Google’s Core Web Vitals have emerged as critical metrics for SEO. These metrics help you optimize your websites for a superior user experience. A new player is making headlines among these vital metrics: Interaction to Next Paint (INP). This one replaces the First Input Delay (FID). This post will explain what INP entails, its significance, and how to improve your site’s performance for SEO.
Essence of Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Interaction to Next Paint measures the responsiveness of a web page to user inputs, such as clicks, taps, and keypresses. It represents the time from when a user interacts with your page to when they see a response on the screen. Unlike its predecessor, First Input Delay, which only accounted for the first input, INP provides a broader view by capturing the responsiveness throughout the life of the page.
Google is very dedicated to enhance the user experiences offered by sites. To validate these, it introduces a more nuanced and comprehensive metrics. It now introducesInteraction to Next Paint into the Core Web Vitals. INP measures a critical aspect of the user’s experience — the responsiveness of a page to user interaction.
By integrating INP into Core Web Vitals, Google aims to provide developers with a complete picture of their page’s performance. In addition, it encourages improvements that genuinely enhance the user experience.
Why INP matters
A seamless user experience is the cornerstone of successful SEO. Interaction to Next Paint directly influences how users perceive the efficiency and usability of a webpage. Pages that respond swiftly to user interactions are more likely to engage visitors. Better performance can reduce bounce rates, and, ultimately, higher rankings in search results.
As the transition from FID to INP unfolds, webmasters and SEO experts must embrace this broader metric. Understanding and optimizing for INP will be crucial for maintaining and improving search rankings.
Real-world improvements for yoast.com
Despite the challenges in optimizing for INP, our team at Yoast has remarkably improved responsiveness. By focusing on efficient code execution and minimizing render-blocking resources, we have significantly enhanced our site’s performance.
Google Search Console already provides INP reports, splitting into mobile and desktop issues. At Yoast, we’ve used these to guide our optimizations. In addition, Screaming Frog now includes INP pass/fail within their crawl reports, which helps as well.
Below shows how the work we did in December and January has reduced the number of issues dramatically:
INP score on desktopINP score on mobile
But remember, while it’s always great to have zero errors, don’t obsess about cutting off milliseconds to get there. If there are significant performance issues, then solve these as soon as you can. Always keep in mind, though, don’t spend dollars to save pennies! Focus on the general page experience; things will naturally progress from there.
Improving Interaction to Next Paint
The shift to INP necessitates a fresh approach to measuring and enhancing web performance. Tools like Google’s Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and the Chrome User Experience Report offer valuable insights into INP scores and opportunities for optimization.
Practical strategies to enhance your INP score
Improving your Interaction to Next Paint INP score benefits your site’s user experience. It’s an important part of staying competitive in SEO. Here are actionable tips to help you enhance your INP score:
1. Optimize event callbacks
Event callbacks are at the heart of user interactions. Reducing the time these callbacks take to process can significantly improve your INP score. Assess the complexity of your event handlers and streamline their code to ensure quick execution.
2. Avoid blocking the main thread
The main thread is where the browser processes user events, executes JavaScript, and renders updates to the screen. Keeping it unblocked ensures that the page can respond to user inputs promptly. Avoid heavy computations or long-running tasks on the main thread to prevent delays in responsiveness.
3. Break up long tasks
Tasks taking more than 50 milliseconds can interfere with the page’s ability to respond to user inputs effectively. Breaking these long tasks into smaller chunks allows the browser to intersperse input handling between these tasks, improving the overall responsiveness.
4. Optimize JavaScript execution
JavaScript can significantly impact your page’s responsiveness. Optimizing how JavaScript is loaded and executed on your page can improve INP scores. Techniques include deferring non-critical JavaScript, using async scripts, and removing unused code.
5. Minimize unnecessary tasks
Evaluate the tasks on your page and identify any that are not essential to the immediate user experience. Postponing or eliminating unnecessary tasks can free up resources, allowing the browser to prioritize user interactions.
6. Prioritize important actions
Not all tasks are created equal. By prioritizing important actions — such as those directly related to user interactions — you ensure that these tasks are executed first, leading to a smoother and more responsive experience.
7. Leverage requestIdleCallback
The requestIdleCallback API allows you to schedule background tasks to run when the browser is idle. This is particularly useful for tasks not critical to the immediate user experience. By using requestIdleCallback, you ensure these tasks do not interfere with the page’s responsiveness to user inputs.
Continuous improvements
Implementing these strategies requires a thoughtful approach to web development and an understanding of how user interactions are processed. Tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can provide insights into your Interaction to Next Paint score. In addition, these can identify specific areas for improvement.
You can significantly enhance your site’s responsiveness by optimizing event callbacks, minimizing main thread blockage, breaking up long tasks, and prioritizing user-centric actions. This leads to a better user experience. It also aligns with Google’s emphasis on page responsiveness as a critical SEO component in the Core Web Vitals era.
Improving INP is a continuous process that can lead to substantial gains in user satisfaction and engagement. As you implement these changes, monitor your site’s performance. Check the impact on your INP scores and refine your strategies for even better results.
Looking ahead
The introduction of INP signals Google’s ongoing commitment to refining its page experience signals. Staying informed and proactive in optimizing for INP and other Core Web Vitals is imperative for you to excel in SEO.
Interaction to Next Paint is a pivotal metric for assessing and enhancing web page responsiveness. Understand its nuances, embrace the available tools, and implement data-driven optimization strategies. Esure that your website meets the ever-changing standards of user experience and SEO.
Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below. Share your experiences, challenges, and successes in working to improve INP. Together, let’s prepare those sites for lift-off!
“Always be available”. That’s common advice for online businesses. After all, you don’t know who might be awake and browsing your site. Having a website makes this easy, and using automated bots for your customer service makes it even easier. That’s why conversational commerce has grown so popular. But is this a good development? Or better yet: is it even required?
What is conversational commerce?
Before we dive deeper into the topic, let’s cover the basics. Conversational commerce is when your customers can contact you through a messenger channel of their choice, and finish their purchase within the same channel.
In other words: if you start a conversation with a business via Facebook Messenger, then purchase the product via the chat, you’ve engaged in conversational commerce.
That sounds useful!
It is. You’ll have 24/7 customer support. Not to mention, customers will get an answer within seconds. That’s important, because 73% of people consider good customer experience an important part of their buying decision. And 65% of customers say a positive experience is more influential than advertising.
