive idea of what the page is all about.
HTML5 Tags Examples
There are a lot of HTML5 tags widely used today by SEOs. If you take a closer look at these tags, you’ll see that their names repeat the most common elements found on any page, such as videos, menus, etc.
So here they are (most of them):
— Defines a big and meaningful piece of content (an article, a forum post, etc.) that goes as a standalone unit.
— Shows an embedded sound or audio stream.
— Describes a widget from which the user can obtain additional information or controls on-demand.
— Defines a dialog box or a subwindow a user can interact with in case of necessity.
— Embeds a piece of multimedia content like videos, sounds, or any external apps.
— Defines the content of the footer of the page, document, or section.
— Defines the content of the header section of the page, document, or section.
— Defines the most important and meaningful part of the page’s content, or of the ( can be placed inside the
section).
— Defines a page section with navigation links.
— Defines a container for multiple image sources.
— Shows alternative sources for the embedded media elements like
— Along with the
, this element provides a summary visible to the user.
— Embeds an SVG file in an HTML document.
— Encodes dates and times (birthdays, events, meetings, etc.) in a machine-readable format.
— Embeds video content in an HTML document without requiring any additional plugin to play a video.
Best SEO Practices
The truth is that HTML5 tags replace neverending
s all of us know and keep using these days.
Still, HTML5 attributes may help your content index faster and rank better, as Google clearly sees and understands what is an
Welcome to the first of a two-part (and possibly more in the future) article series.
I hope you gain some valuable insights for your brand or organization.
I’m writing these articles from my point of view, having been on the agency side for nearly two decades. I’m the first to admit that I’m not perfect, nor is the agency that I own – or any of those that I have worked for over my career. Let’s get that out of the way right now!
The agency/client relationship and dynamic involve all kinds of perceptions, including assumptions that range in accuracy.
As I get deeper into my career in digital marketing, I’m picking up on some trends.
Some of these aren’t new, but I can attest to what I’m seeing in the marketplace with people (agency and client-side) moving jobs more quickly than in the past and the tech changing more rapidly than it has before.
Whether you’ve been with your current agency for a long time, are considering hiring one at some point, just started with one, or have been burned by many, this is the inside scoop for you.
Yes, you’re paying the agency money, but successful relationships take work from both parties. I can tell you that there are things you can do to get the most out of it.
Here are seven tips for getting the most out of your relationship.
1. Make Sure Your Companies Align
As with most of these tips, this one applies both at the time of considering agencies to partner with as well as if you’re already in an agency relationship. Companies change over time, or new things emerge when you have the chance to start getting into actual work with each other.
Regardless of where you are in the relationship (or if you’re considering one), how it started, or where it is now, you want to ensure you’re never out of alignment for long.
There are some definitive non-negotiables when hiring an agency, and one of them is in your company’s core values. If the agency’s values (just like those of an employee or anyone else you partner with) don’t match up with yours, there will be friction.
Yes, this is one of the hardest or possibly subjective or “fluffy” things to analyze and measure.
However, I can guarantee that if you have a data-driven, accountability, and performance-focused company and the agency you’re working with doesn’t align, then you will have problems – no matter how well people get along.
Or conversely, if you’re a people-first company and you partner with a laser-focused, type-A performance agency only focused on numbers, then your brand, community, and mission-focused goals might not align.
Speaking of goals – you have to be clear about what those are and share them openly.
If they are financial and super tangible, then getting them on paper, doing the math together with the agency, and making sure it is clear how efforts by the agency, as well as your company, come together to reach the ultimate goal for the partnership is important.
In the absence of clear goals or alignment on them, you run the risk of just receiving reports, having reporting meetings, and putting yourself in the middle with having to interpret the agency’s data or deliverables against your company goals.
That can be a challenging spot to be in as you are the one determining whether things are working or not.
2. Have Clearly Defined Communication
We’re in an era of some of the most technical digital marketing and AI-driven strategies ever.
Yet, I often hear from people frustrated with their current agency that the primary reason they are dissatisfied or firing them is about communication; it isn’t subject matter expertise.
Getting communication right and sharing your own expectations about it, including the type, frequency, and ways that you do it, are important.
Want more than just a monthly meeting? Want to be on a texting basis? Do you expect to get a response within minutes versus hours or days?
