Yoast SEO uses sophisticated language analysis tools to help you optimize your texts. Most checks work for any language, but our Premium analysis relies on word recognition functionality, which we develop custom for every language. It takes a lot of time to get this perfect for every language out there. Starting with French in Yoast SEO 14.1, we decided to try something new and just ship what we have. This way you can already benefit from better keyphrase recognition, and we’ll allow you to give us feedback to help improve support for your language faster!
Yoast SEO Premium: Better analysis for French
Over the last couple of releases, we’ve talked a lot about word form support for different languages. Thanks to the Premium SEO Analysis, the plugin recognizes your focus keyphrase in a text, even if that word is in a different form. In French, that means we will be able to detect all these word forms, which helps you quickly improve your content. Today, we’re launching a beta version of the word form feature in French. We’ll allow users to help us improve it, more on that below.
The Yoast SEO Premium analysis makes it easier to improve your text. It helps you write a perfect blog post, and it does so in a much more transparent way. Combine this with the synonyms and related keyphrases feature, and you have an excellent tool that is intensely satisfying to work with!
Check out the video, featuring our good friend and renowned SEO expert Jason Barnard!
Of course, we have more language on the way. We collected all the supported languages in our SEO analysis on our features per language page.
Help us improve language support
The launch of French word forms consists of a beta version that we’re improving and expanding as we go. We use this first release to get French up and running. Now, we can find and recognize word forms in French much better than before, but not as good as the other languages we’ve implemented. That might mean that we don’t recognize every word correctly or that you’re noticing false-positives. If you find things like this, we’d like to know!
To help us collect your insights and experiences, we’re working on a special language feedback system inside the plugin. That’s not done yet, so until then you can send us your improvements via email.
While sending us your feedback, please include the following:
The focus keyphrase you’ve used for this specific piece of text.
The sentence in which you’ve noticed one of the assessments working incorrectly for the focus keyphrase you mentioned above.
Our team of linguists will do the rest.
In Yoast SEO 14.1, we’ve not only added a new language to our word forms roster but also improved the Dutch language version. Another language-based improvement is an updated list of Hungarian transition words.
Despite weeks and weeks of testing Yoast SEO 14.0, there were still some people running into issues. In Yoast SEO 14.1, out today, we’re improving things to help stabilize the plugin.
Among other things, we’re making several changes regarding the indexables. In the backend, we’re making it clearer what the process actually does and what you as a user can expect. We’ve also made it possible to show debug information that gives an idea of what went wrong in the indexing process in case you run into issues.
We’ve made several improvements to the indexing process itself. For instance, we’re preventing duplicate indexables to enter the database table. Plus, we’re no longer building indexables from taxonomies that aren’t public. We’ve also added the option te reindex a site’s content from the CLI.
In addition, we fixed several bugs regarding the publication and presentation of breadcrumbs, in Schema and elsewhere. In addition, we fixed several bugs regarding the publication and presentation of breadcrumbs, in Schema and elsewhere. In the changelog for Yoast SEO 14.1, you’ll find a list of all the fixes and enhancements.
Yoast SEO 14.1: update now
That’s Yoast SEO 14.1 for you! In this release, we’ve fixed a number of bugs and made several improvements concerning the indexable release. In addition, we made several enhancements that’ll make the current version of Yoast SEO more stable and easier to use.
That’s not all, because we’ve also added another language to our ever-expanding list: French! Premium users who write in the French language can now enjoy a more flexible and natural writing and optimizing environment thanks to word form support. More languages on the way, so stay tuned. And don’t forget you can help add or improve your language!
It’s been years since the beginning of the age of the smartphone. With it came the era of native apps. Apps continue to play a massive role in our daily life, and many business owners have asked themselves multiple times: should we have an app? Of course, the only answer to that is — it depends. Building and maintaining a native app is cumbersome and often quite expensive. Luckily, there is another option. This option combines the joys of a native app with the technology we use on the web: the progressive web app, a.k.a. PWA.
What is a PWA?
Twitter.com is a PWA
PWA stands for progressive web app. This is an app built from the web technologies we all know and love, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but with a feel and functionality that rivals an actual native app. Thanks to a couple of smart additions, you can turn almost any website into a progressive web app. This means that you can build a PWA rather quickly, in regards to a native app that’s pretty difficult to develop. Plus, you can offer all the features of native apps, like push notifications, offline support, and much more.
Many sites you find online are actually a progressive web app. Take twitter.com, for instance. If you visit that site on your smartphone, you can install it to your home screen. Now, on opening the saved Twitter site, you’ll notice that it looks and performs just like a native app. There’s no browser window or nothing. There’s no difference in running it from an iPhone or an Android smartphone. Simply log in and you’re good to go. That’s a major benefit of building your web app with a PWA in mind.
PWAs are gaining popularity. Many big sites are PWAs, like Starbucks.com, Pinterest.com, Washingtonpost.com and Uber.com are actually installable on your home screen and offer a comparable experience to their native apps.
What’s the difference between a native app and a PWA?
A native app, like the ones you download from Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store, is often built in a programming language specific to that platform. So for iOS apps, that would be Swift and for Android apps, Java. If you want to build an app for those platforms, you need to know the technology. Yes, there are shortcuts, but these come with their own limitations. If you want to have an app on all the mobile platforms, you need to know all the different technologies. There’s no easy way to build one and publish it to all the stores out there.
Of course, there are ways to get the best of both worlds. A progressive web app, for instance. This runs in the browser and — once saved to the home screen — functions like a native app. It even gets access to the underlying hardware and software that the browser can’t access for safety reasons. If the PWA performs great, users will never know that they are using a web-based app instead of a native one.
There are some caveats, of course. While browsers have been quick to adopt the technology for this, there are still some limitations. On iOS, the technology needed works spotty in Safari. Apple doesn’t (want to) support everything yet, making it a bit of a chore to get the same exact experience everywhere.