So, it’s clear that customer service is an important part of the customer journey. Then why are you leaving it up to bots? Because of the 24/7 availability? That’s valid. But if you’re doing it because it’s cheap and easy, you might need to reconsider. Think about it: if all your competitors are doing the same thing, then your human-driven customer service will stand out in the bot crowd.
Remember work-life balance?
As we said before, the current expectation is that businesses always need to be available. There’s no denying that. However, we can question if that’s a healthy mindset. And before you scoff and say that ‘lazy gen-zers just don’t want to work’, studies have shown that work has actually become more intense over the years. Which has a huge negative impact on our mental health.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why 52% of American millennials (and 48% of German millennials) would rather earn 20% less money than have a shitty work-life balance. So, it’s clear that people nowadays don’t want to work, work, work. So why is this expected of businesses?
How can small businesses keep up?
This 24/7 expectation isn’t just bad for our mental health. It also makes it tough for small businesses to keep up. Think about an illustrator selling their own art, or two friends selling handmade clothes. They probably can’t afford the shiny CRM tools or AI chatbots. And with 24/7 customer service being so important, these small businesses should be dying out.
#support small businesses
But they’re not. In fact, while 20% of businesses fail in the first year, that means a whopping 80% survives. Which makes sense when you consider that 91% of consumers prefer to support small businesses when convenient, and 74% will even actively seek them out!
Interestingly enough, 71% of consumers also expect better support from small businesses. So, why do they have this expectation? It might be because small businesses have humans doing their customer service, since they (usually) don’t have enough money for conversational commerce tools. Which begs the question: Do people prefer talking to other people?
Humans prefer humans
The answer is yes. People seem to generally prefer talking to other humans. But why? A study found that users believe that “chatbots are incapable of providing high-quality communication”, which can lead to people no longer being as loyal to platforms after chatting with a chatbot. In some cases, it even led to a staggering 79.7% reduction of sales.
Is conversational commerce useless then?
It’s not. You can still set up live chats with real people, or allow people to send a message via WhatsApp. Depending on your business’s budget, you’ll be able to provide 24/7 service. But judging by people’s unwavering support for small businesses, it doesn’t seem to matter as much if you can’t.
Disclaimer: of course, it’s still important for small businesses to reply quickly to their consumers. While consumers might not expect an immediate response, they also don’t want to wait for weeks.
Best of both worlds
However, we can’t ignore the current situation. If lots of businesses offer 24/7 service, you’ll feel pressure to do the same. Besides, it would be silly to completely ignore all the amazing technology that’s available. You don’t want to make your life harder than it needs to be. So, what should you do?
Well, why not use both? Implement technology strategically. For example, by using AI in the background to help your customer service employees quickly find information. You’ll honor people’s preference for human interaction, while also empowering your employees with AI tools. You’ll have the best of both worlds.
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.
WordPress and the community around it are very committed to making websites as accessible as possible. Websites should be accessible to every visitor and anyone should be able to use WordPress to create their website or application. To keep accessibility top of mind, there’s a dedicated Accessibility Team that provides expertise and further improves WordPress in this regard. Let’s dive into what accessibility means in the world of WordPress and what you can do to contribute to a more accessible web.
One of the cool things about WordPress is that it’s an open source project. One that invites people from all over the world to work on it. Behind it is a very diverse community of people that works towards creating a platform that anyone can use. So naturally, accessibility is a big theme in WordPress.
Accessibility Coding Standards
So how can you keep an eye on the accessibility of WordPress with so many different people contributing to the platform? This is where the Accessibility Coding Standards come in. Since 2016, these have been added to the Core Handbook as a part of the code standards for WordPress developers. This resource helps contributors make sure their code conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, at level AA. This means WordPress will be making the product more accessible with every new update.
A short explanation of WCAG 2.1, level AA
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 cover a wide range of recommendations to make online content more accessible. Accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these. And some accommodations for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations.
The Level AA is used as a reference for a legal standard in many countries worldwide. Level AA success criteria address concerns that are more complicated to address and impact smaller groups of people, but are still common needs with broad reach.
The next step: ATAG compliance
Right now, any new WordPress code needs to meet the WCAG 2.1, level AA. An additional goal that the community is working towards is ATAG compliance. ATAG stands for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, guidelines on how to create a tool for creating web pages that are both accessible and encourage the creation of accessible content. At the moment, WordPress is not ATAG compliant yet. However, the community has pledged to pursue features that are in line with achieving this goal.
Check the accessibility of your site
If you think your audience doesn’t profit from accessibility, think again. Not only does an accessible website grow your audience, but following these guidelines often makes your website more usable for all users. Talk to your developers. Check the accessibility of your site. If you’re using an old version of WordPress update to a newer version to benefit from the latest developments in accessibility.
Free accessibility tools for your site
Running your code through the W3C Validator every once in a while helps you determine if you’re using clean code. Usually, the recommendations this validator gives you, are easy to fix. And they might already make a huge difference in terms of accessibility.
Another great and very easy-to-use tool is WAVE. Just install the browser extension and see for yourself:
The WAVE extension analyses a variety of possible accessibility issues. In the screenshot above, you can see things like missing form labels and contrast issues. This WAVE analysis is done in seconds, it shows you where the problems are on your page and it tells you where your website can be improved for accessibility.
After running your website through the accessibility checker or reading through all the guidelines, you might wonder whether it’s even worth the effort. But remember, every change to your website makes it a bit more accessible. Makes your potential audience bigger and your user experience better. It’s about taking accessibility seriously and handling the main issues first. Nobody’s perfect, but it is important to keep an open mind and be willing to improve your website.
Website menus are one of those things you take for granted — until you encounter a really bad one. In the ideal scenario, users get an instant overview of what a site has to offer, and they can reach all the important stuff with just one or two clicks. In the worst case, users end up frustrated and unable to find what they’re looking for. This post will walk you through the basics of menu design and help you understand which options will work best for your site.
Your website’s menu is important because it helps users navigate your site. Sure, sometimes a user will arrive on the page they were looking for straight from Google. But usually, your visitors will want to look at various pages on your site. Or they land on your homepage and will need to navigate to the right page from there. That’s why your menu should be available on every page, and ideally, you would even have a sticky menu. Meaning that it scrolls down with the content to make sure it’s always in view. That way it doesn’t matter where your users are: they’ll always be able to find what they need.