There are so many misfires and invisible walls that get built by agencies. Sometimes, that’s on purpose to protect scope and to triage things, and in other cases, they don’t know when you’re not getting the level of communication that you expect.
Be vocal about what you expect and make sure it matches up with how the agency works – or can work – if you’re already in a situation where it isn’t where you want it to be. That includes sharing expectations and feelings.
If you struggle with knowing if you’re being direct enough or feel like maybe you’re too direct, then I would encourage you to make sure that all of your communication, and that of the agency, is done in the spirit of shared values.
Beyond that, I strongly recommend Kim Scott’s book “Radical Candor.” It has been a great resource for my team for internal communication and has great examples we use for communication with clients, too, as we work to be tactful, respectful, yet caring and direct.
And, one last note here, wearing my agency hat: If you know that you’re potentially a blocker for frequent communication, then be upfront about that as well, please.
I know the agency will appreciate that so they aren’t filling up your inbox and getting frustrated not knowing how hectic your schedule is. They should be willing to adapt their communication to match your availability, and my hope and assumption is that you’re willing to be available to them (or you wouldn’t be hiring them).
3. Get The Expertise You Need
In the past year, my agency has undergone a pretty dramatic change in how we are niched and focused.
No matter which type is right for you, you definitely need alignment in terms of the expertise offered, both horizontally and vertically.
Know the range of services, channels, and offerings, as well as how deep they go. Plus, how well they layer all that onto your specific industry vertical.
If you’re going to a primarily B2C ecommerce agency and want B2B lead generation, you will likely be out of alignment.
Or, if you’re trying to gain quick sales and are working with a long-form content marketing agency, you might not be properly aligned.
4. Make Sure You Have Your People
Do you know the people you’re working with? Do you have deep conversations? Are you on a texting basis with them? Do you know what they know and what they don’t? Do they often change or are you working with interns?
I’m not here to blow up or bash on other agencies. I believe there’s a right fit agency for every brand. Until we’re all robots or fully replaced with AI (joking), the people will be one of the most important parts of every agency relationship.
If you like who you work with, respect them, have a great communication cadence, and they perform to your expectations, then you have the right people.
Change is inevitable and will happen within your staffing or at the agency. It is important to know upfront how changes will be communicated and handled and what type of “new” people will be in the mix.
Don’t wait for something to happen to get clarity on transitions, the plan, and what level of transparency will be in place if people change, if you have any issues with the people you work with, and how escalations will be handled.
5. Be Clear On Accountability
This is an often misunderstood word.
Most of us don’t love being told that we will be held “accountable” for something if we don’t want to be. Or if we don’t have full control or all the information needed. Or if we’re already wearing too many hats.
I strongly advise that you have a defined level of accountability you’re seeking from an agency. That can include everything from how they communicate, what reporting looks like, how deeply they have visibility into your company, and what lanes to stay within.
If you want them to constantly bring new ideas, follow your processes, define what performance looks like for you, or have ownership in the relationship in other ways, be clear and upfront with that.
Without putting on the table what you expect and want accountability for, the agency can’t be the partner or part of your team that you want, as they’ll default to their standards or be left guessing, leaving you frustrated along the way.
6. Know The Scope
This one is probably obvious, but I can say from the agency side that both agencies and clients sometimes forget what is in scope.
Sometimes, despite the most detailed MSAs, contracts, or SOWs, there are gray areas. Sometimes, agencies are bad at setting expectations and overdeliver or do value-added things that are really nice, but then when they pull back on those, it can be a surprise.
We’re in an era of many value-based, deliverable-based, productized, or flat-rate services. That’s great in the sense that you get all of the things included at a single price, no one has to scrutinize every hour, and we’re more focused on production versus performance.
However, I don’t know any clients who like to hear the words “out of scope” or “change order,” or who get a cold shoulder with the agency slow playing on requests, avoiding the “s” word altogether.
You don’t want that, and I don’t want you to experience that. Agencies aren’t always the best at communicating until things are more acute versus in the moment.
My advice is to be very clear in your understanding of what is in scope, what is out of it, how the agency will manage it, how they will communicate about it, and whether there’s a process for ongoing communication to ensure the scope is the right fit on an ongoing basis if you’re in a retainer or ongoing agreement.
