SEO can be explained as any effort you make to improve your website. But did you know there’s an important distinction between on-page and off-page SEO? Optimizing your website is called on-page SEO and includes things like site structure, content and speed optimization. Off-page SEO entails, among other things, link building, social media, and local SEO. In other words, generating traffic to your site and making your business appear like the real deal it is. In this post, we answer the question: What is off-page SEO?
Exposure, trust and brand awareness
When focusing on on-page SEO, you’re doing everything in your power to create a good website. You write great content, build a solid site structure, make your website mobile-friendly and work on improving page speed. All is well in the world and you’ve done all you can. Right? Well, there’s another part we can’t forget: off-page SEO. This helps you to bring in those hordes of visitors and potential customers. Both are important pieces of the puzzle.
By writing quality content you can rank in search engines, but by getting a few great, relevant sites to link to that content, you’re increasing the chance that you’ll end up ranking a lot higher. The same goes for building your brand and creating trust. This doesn’t just happen on your site, but mostly off-site. Take reviews, for instance, these can make or break your company. You need them, but they most often appear on external sites. These are all factors that contribute to your rankings.
It’s not only important to rank high for your search term, but also to create trust and a sense of authority. You must appear to be the best search result, not just in a technical and content sense, but also in reality. Popularity, quality, and relevance are everything. Especially now that E-E-A-T (which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) has become a core concept in how Google rates your online content.
A lot of it comes down to link building
Links are the threads that keep our web together. Search engines use links to determine how valuable a piece of content or a particular site is. Getting quality links will always be a great tactic if you’re serious about SEO. And who isn’t? In the past, there have been debates on the relevance of links. We firmly believe in the importance of links. That being said, you need the good ones. Don’t buy stuff, and keep a close eye on where and how you’re being linked to. We’ve written several guides on how to get quality links for your site and what you shouldn’t do when link building.
By itself, social media is not essential for ranking well in search engines. It is however growing in popularity, and more and more people are using these platforms for their online searches as well. It’s also a great way to reach more people and grow your brand as a whole.
At the end of the day, SEO is about being found online. By being active on social media, you will be deemed more trustworthy, be more easily found and have a great way to showcase your brand more. People will probably expect to find you there and you don’t want them to end up empty-handed or stumble across your competition. It also gives you a great opportunity to interact with your audience in a fun and approachable way. So make sure to invest in social media to reach your audience.
Local SEO is also off-page SEO
Local SEO is essential if your business is locally oriented. But what is it? Where normally, you would focus your efforts on reaching as many people as possible, wherever they are, local SEO focuses on reaching people in a certain area. So, for example, when you’re a bike repair shop or real estate agent.
For local businesses, part of the off-page SEO is in-person SEO. Word-of-mouth marketing plays a big role in getting people to your business. Not just that, happy customers can leave reviews online that Google – and other potential customers – can use to see how well you are doing. The experiences that people have with your business, should be similar and positive, whether they’re offline or online.
Don’t forget to showcase yourself
Coming back to the importance of showing your expertise or authority on a topic, you need to make sure this isn’t just being said on your website. Make appearances to talk about your field or expertise or service/product with others. By blogging for another website in your field, doing interviews, being a guest on podcasts, or going to events to do a talk or workshop. Share your knowledge and be active to let people know that you’re the go-to person (or website) when it comes to that specific topic.
Off-page SEO is an integral part of your SEO strategy
As we’ve shown, off-page SEO supplements on-page SEO. They go hand in hand. You need to focus on what’s going on outside your website as well. Work on proper link building, branding and your social media efforts to make the most of your SEO. You can optimize your site all you want, but if it isn’t perceived as a quality destination for people, it will be difficult to get people to your website at all.
A new day, a new trend. For businesses and content creators, it sure feels that way sometimes. If you’re not on top of trends, it might be difficult to engage your audience. So, what should you do? Is it still possible to create and maintain a holistic SEO strategy, while keeping your users entertained?
What is holistic SEO?
To keep it short: if you fulfill your users’ needs on every level, you’re practicing holistic SEO. This means your site is easy and safe to use, and provides the right information at the right time.
Holistic SEO is not just doing keyword research and writing content that people are looking for. It’s also user experience, technical SEO, and making sure your website is secure.
What is trending content?
When a topic or joke is trending, it has high visibility on social media platforms. This means people are talking and making content about this topic. And they’re also searching for it!
Depending on the topic that’s trending, people might search for more information on social media platforms or search engines. Sometimes even both! Which is why it can be useful for your business’s visibility to also create content about a trending topic.
Trending content might be necessary
How people search online is changing. In fact, many SEO experts predict that we’ll get less traffic from search engines. So, where will traffic come from? A large part will probably come from social media like TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Instagram – especially now that more people use them as search engines.
Examples of TikTok used as a search engine
And how do you become more visible on social media? By posting trending content.
Trending or quality content?
As we just discussed, a large part of holistic SEO is writing quality content. But how can you create quality content when you only have a day or two before the world moves on to the next trend?
Cookie company joining in on the Taylor Swift’s Eras tour hype
Take TikTok, for example. Generally, by the time you notice something is a trend, you’re already too late. The ship has sailed, and people are moving on to the next thing. With this in mind, it can feel like you have to choose between staying relevant or creating quality content.
Company using a meme to promote their linen sheets
What does your audience appreciate?
It’s good to know that the answer to how much trending content you should create also largely depends on your audience. If your audience consists of older people, then chances are you don’t need to follow social media trends as vigorously. On the contrary, you might even scare them away!
If your audience is younger, however, you might need to come up with a certified ‘trend strategy’. Because you can’t join them all. And if you try to stay relevant by jumping on every trend, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard. Plus, you’ll probably have to compromise on quality.
A trend strategy
As we said, you shouldn’t want to join in on every trend. So what should you do instead? We suggest you create your own ‘trend strategy’. Here’s a few things you should consider:
Which trends are you going to engage with?
Will you only engage with trends within your area of expertise, or will you branch out?
Will you only join in on funny trends, or will you create content for more serious trends too?
Will you only join trends that your audience is interested in? Or will you introduce your audience to new trends that could be interesting to them as well?
Will you drop everything to create content related to a new trend?
Does it need to be a blog post, or is a social media post better? Or both?
How often will you post ‘trendy’ content? Keep in mind that if you join in often, your brand image will change. Your business will probably feel younger, which might alienate part of your audience.
You’re still working on your holistic SEO
With a trend strategy, you should be able to make better decisions about when to post trendy content. Which will hopefully help you to keep creating quality content – one of the pillars of holistic SEO.
What’s more, if you follow trends that your audience likes, you’ll be adhering to another holistic SEO pillar: creating content for your audience! After all, they’re the ones reading (and hopefully engaging with) your content.
Keep an eye on brand image
Just don’t forget that your brand image could change, depending on the type of trending content you post online. If you engage with and participate in a lot of meme-y content and trends (a meme can be a funny video, image, or piece of text that’s rapidly copied and spread online – usually, with slight variations), your brand might come across as more playful and less serious.
However, never posting meme-y content also sends a clear message. Your business will come across as serious, and perhaps a little impersonal. It’s fine if that’s what you’re going for, but it’s also good to keep in mind that authentic content (so more personal content) does really well online.
Conclusion
There’s no telling what the future will bring, but it’s clear that trends won’t go away. Plus, they’re constantly changing! That’s why it might be helpful to create a trend strategy, so you can provide your audience with content they’re currently interested in. Without having to skimp on quality and your holistic SEO strategy. Good luck!
Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.
Have you not thought about your website in a while? Or are you just not sure where to start when it comes to optimizing your pages? No worries. We are here to help you revive your website through the power of SEO! And make you fall in love with your website all over again. Because attracting people to your website and business becomes so much easier when you’re having fun. So let’s give your website some well-deserved SEO love and grow your number of visitors!
As you might already know, SEO helps you get more people to your website and grow your business. Having Yoast SEO on your website is a great start, because it takes care of a lot of things for you. However, to really drive some traffic to your website, you need to put in some work on a regular basis. We realize that this isn’t always easy, especially when you’re doing a lot of it yourself. That’s why we have a plan to get your website back on track.