Besides the essential navigation function of a menu, it’s also a neat way of letting users know what your site has to offer. You can think of it like a banner on each page, saying “This is what we do”. Make the most of that opportunity!
A great site menu should include links to the most important parts of your website. So it’s up to you to figure out what to put in it. But whatever content you decide to include, it’s essential to keep your menu usable.
One of the worst things you can do is overload your menu with too many links. This will make it look cluttered, and users will need to work hard to find what they need. Depending on your choice of menu design, some of the links could end up inaccessible if you have too many. For instance, if you’re using a drop-down menu, users might struggle to access links that appear off-screen.
Do: be selective or use alternative navigation options
The best option is to be selective about what you include in your menu, but for larger or more complex sites this won’t be possible. Luckily, there are lots of other solutions to a crowded menu. One solution is to create hub pages or categories, and add these to your menu instead. Then users can navigate to the relevant category or hub, and find their way to more specific content from there.
A second solution is to add sub-menus; these are additional menu options which only appear when the user hovers or clicks on a particular menu area. Sub-menus can be handy, but they can also become cluttered and difficult to use. So if you do use sub-menus, do so in moderation.
The third option is to include a search bar as part of your navigation menu. That way, if a user can’t see what they’re looking for in your menu, they can search your site for what they need. A search bar is a great feature to include, whether your menu is too cluttered or not. But do take some time to configure your search function well, because otherwise it won’t really help.
Tip:Yoast SEO Premium includes an Algolia integration you can use to improve your site search results. Using it will help push your most important content to the top of the results. Give it a go!
It’s easy to forget about mobile users when you’re using a desktop computer to build your website. But that’s the last thing you want to do, especially when it comes to your site menu design. A menu that looks good and works well on desktop might be completely unusable on a phone or tablet. Now that more and more people are using mobile devices to go online, it’s really important to consider menu design for both desktop and mobile.
There are two options for creating a menu that works on both desktop and mobile. You could add a responsive menu with a layout that adapts to the screen size being used. Alternatively, you can create a specific menu for the mobile version of your site. Whichever solution you choose, test it out on a few different screen sizes to make sure the end result is user-friendly.
There are loads of different menu styles to choose from. Hamburger menus, drop-down menus, and sidebar menus are a few well-known examples. There are also some very abstract and creative menus out there. However, the way that you implement these styles has a big impact on the overall impression and usability.
Here are some of the more standard options:
If you have a simple website and only one or two online goals, it makes sense to opt for a minimalist menu design. For example, Behance is a ‘network for showcasing and discovering creative work’, so it doesn’t need a complicated menu. They only include 3 menu options: ‘Discover’, ‘Livestreams’, and ‘Jobs’. This lets the user focus on the search field and the creative works being displayed instead.
Some sites use a more minimalist menu style to cater to their mobile users. A hamburger menu (which looks like this: ☰) is a popular minimalist choice for mobile sites as it takes up a very small amount of screen space. For instance, on the mobile version of Joolz.com there are three simple icons to help users navigate: search, shopping cart, and a hamburger menu. Clicking on the hamburger menu expands it to show a list of their product categories. Solutions like this work really well on mobile devices.
Classic menus are probably the simplest to work with. These focus on selecting the main categories or areas of the site and use buttons with text labels to guide users to the right place. A horizontal navigation bar is the most common type of classic menu. Sometimes menus like this have a few drop-down options below the main menu items, too. WordPress.org uses a classic menu design on its desktop site. Two of the menu items have a drop-down button to show more options: ‘Support’ and ‘Get Involved’.
Another classic menu style is the sidebar. You can see this kind of menu in action on Google Maps. Usually, these kinds of menus can be opened using a hamburger menu button and closed again using the ×-button. This is a great way to offer full-screen content, as the menu is hidden most of the time.
Mega menus are a kind of drop-down menu, but instead of having a single column of links under each main menu item, there is space for multiple columns. These menus are popular with larger and more complex sites, as they offer space for many more links than other menu styles. So in theory, you can be less picky about which links to include. Right?
Well actually, this supposed benefit can be the downfall of mega menus. Even though all the links can fit in there, including too much content in your menu can be overwhelming for users. That being said, if you limit yourself to a moderate amount of menu links, a mega menu can be a great option for your site.
On asana.com you can see they’re using a mega menu with a manageable number of links below each main menu item:
An example of a very full mega menu can be found on the World Food Program desktop site. In this case, the drop-down menu shows a list of countries, so users will still be able to navigate this menu quite easily. But just imagine if all these links were about different topics. Then users would struggle to find what they need, as if they were rummaging around in a messy drawer.
Other navigation options
You can do a lot with your site menu, but it’s not the only navigation option. Many sites add extra navigation links to their site header or footer. You’ll often see options to log in or change the site language in these spaces. However, if you do choose to add footer links you must disable infinite scrolling, or your users will never be able to reach the footer.
Another possibility is to create a sitemap page that users can access. This shows a structured list of all your site’s pages. These are becoming less popular than they once were, but they can still be a powerful tool for site navigation.
Site menus and SEO
Does your site menu influence SEO? Sure it does! You’re unlikely to get a lot of internal linking benefit from adding items to your menu. But there are other ways your menu can benefit your SEO, and that benefit has to do with how users experience your site.
If users can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re likely to leave more quickly and not come back to your site again. Google can pick up on those kinds of signals. So a great menu can help your SEO, albeit in an indirect way.
As a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep your menu as simple as possible. Especially for smaller sites and those just starting up, a classic or minimalist-style menu should work great for you. If you have an enormous site you’ll need to think harder about what your users need to see, and how best to display that content.
Once you have a design you’re happy with, it won’t hurt to ask a few people to try it out and give you their feedback. If you’re really serious about making your site menu usable, you could carry out task-based user testing. Either way, make sure your website menu works for your users and provides them with a great experience!
Accessibility helps you open up your content to a wider audience, so more people are able to access your site. A great resource to help get you started is this list of accessibility checks made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In this post, we’ll highlight a few important checks, so make sure you read the rest of the checklist as well. Let’s optimize your website for every visitor!
What is accessibility and why is it important?