7. Be Willing To Make Resources Available
No, this is not a greedy agency owner saying this. The reality is that, as I mentioned earlier, agencies typically don’t love to surprise you with hidden costs.
However, if they’re constantly thinking about your business and opportunities to grow it, some of those new ideas might be out of scope. If you have this type of agency partner, you’re in a good place and can evaluate each new idea.
Even within the day-to-day scope of your agreement, things might come up. I recently wrote about how SEO isn’t just SEO.
That’s a great example of how even if you have engaged with an agency for search, some of their recommendations might be beyond the scope of what you’re paying them to do within the SEO aspect of things.
Maybe you need to invest in your website, content creation, or IT. Some of these things may or may not be within the agency’s scope. You might have other partners or internal resources that need to help out.
Being willing to make internal resources, software, data, tools, people, or outside contractors available to your agency will go a long way in ensuring you don’t get limited or siloed services that max out below the ROI expectations that you have.
If you’ve budgeted up to your last marketing dollar and don’t have room, let the agency know that upfront, as they can likely stack their work in a way that leverages creative solutions rather than hitting roadblocks along the way.
Build A Relationship That Spans Years
My hope is that if you’re doing an agency search or currently have an agency relationship, this article will help you avoid some of the misalignment or pain that wrong-fit relationships can incur.
Regardless of where you are on your journey, there’s a big two-way street with agency relationships, and getting your right-fit partnership can go a long way in terms of peace of mind and performance.
Starting with values alignment and drilling down through accountability, communication, and resources, you can have a relationship that spans years or decades and don’t have to make sacrifices or find the hidden issues as you go.
Look out for part two next month, which is focused on how agencies can have successful client partnerships. I strongly believe in transparency from both sides of the agency/client relationship, so there are no secrets here.
The majority of WordPress vulnerabilities, about 67% of them discovered in 2023, are rated as medium level. Because of they’re the most common, it makes sense to understand what they are and when they represent an actual security threat. These are the facts about those kinds of vulnerabilities what you should know about them.
What Is A Medium Level Vulnerability?
A spokesperson from WPScan, a WordPress Security Scanning company owned by Automattic, explained that they use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS Scores) to rate the severity of a threat. The scores are based on a numbering system from 1 – 10 and ratings from low, medium, high, and critical.
The WPScan spokesperson explained:
“We don’t flag levels as the chance of happening, but the severity of the vulnerability based on FIRST’s CVSS framework. Speaking broadly, a medium-level severity score means either the vulnerability is hard to exploit (e.g., SQL Injection that requires a highly privileged account) or the attacker doesn’t gain much from a successful attack (e.g., an unauthenticated user can get the content of private blog posts).
We generally don’t see them being used as much in large-scale attacks because they are less useful than higher severity vulnerabilities and harder to automate. However, they could be useful in more targeted attacks, for example, when a privileged user account has already been compromised, or an attacker knows that some private content contains sensitive information that is useful to them.
We would always recommend upgrading vulnerable extensions as soon as possible. Still, if the severity is medium, then there is less urgency to do so, as the site is less likely to be the victim of a large-scale automated attack.
An untrained user may find the report a bit hard to digest. We did our best to make it as suitable as possible for all audiences, but I understand it’d be impossible to cover everyone without making it too boring or long. And the same can happen to the reported vulnerability. The user consuming the feed would need some basic knowledge of their website setup to consider which vulnerability needs immediate attention and which one can be handled by the WAF, for example.
If the user knows, for example, that their site doesn’t allow users to subscribe to it. All reports of subscriber+ vulnerabilities, independent of the severity level, can be reconsidered. Assuming that the user maintains a constant review of the site’s user base.
The same goes for contributor+ reports or even administrator levels. If the person maintains a small network of WordPress sites, the admin+ vulnerabilities are interesting for them since a compromised administrator of one of the sites can be used to attack the super admin.”
Contributor-Level Vulnerabilities
Many medium severity vulnerabilities require a contributor-level access. A contributor is an access role that gives that registered user the ability to write and submit content, although in general they don’t have the ability to publish them.
Most websites don’t have to worry about security threats that require contributor level authentication because most sites don’t offer that level of access.
Chloe Chamberland – Threat Intelligence Lead at Wordfence explained that most site owners shouldn’t worry about medium level severity vulnerabilities that require a contributor-level access in order to exploit them because most WordPress sites don’t offer that permission level. She also noted that these kinds of vulnerabilities are hard to scale because exploiting them is difficult to automate.
