Nov 19 2024
What is search intent and why is it important for SEO?

SEO is a way to get more traffic to your website. By ranking high on Google, you attract more people to your site, which leads to more sales and returning visitors. You must optimize your content for the right words to get people to your site. However, you should consider search intent to increase your chances of ranking, convincing people to buy your stuff, subscribing to your newsletter, or even returning to your website. In this post, we’ll tell you what search intent is and how you can optimize your content for search intent.

Table of contents

What is search intent?

Search intent (or user intent, audience intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. After all, everyone who does an online search hopes to find something. But is someone looking for an answer to a question they have? Are they looking to visit a specific website? Or are they searching online because they want to buy something? Many of these types of searches are part of the user journey online, but often they represent different stages.

Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to determine people’s search intent. Google wants to rank pages that best fit the search term someone is using and the search intent behind the search query. That’s why you need to make sure that your post or page fits your audience’s search intent.

Four main types of search intent

There are a few distinct types of search intent. We’ll go into the four most commonly used ones, but we’ll start with an infographic describing the four types in short:

There are four main types of search intent

1. Navigational intent

The first type of search intent is called navigational intent. People with this intent want to visit a specific website. For example, people searching for [Facebook] online are usually on their way to the website. So, you want to make sure that your website can be found when someone searches for your company’s name online.

an example of a navigational search, in this case for yoast
Google’s search results for the term [Yoast]

Remember that ranking high for a navigational term is mainly beneficial if your site is what people are looking for. Years ago, we had a Google Analytics plugin that ranked well for the term [Google Analytics]. But that didn’t drive any traffic to our site. People searching for [Google Analytics] specifically were looking for the Google Analytics website and were often not interested in our plugin.

2. Informational intent

On to informational intent. People looking for information do lots of searches on the internet. This could be information about the weather, educating children, SEO, you name it. People with informational intent have a specific question or want to know more about a topic.

an example of an informational search for the term tomato sauce in google
Google’s search results for the term [omato sauce]

You should know that Google understands intent beyond simply showing results that give information about a specific term. It knows, for instance, that people looking for [tomato sauce] are most likely looking for recipes, not for the sauce’s culinary history. It understands that most people typing in [Mercury] are looking for the planet, not the element. Google even understands it’s handy to include videos and images for search terms, like [how to build a bird feeder].

3. Commercial investigation

Some people intend to buy in the (near) future and use the web to research. What washing machine would be best? Which WordPress SEO plugin is the most helpful? These people also have transactional intent but need more time and convincing. These types of search intents are usually called commercial investigating intents.

google results with more commercial information about washing machines
Google’s search results for the term [best washing machines 2024]

4. Transactional intent

The fourth type of search intent is transactional intent. Many people buy stuff online and browse the web to find the best purchase. People are searching with transactional intent when they intend to buy something at that moment. That means that they already know exactly what they want to buy and want to get to that product page immediately.

google search result for an ikea lamp showing places to buy
Google’s search results for the term [IKEA PS 2014]

Keyword intent

People’s words in their search queries give us insight into user intent. This also works the other way around. By formulating keywords with intent-specific words, you can increase your chances of being seen by people with matching search intent.

What do we mean by intent-specific words? Well, keywords with transactional intent will often contain words like:

  • buy
  • deal
  • discount
  • product names

To give another example, informational searches can (but don’t necessarily have to) contain words like:

  • information
  • how to
  • best way to
  • why

How to optimize your content for search intent

Why are we telling you this? Because you want to ensure that a landing page fits your audience’s search intent. If people are looking for information, you don’t want to show them a product page. At least, not immediately. You’ll scare them away. But if someone wants to buy your product and lands on one of your lengthier blog posts, you might lose them. In this case, you want to lead them to your shop and the right product page.

Optimizing your product pages for commercially driven keywords is a good idea. For instance, if you sell dog vitamins, you could optimize a product (category) page for the search term [buy dog vitamins]. Perhaps you also have an article about administering vitamins. You could optimize that article for the search term [how to give vitamins to my dog] and aim it at people with informational intent.

Research your audience’s search intent

Sometimes, it can be quite hard to determine the search intent of a query. And perhaps different users that use the same search term will have a (slightly) different user intent. Luckily, there is a direct source to look at to know which intent fits your keywords best: the search results pages. Find out how you can use the results pages to create intent-based content.

If you want to know more about your audience’s search intent, another way is to ask them. Create a short survey containing questions about what people are searching for, and make that survey pop up when people visit your website. That’ll give you valuable insights into your audience and their intent. Please don’t be too intrusive with these kinds of pop-ups, as this can hurt the user experience on your website.

Search intent in Yoast SEO with Semrush

Aiming your content with the right intent is important, but it becomes even more important for ecommerce content. Here’s how to apply this with a focus on ecommerce.

Start by identifying the intent behind your main keyword. In ecommerce, this often revolves around transactional or commercial investigation intents. If users are ready to buy (“transactional”), your content should guide them toward purchasing. If they’re still researching (“commercial investigation”), provide comparisons, reviews, or detailed product information.

Look for related keyphrases that match these intents. Use tools like the Semrush integration in Yoast SEO to find variations that potential customers might use. For a keyword like “buy running shoes online,” related phrases could include “discount running shoes,” “running shoes with free shipping,” or “best price running shoes.”

In the Yoast SEO Related Keyphrases interface, the different intents will be color-coded using Semrush’s system:

  • C (yellow): Commercial intent
  • N (purple): Navigational intent
  • I (blue): Informational intent
  • T (green): Transactional intent

Examine search results for the keyphrases you’ve found to see what ecommerce sites are doing. Pay attention to product pages, reviews, and comparison guides that rank well. This helps you understand what customers expect and how you can differentiate your offerings.

Incorporate these keyphrases naturally into your product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts. Make sure the content answers potential buyer questions and highlights unique selling points. Include clear calls to action to drive purchases, especially for transactional intent.

If you focus well on search intent, you can create content that improves SEO and enhances the shopping experience. Ultimately, you want higher conversions and better customer satisfaction.

the interface for yoast seo's related keyphrases tool with search intent insights by semrush
Yoast SEO shows search intent insights powered by Semrush

Conclusion on search intent for SEO

It’s crucial to ensure that your content fits the terms people are searching for and your audience’s search intent. Ensure your post or page is informational when people seek information. Be the first result when someone searches for your company name. Provide content that helps people make an informed decision while still investigating their options. But lead people to your sales pages if they want to buy one of your products.

Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
seo enhancements
Jul 18 2024
What is Search Experience Optimization (SXO)?

Today, you have to think beyond simply ranking high on search engines. Users want more than just a simple website visit. Your visitors and customers are looking for an engaging experience. Search Experience Optimization (SXO) can help provide this. This merges SEO with user-centric design to help you attract visitors and keep them engaged. The goal, of course, is to convert them into loyal customers. We’ll explain the topic, how it differs from SEO, and why you could use it in your strategy.

SEO, SXO, OSO?

You might think, “Another acronym? SEOs sure love their acronyms!”. Of course, you are correct — we even wrote about another interesting acronym just last week: OSO (Organic Search Optimization). SXO, however, is one you’ll want to remember. It focuses on merging search engine visibility and user experience.