Accessibility is making sure as many people as possible can use your site. Makes sense, right? After all, you’ve created a website because you want to reach your audience. And by following the checklist, you make sure you’re reaching everyone.
If you don’t, there might be people who can’t access information on your site. You’d be neglecting a huge part of your audience and in turn, missing out on a bunch of engagement and SEO opportunities. So, let’s get to work and check off these accessibility checks!
Provide a text equivalent
For every non-text element, you should provide a textual equivalent. That goes for things like images, but also for everything ranging from image map regions and animated GIFs to stand-alone audio files and video. This can be done with alt or longdesc tags, for instance.
For videos, it can be done by adding closed captions to your videos. If you upload your videos to YouTube, you can let YouTube automatically generate closed captions. Still, it’s good to run through them and check if they’re correct.
Same goes for TikTok and Instagram reels. Most social media provide automatic captioning, so be sure to use them! And don’t forget to change the alt tags or closed captions when the non-textual part changes.
Mind your colors and contrast
For people who are colorblind or have a visual impairment, certain color combinations and contrast simply don’t work. They won’t be able to read your text. That’s why you should always check if your website’s contrast and colors work together.
Did you know that if content flashes more than three times per second, it’s potentially dangerous? It might cause photo-epileptic seizures for some people. But it’s also straining on the eyes in general. That’s why you should avoid using flickering like this with animated gifs, blinking text, etc. And if you must use it, make sure that users can disable the flickering.
Make sure your website can be used with a keyboard interface
This accessibility check is especially important for people who have little or no use of their hands, or who don’t have hands at all. They’ll rely on a keyboard to navigate your website.
Keyboard users generally use the tab key to navigate through interactive elements like links, buttons, and fields for putting in text. A sighted keyboard user (someone who can see) must be able to see that they’ve focused on something with the tab key. This focus is typically indicated by a border or highlight around the element. So make sure that your site clearly shows this too!
When you use the tab key on our site, a black outline shows what you’ve focused on
Try and use your site with tab only! See if it’s easy, and if it’s not, please make sure you fix it.
Allow users to control time limits
You can probably imagine that navigating a website with a keyboard instead of a cursor isn’t always as fast. So, tasks with a time limit can be stressful for keyboard users. And not just them, but people with motor disabilities or generalized anxiety disorder, and people who take longer to read or have low vision may also find time limits hard to navigate.
That’s why you should allow users to control the time limits, or at the very least give them a warning at least 20 seconds before their time expires. If possible, allow them to get an extension.
Use clear and simple language
The checklist says: use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content. Don’t try to make it overly complicated. And be mindful of abbreviations (screen readers can’t understand those) and idioms! While it might make sense for you as a native speaker, it doesn’t always translate well. For example, if we were to write “now comes the monkey out of the sleeve”, which is a Dutch idiom, you probably have no idea that we mean someone finally shows what they are truly like.
Image from stuffdutchpeoplelike.com
Writing clearly is obviously not just good for your site’s accessibility, but also for your SEO and user experience in general. To help you, we’ve created the readability analysis in our plugin. This analysis will help you write better texts. It scans your text and tells you for example if your paragraphs are too long, or you’re using the passive voice too much.
Help your users to avoid mistakes
Let’s say you offer a service where people need to fill in their personal information, or people can take a quiz on your site to find out what product suits their wishes. It doesn’t matter how great your explanation beforehand is, people will still make mistakes. What matters is what you tell people when they’ve made a mistake.
Tell your users what they did wrong and give them an easy-to-understand suggestion on how to do it correctly. Don’t use difficult language. What if someone chose the wrong option? If possible, make sure users can reverse their actions. Otherwise, give them the opportunity at the end of the survey/quiz/etc. to review and confirm or correct their answers.
To put it bluntly: most of the accessibility checks mentioned in this post are not difficult. And luckily, most of the WordPress themes and other website builders are focused more on accessibility. Still, if your theme or site doesn’t cooperate while you’re implementing these awesome accessibility changes, then you should probably find a better theme for your site.
Conclusion: let’s get to work!
By thinking about accessibility, you’re actually thinking about design, the use of textual and multimedia content, and the structure of your site. So look at your colors and contrast, your alt tags and closed captions. And try to use your site with just your tab key! Let’s make sure that your website is accessible for everyone.
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.
Nowadays, it’s easy to run a blog. Simply head to your generative AI tool of choice, insert a prompt, and you’re good to go. But is it really that simple? Spoiler: no. Generated content isn’t as original as something you’ve written yourself. And there’s another thing AI doesn’t take into account: accessibility.
With over 100 million users, ChatGPT is an AI tool that most people know and use. And it’s easy to see why: within seconds, you can be a content writer too. No need to hire other people, which means you can spend your valuable money on other aspects of your business.
Except that’s not really how it works. A computer isn’t human. It doesn’t know your audience the way you do. You might prompt it to sound hip and relatable for people between 18 and 25 who are interested in gaming, but how nuanced will that text be?
Besides, there’s one thing generative AI tools can’t help you with: accessibility.
Know your audience – no, really
Did you know that 1.3 billion people have a disability? That’s 16% of the global population. Chances are at least some of your audience has a disability, too. So have you taken them into account?
Because, let’s face it, AI tools haven’t. ChatGPT is a known perpetrator of biases, and other tools are no exception. They don’t concern themselves with diversity, because they’re not human. But you are. So, tell me: How many people in your audience have a visual impairment? How many are colorblind? Do you know? And, perhaps more importantly, do you care?
Why accessibility matters
An alternative title would be ‘why you should care about other people’, because that’s what it boils down to. Do you want other people to have access to the same information that you do? Then, you’ll want to put in an effort into making your site, blog, and product accessible for everyone.
If that’s not enough reason, then think about your profits. Your clicks. Your traffic. If you haven’t catered to people with disabilities or visual impairment before, they’re essentially an untapped market. Consider people who are colorblind and can’t use your product, for example. By focusing on accessibility, you’ll create an app or product everyone can use. Isn’t that wonderful?
Can’t you have both?
I get it. Time is money, and by using generative tools, you’re saving both. So, is there no hope at all? If we’re looking at content, the answer is: yes, but. You can use AI tools to make it easier to write content. But you should use them as just that: tools.