Chloe explained:
“For most site owners, vulnerabilities that require contributor-level access and above to exploit are something they do not need to worry about. This is because most sites do not allow contributor-level registration and most sites do not have contributors on their site.
In addition, most WordPress attacks are automated and are looking for easy to exploit high value returns so vulnerabilities like this are unlikely to be targeted by most WordPress threat actors.”
Website Publishers That Should Worry
Chloe also said that publishers who do offer contributor-level permissions may have several reasons to be concerned about these kinds of exploits:
“The concern with exploits that require contributor-level access to exploit arises when site owners allow contributor-level registration, have contributors with weak passwords, or the site has another plugin/theme installed with a vulnerability that allows contributor-level access in some way and the attacker really wants in on your website.
If an attacker can get their hands on one of these accounts, and a contributor-level vulnerability exists, then they may be provided with the opportunity to escalate their privileges and do real damage to the victim. Let’s take a contributor-level Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability for example.
Due to the nature of contributor-level access, an administrator would be highly likely to preview the post for review at which point any injected JavaScript would execute – this means the attacker would have a relatively high chance of success due to the admin previewing the post for publication.
As with any Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability, this can be leveraged to add a new administrative user account, inject backdoors, and essentially do anything a site administrator could do. If a serious attacker has access to a contributor-level account and no other trivial way to elevate their privileges, then they’d likely leverage that contributor-level Cross-Site Scripting to gain further access. As previously mentioned, you likely won’t see that level of sophistication targeting the vast majority of WordPress sites, so it’s really high value sites that need to be concerned with these issues.
In conclusion, while I don’t think a vast majority of site owners need to worry about contributor-level vulnerabilities, it’s still important to take them seriously if you allow user registration at that level on your site, you don’t enforce unique strong user passwords, and/or you have a high value WordPress website.”
Be Aware Of Vulnerabilities
While the many of the medium level vulnerabilities may not be something to worry about it’s still a good idea to stay informed of them. Security Scanners like the free version of WPScan can give a warning when a plugin or theme becomes vulnerable. It’s a good way to have a warning system in place to keep on top of vulnerabilities.
WordPress security plugins like Wordfence offer a proactive security stance that actively blocks automated hacking attacks and can be further tuned by advanced users to block specific bots and user agents. The free version of Wordfence offers significant protection in the form of a firewall and a malware scanner. The paid version offers protection for all vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered and before the vulnerability is patched. I use Wordfence on all of my websites and can’t imagine setting up a website without it.
Security is generally not regarded as an SEO issue but it should be considered as one because failure to secure a site can undo all the hard word done to make a site rank well.
Usability testing tools can help an online business identify customer pain points. By capturing customer behavior and providing immediate feedback, these tools can help make the right changes to improve the user experience.
Here is a list of usability tools for testing a website. Tools are available to gather testers, create and run tests, monitor behavior, and collect and analyze feedback for moderated and unmoderated testing. Several offer free plans.
UXtweak is a testing platform that provides access to site visitors’ preferences, decisions, and biases. Use the Prototype Testing tool to test designs. Use the Website Testing or Mobile Testing tools to assess your website’s usability quickly. Compare a website with competitors through Competitive Testing. Access the User Panel to see respondents and target their demographics and preferences. Use the Survey tool to ask users what problems they face and receive additional feedback. Explore user bias through Five Second and Preference tests. Price: Starter plan is free. Paid plans start at $59 per month.
Hotjar provides heatmaps showing where users click, move, and scroll on a site. Watch complete recordings of each visit, including clicks, mouse movements, u-turns, and rage clicks. Incoming Feedback provides a real-time suggestion box for a site. Use a targeted survey to validate ideas and better understand users. Automate the recruitment, scheduling, and hosting of moderated user interviews. Price: Free for up to 35 daily sessions. Paid plans start at $31 per month.