What are the benefits of a PWA?
The main reason why everyone is chasing after apps is because they offer greater engagement. Users who install your app are your biggest fans and they are more likely to turn their usage into sales or signups. Thanks to push notifications it’s much easier to re-engage with users. Apps can offer an excellent experience that can do well for a brand.
We talked about some of the plusses of PWAs in this article, but here’s a short overview:
You don’t have to go through the process to get into different app stores
You can build PWAs with common web technologies
They are often cheaper to build
Since you’re turning your site into an app, you’ll have fewer code-bases to maintain
PWAs are responsive and work with many different screen sizes
PWAs are smooth, fast and lightweight
No need to hand off big chunks of money to Google and Apple
They work offline, unlike your regular site
PWAs are discoverable via search engines (which have a lot larger audience than app stores. Plus, if you want you can still get your PWAs distributed via app stores)
You can use push notifications to re-engage users
Installing a PWA can lead to higher engagement
Still, native apps win out sometimes. PWAs get deeper and deeper access to the operating system of a smartphone, but a native app can go deeper still. Plus, there are limits to what a PWA can do. For instance, PWAs are not the best choice when you want to build high-performance games.
All in all, it makes a lot of sense to think about having a PWA in your mobile strategy. But, the main question you should ask yourself is: does my audience want this?
Who’s this for?
Should everyone simply build a PWA and be done with it? No, consider your business and — more importantly — your target audience. Are they even using apps? Isn’t this an overly complex way of getting to what you want to achieve? Again, like everything, you need to research the needs of your audience. Ask yourself, what do you want this technology to do? Where are your users? Do they have a good data connection and solid hardware? How and where are they using your content? And do you think an app can help them do their job better?
PWAs are awesome and implementing them doesn’t have to be all that hard. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it. If your audience has no need for it, why would you build one?
What are the SEO concerns of a PWA?
The PWA is inherently web-centric. It was born from the web and developed with search engines in mind to make discovery easy. Of course, you can make a progressive web app out of any-old site and it doesn’t take much to do so. However, many PWAs use JavaScript to build more complex functionality and while search engines have become apt at rendering JavaScript, it can still be a cause for concern.
When setting up a PWA, you have to make sure your JavaScript is accessible. Don’t block files for bots and make sure that links are available. To improve the rendering process you can make your JavaScript framework use server-side rendering.
Turning your site into a PWA doesn’t mean you directly improve the SEO of that site. If it makes sense to turn your site into a PWA, do so, but don’t do it for any perceived SEO benefits. If you have a great PWA, you are offering your users a fantastic user experience, which might make you one-up your competition. In this regard, it’s a good idea to take a look at them for your mobile SEO strategy.
What are the three main building blocks?
It doesn’t take much to set up a PWA. There are three things you need to provide before your site turns into a valid PWA.
A secure connection (HTTPS): PWAs only work on trusted connections, you have to serve them over a secure connection. This is not only for security reasons, but it’s also a very important trust factor for users.
A service worker: A service worker is a piece of script that runs in the background. This helps you determine how to handle network requests for your PWA, making it possible to do more complex work.
The manifest file: This JSON file contains information on how your PWA should appear and function. Here, you determine the name, description, icons, colors, et cetera.
It doesn’t look too hard, right? A couple of interesting things in this listing:
start-url: this determines where your app should start. It’s better to let users land on a specific page for you PWA.
display: this helps you determine what type of browser UI you want to show. Options are fullscreen, standalone, minimal-ui and the standard browser interface.
These three things listed above are the minimal requirements for running a PWA. You can expand the functionality via JavaScript (frameworks).
How to set up a PWA?
There are plenty of resources to try your hand at building a simple PWA. This allows you to get a feel for the process. Google has an excellent, easy to follow tutorial on PWAS on the web.dev site. Mozilla has lots of documentation on building progressive web apps. Microsoft also has rich developer docs on building PWAs. Microsoft even built a tool called PWABuilder that’ll help you turn your site into a PWA. Of course, there are WordPress plugins that help you make a PWA of your site. In addition, Google is working on bringing base-support for PWAs to WordPress Core.
Engage your users with a progressive web app
Progressive web apps can be a great addition to your mobile toolkit. Done well, they are fast, work offline and perform like a native app. All in all, they can offer your users an awesome user experience. Engaged users are happy users, right?
We don’t have to remind you of the drastic changes that are happening in the world. There’s a good chance that these changes impact how you do business. But they also bring opportunities. While people are stuck at home, they spend a lot of time online. And they behave differently — they search differently and have different needs. If you have a content strategy for your site, now might be a good time to go back and see how you can adopt these new insights. And with it, find new ways to get your message across in a way that is not considered out of place or tone-deaf. Here are a couple of pointers to help you with adapting your content strategy to changing times.
What’s happening?
It’s a bit hard to write a piece about dealing with a crisis without falling into the trap of terribly cliched language. “Unprecedented, never seen anything like it, bizarre, unreal, et cetera, et cetera.” Everyone knows we are “living in difficult times” and that “we’re doing our utmost best to overcome this crisis.” Yes, we are. You are. We all are. Language plays an important part in the way you handle this crisis and the way your — potential — customer sees you.
Continuing your regular hard-hitting campaigns might backfire. It’s not business as usual, so to say. You do have to show compassion, and you do have to be mindful of what you want to say and how you want to say this.
During this Coronavirus pandemic, many things have changed. There are probably more changes around the corner. And if we look at the future, things might not be the same as they were. The world has changed — and we all have to go along with it.
People change during a crisis
People change during uncertain times, that’s a fact. How people change is most likely to accelerate during a crisis. Today, a lot of people are uncertain about their future and health. Keeping this in mind, it is not strange to see that people’s needs also change. Food and healthcare jump to the top, while other wants and needs like traveling or going to a restaurant are out of the question.