Let’s look at it this way: by writing content, generative AI will save you time. You won’t have to come up with blog post topics or struggle to write a single paragraph. Instead, you’ll have more time to review and edit and to ensure your content is easy to read for people with disabilities. That’s a win-win, isn’t it?
A few quick tips
Let’s say you’ve generated a blog post. Now, you want to make sure it’s easy to read for people who use a screen reader, for example. Here’s a couple of things you should look out for:
Keep your sentences short. It’s easier to keep track of the point you’re trying to make if your sentences are short. Between 20 and 25 words is perfect.
Don’t use acronymsor abbreviations. Screen readers won’t read those like a human would. They spell them out, letter by letter. If you’re writing for your business, this might not be a problem, because it looks more professional if you write it out.
Make sure images have Alt-Text or Alt Tags. Because that’s what screen readers will read aloud. So, use factually correct and accurate information to describe the images on your blog and site.
If you need more tips, we’ve got a post that discusses how to write good alt texts. The post is about social media, but the information is useful for your site and blog as well.
Conclusion: don’t give AI too much power
Truth be told, the problem with AI tools is how much power people give them. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: they’re tools. You’re meant to use them to your advantage, not let them run wild like a Roomba and trust that they’ll keep your house clean.
Because just like a Roomba isn’t good at cleaning corners (because it’s a circle), generative AI tools can’t create diverse, personal, and accessible content. You’ve got to do at least some of the work yourself. And trust us, it’s worth it!
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.
Breadcrumbs are an essential part of almost every good website. These little navigational aids don’t just tell people where they are on your site, but they also help Google work out how your site is structured. That’s why adding these helpful little pointers makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a look at how breadcrumb navigation works.
Table of contents
What are breadcrumbs?
A breadcrumb is a small text path, often located at the top of a page, indicating where the user is on the site. On yoast.com, the path to our Keyword research guide is Home > SEO blog > Content SEO > Keyword Research > Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide. This trail immediately shows you where you are. Every step of that path is clickable, returning to the homepage.
An example of a breadcrumb path on Yoast.com
But why is this navigational help called a breadcrumb? When Hansel and Gretel went into the woods, Hansel dropped pieces of bread onto the ground so they could find their way home if they got lost. These crumbs eventually became the model for the ones we see on websites.
You can see the breadcrumb clearly in Google
They also appear in Google search results, and you can take advantage of this if you use Yoast SEO or add the correct form of structured data to your site. Breadcrumbs in search results give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site.
Yoast SEO automatically adds the necessary structured data — a BreadcrumbList — in JSON-LD format. Just flip the switch in the settings, and you’ll see the relevant lines appear in your source code — although, depending on your theme, you may need to add a small piece of code to your theme. Find out more about our breadcrumb structured data in our documentation. You can use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add them to individual posts or pages quickly.
Remember that Google uses the structured data on your site to understand its structure and contents fully. So Google uses breadcrumbs both for crawling and rich results.
You can find the Yoast breadcrumbs block in the WordPress block library
Different types of breadcrumbs
You may have noticed that there are different types of breadcrumbs. These are the three most common ones:
Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs
These are the most common, and it’s how we use them on our site. They tell you where you are in a site structure and how many steps it takes to return to the homepage. Something like Home > Blog > Category > Post name.
Best Buy gives you a good idea of where you are in the store
Attribute-based breadcrumbs
Attribute-based breadcrumbs are seen most commonly when a user has searched on an e-commerce site. The trail comprises product attributes – for example, Home > Product category > Gender > Size > Color.
Office Depot shows every selection in the breadcrumbs
History-based breadcrumbs
History-based breadcrumbs do precisely what they say on the tin; they are ordered according to what you have done on the site. Think of these as an alternative to your internet history bar, so you get something like this: Home > Previous page > Previous page > Previous page > Current page. It’s also possible to combine these as Macy’s does in the screenshot below.
Some follow you around
Advantages of using breadcrumbs
There are several advantages to using these helpful little pointers on your site. Let’s take a quick look at them:
1. Google loves them
Your visitors like breadcrumbs, but Google does too. They give Google another way of figuring out what your website is about and how it’s structured. Google uses them as a way to crawl your content. But, as covered earlier, Google may also use them in the search results, making your results much more enticing to users. To increase the chances of your them appearing in Google, you need to add structured data like Yoast SEO. Google Search categorizes information from a web page in search results using proper markup within the page’s body.
2. They enhance the user experience
People hate being lost. When confronted with a new location, people often search for recognizable objects or landmarks – the same is true of websites. You need to keep visitors happy and reduce friction as much as possible. Breadcrumbs can help your user experience since they are a common interface element that instantly shows people a way out. You don’t need to click the back button!
3. They lower bounce rates
Hardly anyone enters a site via the homepage — It’s all about organic search. That means any part of your site could be an entry point. You must develop a way to guide these visitors to other parts of your site if the selected page doesn’t meet their needs. Breadcrumbs can lower bounce rates because you offer visitors an alternative way to browse your site. Don’t you think sending visitors to your homepage is better than returning to Google?
How to add breadcrumbs
There are several ways of adding breadcrumbs to your site. Firstly, if you use WordPress, you can use one of the many plugins or Yoast SEO. If you use a different CMS, the process will be different. It is also possible to add them to your code by hand. If you also want them to appear in Google results, you need to use structured data in a way that Google understands. You can find more information on this in Google’s developer documentation. For SEO, Google doesn’t care where you add them — as long as you add them if that makes sense. Visitors will prefer them in a logical spot, though.
Yoast SEO has breadcrumb support built-in
Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. It will add everything necessary to prepare them for your site, not just for Google. Some themes come with support for Yoast SEO breadcrumbs baked in. In that case, you only have to activate them and set them up how you like. In case your theme doesn’t support our breadcrumbs yet, you need to add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:
','
' );
}
?>
This code can often be placed inside the single.php or page.php files just above the page’s title. Some themes want it at the end of the header.php file. It’s not a good idea to add it to functions.php since this could cause problems.
After adding the code, you can go to the advanced settings of Yoast SEO and switch on breadcrumb support. You can also control how their structure will look and what prefixes will be used. Find out more in our document on implementing breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO.
You can find the settings for breadcrumbs in Yoast SEO > Advanced > Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs with a WordPress block
You can use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add breadcrumbs to individual posts and pages using the block editor. This is helpful if you don’t want to touch code or if you only want to add to a specific page. Adding them is incredibly easy — hit the big + icon to add a block. Then, find the Yoast SEO breadcrumbs block by entering the name in the search bar or scrolling down to the Yoast section. Alternatively, you can type /yoast breadcrumbs in an empty paragraph.