Maze is an all-in-one platform for testing concepts, prototypes, content, and customer satisfaction. Create custom AI-powered tests to learn about users and their preferences. Run usability tests on prototypes or designs across the development cycle. Use surveys, interview studies, card sorting, prototype testing, website testing, and tree testing. Run usability tests on live websites and collect in-product feedback that fuels confident product decisions. Price: Free for up to five seats. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Dovetail is a tool that gathers scattered customer feedback into a searchable location for analysis and AI-summarized insights. Find patterns in large data sets. Thematic classification will identify, cluster, and label common themes across sources. Channels proactively identify patterns before they’re problems. Price: Basic plan is free. Paid plans start at $29 per month.
Optimal Workshop provides multiple testing methods to support research workflow with specialized tools for card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, surveys, and user interviews. Use tree testing on content structures, categories, and labels before hitting the visual design phase. Make sense of qualitative research with the affinity map, or slice and dice your data to discover patterns with the theme builder. Use first-click testing and online surveys to capture impressions, opinions, and feedback. Find and recruit quality participants with instant, in-app access, or use the custom recruitment service. Price: Plans start at $208 per month.
Lookback is a research platform for usability testing and interviewing. Collect feedback from customers on a product, website, or prototype. Watch and record participant touches on mobile screens during sessions. Capture live notes during sessions and invite teams to join. Invite stakeholders to observe and chat with each other in a live virtual room. Combine interviews, usability studies, and unmoderated step-by-step tasks within the same project. Price: Plans start at $25 per month.
UserZoom is a UX testing tool from UserTesting. Choose from various usability tests for research, including video-based tests, click tests, tree tests, and card sorts. Combine multiple methods in one study to get more thorough results. A machine-learning-powered distribution engine helps you find the right audiences using 200 demographic filters for any test. Automatically send study invites and reminders to participants or invite teams to collaborate during moderated sessions from a virtual observation room. Accelerate analysis with automated transcripts, synced playback, timestamped notes, and auto-generated charts and heatmaps. Contact for pricing.
Lyssna (formerly UsabilityHub) provides tools to conduct usability tests, recruit participants, and analyze data to help make human-centered decisions. In addition to the five-second test it pioneered, the platform features interviews, surveys, first-click testing, preference testing, card sorting, and tree testing. Use analysis tools to interpret data, including result filtering, text analysis, navigation analysis, click and heat maps, agreement and similarity matrices, and flow analysis. Price: Free for up to three seats. Paid plans start at $75 per month.
Trymata (formerly TryMyUI) is a platform for usability testing, including user interface, user experience, research, remote testing, and more. Conduct UI and UX testing in desktop, tablet, and mobile environments. Use specialized testers to cater to ecommerce usability and UI/UX testing needs. Run UX testing scenarios and get insights from experts. Monitor live and real-time testing sessions. Explore users’ navigations, mouse movements, and written and spoken feedback to uncover their thoughts when interacting with digital products. Price: Plans start at $399 per month.
Userbrain is an easy-to-use user testing platform for websites, apps, and prototypes. Set up a test with templates, or create a test with tasks, questions, ratings, and more. Recruit testers from 120,000 qualified testers, target their demographics, and screen for prior experiences, habits, or preferences. Invite users. Speed up test analysis with automatic transcripts and AI insights. Get the correct information to the right people with automated test reports and clips. Price: Plans start at $79 per month.
Loop11 is an application that runs usability studies. Determine tasks to test on a website, recruit participants, and launch a study. Run moderated or unmoderated testing, A/B testing, prototype testing, mobile and tablet UX testing, UX benchmarking, true intent studies, and more. Loop11 provides real-time data, providing an understanding of the usability of a website and where to improve or make changes. Track users’ click and navigation patterns, visualize user engagement and interaction through heatmaps, capture interactions through session recordings, and gain deeper insights using AI. Price: Plans start at $179 per month.
Useberry is a platform for usability research, including user feedback, actionable insights, and user-centered decisions. Choose testing methods that suit research requirements, including five-second tests, single tasks, first clicks, card sorting, tree testing, preference tests, open analytics, and online surveys. Identify task completions with flexible options. Pinpoint a website’s usability issues, explore users’ perspectives, and make the proper adjustments. Analyze user behavior and identify patterns in how visitors engage with a website. Get more precise insights from UX research studies by seamlessly integrating randomization across multiple testing scenarios. Price: Free for up to 10 responses per month. Paid plans start at $67 per month.