4 phases to get your website back in shape
To get your website into tiptop shape, we’ll go through four phases. In the first phase, we’ll take some time to think about your audience and easy fixes to revive your website. The second phase is all about maintenance and cleaning up. After that, the third and fourth phase will help you make SEO part of your routine.
Phase 1: Thinking
Evaluate what you know about your audience
Before we get to optimizing and writing, let’s take a step back. Take some time to figure out who your audience is. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to analyze your audience to get to know them. Don’t base your decisions on assumptions. So find out who your current audience is, who else you want to attract to your website and what they have in common. Don’t just think about your audience in general terms (age, location, interests). Try to understand what drives them to your site. What does your audience want to read, do or buy on your site? Is your content focused on the right people? Has your business or audience changed since you last worked on your website?
Asking these questions will help you get insight into your audience and focus on the important things. Are you creating the right content? Are your call-to-actions aligned with what your audience expects? Are you still targeting the right people? Collect the right information to make these decisions and make it way easier for yourself to improve your site.
Identify your quick wins
Before making any big changes, it’s always wise to look at your Analytics and Google Search Console. Especially if you haven’t done this in a while, it’s a good place to get an idea of how your website is doing. And it will probably give you lots of input for possible improvements. Check out what pages are performing well and think of how you can improve them. Or if there are pages that performed well in the past, but not so much right now, it’s time to give those some extra love.
Use Google Search Console to get an idea of how your pages are doing in the search results. Are your most important pages ranking high enough and for the right keywords? If not, give those pages a proper refresh and focus them on the right keywords. With the Wincher integration in Yoast SEO, you can easily track which keywords are performing well. You can also see how your page has been doing over time. That’ll give you valuable information on which pages can use an update.
Make a list of pages and posts that seem to be easy fixes. By simply updating the content, adding the right internal links and tweaking what else needs to be fixed, you can already start driving more traffic to these pages.
Renew your keyword research
When it’s been a while since you last conducted keyword research or when you have never had the time to properly do this, there’s no time like the present! It’s possible that the search behavior of your audience has changed, or that there are new trends in your field that you should cover. Either way, take some time to do keyword research to find out what words your audience is using. The Semrush integration in Yoast SEO can help you get a quick overview of high-performing keywords in your field.
Phase 2: Maintenance
Do some technical maintenance
Although it might not be your favorite pastime, it’s important not to ignore the technical side of your website. If you haven’t looked at your website in a while, make sure to do these checks first:
Get your site speed up to par
First of all, check how your site’s speed is doing. Because if there’s something site visitors (and search engines) dislike, it’s a page that takes ages to load. You’ll lose them before they even enter your website. Luckily there are tools that can help you figure out whether your pages are loading fast enough. Read all about how to measure site speed and how to get your site to load faster in our blog post on site speed!
Check and fix those 404s
A 404 page is an error page that is shown to site visitors when the page they’re trying to visit doesn’t exist. When your website has been around for a while, chances are that some of your older links don’t work anymore. Although having a few 404s doesn’t hurt your overall rankings, it can become a problem for your SEO if it becomes too much. So make sure to check whether you have any broken links on your website and use a tool like the redirect manager in Yoast SEO to redirect people to another page.
Do some content maintenance
If SEO wasn’t your top priority lately, there’s a big chance that your internal linking needs some love as well. In Yoast SEO Premium, you can find two practical workouts that’ll help you get your internal linking structure back in shape. You can click through these workouts and solve some major problems with just a bit of your time.
With the cornerstone content workout, you’ll be able to choose which articles are your most important ones. The ones you want to rank with. After that, the workout helps you to make sure that your internal linking structure is helping you to rank with exactly those articles. The orphaned content workout will help you detect all your articles that do not have any internal links going to them. Perhaps you can add a few links to that page to make it findable? Or perhaps these should be removed (and redirected) from your site? The workout will help you decide and even suggest a few relevant internal links, to help you solve all of your orphaned content problems. After you’ve cleaned up, there’s room to create new content and improve your existing content!
Phase 3: Planning
The first two phases have probably given you loads of ideas on what to work on. Hopefully, it also got you excited to get started again. But to make sure your newfound love for your website doesn’t burn out too quickly, let’s make a plan. A plan that’s doable.
Figure out how much time you have, per week or month, to spend on SEO. Then plan your SEO tasks for the next couple of months. Be specific on what you’re going to work on, so you don’t have to figure that out at that moment. To stay motivated and quickly make some progress, I would suggest starting with the quick wins you listed during phase 1. Also, try to alternate fun SEO tasks with tasks that are ‘less fun’ for you, so you don’t leave all the boring stuff to the end and eventually forget about it.
Phase 4: Back to your routine
This bring us to the last phase, a phase that will never really end. Because it’s essentially the phase in which you make sure to make SEO part of your routine. It’s an ongoing thing and requires you to check in and optimize regularly. The good news is that all the SEO work that you’re doing is beneficial to your audience and helps you grow your business. So think of it as a necessary investment of your time. The following tasks should become part of your routine:
Checking and tracking
checking your 404s
assessing your site speed
checking your internal linking structure
doing keyword research
analyzing your performance in Analytics and Google Search Console
Executing
updating old content
writing new content
internal linking
improving site speed
We’ve created a monthly workout schedule (PDF) that you can use to stay on top of your SEO. Of course, it’s just a guideline so feel free to spend more or less time on the tasks mentioned. But it can help you stay motivated by checking off what you’ve done so far!
Love your site and keep doing SEO
We often joke and say that SEO stands for Seriously Effortful Optimization. And that isn’t untrue. At Yoast, we try our best to build a plugin that automatically takes care of a lot for you. But to really stand out in the search engines, you need to put in the work. And if you do it regularly, it’s not that much of a hassle. But starting over after you’ve neglected your SEO for a while, takes a bit of hard work at first. Just remember that whatever love you put into your site, will result in happy site visitors and search engines!
SEO is all about creating a great experience for people visiting your website, or seeing your snippet in the search results. That’s why a lot of your SEO efforts will likely be focused on things like content, UX and pagespeed. Efforts that help you optimize your page or website overall. As they should be! They help you become the best search result for search engines and people alike. However, there are also a few things outside of your website that you should not forget about. An important one being link building. In this post, we’ll discuss the 6 steps to create a successful link building strategy for any business.
Grow your traffic with link building
In a nutshell, link building is the act of getting other websites to link to your page. The reason why you should invest some time into this is because these links are important for SEO. They help your pages rank higher in the search results. But that’s not the only thing they do:
A good link, first and foremost, drives traffic to your site.
Other websites linking to your page will help in getting more (referral) traffic to your site. This grows your overall traffic and brings new people into contact with your website. To make sure these efforts aren’t in vain, it’s good to think about which websites would make sense in linking to your pages. You want people who are visiting that website to also enjoy yours when they’re being directed there, but we’ll go into that further one.
An important note is that link building should always be done from a holistic SEO perspective. Meaning that you should focus on getting quality backlinks that will actually generate traffic for your website. In addition, it means staying away from bad practices as these can hurt your rankings.
The 6 steps of a successful link building strategy
1. Really get to know your audience
To get an idea of what websites would ideally link to yours, you first need to have insights into who your audience is. You might have a hunch of who your audience is, but you’ll be surprised how often that doesn’t match with reality. Make sure to do some research and analyze your audience to get to know them. This can help you retain your current audience and perhaps even reach new audiences that might be interested in what you’re offering. All of this also gives you a better idea of other websites they might be interested in. If it feels natural, you can even ask them about other websites that they frequent.
To give you an example, say you run an online store with loads of craft materials. and blog about new craft ideas now and then. User research could give you the insight that a large part of your audience is parents looking for fun crafts to do with their kids. This could give you the idea to reach out to websites listing fun activities to do with kids. Something you wouldn’t have done if you did not know about that segment of your target audience. Or to give an example closer to home, at Yoast, we started with an audience that consisted mainly of WordPress developers. However, we wanted to broaden our audience to a more general group of WordPress users without losing our initial audience. So we created additional content that caters to our new audience and went to work to get links from other websites where these people can be found.