A breadcrumb path added via the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block
Conclusion
Despite using breadcrumbs, Hansel and Gretel still got lost in the woods. Don’t let that happen to your visitors! Breadcrumbs provide an easy-to-grasp way for visitors to navigate your site, and they instantly understand how your site structure works. Google loves them for the same reason. So use Yoast SEO to add them to your site easily.
A “404 error” page is an essential part of any website. It informs your users the page they requested had been moved or changed. Do you need to pay attention to your 404 page and give it some love? Absolutely yes! In this post, we’ll go through the dos and don’ts of a 404 page and help you get more value out of it.
What is a 404 page, and why do we need it?
A 404 page, also known as an “error page”, or “page not found” page, is the content your visitors see when they land on a page that doesn’t exist.
The number 404 is the status response code for that page. The 404 response indicates that your visitor’s browser could communicate with your web server, but the server could not find what was requested.
There are many reasons why a requested page can’t be found. It may be that:
Whatever the reasons, remember that it’s probably your fault and not your users’ fault. So keep that in mind and create content based on that assumption.
It’s worth noting that, sometimes certain pages need to go down temporarily. In that case, it’s much better to serve a 503 Service Unavailable message than serve a 404 error not found.
What to include on your 404 page (the Dos)
When users click on a link, they expect to land on a page that answers their questions or gives them the necessary information. For whatever reason, the page they land on returns a 404 message. In that case, what should they do next?
If you don’t help your users take the next step after they land on a 404 page, they might still browse your site for information. But nothing is stopping them from leaving and browsing other websites. In that case, you’re not providing users with what they need while losing traffic to your competition.
A better way to utilize your 404 page is to help users navigate to other useful pages on your site. There are many ways to go about that. For instance, you could:
Include a search bar so users can quickly search for other information.
Include a button that takes users to the homepage.
Include links to other important/popular sections on your website.
Include links to popular product or category pages.
Guide them to read your popular or most recent blog posts.
As for the error message, make it perfectly clear that you can’t find the requested page. A simple “We may have deleted or moved this page” should be fine.
Examples of nice 404 pages
Below are examples of good 404 pages. These pages provide extra value — or enjoyment! — to visitors by including options to help them navigate the website, whether via the search bar, shop page links, or popular blog posts.
Ebay.com’s 404 pageLego’s 404 page is still awesomeOur own 404 page
The value of your 404 page
Many marketers and website owners don’t see the value in the 404 page, which shouldn’t be the case. If you have a website, you want to keep your visitors on your site. You want them to engage with your content, browse other pages or check out your offers. But if they land on an error page with nothing to point them in the right direction, they’ll most likely turn back and leave.
That’s why you need to help visitors navigate your site when they land on a 404 page. By doing so, your 404 page may help to:
Reduce bounce rate and keep people on your site longer;
Engage your visitors with other content or offers on your site;
Make it easier for visitors to navigate your site;
Maintain a consistent branding experience while building up your brand image.
Content management systems like WordPress or your web server include a default 404 error message page. But these default pages are ugly and very bare bone. There’s nothing there besides the error message, not even traces of your branding. That’s why you need to customize your 404 page, which can be easily done via plugins if you’re a beginner. A quick search on WordPress.org gives you many options.
The default 404 page that WordPress creates
What not to do on a 404 page (the Don’ts)
Many websites do a 301 redirect from a 404 page to the homepage, which is not a good practice. What you’re doing is putting people on a train they did not choose themselves. Why send them to London if they want to go to Paris? If a visitor wants to find a particular page on your website, please give them that page or an explanation of why you can’t.
Being funny is a good thing. But when it comes to a 404 page, we would instead create an actual page that’s helpful to users instead of a funny one that provides no value. Fun is great, and it could fit well with your brand image. But you need to make it work. Please don’t put a picture of a giraffe licking the screen and think your visitor will like your website regardless of not finding what they want. Help them get back on track. Or point them to your homepage to start over again (but don’t redirect them!).
Another thing we strongly suggest against is not customizing your 404 page at all. As mentioned above, the default 404 page that WordPress or your web server includes is lackluster. It doesn’t provide any extra value to your visitors. That’s not what you want! So make sure your website has a custom 404 page, and make sure it helps visitors navigate your site somehow.
Examples of 404 pages that can be better
Below are examples of 404 pages we think can do better, whether by including a search bar, links to popular pages or categories, or just a better copy for the “error not found” message itself.
IMDB’s 404 pageSouth Park’s 404 page
404 pages and impact on SEO
It’s worth noting that having some 404 errors on a website is not necessarily a cause for concern. It’s common for websites to have broken links or pages that are removed or renamed over time. Google also said that having some 404 pages doesn’t hurt your overall website ranking. However, if a significant portion of your web pages returns 404 errors, this could indicate more significant structural issues that may affect SEO.
You can closely monitor your 404 pages by using tools such as Google Search Console or Screaming Frog. Make sure to monitor and fix 404 errors regularly. That helps ensure your website is properly crawled and indexed by Google and may help improve your overall SEO performance.
It’s also essential to ensure that any internal links to a missing page are updated to point to relevant content on your site. Doing so ensures that your users and search engines are directed to the most relevant pages. It also prevents them from encountering additional 404 errors.
Why do you think your 404 Not Found page is great?
Or perhaps you have some great examples, good or bad. We’d love to see these, so please drop a link in the comments!
At Yoast, we believe that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach. With a holistic approach, SEO has a lot of “teammates” that have to work together. Simply optimizing your page titles isn’t enough. You also need to work on aspects like site speed, great content, and user experience (UX). In this post, we’ll focus specifically on the areas where SEO and UX meet. Why? Because both are vital topics to pay attention to if you’re running a website.
Common page elements that influence both SEO and UX
If you look at the basic elements on a page that influence your SEO, you’ll find a close relationship between SEO and user experience (UX). Below, we’ll discuss a few of these elements.
Page titles and headings
In general, understanding how to use the headings on your site is quite important. Why? Because they benefit your SEO and your users. An optimized page title and a related, visible
element will tell Google what your page is about. But the page title and
element also inform your visitors what the page is about. In addition, subheadings such as
also help both Google and your visitors to scan a page and grasp the general idea of that page’s content.