What is Search Experience Optimization?

Search Experience Optimization (SXO) enhances SEO with user experience design. One of SEO’s main goals is to improve your site’s visibility in the SERPs. SXO, however, goes a step further to ensure visitors have a positive experience that meets their needs and helps them reach their goals.

While modern-day SEO inches ever closer to SXO, it initially emerged as a natural evolution from SEO. It understands that ranking high in Google is just the first step. The challenge lies in keeping visitors and turning them into customers. Combining SEO techniques with UX best practices, SXO creates websites that are easy to find and enjoyable to use.

SXO is about optimizing for both humans and search engines. It takes the entire user journey into account. It sets a path from when someone types a query into a search engine to where they complete an action on your site. This holistic SEO approach gets your website traffic. Once there, you’ll provide a fantastic experience that engages and converts.

The main components of SXO

Search Experience Optimization merges traditional SEO with UX. Combining these components helps create a site that is both search engine-friendly and user-friendly.

SEO basics

SEO is the foundation of SXO. You’ll still do the same stuff, like conducting keyword research to identify the terms your target audience is searching for. Once you have these keywords, you should use them in your content like you are used to. On-page SEO helps search engines understand your site properly. As a result, it can correctly index your content, which helps improve your search rankings.

User experience

User experience is at the heart of SXO. The goal is to keep visitors engaged. For this, you must prioritize ease of navigation, build an intuitive design, focus on accessibility, and make your content readable with great typography. You’ll build a well-structured website with clear menus, hierarchy, and navigation to help users find what they need quickly. An appealing design with high-quality visuals can make your site more engaging. And, of course, there’s also a bigger focus on conversion optimization.

Engagement metrics

To offer a great experience, you need to monitor user behavior. Engagement metrics provide valuable insights into how users interact with your site. For instance, a high bounce rate might indicate that people can’t find what they need. On the other hand, a longer average time on page might suggest that they engage with your content. Analyzing these metrics finds many things to improve and gives you data-driven decisions to enhance the UX.

Content quality

As we know, content quality is essential in both SEO and UX. Your content should be helpful and relevant to your audience’s needs. Use clear and concise language. Aim for excellent readability. High-quality content helps with search engine rankings, keeps users engaged, and encourages them to explore your site.

How SXO differs from SEO

Search Experience Optimization is SEO with an extra focus on user experience. SEO aims to increase visibility in the SERPs and attract organic traffic by optimizing content and technical aspects. SXO, on the other hand, aims to attract visitors and retain and convert them. While SEO brings users to your site, SXO helps them have a great experience once they arrive.

Technical vs. holistic approach

While content forms a big part of SEO, it is often more technical, focusing on structured data, meta tags, backlinks, and site speed. These elements help improve your rankings. SXO has a more holistic approach and combines this with user-centric design principles. It aims to improve the overall user journey, from the initial search query to the final conversion. It focuses on ease of navigation, usability, and content relevance.

Metric differences

Measuring success in SEO and SXO has quite some overlap, while SEO metrics are a bit more search engine-centric. They include rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates (CTR). These metrics tell you how well your site is performing in search results. SXO metrics are also more user-centric. They include engagement metrics and conversion rates. These metrics provide insights into how users interact with your site and how effectively it meets their needs.

An example of SEO vs. SXO

Let’s look at a short example that hopefully makes the differences even more insightful:

SEO approach

An e-commerce website that sells running shoes focuses on optimizing for high-quality keywords. They begin by conducting extensive keyword research to identify popular search terms like “buy running shoes,” “best running shoes,” and “affordable running shoes.” Once they have identified these keywords, they optimize their product pages by incorporating these in the content. Additionally, they ensure that images are optimized with relevant alt text.

To enhance their technical SEO, they improve site speed and mobile-friendliness, both of which are crucial for better search engine rankings. They also create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines to improve site indexing. The content creation strategy involves publishing blog posts and articles targeting specific keywords, such as “Top Running Shoes for Marathon Training” and “How to Choose the Right Running Shoes.” To further boost their SEO efforts, they build backlinks by contacting fitness blogs, influencers, and online publications, increasing their authority.

SXO approach

In addition to the above SEO tactics, the e-commerce website also focuses on the user experience to better meet user intent. They start by analyzing search queries to understand the underlying intent, such as whether users are looking for buying guides, reviews, or specific product features. With these insights, they create comprehensive buying guides that explain how to choose running shoes based on different factors like foot type, running style, and terrain. They also offer interactive tools like quizzes to help users determine the best shoe for their needs.

The website has a clean, intuitive layout that ensures easy navigation. This way, users find what they’re looking for quickly. Clear, prominent calls-to-action (CTAs) like “Shop Now,” “Learn More,” and “Take the Quiz” guide users through the purchase process. To increase engagement and build trust, they incorporate user reviews and ratings on product pages, videos, and 360-degree views of the products to give users a better understanding of the shoes.

Personalization plays a key role in their SXO strategy. They use data from previous interactions to personalize recommendations, showing users products that match their preferences and past behavior. For conversion optimization, they streamline the checkout process to reduce friction, offering multiple payment options and guest checkout. Additionally, they implement retargeting strategies, such as email reminders for abandoned carts, to encourage users to complete their purchases.

Uniting SXO and SEO

The online store integrates SEO and SXO approaches. This attracts a high volume of visitors through search engines and provides a superior user experience. Combined, this leads to higher engagement, increased user satisfaction, and better conversion rates.

For instance, a user searching for “best running shoes for flat feet” might land on a detailed guide that explains what features to look for, showcases top-rated products, and offers an interactive quiz. This comprehensive approach answers their query and guides them toward purchasing, enhancing both the SEO and the user experience.

What is Search Experience Optimization?

Search Experience Optimization combines SEO and user experience. With SXO, you don’t just aim to attract visitors through improved search engine rankings; you want them to have a great experience. This experience should be so good that it encourages them to stay, explore, and convert.

If you want to integrate SXO into your strategy, you need a holistic approach. This focus on experience and rankings builds a great online presence, ultimately driving long-term success.



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
seo enhancements
May 14 2024
What is off-page SEO?

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.

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.

Read more: The ultimate guide to content SEO »



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Apr 17 2024
10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post

Writing blog posts requires skill. To keep readers interested, you should think about the structure of your content and keep it enjoyable. Because if people like and understand your post, they’re much more likely going to share it with others – and that will increase your rankings. So, if you want to improve your writing skills and your rankings, start with these tips on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post!

It might sound like writing for SEO and writing to attract and engage your audience are two conflicting goals. But that’s actually not true. Sure, if you want to write an SEO-friendly post, you should feature the words you want to be found in a prominent place. But over-using keywords severely damages the readability of your text. In fact, a high keyphrase density can even be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords in your text, which can negatively affect your rankings.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are SEO-friendly and readable. These two goals should always go hand in hand. Because we believe that writing in understandable language gets you more visitors and keeps them on your site!

Master SEO copywriting and other vital SEO skills by getting Yoast SEO academy Premium. This gives you access to all our courses and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Before you start: do keyword research

Before you start writing, you have to do keyword research. If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll have to figure out which words your audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and the keywords you should use in your text.