2. Create a list of sites that your audience visits
When you know more about your audience and, you can create a list of websites that will help you reach them. Use your research to find the websites that appeal to these people. Because links from these websites can help you reach your audience, especially if they don’t know about your website yet. Do pay attention whether there’s a logical connection to be made between you and a website on the list. This increases your chances of getting the link and is better for SEO as well. A link from a website that has absolutely nothing to do with your niche is not valuable when it comes to your position in the search results.
In addition, I want to note that a link from a spammy website is also not going to do you any good. These links can even backfire and hurt your rankings as Google is absolutely not a fan of bad link building practices. So stay away from spammy websites, paying for your links and other link building DON’Ts. Link building isn’t just a trick or something you can throw money at. Getting these links should feel like a normal marketing effort and part of a holistic SEO approach.
3. Write great content
To get other websites to link to your content, you need to have content that makes them want to link to your content. Which means that you need to create quality content. Content that appeals to your audience, is helpful and that showcases your unique point of view. If you sell products or services, don’t just write about why they’re awesome and why they should buy them. Write content that answers a question that your audience has or solves a problem they’re facing. Don’t center it around your product or service. Make your content genuinely helpful and show your expertise on the topic. This will not only build trust and authority, but you’ll also get more links to your page as other websites will see the value of your content.
To give an example: Let’s say you sell garden tools like lawnmowers. Instead of writing a blog post on why your lawnmower is the best one out there, write blog posts on topics like ‘How to get your garden ready for the summer’. Or if you sell furniture, write an article on the latest trends in interior design. This type of content is a lot more shareable for other people outside your company. Which will increase your chances of getting relevant links. If you need some guidance on creating quality content, we have lots of blog posts on content SEO and an SEO copywriting training course.
Guest blogging
When you’re a blogger or (aiming to be) an expert in your field, another option is guest blogging. This not only builds your authority, it’s a great way to get more links to your website. Often enough, blogs are looking for input from fellow bloggers and in return will let you link to your own content. This gets you a great link to your website and the opportunity to bring yourself into contact with their audience. Growing your reach.
Once again, be tactical in the websites you choose to partner up with. They should be trustworthy and relevant to your own website to get any real value out of it. Visit your favorite blogs, or blogs that are similar to yours, and check to see if they’re open to guest submissions. They’ll usually mention this on their contact or collaboration page.
4. Match content to the right website
When you’re happy with the content you’ve written, it’s time to dive into the list of websites you’ve made during the 2nd step. Which websites on there will be likely to link to which piece of content? You may be tempted to just send everything that you’ve created to everyone, but this will hurt your chances of anyone linking to your content. You will come across as spammy and you can’t ask those people to read 5 blog posts and decide which one they like.
Also good to know: if you have a long tail keyword approach (writing about small and niche subjects) the number of websites that are a good fit will be smaller. This isn’t a bad thing, as very specific content can mean that this smaller number of websites is more willing to link to your content. It can also mean that readers will appreciate your content even more, as there’s less of the same content out there and they’ll be eager to know more about your business.
5. Reach out in a personal way
After figuring out which content to send to whom, it’s time to reach out to them. You can always send an email, but social media like X/Twitter or LinkedIn are also a great way to contact people directly. To increase your chances of getting their attention, make sure to do your homework. Use your audience research and what you know about the website to personalize your message. Never send out automated emails or direct messages. Send them a polite message in which you tell them about your content, why you feel it would be of value for their audience and request them to place a link to your content. Please note that often, you will not get a reply at all.
To improve your chances, you need to explain why your content is unique. Trying to get a link for a very general blog post that could’ve been written by anyone, is less likely to succeed than unique content. Content that people can only find on your website. That being said, don’t make your message too long, as this will result in people not reading it at all. If you’re not sure where to start, you can also contact your business partners. They will probably be active in a field that’s related to yours and they’ll be more willing to link to your site (as you already know them personally). Just make sure that the backlink is relevant and doesn’t feel forced. Like I said before, link building should always feel natural.
6. Extend your reach through social media
Reaching out to specific people or websites is one way to get links to your content. Another option is to share your content on social media. This can also lead to other people sharing your content, which helps you extend your reach. And a wider reach gives you a higher chance of people linking to you on their websites as well. When people like, share and talk about your content on social media, you’re bound to reach new audiences and receive some more links as well.
Conclusion: link building is a growth strategy
A successful link building strategy should always be aimed at getting new people into contact them with your website. A (welcome) side effect of proper link building is a higher ranking in Google. As long as you consider link building as a way to reach out to other sites to get more visitors that will genuinely enjoy your content, you’re doing it right. Lots of luck!
Step into 2024, where SEO is on the brink of transformation. This post offers a deep dive into the minds of four SEO experts at Yoast. Each expert sheds light on the impact of the changes they see happening. Explore their collective wisdom as they dissect the future of search, the evolving challenges of engagement, and the strategic shifts vital for success in a year where things are moving quickly.
Table of contents
Setting the stage
As 2024 nears, reflecting on the transformative year 2023 for the SEO industry is important. It was a year marked by significant algorithmic shifts and technological advancements. Plus, evolving user behavior redefined the strategies of digital marketers worldwide.
In 2023, the SEO community witnessed the full impact of Google’s helpful content update. This placed a premium on user-centric content, diminishing the effectiveness of keyword-stuffed articles. In return, it rewards content catered to user needs and intent. This update re-emphasized the critical importance of understanding the searchers’ journey and creating content that offered genuine value.
The rise of artificial intelligence also reached a tipping point in 2023. AI-powered search features and content tools are becoming more mainstream. Integrating AI into search algorithms brought about smarter, more contextual search results.
As we move into 2024, these trends and challenges form the backdrop against which we navigate the future of SEO. The industry is set for another year of rapid evolution. Adaptability, strategic planning, and a keen eye on user experience will be the hallmarks of successful SEO.
2023: The year AI didn’t take over
To kick things off, our principal SEO expert, Carolyn Shelby, about the impact of AI on SEO in 2024:
As 2022 drew to a close, there was a sense that AI was about to take over everything, not just SEO. It was going to steal our jobs and replace us (humans) in nearly every possible way. In SEO, there was a massive interest in detection processes to determine what content people created and what AI created. There were questions about how the search engines were going to treat content deemed to be non-human. Thankfully, 2023 is almost over, and we are all (mostly) still employed, and none of us have new robot overlords.
Instead of completely taking over, AI is embedded within and added to most of our technology — especially in SEO. It’s a helper rather than a replacement; we’re all learning to leverage this new assistance. Even Google changed its language on treating AI-generated content to remove the stigmatization of using AI to help write. AI isn’t ruling over us; it is making us more efficient and helping us do our work faster. It might make you even better — if you’re good with your prompts.
Looking ahead
Looking ahead to 2024, it’s clear that the integration of AI enhancements into everyday life will continue and probably accelerate. The most beneficial skills prized in the workplace will be language and logic skills that improve your prompts.
The search engines are furiously competing to enmesh the AI equivalent of Clippy into their overall experiences. That, in particular, concerns the SEO community because it raises questions about potential traffic loss. Especially when the SERP starts reading and summarizing your search results to answer questions without needing to click through. As a result, it prevents users from doing research. The lack of a need to do research raises concerns about bias in the algorithms and big tech possessing undue and unchecked influence over the masses.
So many ethical concerns, so few guardrails.
SEO will survive
Ultimately, SEO will survive this, as will websites. SEOs are still necessary, and we now have the luxury of offloading our tedious tasks to AI helpers. Our sites might lose some traffic to the AI in the SERPs, but quality content that provides valuable information will always be needed and should win out. We need to moderate some of our expectations regarding how we interpret our analytics, and our conversion metrics might start looking different. But to be fair, traffic now doesn’t look or convert the same as it did five or ten years ago. Things change, but SEO will adapt and evolve.
What do you E-E-A-T?
Now, our other resident SEO expert, Alex Moss. He has the following to share on the growing impact of E-E-A-T in 2024:
Authority within SEO isn’t a novel concept. For years, SEO experts have concentrated on page and site-level metrics. However, the rise of entities, recognized through schema markup and the Knowledge Graph, is now pivotal in enhancing a site’s or individual’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). In 2024, it’s crucial to implement the correct schema markup for a page or site. Plus, you should craft content that genuinely serves the end user.