Userlytics is a testing platform that creates and conducts studies, recruits users, and analyzes results. Choose from various study types and qualitative and quantitative activities to gather insights. Access a panel of 2 million global participants, specify demographic criteria, or bring your own users. Conduct the study using testing tools provided by Userlytics, such as time on task, net promoter score, card sorting, tree testing, and more. Use Userlytics’ analytics dashboards, which include highlight reels, transcriptions, AI UX Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis, to gain insights into the user experience. Contact for pricing.
Usability testing tools can help an online business identify customer pain points. By capturing customer behavior and providing immediate feedback, these tools can help make the right changes to improve the user experience.
Here is a list of usability tools for testing a website. Tools are available to gather testers, create and run tests, monitor behavior, and collect and analyze feedback for moderated and unmoderated testing. Several offer free plans.
UXtweak is a testing platform that provides access to site visitors’ preferences, decisions, and biases. Use the Prototype Testing tool to test designs. Use the Website Testing or Mobile Testing tools to assess your website’s usability quickly. Compare a website with competitors through Competitive Testing. Access the User Panel to see respondents and target their demographics and preferences. Use the Survey tool to ask users what problems they face and receive additional feedback. Explore user bias through Five Second and Preference tests. Price: Starter plan is free. Paid plans start at $59 per month.
Hotjar provides heatmaps showing where users click, move, and scroll on a site. Watch complete recordings of each visit, including clicks, mouse movements, u-turns, and rage clicks. Incoming Feedback provides a real-time suggestion box for a site. Use a targeted survey to validate ideas and better understand users. Automate the recruitment, scheduling, and hosting of moderated user interviews. Price: Free for up to 35 daily sessions. Paid plans start at $31 per month.
Maze is an all-in-one platform for testing concepts, prototypes, content, and customer satisfaction. Create custom AI-powered tests to learn about users and their preferences. Run usability tests on prototypes or designs across the development cycle. Use surveys, interview studies, card sorting, prototype testing, website testing, and tree testing. Run usability tests on live websites and collect in-product feedback that fuels confident product decisions. Price: Free for up to five seats. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Dovetail is a tool that gathers scattered customer feedback into a searchable location for analysis and AI-summarized insights. Find patterns in large data sets. Thematic classification will identify, cluster, and label common themes across sources. Channels proactively identify patterns before they’re problems. Price: Basic plan is free. Paid plans start at $29 per month.
Optimal Workshop provides multiple testing methods to support research workflow with specialized tools for card sorting, tree testing, first-click testing, surveys, and user interviews. Use tree testing on content structures, categories, and labels before hitting the visual design phase. Make sense of qualitative research with the affinity map, or slice and dice your data to discover patterns with the theme builder. Use first-click testing and online surveys to capture impressions, opinions, and feedback. Find and recruit quality participants with instant, in-app access, or use the custom recruitment service. Price: Plans start at $208 per month.
Lookback is a research platform for usability testing and interviewing. Collect feedback from customers on a product, website, or prototype. Watch and record participant touches on mobile screens during sessions. Capture live notes during sessions and invite teams to join. Invite stakeholders to observe and chat with each other in a live virtual room. Combine interviews, usability studies, and unmoderated step-by-step tasks within the same project. Price: Plans start at $25 per month.
UserZoom is a UX testing tool from UserTesting. Choose from various usability tests for research, including video-based tests, click tests, tree tests, and card sorts. Combine multiple methods in one study to get more thorough results. A machine-learning-powered distribution engine helps you find the right audiences using 200 demographic filters for any test. Automatically send study invites and reminders to participants or invite teams to collaborate during moderated sessions from a virtual observation room. Accelerate analysis with automated transcripts, synced playback, timestamped notes, and auto-generated charts and heatmaps. Contact for pricing.
Lyssna (formerly UsabilityHub) provides tools to conduct usability tests, recruit participants, and analyze data to help make human-centered decisions. In addition to the five-second test it pioneered, the platform features interviews, surveys, first-click testing, preference testing, card sorting, and tree testing. Use analysis tools to interpret data, including result filtering, text analysis, navigation analysis, click and heat maps, agreement and similarity matrices, and flow analysis. Price: Free for up to three seats. Paid plans start at $75 per month.