This behavior translates to the online world. While you see people lining up to get their groceries in stores, they also line up online to get a delivery time slot for their local supermarket. Traffic to online stores selling essential items and food has surged, while other markets and industries plummeted. For instance, while the travel industry tanked, the home improvement and home fitness markets exploded.
This image shows the increase in Americans searching for the term ‘How to make bread’ after the outbreak of Covid-19
As the behavior of people changes, it doesn’t change for everyone and every industry in the same way. Some win, some lose. While everyone is adapting to this new reality, there might be new opportunities for your business to be found.
Concerns, needs and search behavior
While we’re trying to keep occupied by Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube, it’s also pretty obvious that many people have concerns. Just go to Google Coronavirus Search Trends dashboard and see what people are looking for:
How to make a face mask?
Where’s my stimulus money?
When will everything go back to normal?
How long until 2020 ends?
Yes, that last one was a trending search in the US at the time of writing this article. But seriously, as a content creator, you need to be aware of these changes and adapt your content if needed.
There are a lot of sources that look into how people are adapting to this situation, like these Coronavirus insights from Google.
Google lists five ways in which people change their behavior, reflected in their search behavior during this situation.
More internet usage at different times
With everyone at home, internet usage is up as well. For many people, life has moved online. Not only do social media platforms report surges in usage, but many sites and apps as well. New tools to work from home pop up quickly, while existing ones reach huge audiences overnight.
Changes in human online behavior lead to new online habits. It might be that traffic to your site has changed — it may not simply have gone up or down, but perhaps it comes from different devices, keyphrases or at different times. It might also mean your audience is less or more focused and maybe more eager to get your products or services. This all influences how you previously thought everything worked.
For instance, when we look at traffic for yoast.com our total traffic has gone up. We never had a huge amount of mobile users, but in the past couple of weeks, their number grew as well. In addition, we have more traffic coming in on the weekends. Our audience is used to visiting our site during ‘office hours’, but we see a pretty big move towards the weekends. It could be that our audience is getting some extra work done on the weekends, or it might simply be a result of the overall boost in traffic we had. Something we have to dive into. With enough insights, we can make adjustments to our content strategy.
What can you do to adapt your content strategy?
Would you like to simply drop everything, hide under a table and wait for these months to end? I understand, I really do. But that doesn’t help. It is ok for you to keep your regular content going, but be sure to think about the message and tone. Other carefully crafted campaigns might have gone down the toilet and you need to accept that. It might also be that you’re not tanking but soaring, which brings a whole new set of challenges. There are, however, things you can do right now to re-align your content with the times.
So, don’t blindly drop everything, but make educated guesses on what content works and what doesn’t. Dive into the research to find out where you can double down and where you should change the focus. Try to find a way to look over the horizon and get a sense of where your business or market is going. And keep a close eye on your campaigns and make adjustments accordingly.
Today, it’s a good idea to ask yourself: who am I and who do I want to be? Can I hold this course or do I need to pivot? How do I add value and does this value align with what people truly want right now? If you’re not comfortable with what you’re doing, you should change it up.
In general, these are the times that SEO can prove its worth. Don’t just focus on content, but invest in all-round SEO. Improve your site. Get those technical issues fixed, work on the site speed and build a solid site structure. All this can help you get back on top when — if — the world gets back to normal. Our temporarily free All-around SEO training can help you get started! We’ve waived the cost of this interactive course during this pandemic.
Do your research
It is very important to open Google Analytics, Search Console and maybe some third-party SEO tools and dive into the data. There are important clues to be had about the direction you should take your content strategy. What do the numbers say? Is your recent content doing awful or better than ever? Are there new search terms popping up in Google Search Console? What does your Google Trends look like?
Keyword research is one of the key ingredients in a successful content strategy. Now that you know that people’s online behavior is changing during these times, it’s a good idea to redo that keyword research. In fact, it’s always important to redo this research on a regular basis. But when you’re changing or adapting your content strategy, this is essential.
The same goes for search intent research. You can even ask your customers how they’d like to keep in touch and what kind of content they’d like to see. It might be that your customer is no longer in a buying mood or it takes them longer to get there. This might mean you need to change the content to match an updated user journey. In this regard, you should also keep a close eye on the SERPs. Check up on your terms, notice the changes and jump on any realistic chance you see.
Also, read up on the research other organizations are doing. Keep tabs on the larger trends to see if you can find new ways of adapting your content to changes in behavior.
Adapt your tone
Finding the right tone is not always easy. It’s hard enough to develop your own tone of voice without having a crisis weighing down on you. People will look more critically at what you are doing and what you are saying. That’s not always a bad thing, of course, but it can be hard to please everyone. Not everyone reads a message the same way. Some think you shouldn’t put out anything at all, because they think you’re exploiting the situation. Others value what you do or welcome your content to help take their mind off things.
If you can, keep your content going. Don’t throw everything overboard, but be mindful. Listen to your customers and care for them. Make sure that what you do is real and fitting of you and your company.
Adapt your message
Adapting your tone inevitably also means adapting your message. You have to think carefully about what you want to communicate. Ask yourself, does your service or product still align with what people want? Priorities shift and it might be that your customers need something different from you. Also, ask yourself if you’re really adding something to the world if you’re thinking about publishing COVID-19 content.
The world used to revolve around getting conversions. Getting that newsletter sign up, making people buy your product or try your course. Now, it is probably more important to get noticed in the first place. Become top of mind because of the social work your brand does or how you try to make this world a better place.
Use social media to reach out to your customer with caring messages, without being too cliched — remember the intro of this article? Find out which type of content people are looking for. We, for one, have noticed a lot of interest in how-to content, so it could be a good idea to invest in video explainers. Or maybe you could try and answer more questions, with an FAQ for instance. Of course, your research will give you an idea of what to focus on.