External links
What about external links? They’re great for SEO, because they tell Google that you respect your sources. Plus, external links can increase the odds that your sources will link back to you in their content. For your users, however, external links provide a way to access background information. They also give you credibility, because external links show visitors that you’ve done your research.
Great content
If you provide quality content, people want to link to you, and visitors want to read what you have to say. Plus, they’re more likely to stay on your site. That’s great, because these incoming links and time-on-page are things Google will notice. In fact, Google could even start to consider your content as the main source of information on a certain topic. So focus on creating that quality content! For example, you can add images and videos to your posts and pages, which will make both Google and your users happy.
Site structure
Let’s say your post or page hasn’t fully answered the user’s question, then it’s great to point them to another page on your site. Why? Because you want to prevent users from clicking back to the search result pages. This is otherwise known as a bounce. A high bounce rate can have a negative influence on your SEO. It indicates to Google that you may not be answering your visitors’ search query.
One way to prevent a bounce is to make sure your site structure is clearly reflected on your page. In other words: No matter which pages a user visits, they know where they are on your website. It’s especially important that visitors know there’s more to explore on your site. So, how do you achieve this? Partly by creating (and maintaining!) an optimized menu, but also by making sure your website has a good structure. You can show your structure by using breadcrumbs, but you can also think along the lines of related posts and products. If you want more in-depth information, take a look at our site structure course!
And there’s another benefit to having a nice, hierarchical site structure: You make sure that Google can efficiently crawl your pages!
Site speed
You might already be familiar with site speed. Still, it’s good to address the topic again, because it heavily influences your SEO and UX. How? First, visitors don’t like waiting for your content to load. Just think about it: How long do you want to wait for a page to load? A few seconds at most, probably.
Second, Google only wants to spend a certain amount of time on your site to crawl it. That’s why it’s important to optimize your site speed. Try different techniques, such as lazy loading images. In addition, you can defer parsing of JS and CSS files where possible. That way, you make sure your page will show something as soon as possible.
Mobile experience
Nowadays, having a good mobile experience is extremely important. Luckily, the same rules that apply to your website also apply to its mobile version. It should be fast, well-designed, and have an easy-to-use navigation. After all, you want both users and search engines to quickly find what they’re looking for.
So think hard about the mobile version of your homepage! Does it cover the main areas of your website? Does it invite your visitors (and any search engine) to explore the rest of your website as well? Even button sizes could influence a user’s experience. You can always ask Google’s opinion on your mobile website via their mobile-friendliness test, or read our post on how to improve the mobile version of your site.
Conclusion: SEO and UX go hand in hand
As you can see, there are many areas where SEO and UX meet. It’s probably fair to say that almost every optimization that benefits your users (UX) will also have a positive effect on your SEO. And it’s the other way around too! If you deliver a poor user experience, you might see this reflected in the search result pages. Obviously, the impact may differ from optimization to optimization. But SEO and UX are clearly a great match in our larger concept of holistic SEO!
If you want to learn more about user experience (UX) and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!
For most sites, SEO in 2023 will probably be similar to the past couple of years: you still need to improve your work but set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer, and Google — and your potential customers — are getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you should keep an eye out for technological advancements like ChatGPT, as they might make for an exciting year. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2023.
Table of contents
2022 is over; now what?
2022 was a weird year. It might have been a somewhat positive year for most of us — although we’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with a recession looming. The pandemic is still around but has taken a back seat in most places. If we look at our industry, SEO, we see that the online world has made a big jump. A lot of businesses moved online. Many people have shopped online for the first time, and many of them will keep doing that. There’s never been a better time to build an online business.
With a recession looming, SEO will likely become even more important. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching an audience — plus, it’s relatively easy to do. You can rely less on external platforms and more on the one that you fully control: your website.
So, with all these people waiting for your content — how would you use SEO in 2023?
It’s all about quality and E-A-T
2023 is all about quality and authority. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what you do. Please look at your products and services and the way you describe these. Have you had any trouble telling what you do? You may need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.
Increasingly, Google looks at other signals to determine the value of your offer and yourself. These signals, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (or E-A-T) help it to discern the real from the fake, so to speak. The web is already rife with sub-par content, and the advent of new artificial intelligence content writers might flood it with even more. Quality, originality, authority, trustworthiness, and expertise will be where you will be judged on. And the recent addition of Experience to the E-A-T acronym shows Google is not done with its focus on this ranking factor.
Google will build out the Helpful Content system that it launched earlier in 2022 to help uncover truly good and original stuff.
SEO in 2023
For years, we heard talk about AI taking over the world, and 2023 might be the year that could happen. The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 was a bombshell for many, and it was followed by a ton of new tools and developments. Plus, all the news surrounding the chat AI helped it reach a vast audience, which will surely help it get into the mainstream. ChatGPT could dramatically reshape how we search for answers, write our content, and much more. Now, it’s still early days, but keep a close eye on it and related technologies.
There’s a ton of other stuff happening as well. 2023 will also see much more visual and intelligent ways of searching and finding, like the multisearch stuff that Google introduced. Images will play a big part in how people will find you, so be sure to make these as good as possible.
There will also be a renewed interest in SEO as marketers will get trouble tracking their success on other platforms due to various legal changes, like a possible ban on Google Analytics in Europe. Cookies are also about to die. Even though tracking will continue in different forms, it’s time to invest in SEO before others flock to SEO.
Take note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is critical. Content quality is vital. So, these SEO trends for 2023 are not hyped-up stuff but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?
Improve site quality
If you’ve been playing this SEO game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know many factors that search engines consider to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s not possible. While nobody knows precisely what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a more significant period to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?
Quality.
To win in SEO in 2023, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and high-quality content, and target the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed and user experience need to improve. It also means incorporating and improving Schema.org structured data, as structured data remains one of the critical developments for some time.
Let’s review some of the things you need to focus on in 2023.
A better Page Experience with good Core Web Vitals
As part of an effort to get sites to speed up and to provide a great user experience, Google announced the Page Experience algorithm update that rolled out in 2021. This update gives you another reason to put site speed front and center. While the Page Experience update didn’t shake up the SERPs, we expect it to continue to become a stronger signal.