When you’ve done your keyword research and have a list of focus keywords to write about, it’s time to get on with writing. Here are 10 tips to help you end up with an awesome blog post!

Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing. When starting a new post, many bloggers just start writing. While this may work for some people, others need more guidance. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’ when I write a new blog.

1. Think before you write!

Before you start, think carefully about the message of your piece. It helps to answer the following questions:

  • What do you want to tell your readers, or which central question do you want to answer?
  • What’s the purpose of your article?
  • What do you want your readers to do at the end of the page?

It’s also good to think about the search intent someone may have. An easy way to get an insight into this is by looking at the search results for the search term you want to rank with.

2. Devise a structure for your post

To write a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, you need to create a clear structure. This means that every post should have:

  • some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic).
  • a body (in which the main message is written).
  • a conclusion (in which you summarize the main ideas or draw a conclusion).

In a few sentences, write down what you want to say in all three sections. You’ve now created a summary of your post. This will help you create a structured and readable blog post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs and headings

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. For example, it might be tempting to start each new sentence on a new line because it looks nice. But you shouldn’t do that! You also shouldn’t make your paragraphs too lengthy, as each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. So, ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to summarize that main idea in one sentence. If that’s not possible and you need more sentences to explain the main idea, you simply need to use more paragraphs.

Proper headings also help your readers understand what a specific part of your text is about. If you want people to find their way through your articles, use subheadings to lead them. Subheadings help readers scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. They’re not just important for readability, but for SEO as well. That’s why we also advise to use your keyword in some of your subheadings. Don’t use your keyword in every heading! It will make your text read clunky and unnatural. Plus, it will put people off from reading further.

4. Use transition words

Transition words help people scan through your text and understand the relationship between sentences and paragraphs. For example, let’s say there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘however’, ‘similarly’ and ‘for example’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘to sum up’ or ‘in short’. Transition words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.

Stuffing your article with your focus keyword makes it less attractive to read, and it can hurt your rankings. Google is getting smarter, after all. It wants you to write content that users will love. It doesn’t want you to use your focus keyword in every other sentence, because Google now has other ways to analyze what your text is about. For example, one of the ways Google understands the topic of your text is by recognizing synonyms and other keywords that are related to your focus keyphrase. That’s why you should use synonyms and related keywords throughout your copy.

Synonyms are relatively easy to think of, but finding the right related keywords is a bit more challenging. That’s why the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a feature that helps you find related keyphrases right away. Based on your focus keyword, our plugin can generate a number of related keyphrases with the click of a button! Along with how many times that keyword is searched for and what the search trend looks like. This feature is powered by SEMrush and can be used in both our free and Premium plugins. So use this related keyphrase feature!

6. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your blog posts have a minimum of 300 words but keep the length of your article balanced. Google likes long articles. However, if your article is too long, you might scare users away. So, what should you do? Our advice is to write short to medium-length articles. When you know you’re a skilled writer, you can also try your hand at longer articles. Check out this article if you’re not quite sure how long a blog post should be.

And remember to keep using your focus keyphrase throughout your text to make sure you end up with an SEO-friendly blog post!

7. Link to existing content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t forget to link to and from these posts. We call this internal linking. Both your readers and Google will thank you for it, because it helps them manage your content and understand relationships between different content on your site. So, take some time to link to and from your previous content. Our internal linking tool can help you by suggesting relevant pages and posts on your site that you can link to.

To summarize, internal linking is useful because:

  • Your link structure is also important for your rankings in Google.
  • Linking to other content about a subject is great for your readers, as they may be interested in reading these related posts too. It helps them navigate your site!
  • It will make your new blog post (and the existing posts) stronger, because you show your authority on the subject.

8. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, make sure to let someone else read it first. Ask them whether they understand the main concept of your post, and invite them to correct any typos and grammatical errors. They can help you by providing an objective view of the readability and attractiveness of your text. If you have someone in your team who happens to be an expert on the topic you’re writing about, make sure to run your post past them. That way, they can check whether you’re covering everything you need to and give suggestions to make your post even better.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website is alive. This is important! Because if your site isn’t active, Google will crawl it less often and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure that everything you post is high-quality content: informative, well-written articles that entertain readers and fit their search intent.

If you have difficulty posting on a regular basis, it might be a great idea to create an editorial calendar for your blog. This allows you to structure the process in a way that fits you and your team. It’s also a good idea to update your old blog posts once in a while to avoid them getting stale.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write readable and SEO-friendly blog posts. Start by choosing the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. This will be your focus keyphrase. After you fill this in, our plugin runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is optimized or still needs improving. Such as:

  • Our plugin checks your post to see whether you’ve used the keyphrase in the right places, like your copy, SEO title, meta description, alt text and URL. Yoast SEO Premium also recognizes different word forms of your keyphrase.
  • It gives you suggestions for related keyphrases that you can add to boost the quality and relevance of your content.
  • It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs too long? Do you use transition words?
  • It checks the internal and external links in your article. Yoast SEO Premium even provides suggestions for links to related articles on your site.
  • It calculates how often you use your keyphrase throughout your text: not enough or too often? When you have Premium it also checks if you’ve distributed your keyphrase evenly throughout your post.
  • It checks if you’ve used potentially non-inclusive words or phrases, so you can make your content relatable for everyone.
  • It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed above) the plugin will indicate this with a green light. Posts and pages with green lights will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

An example

It’s good to remember that not every light has to be green for your overall SEO score to be good. For example, these are the results of this blog post. As you can see, it does have an overall green light for the focus keyphrase “SEO-friendly blog post”:

Analysis results as shown in the Yoast SEO sidebar

Kind of a cool way to get feedback on your content, right? When you use the Yoast SEO plugin you’ll find this feedback in the Yoast SEO sidebar next to your post and in the Yoast meta box under your post (while editing). If you’re interested in learning more about all the aspects this analysis tool looks at, read our article on how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool.

Conclusion

The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content also leads to more links, shares, tweets and returning visitors to your website. Of course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but the most important thing is to just write very, very good posts! Still not sure if your blog post is ready to publish? Take a look at this checklist for your blog post to make sure you’re good to go!

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »



Cindy Paul

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.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
seo enhancements
Apr 10 2024
How do you improve your mobile site?

Your site should be mobile-friendly. Because nowadays, most people are searching on Google with their phone. But what does it mean to have a mobile-friendly site? And where do you start? In this SEO basics article, you’ll find an overview of what you could do to improve your mobile site.

Table of contents

When is a site mobile-friendly?

A site is mobile-friendly when it:

  • helps users get their tasks done quickly and joyfully.
  • loads correctly on a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet.
  • loads lightning-fast.
  • presents content in a readable fashion, without users having to pinch and zoom.
  • offers enough space to navigate by touch.
  • offers added value for mobile users.
  • is instantly understandable for search engines.

Why is mobile SEO important?

Mobile SEO makes sure your mobile site offers the best possible presentation of your content to a mobile device user. Since our world is increasingly mobile-oriented, it’s important that your site is mobile-friendly. If your site isn’t (properly) available for mobile users, you’ll miss out on a decent ranking in the search engines, and thus miss the income. Therefore, you should do everything in your power to optimize the mobile view of your site and make it as good as possible. In fact, it should be excellent!