Essential tools
These days, you should live in Google Trends. Exciting things are happening almost in realtime. Of course, Google Analytics will show you everything you need to know about people who visited your site, while Search Console also gives you insights about people who searched but didn’t end up on your site. SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Ryte also give you a ton of information about what’s going on and off your site. Use Q&A tools like Answer the Public and AlsoAsked.com to find new questions to answer.
Interest in new terms and activities like indoor cycling spike compared to outdoor activities such as mountain biking, illustrated in the graph above.
Start adapting your content strategy
It’s hard to predict when everything is getting back to normal. It might take some time and the world is bound to change in the meantime. So, when looking at your content strategy it’s important to align this with the current situation. Find out if you can help your customers or if you can reach them in other ways. Make sure your message is on point and caring. Don’t scream BUY BUY BUY. It’s okay to sell stuff, but try to keep it genuine.
Your site needs to be up and running if you want to be found in search engines. If you aren’t blocking anything — deliberately or accidentally — search engine spiders can crawl and index it. You probably know that Yoast SEO has lots of options to determine what does and doesn’t need to be indexed, but did you know it also has a tool that monitors your site’s indexability? This is the indexability check, provided by our good friends at Ryte.
Update: In Yoast 13.2, we moved the Ryte indexability check from the Yoast meta box on your Dashboard. You can now find the Ryte indexability check in the WordPress Site Health tool! In WordPress 5.4 the site health status widget also appears on the Dashboard.
The indexability check checks if your site is indexable and does so on a weekly basis. You can find the Ryte indexability check in the Site Health tool in WordPress. The Site Health tool groups its checks into three sections:
critical issues
recommended improvements
and passed tests.
The Ryte check will be displayed within one of these groups. When your site can be found by search engines, the Ryte check appears in the Passed tests section of the Site Health tool. If something is wrong and it needs your attention, the Ryte check appears with an SEO tag next to the issue.
The Ryte check in the WordPress Site Health tool
When you see a Ryte check warning among the critical issues, it means that your site cannot be found by search engines. You need to act on this issue quickly if you want your content to appear in the search engines.
In some cases, an error occurs while checking whether your site can be found by search engines. Or Ryte might not be able to determine if your site is findable. When this happens, we recommend you check what is causing those issues.
What do I have to do to get it?
We add this check automatically when you install Yoast SEO. You can find it by going to the WordPress admin menu item Tools > Site Health. In WordPress 5.4 you can also find a Site Health Status widget on the Dashboard.
We advise you to keep the Ryte check turned on. But we do give you the option to turn it off. Learn how to do this by following the steps in this post.
Error: your site cannot be found by search engines
Your homepage cannot be indexed by search engines. This is very bad for SEO and should be fixed.
Are you getting the error message shown above? When Yoast SEO reports your site as not indexable by search engines, this can be caused by several reasons. However, it is an issue of the highest priority, assuming that you want your site to be indexed by Google.
First of all, test your URL in Google’s mobile-friendly test here. If Google can run the mobile-friendly test for your domain, Google can also crawl the domain. In that case, the Ryte warning is wrong.
If Google cannot run the mobile-friendly test, our advice is to follow this Go to Ryte to analyze your entire site link, create an account on Ryte (formerly OnPage.org) and see what they have to tell you. One possibility is that you have a robots.txt file that’s blocking indexation. Or perhaps your theme has some code in it that’s blocking search engines. Ryte can tell you what the problem is and how to fix it!
Indexability check fails
If your indexability check fails, your server is not able to connect to the ryte.com servers to retrieve the indexability status for your domain. This can happen for several reasons:
Your server can’t connect to other servers at all.
Your server has a whitelist of servers it’s allowed to connect to. In this case, adding ryte.com would fix that.
A myriad of other server configuration reasons.
Usually, your hosting party can tell you the cause of the issues and will also be able to help you fix it. If not, go to Ryte where you can create a free account and have access to all of the benefits without having to change anything on your server.
The Yoast Ryte check
Ryte & Yoast SEO
Ryte offers a free indexability check for Yoast SEO users. This way, you can quickly see whether your site is still reachable for search engines and visitors. If you need help fixing technical SEO issues or if you are in need of a suite of SEO tools to help you fix or improve your rankings, sign up for the free Ryte introductory plan. Just go to Ryte and follow the instructions!
While we’re working on getting Yoast SEO 14.0 ready for the world, you can enjoy today’s release of Yoast SEO 13.5. In this release, we’re adding word form support for a new language: Spanish. Spanish joins, Dutch, German and English, and we’re working on more languages. Read all about Yoast SEO 13.5!
An easier, more flexible text analysis
We’ve made our keyphrase analysis smart to make the process of editing a text with Yoast SEO more natural. More invisible, so to say, so you can focus on creating that epic piece of content.
Thanks to the innovative way of working with language, the plugin is now much less restrictive in finding your focus keyphrase. It has become smarter. In the past, you often found yourself working according to the rules of the plugin, but not anymore. Now, you don’t have to try to fit your focus keyphrase awkwardly in a sentence to make the plugin happy. No, now the plugin recognizes all parts of your focus keyphrase automatically — and the words don’t even have to be in the same order.
That’s all happening in the free version of Yoast SEO, but Premium analysis ups the ante. Here, word form support comes into play.
Yoast SEO Premium analysis
The Yoast SEO Premium analysis not only picks out your focus keyphrases flawlessly inside a sentence, but it also looks at words forms of your keyphrase. Word forms can be anything, from plurals (e.g., perro – perros), verb forms (e.g., aplicar – apliques) to adverbs (e.g., actual – actualmente).