Over the past year, Google has underscored the importance of E-E-A-T with several updates, including an additional “E” for experience. This reflects a shift towards valuing personal experience in creating helpful, user-centric content. Alongside this, Google has updated its schema documentation — most notably with the anticipated enhancements to the Organization schema. In addition, it also introduced new types, such as profiles for individuals, discussion forums, educational offerings, and vacation rental listings.
Google’s focus on E-E-A-T will intensify in 2024, with further expansions and refinements to schema types and entity recognition. This evolution promises to intertwine individuals’ Knowledge Graphs more closely with the entities they are associated with, thus amplifying the importance of E-E-A-T in SEO.
The shift in online search behavior
In 2024, content specialist Camille Cunningham sees more changes happening in the way people search for answers to their questions:
When we think of how people find us online, we often picture someone typing in a keyphrase in Google’s good old search bar, hitting enter, and getting a neat list of search results. But as online search behavior evolves, we see a noticeable shift to other devices and platforms.
The importance of mobile
It may not be news to you, but the popularity of mobile is continuously growing. According to Hubspot, a percentage of 54% of consumers primarily use their phones for online searches. In that same research, they found that 80% of Gen Z, 62% of millennials, and 66% of Gen X use their phones most often when searching online. The younger generations (and the ones still to come) expect a great mobile experience whenever they experience you online.
The importance of social media
Related to this, you need to think bigger than just appearing in Google. Another development that will continue well into 2024 is using social media as a search engine.
People are spending loads of time on social media and using it to (actively) find information. Especially for younger generations, this is where you can reach them and get them interested in your business. These people will not be reached through traditional SEO; you’ll need to figure out where they hang out online and be there. Build your brand there and earn their trust through content that resonates with them.
Keep investing in user research and stay flexible in your marketing to ensure you cater to your audience’s changing needs. Constantly evolve with your target audience because user behavior will continue to change.
Google’s Search Generative Experience rolling out
Yoast’s strategic content specialist Edwin Toonen talks about the impact the SGE will have:
In 2024, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) will change the game. Google will probably roll it out worldwide sometime next year. With SGE, users will get more options to shape their searches and the results they get. In general, they can do more on the SERPs. They will likely search differently, asking more complex questions rather than entering short keywords. We must prepare for this by creating content that answers these more detailed questions.
There’s been a lot of talk about zero-click results, and getting traffic to websites will definitely change. SGE will provide answers directly on the search page, which could mean fewer people clicking through to websites. This requires a new approach from all of us, as we must find fresh ways to engage users and measure success. Also, we need to assess how much site traffic the SGE can cost us and adjust our strategies accordingly.
Content accuracy is now more important than ever. To be used by SGE, content must be factually correct and highly relevant. Therefore, we must focus on quality to ensure SGE picks up our content. In addition, we must find new ways to align our content with what SGE seeks. While writing that unique content, use AI sparingly to ensure our original work stands out.
Underneath all that, structured data is the bedrock for everything. By embedding this standardized format, we can directly communicate the context of our website’s content to Google. This clarity allows SGE to parse accurately and present information in response to user queries.
To keep in mind
Amid these changes, Google’s ad business remains a focal point. It has a history of integrating new features with an eye on monetization. Any advancements, including SGE, will likely support and enhance their advertising model. As we work through these changes, we must remember that Google will prioritize features that tie back to revenue generation. This will influence how organic and paid content coexist on SERPs.
In short, SGE is a wake-up call. But, as with everything, there are opportunities. It’s an exciting time for SEO!
Conclusion to SEO in 2024
As we look ahead, it’s clear that four key drivers are reshaping SEO in 2024. First, artificial intelligence is not just on the horizon — it’s here, fundamentally altering how we approach search engine strategies. AI’s influence spans from content creation to search query processing, setting a new bar for what it means to optimize for search.
Simultaneously, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) makes its presence felt. Its immediate impact on user search habits and site traffic compels us to re-evaluate our tactics to stay ahead.
The emphasis on E-E-A-T and entity SEO is rising to new heights of importance. The confluence of user experience, demonstrated E-E-A-T, and a clear understanding of entities and their relationships will form effective SEO.
Lastly, a new wave of user and search behavior changes is upon us. These shifts demand our attention and adaptability as they redefine the avenues users seek and consume information.
In summary, SEO in 2024 is dynamic and challenging but also brings opportunities. Staying attuned to these four focal points — AI’s transformative role, the ripple effects of Google’s SGE, the cruciality of E-E-A-T and entity SEO, and the evolving patterns of user behavior — will be pivotal for anyone looking to navigate the future of SEO successfully.
Not sure why you’re not ranking #1 for your focus keywords in Google? You might be making one of the mistakes a lot of site owners make. We see it happen a lot. From small local businesses to big corporate ones, lots of websites forget a few important things. Here, we’ll give you an overview of the SEO issues we encounter most frequently. Of course, we’ll also explain how to avoid or solve them. Check this list and make sure you’re not making any of these common SEO mistakes!
First off, we’d like to mention our vision on SEO: holistic SEO. With holistic SEO, you don’t just focus on the content or technical aspects of your site but also work on user experience (UX). A factor that’s more important than ever when it comes to SEO. Therefore, we’ll include a somewhat wider range of issues and tips to solve them.
1. Forgetting that faster is better
The first common SEO mistake we’d like to touch on is site speed. The faster your site, the more Google will favor it. Especially now, with page experience being one of Google’s ranking factors. Your site and its pages need to load fast enough to keep them in the search results. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed: Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you an overview of what aspects you can improve on to boost the speed of a particular page.
A quick win and a recommendation we frequently give is to optimize your images. A lot of websites have relatively large images, which take a lot of time to load. This makes your website slower than it needs to be. Resizing your images can speed up the loading time. If you have a WordPress site, you can do this easily by installing a plugin that does that for you.
Another quick win if you have a WordPress site is taking a good look at the plugins that are activated. Are you using all of them? Perhaps some of them can be replaced by another plugin that combines those functions? The best advice we can give you on this topic is that less is more. The fewer plugins that are activated, the faster your WordPress installment can be loaded. Stick to the essentials.
2. Trying to rank for the wrong keywords
If you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes we frequently encounter is that site owners optimize their pages for generic keywords. If you are a relatively small business that wants to rank for ‘rental car’, you might be aiming too high. Try to come up with something more specific. Otherwise, you’re mainly competing with the big car rental companies that have offices all over the world, which is impossible to do! You could, for example, add the area in which your company is located to the keyword to focus on your local area. But there’s more you can do to appear high in the search results for your specific audience. We call this focusing on long-tail keywords or -phrases.
The longer and more specific the keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for this keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword is lower. But you can compensate for this by optimizing a lot of pages on your site for different long-tail keywords. Your site will eventually gain more traffic for all of these keywords combined than it ever would if you optimized for one main keyword, for which your page will never rank on page 1 in Google. Also, although the search volume might be lower, a longer keyphrase often means a more specific search intent. Meaning that you might reach fewer people, but you are reaching the right people.
3. Failing to invite people to your site
Let’s talk about something that often gets ignored: metadata. Metadata is the information that people see on the result pages (SERPs) when a website comes up for an online search. It includes the title of your page and its meta description. The page title is still an important ranking factor for Google, so you have to make sure it’s optimized correctly for every page. We suggest adding your keyword to the title if that’s possible and making sure that your page title isn’t too long. If your page title is too long, it will get cut off. You don’t want potential visitors to see just half of your page title in the search results.
The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in your Click Through Rate (CTR). If you optimize your meta descriptions with a clear and attractive message on what people can find on your site, it becomes easier for them to see if the information they’re looking for is on that page. The more likely people are to think your site will provide an answer to their search query, the more traffic a page will gain.
We’ve recently introduced a nifty feature in Yoast SEO Premium that can generate great titles and meta descriptions for you. Powered by AI, this tool analyzes the content on your page and offers you several suggestions for an inviting title and meta description. This means you can easily optimize these to invite people to your page, without losing too much time over it. Use our AI title and meta description generator to stand out in the SERPs.