Important to Google

Since 2016, Google uses the mobile version of a site to determine the site’s rankings. So if your site isn’t up to scratch or shows less content on your mobile site, you’ll find it difficult to get good rankings. That’s why it’s so important to create a fully functioning and responsive design for your (mobile) site.

Luckily, Google has a great getting started guide to help you improve your mobile site. Plus, they’ve also set up a Page Experience initiative that gives you metrics — the so-called Core Web Vitals — on how humans and machines perceive your site’s performance. So, use these metrics to help you figure out what to focus on while improving your mobile site.

Treat it as one website

Don’t forget to see your site as being a single thing. You shouldn’t have a ‘mobile site’ that’s distinct from your ‘desktop site.’ You should have one site that adapts to whatever screen it’s being viewed on. That also means that the content of the different views should be the same.

How to improve your mobile website

To improve your mobile SEO, you need to focus on a couple of things:

  • Make a joyful user experience.
  • Make sure your site is responsive.
  • Improve your site speed.
  • Use structured data.
  • Don’t block JavaScript, HTML and CSS code.
  • Don’t use too many redirects.
  • Choose the correct viewport.
  • Don’t use interstitials or pop-ups.
  • Verify mobile-friendliness.
  • Tell Google about your site.

Let’s go over these topics in more detail.

Focus on making your site easy and joyful to use with mobile SEO

Offer a great user experience to your users, and you’ll notice that Google will enjoy it too. So, how do you do that? First, figure out what you want users to do on your site. Then, make sure that it’s easy for people to do. Do you want people to call you? Make sure you put your phone number front and center, so it’s easy to find. Want to enhance conversions? Make that buy button stand out and function properly! In other words: bring focus to your site, and helpfully guide your visitors through the steps you want them to take.

But don’t just focus on your intent. Look at your users too! Figure out why they visit and which tasks they mostly do on your site. Then make sure it’s easy for them. Because If something frustrates your user, it hurts you and your results. That’s why you should test, improve, and fully optimize your mobile site.

Responsive design

There are multiple ways to improve your site so it’s available for mobile users. The most important one is to create a responsive design. This is also the the technology that Google advocates. With a responsive design, your site lives on one URL, which makes it easier for Google to understand and index it.

If you use WordPress, chances are your theme is already responsive and can adapt to all screens. Still, it’s good to check how your site scales in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. Because if it doesn’t scale correctly, you should talk to your web developer about fixing it – or choose a different theme.

Improve your site speed

One of the most important things you can do to improve your site’s mobile SEO is to improve the site’s loading speed. Time after time, studies have shown that people leave sites that load slowly, and probably never return. That’s why site speed has been a ranking factor for years, and why Google is increasingly focusing on fixing this common issue. See the Page Experience update and the Core Web Vitals metrics’ introduction for more proof.

If you need more tips, we have a post on how to improve your site speed and which tools that might help you.

Get better web hosting for your site

The number one tip to optimize the speed of your mobile site is to invest in better web hosting. Many sites run on budget hosts that share a lot of the server space with other websites, which can cause their sites to slow down. That’s why it really is essential to stay away from cheap hosting and get a good plan at a renowned host — it truly pays for itself!

Don’t know where to start? We have a page with WordPress web hosting companies that we vouch for, as we vetted them personally.

Optimize images

If there is one quick win to improve your site speed, it’s this: optimize your images. Don’t load those 3000 x 2000 pixel HD images on your site. Scale them to the correct size, then make them smaller with tools like ImageOptim, Squoosh, or WordPress plugins like WP Smush. You can also look into serving those images in next-gen image formats like WebP.

Minify code

Every request your site has to make has an impact on your site speed. That’s why you have to work on reducing these requests to improve your mobile site. One way to do this is by minifying code.

Minifying code means that you group and link together assets like JavaScript and CSS. As a result, the browser has to load fewer files, which leads to a faster site. This sounds hard to implement, but a plugin like WP Rocket can take care of all your caching needs. Or you can use Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress to get a load of enhancements in one go.

Browser caching

By using browser caching, you’re telling the browser that page elements that don’t change often can be saved inside its cache. This way, the browser only has to download new and dynamic content whenever it visits again. Again, this is something that a plugin like WP Rocket can help you with. Or you can also do it yourself if you like.

Reduce redirects

A redirect leads a visitor from one requested page to another, because the requested page was moved or deleted. While this leads to a good user experience if done well, the more redirects you use, the slower your site will be. Don’t make endless redirects. Also, try not to keep links around that point to deleted posts redirected to new ones. Always make direct links.

Use structured data to improve your mobile site

Structured data is essential for every site. With structured data, you can describe your content in a way that search engines can understand. It gives you a direct line of communication with search engines, so to say. In return, search engines might reward you with awesome rich results.

Your mobile site needs to have the same structured data as your desktop variant — otherwise, Google might get confused. Yoast SEO automatically adds structured data for the most important parts of your site, which you can fine-tune it to your liking.

Don’t block assets like JavaScript, HTML and CSS

We’ve said it before, and we’re going to keep saying it: Don’t block assets like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Doing so makes it harder for Google to access your site and that could lead to bad rankings. Check your Google Search Console to see if you’re blocking resources. If so, we advise that you take away all blockades if you want to truly optimize your mobile site.

Improve legibility

Make sure that your mobile site is readable on mobile devices. Use different devices to check if your typography is in order and make changes when necessary. Typography can make or break the user experience of your site.

Improve tap target sizes

People hate it when their fingers can’t hit a button, link, or menu item without fault. They can feel frustrated when navigation is hard or unnatural. Please fix it to improve your mobile site.

Choose the correct viewport

The viewport determines the width of the page for the device used to view it. By specifying a correct viewport, you make sure that visitors with specific devices get the right version of your site. Fail to do this, and you might show your desktop site to a small-screen smartphone user — a big no-no.

Don’t use interstitials or pop-ups

Google will penalize sites that use large pop-ups or interstitials to promote newsletters, sign-up forms, or ads. These often get in the way of the user quickly accessing the content they requested. Don’t use these. If you must though, make sure you abide by Google’s rules.

Test your site and tell Google about it

Before you start working on your mobile SEO, you should run a mobile usability test on Google to see where you should start. As you work, you should keep testing to see if you’re making progress. If your mobile site is optimized, you need to tell Google so your site will be checked and indexed. Use Search Console to stay on top of the performance of your site.

Investigate other technologies

There are other ways to improve the performance of your mobile site. One of these technologies is the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. This is an initiative by Google and others to get web pages to load super fast on mobile devices. By wrapping your content in special HTML code, you can optimize the pages in a way that Google can use to improve the performance. Keep in mind that AMP is not without its drawbacks, and not every project will benefit from it.

AMP is not the only technology that helps you optimize your mobile site. Other companies offer similar solutions, like Cloudflare’s various optimized delivery technologies. There are so many options these days!

Conclusion

Mobile is the new baseline, the new default. Do everything you can to fix your mobile site and make it perfect, not just in Google’s eyes, but, more importantly, your visitors. Mobile SEO is not just about great content and a flawless technical presentation. It’s more about creating an excellent user experience. Once you’ve achieved that, you’re on your way to the top!