Now, if you write naturally your focus keyphrase will become much easier to find because it looks at different forms as well. All these instances count towards the correct keyphrase density of your text.
That’s not all, because Yoast SEO Premium offers something else that you can use in conjuncture with word forms: support for synonyms and related keyphrases. By adding different related keyphrases, you can write a text that fully covers your specific topic. This includes all relevant terms users use to talk about this subject.
Need a recap? Check out this video that explains it perfectly:
Today, we introduce word form support for our Spanish language users. This version is fully functional and works really well, but it might still be a little rough around the edges. Please test it thoroughly and report back your findings.
In addition, we’d like your help adding word form support for other languages. Each language is different, so you need a new word form recognition mechanisms in each language. Up to now, our in-house team of linguists refined and adapted the word form recognition mechanism in each language until it delivered the best possible quality.
This process has a major advantage: you get the best quality right in the first release. But it also has a downside, as it takes a while before a word form mechanism can cope with all the intricacies and irregularities in a language. As we want to provide word form recognition in more and more languages, this process will take longer. To speed up the process, we are changing things for the upcoming languages.
In the future, we’re building on existing word form recognition mechanisms. We need your help, though. To improve these existing mechanisms, we’d like native speakers — or experts — in that language to give us feedback. We’re working on a new feedback system to allow you to send your suggestions or improvements from within the plugin. For now, if you encounter strange things or want to help out, you can send us an email, comment on this post or make an issue on our GitHub repository. Thanks!
Update to Yoast SEO 13.5
Yoast SEO 13.5 is out. In it, you’ll find a great enhancement for our Spanish language users: word form support! Word forms help you to write a better article while spending less time on making Yoast SEO happy, we hope. If not, please let us know so we can improve it.
With restaurants, shops and other businesses closing due to the Coronavirus pandemic, their owners are looking for other ways to keep their business going. Luckily, many customers are searching for ways to support their local businesses. One of the ways for a restaurant to keep serving people is by offering local pickup of meals. All you need is a WordPress website, a simple ordering system using WooCommerce and a Local SEO plugin. Let’s see how that works.
Thinking outside the box
At times like these, we all need to step outside our comfort zone and do things differently. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so to say. In this post, I’ll take a look at what a restaurant can do, but many of these things apply to other local businesses as well.
All restaurants are closed for eating in, but if you try to get creative, there are still ways to keep the business going. For one, that would be offering gift cards for your restaurant to be cashed when you open again. Or, you could keep serving menus to customers and having them come pick it up at your location.
What do you need?
Of course, you would need a site for your restaurant. If you have a WordPress site, it’s quite easy to add a shop of sorts using WooCommerce. You wouldn’t even need a very complex setup with a thousand payment options and user account management or something. Keep it simple, you just want people to select a menu, pick it up and pay for it on the spot using contactless payment. If you wish to extend these options, feel free to do so.
Besides a WordPress site with a WooCommerce shop, you can improve how these two work together by installing our Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO plugins. These not only enhance your site in a technical sense but also improve the chance of it showing up properly in the search engines.
How to start an online store for local pickup
In this post, you won’t find how to set up a WordPress site. I’ll assume you have a WordPress site. If not, there are a lot of guides on how to make a WordPress website out there that describe how to build one. We have a free WordPress for Beginners course that helps you get going quickly.
Whenever you are working on your site, it’s a good idea to set up a test site that mirrors the real one. This way, you can experiment to your heart’s content without breaking the actual site. Here’s how to set up a test environment for WordPress.
It goes without saying that your hosting plan should be able to facilitate WooCommerce. You should also serve your site over HTTPS (check the green lock icon in the browser bar), this is essential now that you are going to handle customer data.
Install WooCommerce
Go to the Plugin section of your WordPress site and click add new. Here, you can look for the WooCommerce plugin. This is the number one e-commerce solution for WordPress. It powers online stores in all shapes and sizes, including the one on our site. After downloading, the plugin installs and asks you to activate it. WooCommerce is now ready to set up.
Install the free WooCommerce plugin to transform your website into a webshop
Set up WooCommerce
WooCommerce has an awesome wizard that guides you through the setup process. If you follow these steps, you’ll have most of the essential things in place. If you want to do it by hand, you need to go to the settings in WooCommerce and go over the screens by yourself.
Easily configure your new webshop through WooCommerce’s setup wizard
Even if you’ve done the wizard, it’s a good idea to go over the settings to get acquainted with everything. Need to rerun the Wizard? Click the Help button in WooCommerce to find it on the left-hand side.
Go to the WooCommerce settings and set up or check the following settings:
On the General tab:
Make sure your store address is correct and that you’ve limited selling to your country and location
Enable or disable tax calculation if needed
Enable or disable the use of coupon codes if needed
Pick the correct currency
On the Product tab:
Select the page where you want the shop to appear
Want users to leave reviews on your product? Activate that option here
On Inventory: Disable stock management unless you need it
On the Payments tab:
Pick an easy payment option, like cash on delivery or bank transfer
If needed, you can add more complex payment providers like PayPal
On the Accounts tab:
Allow guest checkout
Allow account creation if needed
Select the Privacy policy
Review the other options on this page carefully, you may need them
On the Emails tab:
Check the different email templates and activate the ones you want to use. For every email, change the text to match what you want to say
Scroll down to check the sender options
Also adapt the email template to fit your brand
Skip the Integrations tab
On the Advanced tab:
Map the essential pages for your shop, i.e. the cart, checkout, account page and terms and conditions. You can make these pages in WordPress:
Add the `[woocommerce_cart]` shortcode to the cart page
Add the `[woocommerce_checkout]` shortcode to the checkout page
Place the `[woocommerce_my_account]` shortcode to the account page
These are the settings that get you up-and-running quickly. WooCommerce is a solid piece of software with loads of options and it can be used to power tiny webshops selling one item to megastores carrying millions. Go over the settings to see if you need to set something that fits your goal.