4. Neglecting to write awesome content
We regularly write about writing awesome content, but we still see a lot of sites struggling with content. This is another common SEO mistake that we want to tackle. Because every page on your site must have decent content that’s at least 300 words long. Google needs enough copy to find out what your page is about and whether you’re providing the answer people are looking for. You can’t expect Google to see you as an expert on a certain topic when you have only written two sentences about it. Thin content indicates to Google that your page probably isn’t the best result to match the search query.
That being said, keep in mind that Google is not your primary audience. You need to write for your visitors first. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and provide the best answers possible. Therefore, writing quality content for your audience is the way to go if you want to rank well in Google. Writing quality content means writing original content that shows your expertise and is easy to read.
5. Failing to keep people on your site
Once visitors land on your site, the next goal is to keep them on your site. You don’t want your visitors immediately bouncing back to Google once they have read something on your page. This is why you need to encourage visitors to stay a bit longer. The best way to do this is to create a call-to-action (CTA), which is usually a button that offers an action to your visitor. This can be a ‘buy’ button on a product page or a ‘sign up’ button for your newsletter. Don’t go overboard with several call-to-action buttons and try to have one main CTA that stands out from the rest of your page.
Another way to keep people on your website is by linking to other pages on your website. This is also an important part of SEO and should not be forgotten. By adding internal links, your site visitors and Google will know what pages are related to each other and can be interesting when they’re looking for information on a certain topic. So make sure to spend time on your internal linking to create a great site structure that keeps people on your website!
6. Not taking mobile seriously
The sixth and final SEO mistake that’s quite common is not considering mobile. A few years ago, Google switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google now looks at the mobile version of your site to decide how high you should rank. So if the desktop version of your site is set up brilliantly, but your mobile site isn’t responsive at all, this will be reflected in your rankings. In a negative way. So if that’s the case, make sure to work on mobile SEO!
A great way to test if your site is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. This gives you an indication of how easily visitors can use your page on mobile devices. But don’t stop after checking this. The best advice we can give is to visit your site on your mobile phone. Browse your site for a while and try to click on every button, link and image to see what happens. Is everything working as you would want it to? How easy is it to purchase something on your site while using your mobile phone? Are all pages displayed correctly? Mobile usage can no longer be ignored, so don’t miss out on all those mobile users and create a great user experience on every device.
In short
We know that SEO is a lot of work. And that it’s not easy to remember all the different parts that you need to work on. But it is important to do so, regularly. You don’t want one of the mistakes we discussed to cost you your rankings. So make sure to focus on site speed, write great content and optimize for the right keywords. Entice people to visit your site and use call-to-actions and relevant internal links to keep them on your site and lastly, optimize your website for any device. Do all of this and you’re already on your way to a well-optimized website, the holistic way.
People often ask us: What makes a good website? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy, one-size-fits-all answer. As with many things SEO, the answer is: it depends. What kind of site do you have, and what do you want to achieve? Who do you want to target? There are, however, a few best practices that help you get underway. In this post, we’ll list 7 elements that can help every site become a good site and a better search result.
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Holistic SEO
The number one thing you should keep in mind is something that we advocate a lot at Yoast: holistic SEO. Essentially, holistic SEO helps you strive to be the best result. This comes down to optimizing every part of your site on all levels; from satisfying user intent with your content to offering a stellar user experience. If you combine all these things in a solid SEO strategy, implement the enhancements, and keep an eye on the results, then you’re on the right track!
7 elements of a good website
Many things we deem important for a good website are hard to quantify. There’s a lot of talk about quality in SEO, for instance. Even Google has been saying for years that you should focus on the quality of your site and content. After every algorithmic update that Google implements, the answer for those who lost rankings is the same: it might not be your fault. Other sites might seem to be a better fit for this specific query. Nonetheless, you should work on the overall quality of your content.
People flock to the Search Quality Raters Guidelines for input on how to improve their quality. Now, you shouldn’t take everything that Google says as gospel, but in this case, they are right. You should improve your content — always! Make sure to look at user intent and the behavior of your potential customers. Periodically redo your keyword research. And check your niche. What’s happening in your part of the market? By continually evaluating your SEO strategy, you’ll get a grip on the changing market and find new opportunities.
1. Your website satisfies user intent and has a clear goal
Why should anyone come to your site and do business with you? It’s not because you think you have an awesome product — that just doesn’t fly anymore. “Build it and they will come?” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You need to have a clear mission and goal for your website.
What does your audience need?
If you want to succeed, you need to know your audience. You have to uncover everything about them. You can probably find out what your audience says they want, but is that the same as what they really need? Does your product or service offer a possible solution to a problem, or does it make your customer’s life genuinely better? Are you selling a drill or a hole in the wall?
Focus on your site’s search intent
Your story has to be right. It has to align with what people want and need. This means you should nail your site’s search intent. Uncover all the different ways of how people can end up on your pages, then tailor these to answer their questions. Map out your user journey from A to Z and place your content in strategic spots. Also keep a close eye on the way you formulate your answers. More often than not, a conversational style will turn out to be what you are looking for.
2. Your website has technical prowess
A good website is easily crawlable, and shows search engines what they can and can’t index. Good sites don’t have a huge amount of errors. A good website loads super fast, from anywhere in the world. Make sure you do everything you can to get your pages to load as fast as possible.
Technical SEO is incredibly important, but you can get ahead of the curve by getting the basics right. Thoroughly think about which CMS you’re going for and how you’re going to run it. We may be a bit biased, but WordPress has given us everything we need. It’s solid, flexible and has a huge following. WordPress is pretty SEO-friendly, but with a bit of help from Yoast SEO, you can get your WordPress SEO going in no time. Also make sure to pick a reputable hosting company; one that’s flexible and helpful.
3. Your website is trustworthy, safe and secure
Both search engines and users are looking for signals that signify trust. Things like regular downtime might be an indication of sloppy maintenance. A missing green lock icon can mean you don’t take security seriously. But why is this important?
Best result
Search engines like Google want to give searchers the best possible result. Increasingly, if a search engine doubts the claims you make, or if you use sketchy ‘experts’ to validate your content, search engines will not show your content. Instead, they’ll pick a result that has proven to be a good and trustworthy result. That’s why you need to work on your trustworthiness on all levels, both technical as well as in content.
Safe for visitors
In addition, your site should be a safe haven for visitors. You need to have your security in order. A hacked site isn’t getting you anywhere! And a hacked site is easier to prevent than it is to fix. Use up-to-date software, have your SSL in order, create strong passwords and use tools such as Cloudflare to protect your site from DDoS attacks.
4. Your website has a great design and stellar UX
Does your website need to be beautiful? Let’s be honest, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You won’t please everyone with your design. You should, however, create a website design that fulfills the goals you set. For example, your message should come across loud and clear. The design should also be on-brand and well-thought-out. But more importantly, your site should be clear and easy to use for everyone. Accessibility is not something you should scrimp on.
You also need to consider user experience. Which is not only how something looks, but also how it feels. It’s about giving users an enjoyable experience; something they will remember. This means it’s not good UX to let users wait long for your pages to load, or have them become frustrated because they can’t read the text on your site thanks to your color scheme or because they can’t hit the buttons on your mobile site. Ask yourself: how can I turn any possible frustration on my website into happiness?
And happy users might just have higher buyer intent, so get those CTAs in order!
5. Your site has awesome, user-centered content
Be user-centered, not company-centered. Good content helps your users accomplish their goals. But you want to offer this content at the right moment, while keeping your business goals firmly in sight. To do so, you need to know your user inside out, as I mentioned earlier. Understand your audience, understand their behavior, and focus your content on that. The content you offer should be clear and easy to understand by using language your users know well. Try to bring something unique to the table. Do the research and present original reporting.
6. Your site is mobile-friendly (or rather, designed mobile-first)
For the last couple of years, mobile traffic has kept growing and growing. If your site is not mobile-friendly by now, you should really get to it. And don’t forget to work on your mobile SEO. However, if your site has been mobile-friendly for a while, it’s time to start looking at building your next site mobile-first.