Read more: Mobile SEO: the ultimate guide »



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Mar 6 2024
SEO basics: SEO fact or fiction?

SEO has a somewhat questionable reputation. In the past, people shared supposed tricks that would instantly get you to rank. But a lot has changed in the SEO world. So, are these tricks still true? Let’s take a look at what’s an SEO fact, and what’s SEO fiction!

The origin of this reputation

A lifetime ago, when Google’s algorithm wasn’t that good, you could trick your way into the search results. Putting down keywords in white (so nobody would see, but Google would crawl it) was an effective strategy back then. As was buying bulks of links from questionable sites. As Google evolved, these kinds of dirty SEO tricks started to backfire. 

If you’re wondering whether certain tactics of old school or blackhat SEO still pay off, just think: does it give the user a better experience on your site? Does your website become a better result? If you can answer these questions with yes, then it’s probably a good SEO strategy. Anything that feels like a trick though, probably won’t be a good SEO strategy in the long run. So, let’s look at some SEO statements and find out if they’re fact or fiction!

SEO fact or fiction?

Fact or fiction 1: Content is king

Content is a very important aspect of any SEO strategy. After all, Google crawls texts and determines the ranking of your site on the quality of your texts. High-quality content also leads to lower bounce rates and more social media attention.

SEO fact: Content is king

While backlinks are definitely important for your SEO strategy, you should be rather selective in which kinds of backlinks you’d want to attract to your website. To start, you shouldn’t buy large amounts of links. (Nor should you exchange links.) Secondly, don’t use any automated programs to get links. Moreover, don’t do guest blogging with very thin content and don’t go for links that are unrelated to the topic of your website. You shouldn’t have links from spammy sites whose only purpose is to advertise for gambling, viagra and porn (unless your website is about gambling, viagra and porn). Lastly, make sure there is real content behind the links you use. In a nutshell: you should never pay for links.

If you choose to go overboard on link building, you’ll risk a penguin penalty and lose your rankings in Google. If you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! 

SEO fiction: Get as many links as possible

Fact or fiction 3: Keyword density should be sky high

Some people claim you should put as many keywords in your texts as possible. They hope that Google will notice the amount of keywords they’re using and therefore will rank the text highest in the search results. However, their text will become unreadable. So they shouldn’t do that! It’ll definitely backfire. Never write content that’s created for the search engines. Always write content with a real audience in mind. Invest in high-quality content that’ll generate long-term stable traffic to your website.

SEO fiction: keyword density should be sky high

Fact or fiction 4: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Technical SEO is definitely an important element of an SEO strategy. And it doesn’t hurt to learn a bit of code (it could even be great fun). However, if you’re using WordPress and our Yoast SEO plugin, your technical SEO is pretty much covered. Our plugin is designed to take care of all the technical aspects of your SEO strategy.

SEO fact: You don’t need high-end technical skills to do SEO

Fact or fiction 5: Meta descriptions don’t matter

Google rewrites 70% of manually added meta descriptions. That means there’s a high chance that a meta description you added manually will be rewritten by Google. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to the content of your meta description. Meta descriptions provide critical information to both search engines and users. Moreover, it’s based on the SEO title and meta description that the user decides whether to visit your page. Neglecting them would be missing an opportunity to get more traffic to your website.

SEO fiction: Meta descriptions don’t matter

Fact or fiction 6: Social media can improve your rankings

Google doesn’t look at your website’s social media performance (like followers or shares) when ranking your content. However, a good social media strategy helps your rankings by boosting your traffic. A lot of traffic makes search engines deem your content as relevant. Furthermore, the difference between search engines and social media has been blurring. For example, both Google and Instagram can be used to find an answer to a question. 

SEO fact: Social media can improve your rankings

Fact or fiction 7: Google will be replaced by AI

While using AI platforms as search engines might be relatively new, AI has been shaping the search engine experience for quite some time. For example, AI is what helps Google provide voice search and image search. And not only are some search engines introducing their own AI language models (like Gemini), they are also integrating AI models into the search engine results.

So while we don’t know exactly what the future holds, it’s clear that Google and AI found a way to work together instead of replacing each other.

SEO fiction: Google will be replaced by AI

Fact or fiction 8: SEO is all tricks

At Yoast, we propose an SEO strategy we refer to as holistic SEO. Holistic SEO means you focus on developing a long-term SEO strategy that focuses on all aspects of website optimization, in order to be the best result. Part of this strategy is to write awesome content, do great PR and social, make sure your website is properly secured and create a superb User Experience. And of course, your website should have technical excellence and an awesome site structure. That’s no trick. That’s just a whole lot of hard work.

SEO fiction: SEO is all tricks

Conclusion

The final SEO fiction actually says it all: SEO is not all tricks. Yoast believes that SEO is a long-term strategy that focuses on creating quality content for your audience and becoming the best result. It is a lot of work, but it will definitely pay off in the long run!

Read more: Holistic SEO »



Camille Cunningham

Camille is a content specialist at Yoast. As part of the Search team, she enjoys creating content that helps you master SEO.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Feb 15 2024
The SEO checklist for beginners

SEO is a HUGE thing – and who doesn’t love a checklist? Although SEO work is never done, there are many things you can simply cross off the list to ensure you’re optimizing your website not just for people but for Google as well. Want to work on your site’s SEO? Check out these things so you know where to start.

Content, content, content!

SEO is about optimizing your content so it’s helpful for users, and, therefore appears at the top of search results for relevant keywords you want to rank for. Making sure that if someone searches for a term you want to rank for, you actually end up on that first page. That’s why you should focus on two very important things: keyword research and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Let’s talk about those a bit more.

Keyword research

Before you can start optimizing your website, it’s crucial to know what you’re optimizing for. Let’s say you own an online store for climbing equipment. You sell tape, brushes, bags, and shoes. Before you can start ranking, you need to think about what kind of words your audience uses to describe these things. Because if you’re not optimizing your content for the words your target audience uses, you won’t be visible to the right people. This means that you might attract some traffic, but not the traffic you want.

For example, if someone searches for ‘tape’, and finds your page about climbing tape where they want to know more about paper tape – they will leave your site and continue their search. This is bad for website engagement and will lead to poorer rankings. Here, you want to think more about the semantics and context of the content you write.

So, that’s why this SEO checklist starts with doing proper keyword research. And no, this isn’t the easiest thing to do, or the one that takes the least amount of time. However, if you have a solid keyword list, you’re off to a good start for the rest of your SEO work. And if you really want to be thorough, just read the step-by-step guide to keyword research.

E-E-A-T

When you have that keyword list, the next thing on your SEO checklist should be to focus on E-E-A-T. This stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In simple terms, it means that Google judges your pages based on the credibility of the page, the author, and the website as a whole. So, what does that mean for your website, and what should you be checking your content for?