Install Local SEO by Yoast SEO
The Local SEO plugin by Yoast is a great addition if you want your business to rank locally. It comes with a lot of cool options, like managing multiple locations, getting your correct business details to Google easily and creating an awesome map where customers can find your business.
One of the coolest options of the Local SEO plugin is the local store pickup option it adds to WooCommerce shops. As WooCommerce doesn’t offer this natively, the Local SEO plugin makes it much easier to offer this important option to your customers. Simply activate and customize it, that is all. It truly is a must-have addition!
The Yoast Local SEO for WordPress plugin adds these options to WooCommerce
The same goes for the WooCommerce SEO plugin. This is optional, of course, but it is a great help if you want to get serious with WooCommerce. The plugin improves the product structured data WooCommerce generates, it cleans up the XML sitemap making it faster to load and it makes products stand out more on social media platforms by adding specific code.
Adding a shop to your theme
You might use a WordPress theme that your developer built especially for you. Adding a WooCommerce store shouldn’t be too difficult. Often, it works out of the box or with limited edits. Look, you are not trying to build the world’s most beautiful restaurant website with a fully functioning online shop with all bells and whistles. You are looking for something quick and dirty to get you started.
This is what your online store, displaying your menu’s, could look like
For most instances, you could simply add a special shop page to your site and accept the design it comes with. Or, you could override your own theme with a WooCommerce enabled restaurant/shop theme from the WordPress repository. Please see what works for you.
Payment options
Like you don’t have to have an astonishing design, for your shop, you don’t need to offer a gazillion payment options. Please pick the bare necessities. Simply offer contactless payment on the spot, or a low-cost payment method like we have in the Netherlands called Tikkie. This lets you easily send payment requests via a link that your customers can use to pay the invoice using their own bank. Big payment providers often charge big money and you want to save as much as you can, right? Plus, these can be a pain to implement and maintain.
Set up the payment options for your online store
Also, it might be a good idea to offer gift cards. In that case, you also need to turn on those settings in WooCommerce.
Add your products
Once you’ve set up a store for your restaurant, you can add products. Again, do this as you see fit. You might offer all dishes separately, but you can also offer complete menus. Or maybe you have a different idea on how you would go about this. There’s no wrong way, pick what works best for you.
Adding a product consists of giving it a strong product name, plus a description and images. You should also give the product a price. There are a lot of options here, but you probably won’t need most of them. Do take a look, though. To help you write great product texts that also do well SEO-wise, you can always have Yoast SEO take a look at them.
How to add a new product to your online store
Publish your online store
After you’ve filled your store, it’s time to do a test run. Open your store, click all the buttons and make a test order. See if everything works. Check if all the order emails come in. Fulfil the order and celebrate! Now, if you haven’t run into too many errors, you should be good to go. Publish your store and communicate it to your customers. Hopefully the orders for your tasty food will come in quickly.
In WooCommerce, you can easily track the orders that come in and you can do all kinds of analysis to see how the money comes in. Click to your Dashboard to get an overview of what’s happening at the moment. There’s so much more you can do in WooCommerce, it’s silly. Read the WooCommerce documentation to see what else you can do to run and improve your shop.
Communicate your new store
Now’s the time to start marketing your store. These are not exhaustive and you can probably think of a few good channels for your business. If nothing else, think about your social media and your email newsletters. Also, there might be a collection of other local restaurants that are in the same boat as you are. It might be a good idea to build a platform together?
Another important thing is your Google My Business account. Please update it with the latest information! Google is adding COVID-19/Coronacrisis management options as we speak. Restaurants can now pick special attributes if your restaurant is available for take out or delivery. This will show up in Google Maps. You can also use the Posts features in My Business to communicate with your customers.
A new feature on Google’s search engine result page showing whether your restaurant offers takeout and/or delivery
WooCommerce and Local SEO help arrange local pickup
This post was meant to give you an idea of the steps you need to take to run a small-scale, WooCommerce-powered online store. Even a local shop, a restaurant or a cafe can run one just like it. The technology is there, and most of it is free to use. Of course, paying for a couple of premium plugins will greatly enhance the experience and save precious time as well. WooCommerce alone has a ton of purposely extensions for improving parts of a store for specific industries.
In Yoast SEO 9.0, we launched an innovative new way to analyze your English language text using word forms. In Yoast SEO 10.1, we added word form support for the German language. Today, we’re glad to announce word form support for Dutch. Here, you can read why this is such an awesome addition to Yoast SEO 13.4.
Word forms?
Back in the day, Yoast SEO used to be rather picky — sometimes it had a hard time detecting the focus keyphrase in your text. For instance, if your focus keyphrase was [vegan pancakes], the plugin wouldn’t recognise instances of the word [vegan pancake] or [pancakes for a vegan friend]. Today, however, the WordPress plugin is so much smarter.
Now, your focus keyphrase doesn’t even have to be in an identical order. The plugin finds all parts of the keyphrase even if the words are split over a sentence.
Yoast SEO Premium takes it one step further. Using the Premium analysis, something like [How to make the fluffiest pancake that even the most critical vegans love] would count as well.
One of the coolest parts of this is that Yoast SEO Premium recognises all word forms of your keyphrase: [vegan], [vegans], [veganism] and more. This way, you don’t have to keep trying to awkwardly fit your focus keyphrase in your text. Simply write naturally and let Yoast SEO take care of the rest. The goal? To write a better text, while spending less time optimizing!
The same goes that other epic feature in Yoast SEO Premium, the possibility to add synonyms and related keyphrases to your post analysis. This too, makes it easier to write a rich, high-quality post that covers all aspects of your subject.