Site speed has always been critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a more challenging time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s an excellent tradeoff.
Start by finding a better hosting plan — one of the quickest ways to speed up your site! — and optimizing your images with image SEO.
Enhance the user experience
Page experience ties in with user experience. Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in an instant? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a surefire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!
Untangle your site structure
Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts, and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors and search engines. Everything should have its proper place, and if something is old, outdated, or deprecated, maybe you should delete it and point it to something relevant.
This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or if improvements need to be made. How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing up the flow of your site? The SEO workouts in Yoast SEO Premium can help you get started on this.
Implement Schema.org structured data
Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to connect parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data makes your site eligible for rich results. There are many rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many developments, like voice search and Google’s ecommerce push.
Implementing structured data has never been easy, but we’re solving that problem. Yoast SEO automatically outputs a complete graph of structured data, describing your site and content in detail for search engines — and connecting everything. For specific pages, you can describe the content in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO. Also, our structured data content blocks for the WordPress block editor let you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online training course on structured data to help you improve your SEO in 2023.
The FAQ block in Yoast SEO makes it easy to get rich results for your FAQs
Mobile still needs your focus
We’ve talked about mobile for years, but we must remind people to take it seriously. Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when most of your traffic is from the desktop. Give your mobile site special care and work on its mobile SEO. You should test whether your site works as well on mobile and desktop. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Could you make it lightning-fast, easy to use, and valuable?
In 2022, many people experienced mobile shopping for the first time, and they will come back for more in 2023. If you sell stuff online, be sure to optimize the checkout process of your ecommerce site — make it as short and focused as possible!
Content quality
There is a ton of content out there — and a lot of new content is published daily. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrases? Is it perfect enough to beat the competition? Are you publishing original, all-encompassing content that answers the questions your audience has?
Keep search intent front and center
Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior. Thanks to breakthroughs in natural language processing with BERT and MUM, Google is starting to know the language inside out. In 2023, we’ll see Google use these new skills to bring better and more accurate search results — and present them in innovative ways.
Of course, we can still help search engines pick the correct version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to a searcher’s specific goals. Map these intents to your content, and you’re good to go.
Re-do your keyword research
The last two years were impactful for many of us, and a lot has changed. Keeping this in mind, it’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of change in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research means missing out on significant opportunities. Read up on the research about consumer trends for 2023 and beyond. After that, ask yourself these questions:
What changed in my company?
What changed in and around my audience?
Has something changed in people’s language?
What has changed in where people search?
Content is context
Context is one of the essential words in the SEO field. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become more innovative and intelligent, providing them with as much related information as possible is becoming more critical. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema structured data provides another way to show search engines how entities are connected.
By mapping the context of your subject, you might find a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or perhaps the recent developments threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.
Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages
If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content. That’s not a bad thing, of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization can become a big issue, so content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Is that what you want to happen?
You need to re-assess your content to find out how you are doing. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles into one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be to hold the writing for a while and improve what you have!
Work on your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
Now search engines can understand the content; they are increasingly looking at its value. Is it trustworthy? Who is the person claiming these things? Why should we trust the author? Is the author an authority on the subject? Google looks not just at the quality of the content but also at whether that content can be assessed professionally. Trust and expertise will be essential, especially for YMLY (Your Money or Your Life) pages, like medical or financial content. E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) looks at this and is becoming a more significant part of SEO in 2023. What’s more, at the end of 2022 even added an extra letter to the acronym: Experience!
Hone those writing skills!
Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth, and easy to understand. Search engines are improving at determining an article’s text quality and making decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across as more professional, and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content.
While it is increasingly challenging to write all that high-quality content yourself, artificial intelligence might help make your job easier. AI content generators are getting better by the day and have reached a level that produces pretty good content. So why not make use of these tools, I hear you say?
Having an AI tool write your content doesn’t lead to high-quality, unique, authentic stuff. An AI has been trained on stuff that we already know, so there is no way for it to write something unique. Please take care in using tools like this. Of course, there’s no harm in having an AI speed up your work, getting you inspired, and helping you set stuff up. Be sure to edit the outcome into something you are proud of.
It will be interesting to see Google’s reaction to the flood of AI-generated content that is bound to arrive in 2023. They will probably focus even more on identifying E-A-T signals in content to try and discern AI content from content written by expert humans.
As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere, not specifically in Google. Search is moving beyond the website or social media platform for investigations and actions. Loads of devices can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Machines that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are powerful e-commerce platforms that seem to get most of the product searches, not to mention all those app-based services. Visual search is also on the rise. TikTok is huge in certain demographics. Maybe these have value for you?
(Progressive web) apps
Links to apps continue to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Many sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere; even Google is testing structured data for software apps. Moreover, Google has expanded its mobile homepage with the Discover app that suggests new content based on your interests.
Where there’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi-hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes a better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, looking into apps might be a good idea. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there are always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot of this year!
Video
Video content is incredibly popular! And there’s no end in sight for the video boom. YouTube might be the most crucial search engine for many people besides Google. We’ve seen the arrival of short-form content providers like TikTok and several enhancements in how video gets presented on the search results pages. You can count on it that video content will only become more critical. If you have the means, invest in video. Remember, it doesn’t always have to be flashy and professional — make it heartfelt. In addition to our Video SEO WordPress plugin, we also have a ton of content on how to do video SEO well.
Other platforms
Traditionally, many searches happen not on search engines but social media and other platforms. These past years, we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion from social media. Different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. Plus, there are all those short-form videos going around. Maybe that’s something to attract a new audience? Also, did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Neeva? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and their goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Indeed, something to think about!
Don’t just think: “I need to publish a blog post on my website” — there are so many great destinations out there that might fit the goal of your message better.
A system for getting traffic with SEO in 2023
What does it all boil down to if we recap all this? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:
A lot has changed in the last two years, so restart your research and read up on consumer trends for 2023.
You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that genuinely helps visitors.
This website must be supported by a brand offering high-quality products and services.
SEO in 2023: What’s next?
It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2023 because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic searches. Social media traffic is down, and conversational search is rising, but not enough to put a dent in organic. And then there’s video. Ultimately, you must keep improving your site in all the right places.
Of course, much other stuff is happening simultaneously, and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we might see Google less like a search engine and more as a virtual assistant — a person who lives on your phone and solves your problems. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.