  • Experience: the content should contain examples of the writer’s experience on the subject. It’s about giving opinions and for example, sharing pictures.
  • Expertise: this means that the writer should have the right knowledge and qualifications to write about something. For example, I can write about this SEO checklist because I have been in marketing for years and years (experience), and have done courses on the subject (expertise). This example shows that both experience and expertise can overlap, but they don’t have to be. For example, a hobby chef doesn’t have to be a professional to write about new recipes.
  • Authoritativeness: are you an authority in this area? With ‘you’ Google means the creator and the website. Meaning that ‘Yoast’ can be the SEO authority, but the writers on the website should also be some kind of authority.
  • Trustworthiness: this is about citing trustworthy sites, having a secure connection, and not hiding content behind a wall of ads.

Update old before creating new content

Without good content, it’s very difficult to rank on Google or other search engines. Although you might have a nice keyword list by now, that doesn’t mean you should just go out and create new content. So, next on your SEO checklist is:

Improve high-potential content

If you already have a lot of content, but it isn’t ranking very well, you might wanna update some high-potential pages. These are pages that have the potential to rank, because the keywords have a high volume and low competition, but don’t yet. Check out those pages and go through the specific on-page SEO checks. For example by using the Yoast plugin to optimize your content. One of the ways to look at your current content is by using the RID principle, which stands for Retain, Improve or Delete:

  • Retain means you’re keeping the content
  • Improve means you need to update it
  • Delete means it’s no longer needed

Just export an overview of all your content, and label it with an R, I or D. Now you’ll have another checklist that you’ll just need to follow.

One of the things Google looks at when indexing your website is metadata. That’s data that describes other data. In other words, it’s words describing the content you’ve made. The meta description for example, is a short summary of your page or post. This is often used by search engines in the snippet in the search results. So, that’s very important data! But it’s not just the meta description that counts, also think about adding alt text to your images to describe them. That doesn’t just help search engines, but also screen readers. Making it a win for accessibility.

Schema

Metadata isn’t just about adding a couple of details, it’s also about something bigger: schema. Schema, in the context of SEO, refers to structured data markup that you can add within the page source code to make web pages more contextually understandable for search engines to understand what kind of an entity it is. This isn’t just about making the content look better for users, but about making it clearer for search engines.

When you use schema markup on your website, you’re essentially providing search engines with a clear and structured way to identify and interpret these entities within your content. This allows search engines to not only grasp the individual elements of your content (like the name of a person, a place, or a date) but also understand the context and relationships between these entities. By doing so, schema markup aids search engines in accurately categorizing and indexing your content, which can improve how your site appears in search results. This deeper level of understanding helps search engines connect users’ search queries to the most relevant content on your site, enhancing visibility and user engagement.

Images and video

Up until now, I’ve talked a lot about content in terms of words. Of course, content is more than that. Think about images, audio and video. Now, with AI being used even more, this means algorithms can easily recognize and interpret visual content, meaning it gets even more important for SEO. So, what should you do? Here are a couple of tips:

  1. Always use relevant file names
  2. Check the file size and format 
  3. Use alt text for images
  4. Add subtitles to your videos
  5. Publish a page and add a transcript to your videos
  6. Ensure you have embedded links pointing back to a relevant page on your site

Internal linking

One of the things that you shouldn’t miss on your SEO checklist, is to check your internal linking structure. The thing is, this really helps you show search engines what your site’s about and it helps visitors navigate easier. And, even more important: your pages need links in order to be indexed at all. 

 But, where to start? We like to follow these 9 steps:

  1. Determine the ideal structure for your site. 
  2. Decide what your most important content is. 
  3. Add contextual links to your articles so you show that the articles are relevant in that context.
  4. Link hierarchical pages. So link parent pages to their child pages and the other way around. 
  5. Consider adding a related post section. This way you can even give your pages more link value. 
  6. Link to your important pages from the menu or home page. 
  7. Add links to your taxonomies. 
  8. Add links to your most recent posts. 
  9. Consider adding links to popular posts. 

I know, this is not an easy fix. That’s why I suggest you start working on the big list that I mentioned here, but also start working on the little things. For example, every time you publish something new, make sure to include relevant internal links. That way, you can start building your internal linking structure slowly.

Page speed

A main factor that impacts your SEO, is page speed. But page speed entails lots of things. It is not an easy thing or a single measure. It ties back to things like the infrastructure of your web server, but also depends on the internet connection of the user, for example. So, what are easy things you can do to improve your page speed?

  1. Compress your images. For example with squoosh or TinyPNG.  You’ll sacrifice a little bit of image quality, but will improve page loading speed. 
  2. Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. You can easily do this by using an online minifier tool, or a plugin.
  3. Enable browser caching. This will store webpage data in a user’s browser. You can do this with a WordPress plugin as well, for example, Litespeed Cache or WPRocket.

Long-term SEO

I know this might not be what you’d like to hear, but SEO is something for the long term. Fixing your website and content for SEO purposes takes time and effort. However, the good news is that you don’t have to check everything off your SEO list at once. Meaning that you can simply start working on one of these items each day, and will definitely impact your SEO in the long run. What helps you most in working on your SEO every day? Well, I’d recommend using Yoast SEO to optimize your content. But I might be a bit biased. 😉

Florie van Hummel

Florie van Hummel is Director of Marketing at Yoast. She’s an experienced marketeer and very passionate about learning new things, cats, and, of course, making more people love Yoast.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 4 2024
6 essential tips to save time in SEO

Whether you have a company website, a blog, or an (online) store, chances are you’ve got a lot to do. You’re probably busy leading your company, blogging, or making your customers happy with the necessary goods. SEO might not be top of mind at all times. Yet, you also know that higher rankings would most likely benefit your business. So, how do you do SEO efficiently? Here, we will give you some tips on how to save time in SEO!

Disclaimer: it’s a known fact that SEO also stands for Seriously Effortful Optimization, so you will only get to the top by putting in the work. You should focus on stuff that matters (creating excellent content, making your site fast, and providing the best user experience, i.e., doing holistic SEO). The biggest time saver is choosing the right SEO tools to help you perform these tasks.

Table of contents

1. Unlock time-saving optimization with AI

Embrace the cutting-edge AI capabilities of Yoast SEO Premium to streamline your content optimization process. This powerful feature effortlessly generates titles and meta descriptions for your content. It even extends its benefits to your product meta descriptions when using WooCommerce SEO.

By leveraging AI, you can say goodbye to hours spent brainstorming catchy titles and compelling meta descriptions. Let the AI-powered tool handle the heavy lifting, ensuring your content is search-engine friendly while freeing up valuable time. You can focus on delivering high-quality content to your audience while our generative AI feature handles the optimization.

Yoast SEO Premium uses generative AI to help you work faster

2. Improve existing content

Are you considering writing yet another post on topic X? Think twice. Before you write something new, please check which posts you already have on this topic. Do you find something similar that you’ve written two or three years ago? You can refresh the existing post instead of writing a brand new post. Add new insights, add a hook to current news, improve the quality, and merge it with another post on the same topic on your site. Update it, and you can even share it again in your newsletter or on social media.

This is beneficial in more than one way:

  • It will prevent keyword cannibalization: if you have multiple similar posts on the same topic, your rankings for that query can deteriorate.
  • You’ve eliminated that old article and shown users the best and most updated content. This serves both your users and Google!
  • And, of course, you’ll save time by reusing content. In most cases, rewriting and updating content takes less time than writing something from scratch.