Word forms: now available in Dutch
As of Yoast SEO 13.4, users in the Dutch language can get in on the action too. For every language we add to the plugin, we need to adapt the analysis. Every language has its own sets of rules, you know? We have a team of linguists working on this and bringing you top notch language support.
How does this work in Dutch? Well, here’s Marieke explain it all for you — in Dutch this time!
Let’s take a look at an example! In the screenshot, you see the Premium analysis at work. The focus keyphrase for this example post is [spelen met katten]. If you look closely, Yoast SEO Premium won’t just find the exact match to that keyphrase, but also several variations.
If we look at the word [kat], or cat in Dutch, the plugin now recognises variants on that word as well. So this means, [katten], [kater] and [katjes], among other things, are correct instances of that keyphrase as well.
In the Premium analysis, you can add a number of related keyphrases to make the text analysis even richer. One of the outcomes of this, is that it helps to determine if you have distributed your keyphrases well across your text. All this helps you write the awesome your audience is looking for!
To cap if off, here’s the Dutch version of our infographic that explains the differences between synonyms, word forms and related keyphrases.
Update now to Yoast SEO 13.4
Yoast SEO 13.4 brings a big feature for all you Dutchies: full word form support! This state of the art analysis helps you write better text with a lot less effort. Writing and editing a great piece of content has now become much more natural.
Writing in English or German? But not familiar with the Premium analysis yet? Try it and tell us what you think!
The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a wave of canceled or postponed events. Some events made the switch from an offline event to an online one. As everyone is scrambling to look up the latest information on events online, it is important to have all the latest details on your website. Search engines can pick up these details and post the correct information in the search results. New Event Schema helps speed up this process.
Events structured data expanded quickly
In last week’s release of Schema.org 7.0, you can find several updates to the Events structured data. You can give your event an eventStatus of EventCancelled when it’s cancelled or an EventPostponed when it’s been postponed. In addition, you can also set a rescheduled event as EventRescheduled.
A new option is available for events that moved online: you can now update the eventStatus to EventMovedOnline. Here, you can also mark events as online-only by setting the location to VirtualLocation and set the eventAttendenceMode to OnlineEventAttendanceMode.
An example for YoastCon 2020
We had a new edition of YoastCon planned for April, 2020. As everything else, we rescheduled that to a date later in the year. I thought I’d let you see how one of these additions could look in code.
Below, you can find a part of the Schema code found on the YoastCon page. I’ve added the eventStatus, plus the corresponding EventRescheduled property. Also, I’ve added the old, plus the new date. Now, search engines know this event was rescheduled to a new date and can update the listing accordingly.
{
"@type":"BusinessEvent",
"@id":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#yoastcon",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@id": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#webpage"
}
,
"name":"YoastCon",
"description":"Due to the recent COVID-19 health concerns both locally and among our (international) speakers, we're sad to announce that we're postponing YoastCon 2020.",
"organizer": {
"@id": "https://yoast.com/#organization"
}
,
"startDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",
"endDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",
"eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",
"eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
"previousStartDate": "2020-04-21T19:00",
"url":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/",
"image":"https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2019/10/YoastCon2020-600x338.png",
"location": {
"@type":"Place",
"name":"Theater 't Moza\u00efek",
"url":"https://www.mozaiekwijchen.nl/",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"addressLocality": "Wijchen",
"addressRegion": "Gelderland",
"addressCountry": "The Netherlands",
"postalCode": "6602 HX",
"streetAddress": "Campuslaan 6"
}
}
Moving the event online
Many events now move to online-only, for the time being or completely. You can now let search engines know that the event has turned into an online event — or a mixed event with both an offline and an online component.
In the YoastCon example, I could move the event by adding an EventMovedOnline property, combined with a new VirtualLocation property with a link to the page where the event is happening online. Code is truncated.
Of course, you can combine both online and offline locations of the event. Simply add the MixedEventAttendanceMode to the eventAttendanceMode and set both a virtual as well as a real location for the event. This might look something like this:
SpecialAnnouncement for broadcasting announcements
The new SpecialAnnouncement type lets governments announce important happenings, like the closing of businesses and public recreation areas. While the initial offering is focused entirely on the spread special announcements during the Coronavirus pandemic, this will be extended at a further date. Both Bing and Google accept SpecialAnnouncement and will highlight these pages in the results how they see fit. You can find more information on SpecialAnnouncement on Schema.org/SpecialAnnouncement.
We’re working on this as well
As you see, it makes a lot of sense to add this to your event pages. Unfortunately, at the moment Yoast SEO doesn’t have to option to add this code automatically. We’re working on that, though! Our structured data content blocks already let you build great FAQ pages and how-to articles, but we’re also working on blocks for events and recipes, among other things. In a while, you can add events and mark these as online, offline or mixed, while the correct structured data will be applied automatically.
Other things you can do to get provide accurate and up-to-date information
In the current COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic, it is crucial to give people accurate information about your event or business. A lot things have changed, many people sit indoor and have to go online to find out which businesses they can still visit or which events take place when. So, please take a moment to bring all your listings up-to-date.
Please check your listings on Google My Business, Bing Places, Yelp, TripAdvisor et cetera. Also update your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. In addition, it might be a good idea to put a COVID-19 related FAQ page on your website answering the most pressing questions on how your business or event is handling this crisis. The Yoast SEO FAQ content block helps you make such a page in an instant. It also automatically adds valid structured data that makes sure the FAQ shows up in Google. Use it to your advantage.
Our current string of releases focusing on improving our code is continuing with Yoast SEO 13.3. In this release, for instance, you’ll find a sizable update to how we work with languages. In addition, we have a Schema structured data addition and several improvements to how Yoast SEO handles URLs. Read on!
Improving the way we handle languages
As you know, Yoast SEO has a very advanced system for working with languages. We analyze your texts and give you tips to improve the readability or the enhance the SEO-friendliness of those articles. Yoast SEO Premium customers get an even more advanced analysis that makes it even easier to optimize your text in a natural way. All thanks to word form recognition, related keyphrases and synonyms.