Trymata (formerly TryMyUI) is a platform for usability testing, including user interface, user experience, research, remote testing, and more. Conduct UI and UX testing in desktop, tablet, and mobile environments. Use specialized testers to cater to ecommerce usability and UI/UX testing needs. Run UX testing scenarios and get insights from experts. Monitor live and real-time testing sessions. Explore users’ navigations, mouse movements, and written and spoken feedback to uncover their thoughts when interacting with digital products. Price: Plans start at $399 per month.
Userbrain is an easy-to-use user testing platform for websites, apps, and prototypes. Set up a test with templates, or create a test with tasks, questions, ratings, and more. Recruit testers from 120,000 qualified testers, target their demographics, and screen for prior experiences, habits, or preferences. Invite users. Speed up test analysis with automatic transcripts and AI insights. Get the correct information to the right people with automated test reports and clips. Price: Plans start at $79 per month.
Loop11 is an application that runs usability studies. Determine tasks to test on a website, recruit participants, and launch a study. Run moderated or unmoderated testing, A/B testing, prototype testing, mobile and tablet UX testing, UX benchmarking, true intent studies, and more. Loop11 provides real-time data, providing an understanding of the usability of a website and where to improve or make changes. Track users’ click and navigation patterns, visualize user engagement and interaction through heatmaps, capture interactions through session recordings, and gain deeper insights using AI. Price: Plans start at $179 per month.
Useberry is a platform for usability research, including user feedback, actionable insights, and user-centered decisions. Choose testing methods that suit research requirements, including five-second tests, single tasks, first clicks, card sorting, tree testing, preference tests, open analytics, and online surveys. Identify task completions with flexible options. Pinpoint a website’s usability issues, explore users’ perspectives, and make the proper adjustments. Analyze user behavior and identify patterns in how visitors engage with a website. Get more precise insights from UX research studies by seamlessly integrating randomization across multiple testing scenarios. Price: Free for up to 10 responses per month. Paid plans start at $67 per month.
Userlytics is a testing platform that creates and conducts studies, recruits users, and analyzes results. Choose from various study types and qualitative and quantitative activities to gather insights. Access a panel of 2 million global participants, specify demographic criteria, or bring your own users. Conduct the study using testing tools provided by Userlytics, such as time on task, net promoter score, card sorting, tree testing, and more. Use Userlytics’ analytics dashboards, which include highlight reels, transcriptions, AI UX Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis, to gain insights into the user experience. Contact for pricing.
The European Accessibility Act is a directive of the European Commission and adopted as law by member countries in 2019. Its purpose is to improve access to products and services for E.U. residents with disabilities. Enforcement begins June 28, 2025.
The EAA applies to many products and services, such as mobile phones, ebooks, and transportation providers. It explicitly includes ecommerce websites.
Like the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation, the EAA requires compliance by businesses with Europe-based customers. No matter where it’s located or registered, any ecommerce business with E.U. customers must comply with the EAA. Only “micro-enterprises” — those with fewer than 10 employees and revenue below €2 million (approximately $2.1 million) — are exempt.
Companies worldwide with customers in any of the 27 E.U. member countries must comply with the EAA. Source: European Commission.
Enforcement
Each E.U. country has laid out enforcement mechanisms and penalties for noncompliance. Consumers may file a complaint with a country’s monitoring agency, which will notify the business and launch an investigation, although the agencies can investigate and enforce without a complaint.
The penalties for noncompliance range in severity but include fines of €60,000 or more and, in Ireland, up to 18 months in jail for refusing to comply or dishonesty in reporting.
Your site meets minimum WCAG color contrast guidelines between fonts and backgrounds.
Images (except for spacers and other decorative items) include descriptive alt text for users of screen readers.
Headings are properly nested to indicate the content structure and not simply for styling.
An accessibility specialist can help, as can automated testing platforms, such as the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. However, in my experience, automated checkers detect only 30% of accessibility problems. For instance, checking keyboard navigation requires manual testing, not automated.
Moreover, the European Commission has stated that no automated tool, including overlays and widgets, can cover the entire WCAG 2.1 AA criteria or substitute for manual work to ensure full EAA compliance.
Avoid Delay
Accessibility compliance is not a one-time task. Any change in website layout, navigation, categories, or products could impact accessibility. Thus consider how to maintain compliance over time through regular checks or audits.
Depending on the website, fixing accessibility failures could take upwards of a year. Don’t delay if your business has E.U. customers. Remember, enforcement begins June 28, 2025.