If you want to refresh your content smartly to benefit your SEO, check out our blog post on updating your content in 10 steps. A tool that saves time in the updating process is Yoast Duplicate Post. This free plugin allows you to duplicate and rewrite an existing post as a draft. When it’s ready, you can just hit ‘republish’ (or schedule) it. No more copying and pasting or inconveniently working in docs!

The duplicate post menu item with the rewrite and republish feature
Creating a new draft or clone with Yoast Duplicate Post

One of the first things many SEOs do when auditing a site for the first time is to check the internal linking profile of a website. You could write a thousand articles, but if they don’t get links (external and internal), not many people will find them, making all the writing you’ve done a waste of time. A good site structure can boost your rankings, especially if you structure your site according to the cornerstone content principle.

In a nutshell, the cornerstone content principle means linking related posts. And most importantly, link these posts to the best, most complete article you’ve written on that topic. This is the article that touches on all aspects of the topic. It’s the article that you surely want to rank with! Because this post (or page) gets the most internal links, it sends signals to Google that this is the most important post on that topic.

Internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium

Without any help, implementing this is a lot of work: finding out which posts are related, making sure they’re linked, and manually checking whether they all link to a cornerstone article. Fortunately, Yoast SEO Premium has an excellent feature to help you save time: the internal linking suggestions tool. It will find and show suggestions for related articles to link to next to the post editor in the Yoast SEO sidebar. Pick the ones that you think fit best in the context of your post.

internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO sidebar
Easily add contextual links with Yoast SEO Premium

Moreover, you can mark your posts as cornerstone content in the backend with Yoast SEO. If you’ve done this and you’re writing a related post, this cornerstone article will show up on top in the suggestions. So you won’t forget to link to those!

Of course, you need more than just internal links for SEO. Nothing beats getting an external link from a high-authority website to build your authoritativeness (part of E-E-A-T). So, building backlinks remains key to achieving good results in SEO. Unfortunately, there’s not a shortcut here. You’ll need outstanding and genuinely original content to earn backlinks nowadays. Plus, you must put effort into the necessary outreach to get the word out about the fantastic things you do, create, or write.

SEO can be overwhelming. You’re never done with SEO, and the tasks you want or need to do can pile up. As a result, you can lose track of everything on your plate, which can even lead to overwhelmed paralysis. It is stressful and not helpful if you want to save time. It’s good to get an overview of the SEO improvements you want to work on to prevent feeling overwhelmed or regain control. Productivity tools like Trello or Todoist can help you attain and keep this overview.

When you’ve organized your board, you’ll need to prioritize. But you might wonder: which tasks on your board come first? Well, as always in SEO, the answer is: it depends. Are significant technical flaws preventing Google from correctly crawling and indexing your site? The obvious answer is to start with that. Do you use huge images on your site, causing pages to load for ages? That might be a good starting point, too.

As for content improvements, it’s impossible to give one-fits-all advice. One principal recommendation, and maybe stating the obvious: make sure your priorities are aligned with your business goals. Are you focusing on getting more sales right now? Optimizing your product pages probably makes sense. Do you want to establish sustainable growth? Focus on the long-term with sustainable SEO.

Are you still feeling overwhelmed? Then, starting with more minor, easy-to-accomplish tasks might be a good idea. Getting into a flow of achieving things and moving cards to done can give that positive energy needed to take up the more significant tasks.

5. Optimize your post for synonyms and related keyphrases

What if you want to rank for multiple queries with one post? That would be a huge time-saver, right? The good news is that you can and might even already do. Of course, there’s one significant constraint: the queries must be very similar. For instance, if you write about sustainable hen houses, it might be worth optimizing for a synonym such as eco-friendly poultry houses too. Using synonyms is a best practice not only for SEO but also for readability. Generally, people don’t like repeatedly reading the same word in a text.

Using synonyms will also help Google to understand the topic better. You’re giving them more context on the topic, making it easier to identify which entity you’re writing about. The same goes for related keyphrases; it will provide Google with the context to show your post or page for the correct query. If you want to optimize your post for related keywords, our Semrush integration can save time finding these. It will show related queries to your focus keyphrase with search volume.

Semrush integration Yoast SEO
Related keyphrase suggestions by Semrush in Yoast SEO

In Yoast SEO Premium, you can set keyphrase synonyms and related keyphrases. The SEO analysis will consider these phrases when analyzing your text and give you feedback so you can also optimize for these phrases. As explained, this will result in more natural writing and a better understanding of the post’s topic by Google. And it can save you time because you won’t write essentially identical posts. As a bonus, you’re not creating duplicate content or causing keyword cannibalization.

6. Preview your social post in the admin

We think sharing your content on social should be part of your SEO efforts. When you’ve written a blog post and plan to share it on social media, you want to ensure it looks good on your timeline. But if you need to do that on the social media platform itself, it does take some time. You must go back and forth between platforms, adapt and upload improved images, etc.

A small but easy time-saving feature in Yoast SEO Premium is our social media preview functionality. It will show you what your post looks like when shared on Facebook or X. Does the image fit, and does the title look good? If you use it, you’re no longer in the dark about the appearance of your post on your timeline. And it saves you time switching between platforms and copy-pasting URLs.

Moreover, you can even set default templates for specific post types. For instance, at Yoast, we set those for help articles. We don’t share these frequently on social media, so we won’t create individual images for all these articles. But setting a good fall-back image prevents these posts from looking misfitted when shared by someone else. Read more about our default social templates.

Save time in SEO

So that’s it. These are our tips on saving time in SEO. It mostly comes down to focusing on what matters and using the right tools. Over to you! Do you have any tremendous time-saving tips? Please share them in the comments!

Read more: Save time in SEO with these tips »



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

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Dec 28 2023
What is a keyword strategy?

To get traffic, you need people willing to visit your site. To get them to visit your site, you need to know what they are looking for, which words they use, and what type of content would fit their intent best. In short, you need a keyword strategy. In this SEO Basics article, we’ll take a brief look at what keyword strategy is and how it goes hand in hand with keyword research.

What is keyword strategy?

You’ve probably gotten the advice to conduct a keyword research to find out what terms you should use. Which is good advice, but it isn’t a keyword strategy. That comes after your research.

A keyword strategy is about how you want to target those keywords, now and in the future. It contains every decision you take based upon your findings in your keyword research project, whether it’s about the content you’re planning to write or how you’re going to track the results in Analytics.

Read our ultimate guide to keyword research for SEO for an all-encompassing overview of all things keyword research. In addition, we have online training on keyword research as well.

A keyword strategy forms when looking at yourself and your environment

You need to have plenty of insights if you want to make informed decisions about your keyword strategy. Start by thoroughly investigating yourself, your product, and your competitors.

Look at yourself

A good keyword strategy starts with asking yourself the following questions:

  • What is your business doing, and why?
  • What are your goals?
  • What’s your uniqueness in this world?
  • What is the message you want to send?
  • How’s your branding?
  • Why would anyone want to visit your site?

Better insights lead to a better understanding of what you want to achieve. You’ll safe yourself time, and make sure you’re not focusing on the wrong things.

Look at search intent

After you’ve fleshed out your uniqueness, it’s time to look at search intent. Search intent is the why behind people’s search and click to your site.