It’s not a new concept, but most sites are still being developed desktop-first. After designing the desktop view, the designer crams it down to mobile size, often losing its authenticity and freshness along the way. Adopting a mobile-first mindset helps you focus on the tasks users should be able to perform on your mobile site. It helps to clean up the clutter and, more often than not, lets you come up with a minimal and fully focused design. Less is more, remember?
7. Your site can ‘talk’ directly to search engines
For years, search engines tried to read content on pages to determine what that page is about. They need that content to be able to match the search query with the indexed pages that give the best answers to this query. Turns out that truly understanding what something on a page is or means is harder than it seems, especially for machines. Search engines need a little guidance to discover the true meaning of elements on a page. Enter, structured data in Schema format.
The power of Schema
Schema is kind of like a translator for search engines. It describes elements on a page, so search engines can now say with certainty that a review is a review and a recipe is a recipe. In return, because Google is so certain about your content, marking up these elements can lead to rich results in the search results pages. This includes carousels, nutritional information for recipes, star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, swipeable How-To boxes on mobile and much more. Structured data is one of the areas search engines spend a lot of resources on these days, so make sure to get on board.
We noticed this, and built a complete and fully extendable Schema framework inside Yoast SEO. This structured data implementation builds a complete graph for your site, so search engines not only know what everything means but also how everything is connected to the bigger picture. In addition, Yoast SEO comes with a few structured data blocks and we’re working on adding more in the future.
So what makes a good website?
There’s a lot that goes into building a good website. It’s more than simply buying a domain, getting some random host, installing WordPress and picking a theme that looks cool. When you leave it at that, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You need to plan to get things right. You need a strategy — which is probably the most important element of a good website.
These are some of the most important elements you should focus on while developing or improving your site. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, so I’d like to ask you: What is your number one focal point for building a good website?
When you think about searching online, do you picture the Google search bar, or the TikTok search bar? If it’s the former, you might be behind on the trends. Because while you’re optimizing your content for Google, younger generations are turning to social media to search for information. Almost 40% in fact. But should this information impact your content strategy? And is this just a trend, or are social media really becoming the new search engines?
With the internet being as chaotic as it is, young people (and particularly Gen Z) use social media as a way to easily find what they’re looking for. So what are they looking for? Genuine content. Videos made by real people who share their experiences about a certain topic, product, or service.
Example of Instagram (left) and TikTok (right) influencers
But young people also love short content. Both TikTok and Instagram have a limit on how long videos can be, which means you get more relevant content in a short time. Just think about it. Would you rather comb through a wall of text that is the Google search results, or watch a video of under a minute? The latter is definitely more efficient.
To answer this question, we need to look at some facts. Let’s start with the most obvious one: how many people use social media anyway? The answer: around 56% of the world’s total population. Which is more than half, but not by much. The average person spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social mediaevery day. So there’s no denying that there are benefits to being present on social media as a company. However, compared to the whopping 6 hours and 37 minutes that people spend on the internet, you might think that social media is not as valuable as having a website and optimizing for search engines.
During YoastCon 2023, SEO expert Jes Scholz also spoke about the importance of social media in today’s search landscape. During this talk, she explained why, in today’s day of age, you need to optimize beyond search. Check out a short snippet of her talk right here:
Trust goes an even longer way
But it’s not just about sales. Research has shown that brand image has become increasingly more important to consumers. In 2022, consumers stated that they would pay more to purchase from a brand they trust, and what better way to build that trust than by using TikTok or Instagram, an app that requires businesses to show the faces behind their company? So while social media might not be your main venue, it can certainly be a good one to leave a positive impression on your audience.
Search engines are no longer just for search
When you really think about it, is it so strange that social media is becoming more popular as a search engine when Google has become more like a social network? A few years ago, Google started to fundamentally change the way they work. And one of these changes was going from text to visual. Have you noticed that when you search in Google, you’re shown more visual results? Videos, images, reviews with photos attached. Instead of a wall of text that no one wants, Google now shows you authenticity.
And it makes you wonder: if Google thinks social media are a big enough threat that they changed the fundamental way Google worked, should you?
Everything is changing
Social media becoming search engines, conversational search gaining popularity, and AI tools taking over the internet… All that change can feel scary. The good news? You’re not alone in that feeling. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or tired because of the changing online world (even though many businesses use the slogan “the only constant is change” on their site, so really, what did you expect?), then so are many other people. And those people might prefer that you’re still doing things the old way.
Is changing your strategy even a choice?
But let’s be realistic: many companies will follow in Google’s footsteps. They’ll utilize social media and Google’s new functionalities to stay in the game. And those people that also felt overwhelmed or tired? They’ve gotten used to the new functionalities. So while it might not sound fun to learn a new way of doing business, it’s the only way you’ll be able to move forward. Or move at all. Luckily, you can always hire a young person to help you navigate the highly addictive landscape of social media.
Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.
If you own a website or are thinking of creating one, you should be mindful about your ecological footprint. Because the tech industry plays a big role in the current climate crisis. With its data centers, large manufacturing operations, and huge amounts of e-waste, it’s accountable for nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions. Which, shockingly enough, is similar to the travel industry. And this number is only growing! So, what can you do to make your website greener?
Nowadays, everyone owns at least one digital device. Most of us own many. And the number continues to rise. According to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report, we will own 29.3 billion networked devices in 2023, which is a ridiculous amount of products that need to be manufactured.
And the factories needed to produce our devices don’t just negatively impact the environment because of their gas emissions. Factors such as land degradation, biodiversity loss, and water consumption also play a role. For example, the industry uses 12,760 liters of water (which is 3,190 gallons) to produce just one smartphone.
The rise of data centers
The story only gets bleaker when we look at data centers. Because the more digital devices we use, the higher our global data traffic will be. In order to keep up with this traffic, new data centers are being built and expanded every year. And though they currently only consume 1% of the world’s electricity, it’s expected that data centers will consume about 20% in 2025. Which isn’t all that strange, if you consider that there are currently 8000 data centers in the world.
It’s time to take action
Climate change is a serious threat. If we don’t want our world to become uninhabitable in a few years, we should take action. Luckily, there are multiple things you can do to improve your website’s carbon footprint. Before you get started, it’s good to check how green your website is now. You can use an online carbon footprint calculator, like Website Carbon Calculator.
Save energy by blocking bad bots
This is a big one. As we mentioned before, bots also spend energy as they crawl your site. And they crawl your site many times a day, and often when there is no need. So many, in fact, that bots make up around 30% of the daily internet traffic!
That’s why you should identify unnecessary bots and block them from your site, so when they request your server, your server won’t answer. You’ll be saving energy. You can block bad bots by blocking the individual or entire range of IPs where the unusual traffic comes from. Or you can use a bot management solution like Cloudflare.
Reduce bot traffic
What about the bots you don’t want to block? It is still useful to reduce their traffic. For example, on any given day, Google crawlers can visit the Yoast website 10,000 times. During these visits, they only crawl 4,500 unique URLs, meaning that a lot of energy gets wasted on crawling duplicate URLs.
And it’s not just Google bots that are visiting us. There are bots from other search engines, digital services, commercial bots, etc. And we don’t want to waste that much energy! That’s why we created the crawl optimization feature, which removes unnecessary URLs, feeds, and assets from your WordPress site. This helps bots crawl your site more efficiently and reduce their visits. In other words: You’re saving energy!
Green host, green website
You can also take control over your website’s carbon footprint by choosing the right hosting provider. Because 48% of the total energy that’s used by the internet (and your website) is used in a data center. So if you choose a hosting provider that actively purchases renewable energy for their data centers, you’ll have far lower carbon emissions.
Don’t be like GameSpot
With all these steps to make your website greener, it’s a surprise that many large companies still have ‘dirty’ sites. Take GameSpot for example, which is a news site about video games. GameSpot produced the most CO2 per visit last year. They also ranked second-to-last for the energy they produce per year, which is more than 550,000 grams of CO2. Meaning: It would take 26 trees an entire year to compensate for the carbon emitted by the GameSpot website.
