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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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
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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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
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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WordPress for beginners series

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 6 2023
6 common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them

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.

If you ever get off-track, check out this post on picking up SEO after neglecting it for a while. In that post, we discuss everything you can do to get your SEO into shape again! Or check out our guide on how to get started with 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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Nov 9 2023
What is thin content?

At Yoast, we like to say: “Content is king”. But what does that mean? In short, it means you need content to rank. But not just any content. It needs to be meaningful and original. In this SEO basics post, we’ll explain why you need content to make your site attractive for visitors. We’ll also explain why Google dislikes low quality or thin content, and what you can do about it.

What is thin content?

Thin content is content that has little or no value to the user. Google considers low-quality affiliate pages, doorway pages (pages optimized for a keyword that redirect the user to another page), or simply pages with very little to no content as thin content pages.

But don’t fall into the trap of just producing loads of very similar content! Non-original pages, pages with scraped and duplicate content are considered thin content pages too. And Google doesn’t like pages that are stuffed with keywords either, because it has learned to distinguish between valuable and low-quality content, especially since Google Panda. That’s why Google has also launched the Helpful Content update, to further differentiate between helpful and original content, and low-quality content.

What does Google want?

Google tries to provide the best results for their users. The best result is usually the one that matches the search intent of the user. So, if you want to rank high, you have to convince Google that you’re answering the question of the user.

When we look at it this way, it makes sense why thin content rarely qualifies as the best result. If there’s not enough information, people will likely not find their answer. So try to write enjoyable and informative copy. Not just to make Google happy, but (even more importantly) to make your users happy.

Read more: SEO basics: What does Google do? »

Be the best result

Now that you understand what Google wants, it’s time to write meaningful copy about the keywords you’d like to rank for. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you blog about something you’re passionate about. After all, if you write about a topic you love (and probably know everything about), it’ll be easy to show Google that your content contains an expert’s point of view!

I don’t know how to write longer content

Every situation is different. We understand that it’s not always possible to write an elaborate text about everything. For instance, if you own an online shop that sells hundreds of different computer parts, it can be a challenge to write an extensive text about everything.

Our advice: make sure that every page has some original introductory content, instead of just an image and a buy button next to the price. If you sell lots of products that are very alike, you could also choose to optimize the category page instead of the product page or use canonicals to prevent duplicate content issues.

How do we help you?

Have you heard of our content analysis checks? It’s part of the Yoast SEO plugin, and it helps you write awesome copy. For example, one of the checks is to write at least 300 words per page or posts. This ensures that you won’t publish thin content. We also check if you haven’t used the same keyword before, which helps prevent you from creating similar content. 

And what about keyword stuffing? Yep, we check for that too! Our keyword density check shows you if you’ve used your keyword too many or too little, so you get a nicely optimized and natural-sounding text. That’s why you should make sure at least these lights are green!

If you want to take it one step further, you can use our readability check. This allows you to make sure that the quality of your text is good, and that readers can easily understand your content.

Next steps

Really want to learn how to create content that ranks? Then you may want to give our SEO copywriting training a try! It guides you through the entire process of keyword research and content creation. This training will help you to develop skills to write awesome content for your website!

Keep reading: Content SEO: 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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