So, ask yourself: Do you know your audience? Are people only looking for information on your site, or are they willing to buy stuff as well? And are there ways for you to target specific search intents with focused content, so you can influence this?

Look at the words your audience uses

By doing keyword research, you should get great insight into the words people use to find what they are looking for. Next, make sure the content you write (and that your audience is interested in) fits with your users’ search intent and the language they use.

Look at the competition

Don’t forget to take a good look at your competitors! What are they doing? How well are they ranking for terms you’d like to target? What kind of content do they have? Are there ways for you to improve on that? Have you thought about looking at the long tail?

Look at the search engines

Of course, while looking at your competitors, you’ll often use search engines to see how they are doing. Doing these types of searches can give you great insights into the strategy of your competitors. It also gives you a very good feel of what happens when you type in your main focus keyphrase. What’s the on-screen real estate like? Are there featured snippets you could target? Are there other types of rich results? Is there a local pack?

In some markets, if you track developments over time, you might see that search engines are increasingly giving answers that lead to no-click searches. Always keep an eye on search engines, but don’t go obsessing about every little algorithm update.

Look at data

Of course, analyzing data plays a big role in the success of your keyword strategy. Both before and after, Google Analytics provides invaluable insights into the performance of your site. Even Google Search Console can give you a lot of stuff to think about and opportunities to pursue!

How are you targeting your keywords?

Checking your analytics regularly to keep track of your SEO performance is incredibly important. But you can’t have performance without content that’s specifically tailored to the needs and goals of your strategy.

If you’ve ran through all the steps and did a thorough keyword research, you should have an idea of what you should target and how you should do that. You can use these insights to create the content you need to make a success of your strategy. There’s a lot you can do:

  • Make landing pages
  • Create specific types of content for different search intents
  • Maybe make specific content to get featured snippets
  • Perhaps voice search is something that might fit your strategy?
  • Or apps?
  • Video?
  • Something else entirely?

Many roads lead to Rome, but some roads are more difficult than others. You could say that the highway is the fastest way to Rome, but you might run into a traffic jam because everyone wants to take that route. Sometimes, it’s better to take the rarely traveled mountain pass — the results might wow you!

Update your keyword strategy

Through the years (sometimes even months!), there’s a lot that can happen and change in the online world. It might be that your users’ language changed, or that a new competitor is gobbling up market share. Your keyword strategy should take that into account. So, regularly re-evaluate your keyword strategy, and adjust where necessary!



Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

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Dec 20 2023
What is a slug and how to optimize it?

When we talk about SEO for WordPress, we often talk about creating the right slug for a page. Of course, we’re not talking about the slimy creature that eats your plants. So, what is this ‘slug’ then? And why should you optimize it? In this post, we’ll explain all you need to know about it.

Having an orange or red traffic light for the ‘keyphrase in slug‘ check in Yoast SEO? Here’s what that check does and how to turn that light green.

Table of contents

What is a slug?

A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a particular page on a website in an easy-to-read form. In other words, it’s the part of the URL that explains the page’s content.

For this article, for example, the URL is https://yoast.com/slug, and the slug simply is ‘slug’.

How to edit a URL slug

In WordPress, the slug is the part of your URL that you can edit when writing or editing a post. Editing it in WordPress looks like this:

Note that this only works with the right permalink settings. You can edit the permalink settings in WordPress through Settings > Permalinks. We recommend choosing an option in which the URL contains relevant words, as this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or parameter would.

The WordPress Permalink Settings controls

Note: don’t just change your permalink settings once your site is already online. This could cause all kinds of trouble.

There are two ways to edit a slug in Shopify: You can either use Shopify’s ‘Search engine listing preview’ function, or you can use the Google Preview tool in Yoast SEO for Shopify instead.

To edit a slug using the built-in Shopify function, you’ll first need to click on ‘Edit website SEO’ to open the Search engine listing preview options. From there, you can easily adjust your slug as necessary. Note: Shopify calls the slug the ‘handle’ instead, but it’s exactly the same thing!

Search engine listing preview in Yoast

Alternatively, if you’re editing your Shopify page with Yoast SEO, all you need to do is open the Google preview in the Yoast SEO sidebar and you’ll see a field to enter a new slug:

Enter new slug in URL preview

Why are URL slugs important for SEO?

Writing a good slug for your page or post can positively affect your SEO. It allows you to do the following things:

1. Include your keyword

Why? Because the slug is one of the indicators Google uses to determine what a page is about. So change your slug, and make sure that it includes words you really want to rank for.

2. Create user-friendly URL slugs

Picture a results page: you’ll see many different URLs about a certain topic, right? So you need to make sure your slug is in line with what people expect to see.

For example, our main article on WordPress SEO has the URL yoast.com/wordpress-seo, which is very on point. People are a lot more likely to click on that, than on yoast.com/?p=607, even though that’s the URL that WordPress creates by default.

Find out more about creating SEO-friendly URLs »

What does the keyphrase in slug assessment in Yoast SEO do?

Your article or page should have an easy-to-remember, focused and SEO-friendly URL. That’s why, to improve your URL, the Yoast SEO plugin checks how you’ve fitted in your main focus keyphrase and makes suggestions to improve it.

A screenshot of the Yoast SEO analysis with the Keyphrase in slug assessment

How to optimize your slug in WordPress

What do you need to think of when crafting the right slug for your post or page? Let’s go over the six steps of optimizing it in WordPress:

  1. Include your focus keyphrase

    This is probably a no-brainer, but your focus keyphrase should always be in the slug. This will immediately make it clear to your audience what your page is about.

    If you keyphrase isn’t in the slug, the SEO analysis in the Yoast plugin will show you this message:

    A screenshot of the keyphrase assessment with an orange bullet

  2. Think about function words

    The slug that’s generated by default may include function words like “a”, “the” and “and”. In some cases, you might need those to clarify what your page is about. Usually, however, you can leave them out.

    You can read more about this in our WordPress SEO article.

  3. Add focus

    You shouldn’t just filter out any unnecessary function words, but every word you don’t need. In the case of this post, WordPress automatically created the slug “what-is-a-slug-and-how-to-optimize-it” (based upon the permalink settings in WordPress). That’s quite long, so we manually reduced it to “slug”. However, you should make sure your slug still makes sense!

    And remember: You can use a slug only once, so use it for the right page. For example, if we want to write another (but different) post about slugs in the future, then we can’t (re)use this slug.

  4. Keep it short and descriptive

    As we’ve said before, the URL of your page is sometimes shown in Google search results, and may therefore influence whether your audience decides to click your snippet. So, you don’t have a lot of room to play with. So think carefully about the specific words you want to include.

    In addition, be careful with adding dates and such to your URL. These instantly tell your audience when your content was originally published.

  5. Use lowercase letters only

    Try to use only lowercase letters in your slug. If you don’t, in some cases, you might accidentally create duplicate content by mixing uppercase and lowercase letters.

  6. Remember that URL slugs should be permanent

    Changing URLs can be bad for SEO, and bad for users – even if you use a redirect manager to make sure that people get to the right place. So when you’re choosing your slug, make sure it’s still going to make sense years from now.



Cindy Paul

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.

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