GameSpot homepage
Example of a green site
Now that we’ve discussed the ‘dirtiest’ site, let’s look at the cleanest and greenest: Google. They only produce 5,480 grams per year. Which isn’t surprising when you consider their net-zero target in 2030. Google’s sustainability efforts range from machine learning to help cool data centers to smart thermostats that conserve home energy. And with their eco-routing in Google Maps, which gives users the route with the lowest carbon footprint, Google has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 500,000 metric tons. Which is the equivalent of getting 100,000 fuel-burning cars off the road.
Google homepage
Final thoughts: Start now!
Our advice? Start now. Because the longer it takes to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, the more damage we’re doing to our environment. That’s why Yoast introduced the crawl optimization feature. Because we also want to contribute to Google’s net-zero goal. So use our plugin to make your website greener, and do whatever else you can, no matter how small. Because small actionscan have a big impact.
Sam Alderson is a digital native with an analog heart, and a passion for all things marketing. They’ve a particular interest in social media. They believe it’s a fantastic way to communicate your brand’s story and values while having fun at the same time. And the more human you can make it, the more connections you’ll make.
We’ve said this time and time again: a fast website is necessary for SEO. In a sea of similarly good (or not-so-good) results, Google will favor fast pages that can deliver a good user experience to searchers. If your goal is to attain higher rankings and drive organic traffic from Google, you need to speed up your WordPress website. In this post, we’ll discuss tips to help you improve your website performance to get that spot in the search results!
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Fast websites perform better on Google
Fast websites tend to outperform slow ones on Google because of one good reason – good user experience, and this aligns with Google’s mission. Google wants to deliver the best results and the best experience for their users. Hence, they want to show users web pages that will answer their search queries and provide a good experience. That’s also why page experience is now a ranking factor in Google.
This makes perfect sense when you put it in context. We’ve all had moments where we click on a link only to hit the back button because it takes so long for the page to load. And when we leave a page (or bounce off a page) like that, we’re way less likely to visit the website again because we know there are better, faster pages to browse. So website performance not only affects user experience but also greatly shapes how visitors judge the quality of your business.
That’s why speeding up your WordPress website is beneficial in many ways. A fast site makes your users happy, they’ll engage and buy more on your site. Ultimately, that’ll make you happy. Apart from that, It also makes search engines happy because it’s easier for them to crawl and index your site, thus reducing the resources and electricity they need to spend on those processes.
Don’t I need to focus on Core Web Vitals for SEO?
Yes, we hear you! It’s true that Core Web Vitals is an important part of the page experience ranking factor, and passing Core Web Vitals is essential for higher rankings. Metrics in Core Web Vitals directly measure your page speed, so improving your Core Web Vital scores may result in higher rankings, provided that you have good content already.
While metrics in Core Web Vitals measure the performance of a page, they don’t tell the whole story about your website performance. And Core Web Vitals only measure performance on a page level. So on a site level, you may have pages that pass Core Web Vitals and slower ones in the mix.
By making various improvements to your website performance, you can ensure that your visitors will get the most out of your website regardless of the page they land on. Besides, adopting website optimization best practices also directly benefits your Core Web Vitals and helps to reduce the time spent optimizing pages for speed.
This post is about general guidelines and best practices that will help you speed up your WordPress website. But if you specifically care about getting better CWV scores, check out 5 tips to improve your Core Web Vitals. You will also find a few similar pieces of advice in this post.
How to speed up your WordPress website
Now, WordPress is a simple platform at a first glance, but it’s quite complex under the hood. There are lots of different moving parts, with lots of databases to pull data from when you need to show a page to a user. And when you add lots of pages, media content and install lots of plugins and widgets, your site performance might start to drop.
Fortunately, WordPress is very versatile so there are many things you can do to optimize your performance. Let’s go over some of the tips to help you speed up your site.
1. Choose a great hosting provider and a good hosting plan
Let’s start from the top, having a good hosting provider is crucial for ensuring your website performance. That’s because all your files and databases are stored on their server, which will be called upon when a user requests a page.
A good host will have fast and stable servers. Stable means they have good “uptime”, which essentially means their server is always up and running, ensuring that your website is always accessible. On the other hand, a “fast” server refers to the specification of the computers/machine on which your website lives.
Good hosting providers also offer scalability to handle traffic spikes. A good host will have the resources to accommodate the increased load and ensure that your website remains up and running.
Next to that, customer support quality is another important factor to consider when choosing a host. A good host should provide technical support, which can be invaluable when you encounter any issues with your website. A knowledgeable support team can also help you resolve problems quickly, so you can get back to business as usual.
Another thing to consider is the server location relative to your users. If the server is fast, but it’s located far away from your users, then they might still experience slow-loading pages.
If you’re looking for the best fit when it comes to hostings, we’ve vetted some top-notch hosting companies to help you out.
2. Update your PHP to a newer version
Updating your PHP to a new version is a simple thing to do that often gets overlooked. PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a popular open-source server-side scripting language widely used for creating dynamic and interactive websites. By using PHP, web developers can build robust, feature-rich websites that can dynamically change based on user interactions, database information, and more
Updating your PHP to the newest version will greatly increase your website performance. You will get:
Improved performance, resulting in faster processing time and reduced resource usage.
Better memory management, which can reduce the amount of memory needed to run your WordPress site, resulting in faster page load times.
Faster request processing, as new versions of PHP are able to process requests more quickly, leading to faster page load times.
Some newer versions of PHP also have improved caching capabilities, allowing for faster page load times and reduced server resource usage.
You can check out endoflife.date to see which PHP version is in development and which version isn’t supported anymore.
Since it’s a server-side scripting language, many hosting providers offer PHP support as part of their hosting packages. If you’re looking to update your PHP, check with your host to see if they can help you with that.
It is important to note that updating PHP can cause compatibility issues with your WordPress plugins and themes. A compatibility issue can cause the website to break, so it is important to make a backup before updating and to test the website after updating to make sure everything works as expected.
3. Update your WordPress version is an easy fix
Advice as old as time! But it does work so we can’t go without mentioning it. You can gain a nice speed boost just by updating your WordPress website to a newer version. You get the latest performance improvements and lots of other optimizations. What’s not to like about that!
WordPress 6.1, for instance, got a bunch of performance improvements under the hood, such as better database performance and better handling of media delivery. On the front end, this results in faster load time for both new and returning visitors.
Additionally, updating to a new WordPress version allows you to run a newer version of PHP, which also gives you all the more performance improvements.
To be cautious, one piece of advice we have is to test an update on a staging environment before you update your live website. See if the update causes issues, check if there are any plugin conflicts, and make sure everything works as intended. You can check the WordPress.org forum or Twitter to see if the update causes issues for others.
4. Implement a caching solution
Caching is an important part of the performance equation. It’s a simple solution that can speed up your WordPress website and make your pages load faster, especially for returning visitors.
Caching refers to the process of storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area. Rather than being fetched from the server each time the data is requested, it can be quickly retrieved from the cache when needed.
This helps to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred between the server and your visitor’s browser, resulting in faster page load times and improved overall website performance. So every time a visitor access a recently-viewed page, the page will be served from the cache instead of having to request all the elements like HTML and images from various databases.
You can rely on caching plugins to do the work for you. For the most part, they’re quite easy to use. Be careful when installing multiple caching or optimization plugins though. They can get in each other’s way, and slow down your site!
Some of our recommendations for caching plugins:
WP Rocket – Very powerful, and one of the best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
W3 Total Cache – Extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
NitroPack – Full page caching with some really clever, cutting-edge performance optimization techniques. Tons of impressive bells and whistles, though the pricing model scales with pageviews.
WP-Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full-page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
WP Super Cache – A basic solution that offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
These plugin suggestions are derived from our top WordPress plugin recommendations post. There are a lot of good resources to help you build a better WordPress website on that page, so do check it out!
5. Use a lightweight theme
The theme you use greatly impacts how fast your pages load for users. Although WordPress offers a huge selection of themes to play around with, not all themes are created equally.
Some themes are better coded than others. Themes with inefficient or poorly optimized code can slow down page load times and cause you headaches along the way.
Some themes are much leaner than others. You might be drawn to themes with lots of bells and whistles, but be careful. Themes with many images, scripts, and other assets can increase the size of a page and make it slower to load. Sometimes, all you need is simplicity!
For the most part, our advice is to pick a fast and lean theme that’s well-reviewed by the community. They’re your best bet in a sea of choices. Always check the ratings and reviews to see if you’re making the right choice. Even though you can change theme later on, it’s better to just stick with one for a while. That’ll save you troubles that may arise from switching themes.
Apart from themes, many people like to use a page builder to design websites. It’s a great tool for beginners and experienced WordPress users alike. We have the same advice as with theme, that is to choose a popular and well-reviewed one. Some page builders are much lighter and more optimized for speed than others. Elementor, for instance, has done a bunch of work recently to speed up their builder.
6. Deactivate and remove unused plugins
WordPress is a wonderful platform thanks to its plugins and widgets, making it possible to extend a website in many ways. But it can be tempting to install a plugin for every little functionality that you want.
Although plugins can make your life easier, using too many of them is bad for your performance. Since there are more functionalities to load, they make your page load slower.
Really take a look at your plugin collection and asses which ones you need and which you don’t. And instead of using a plugin for every small functionality, use more versatile ones that can do multiple things you need.
For the ones that you don’t need, don’t forget to deactivate and delete them from your site. That’ll remove the additional codes they add to your website. This is an easy fix that may be ignored by some. Besides, unused plugins can cause conflicts with other plugins, themes, and core WordPress functionality. By removing them, you reduce the risk of compatibility issues, which can improve the stability and performance of your site.
7. Optimize your images: a quick fix to speed up your pages
We’ve said this many times, heavy images are detrimental to your page speed. Although eye-catching, high-definition images are a joy to look at, they make your pages much heavier. This means there are more things to process and load, resulting in a slower load time. For instance, having a large, unoptimized hero image above the fold will definitely lead to a low LCP score in Core Web Vitals.
You don’t actually need those high-resolution images. They only need to be sharp enough for everyone to easily make out what’s in them. There’s also a point of diminishing return where higher resolution doesn’t translate to better picture quality. The key is to find a sweet spot between resolution and quality.
Before uploading images to your website, make sure to compress them to reduce the file size. This is especially important if you’re displaying many images on your website or if you’re running an ecommerce website with lots of product images.
We recommend Compress JPEG & PNG images or Optimole to compress, optimize and manage your images. Squoosh.app is another great tool that we use to compress the social image of our posts, which is shown when our posts are shared on social media.
Want to go in-depth into image optimization? Check out our comprehensive image SEO guide!
8. Optimize your media delivery
The way you serve media content to end users can greatly impact your page speed, too. It’s crucial that you optimize and make tweaks to how your website delivers media content.
Lazy-loading is a popular technique that a lot of websites implement. It tells your user’s browser to load images only when they are needed, rather than loading them all at once when a page loads. Luckily WordPress does this natively so you can use that feature right out of the box. In addition, WordPress 6.1 also received a nice media delivery improvement, which is great for websites with lots of images. But even with all these features available, it’s still best to only add images when they are necessary.
As for videos, they can be useful in driving search traffic to your website. But we strongly advise you not to host videos directly on your server. They are heavy and can take up a lot of your server storage. Self-hosted videos will also make pages load slower, which is not what you want for SEO.
A better choice is to host videos on a video hosting platform like Youtube or Wistia and embed a link on your page. Next to that, make sure to use a process to show a preview image, and only load the video on interaction.
We also have a solution for optimizing videos for SEO – our Yoast Video SEO plugin! It adds the necessary structured data to videos on your website so Google can show them in rich snippets. The plugin will also supercharge your videos so they load more efficiently. If videos are an important part of your website and your SEO strategy, you need to use Yoast Video SEO!
9. Use a content delivery network
Content delivery networks (CDNs) won’t let you down when it comes to speeding up your WordPress website. It is incredibly important if you serve overseas users or those who live far away from your original web server.
A CDN is an interconnected network of servers working together to deliver content to your end users. They make copies of your static content like images or HTML files and distribute them on all the servers within the network. So instead of serving images or HTML files directly from your original servers, those files will be sent from the server closets to your users.
On the left: traffic to your site lands on a single server. On the right, a CDN sends visitors to the server nearest to their location. Image: Wikipedia
As we explain in our guide to CDNs, the same ‘do your own research’ principles apply here, too. You’ll need to find the best mix of performance, features, and price.
We’re huge fans of Cloudflare at Yoast (which we use to power all sorts of our own ecosystems), but it may not be the perfect fit for you.
When you’re choosing a CDN for WordPress, it’s worth making sure that they have a good plugin integration, so that page and resource caches are automatically updated or purged as you write or update your content (like the Cloudflare WordPress plugin).
10. Use fewer external scripts and optimize your JavasScript
A note before we go further: this section is a bit more advanced compared to the other advice in this post. It’s best not to tamper with any JavaScript if you’re new to website building, or if you don’t have any development experience. Instead, play it safe and ask an experienced developer to help you out with JavaScript tweaks and optimizations.
With that said, JavaScript is a wonderful language and allows us to do a lot of things on websites. It makes websites more dynamic and enjoyable for end users to use.
When you see animations on a website, like when you click a button and something pops up, that’s most likely thanks to JavaScript. For website owners, it allows them to add analytics tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar and do cool things like A/B testing or personalization.
But using too much JavaScript and external scripts makes a page load much slower. Loading external scripts can slow down the performance of your website, as the browser has to make additional requests to retrieve the scripts. We often see this on web pages with many external ads, which can be frustrating at times. By minimizing the number of external scripts, you can reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and improve page load times.
Too much JavaScript can also affect your crawl budget. That’s because Google needs to render these files while indexing, which takes up resources. The more resources Google needs to spend on processing those files, the less they have to come back and crawl other pages on your site.
There are many ways to reduce the amount of JavaScript you use, which greatly depends on your website and the type of scripts. Start by finding out what’s loading. Then you can decide to not load it, or change how it loads to make it load more efficiently by implementing defer or async loading.
Avoid loading stuff from external domains, like Google Fonts or resources from CDNs, and load local copies instead. Also, ask yourself if you can get the same result by using a different method than using a script. For example, you can use CSS instead of a script for animation.
11. Reduce files size
We mentioned that you can compress your images to reduce their file size. You can do the same with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, too.
Although the number of bytes and kilobytes you shaved off these files doesn’t sound like much, they can add up. One way to reduce file size is to reduce the redundant spacing or lines in your code. You can also combine multiple files into a single file, compress it and still serve that file without breaking your site.
Tampering with codes never sounds like a great idea, especially if you’re not a developer. But thankfully we have plugins to help us out. You can check out:
Autoptimize, which has some really clever JavaScript, CSS, and HTML optimization.
WP Minify, which also allows you to combine and compress JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
12. Reduce HTTP requests to your server
Every time a user clicks on a link to visit your website, their browser has to make multiple HTTP requests to your web server asking for various files and data. The server has to process these requests and send back all the necessary files so the browser can render them and show the page to the user.
Reducing the amount of HTTP requests here basically means reducing the number of files the server has to retrieve and send to your user’s browser. That will help with decreasing the amount of data transferred and decreasing the load on your server, as well as making it easier for the browser to render and construct a page.
If you’ve already implemented all the tips we mentioned above, then you’re already removing quite a bit of unnecessary HTTP requests. That involves using fewer plugins and scripts, including fewer media files, implementing a caching solution, and using a CDN to serve static content.
Wrapping up
Congratulations on making this far into the post! We hope this post will be useful in helping you speed up your WordPress website. We know there’s a lot of information here, so do take some time to process and digest it.
By implementing the techniques and best practices we suggest, you’ll be on your way to building a fast and snappy website! Don’t forget to document the changes you make and evaluate the impact on your website’s search presence, organic traffic, as well as overall website performance.
When every millisecond can make the difference between a visitor buying or leaving, there’s always more room for performance optimization. We regularly review the setup and configuration of our hosting, CDN, plugins, and theme – and so should you.
Got a great recommendation for speeding up WordPress or other site speed tools? Let us know in the comments!
More resources to help you speed up your WordPress website
These articles and documentation can provide more information on website speed optimization. Have a read!