Getting the analysis so smart is no small feat. Languages are hard to grasp and every language has its own rules and peculiarities. To get these analyses to function properly, we need to finetune these for each language. In Yoast SEO 13.3, we’ve drastically improved this system.
We now break down words to their stems automatically — also called stemming —, but no longer build a complete list of all the different word forms. This was a complex and time-consuming process that made it hard to scale. This new version makes it much easier for us to improve the system — and to roll out a lot more languages in the near future.
Keep in mind, the analysis itself haven’t changed — just the way we come to the end results.
Enhancements in Yoast SEO 13.3
In Yoast SEO 13.3, we’ve improved how the plugin handles URLs. Saša Todorović also submitted a number of improvements to how Yoast SEO works with URLs as well. We made sure that URLs keep human-readable, both in our forms and in the metadata Yoast SEO outputs on the frontend. Of course, they will remain encoded in the Schema structured data, because of the way JSON works with this.
Speaking of Schema, we’ve added a potentialAction entity to the WebPage and Article Schema pieces. This means we can indicate in the structured data that readers of this piece of content have the option of leaving a comment, for instance.
Update now to Yoast SEO 13.3
There you have it, Yoast SEO 13.3. This release bring a better language processing system, plus enhancements to the way Yoast SEO works with URLs. In addition, we fixed several bugs and made improvements to our code. You can find out more in the changelog for Yoast SEO 13.3. Download now!
You’ll probably have heard the term user journey a lot, but what is it exactly? And what does it have to do with SEO? The user journey consists of all the steps a user takes to reach their goal. In buying something, the user journey includes steps like reading reviews, checking prices, comparing shops etc. In SEO, you can map out the user journey and place content on all the points a user comes into contact with you. Let’s take a look.
Your user journey: how do you purchase a product?
The concept of the user journey becomes instantly clear when you are looking to buy something. Let’s say you want to buy a new tv — your 15-year old 42 inch LCD tv doesn’t cut it anymore. You do research and ask yourself some questions: how big should it be? Which screen technology? What about 4k or maybe 8k for future-proofing? Do my friends have any advice? Which shops can I go to to see some screens in action? You go through a whole lot of steps before you are ready to pull the trigger on a new tv.
That proces, from the moment you realise you need a new tv to the moment you turn on the new tv in your home — and even after that fact — is called the user journey. As an eCommerce store selling tv’s you need to know how a user might get from A to Z and prepare useful content for the moments when that user might need that content.
Now, you might think that you can simply think about which steps a user might take in any given situation and put that on some kind of timeline. Well, it’s more complicated than that. If you think about it, your process of buying something might differ completely from someone else’s. You can’t force everyone to follow the same path.
In addition, the user journey is hardly ever a straight line, more often, it’s a squiggly line moving in all directions. Users go from awareness, to research, to checking prices, to research, to talking to friends about it et cetera. Eventually, the user makes a decision — some users take hours, other months.
This also goes for how people behave on websites. They hardly ever arrive neatly via the homepage only to follow the path you want them to follow. In different stages of the journey, people need different kinds of information and they will, therefore, enter your site via different pages — probably the one buried deep in your site. After that, they can move in any kind of direction. That means that every page on a site needs to consider multiple user journeys, and act as a landing page. You can’t assume that there’s a linear/predictable flow through a site.
Mapping the user journey makes it easier for users to find what they need to come to a decision. For site owners, it offers a helpful guide to where what kind of content should be to help speed up this decision making process.
Classic marketing still applies
Thinking about user journeys automatically lets you think about all those classic marketing funnels. The AIDA model — over a hundred years old —, for instance, is a good fit for making user journeys insightful. AIDA stands for:
Attention: get your potential consumer to notice you
Interest: find a way to hold that attention to build interest
Desire: persuade the consumer to make them want your product/service
Action: get the consumer to make that conversion
AIDA is often appended with another letter, the S for Satisfaction — or the R for Retention. This is where you keep your customer once that sale is done, be it in excellent customer service or guiding him or her to their next purchase. You have to try and get some kind of loyalty. For many things, you don’t want to simply convert a sale, but also a customer for life and a champion of your brand.
Mapping the user journey helps structure the process
Mapping the user journey helps you make sense of what you need to do to turn that potential customer into a loyal returning one. Once you start researching, you’ll probably find a number of holes in your strategy or thought-process. You’ll have missed a couple of entry points and discover thinking that hadn’t occurred to you. Once you find this, you’ll also notice that there is a lot of content missing that should have helped potential customers in their journey towards you.
Mapping done well, you’ll have a solid story for your customer’s process and a guide that helps you take away all pain points.
How to map out a user journey?
The most important thing for mapping a user journey is getting inside the potential customer’s mind. These are the people doing the travelling and they know what they do to get somewhere. Don’t think you can make up stuff by yourself or your marketing team. Talk to people! Also find out what they’re saying on forums and social media like reddit.
What journey does the user take to get to your solution? (c) Rosenfeld Media
Mapping a user journey can sometimes feel like releasing the kraken — it can become unwieldy, like something with a lot of tentacles. It is, therefore, a good idea to limit the scope somewhat. Set clear objectives, know when a task ends and don’t try to fit everything you do into one user journey. Research specific tasks for specific people and go from there.
Define scope
Before you start, you need to have the basics questions answered. Who are you? What is your mission? Which problems does your product or service solve? Who is your audience or who do you think your audience is? Know yourself before you jump into a research project with the wrong knowledge.
With that out of the way, it is often a good idea to make a high-level overview of what you want to achieve. Consider how you think the user will behave on this particular journey. Don’t go into detail, but simply make a quick visualisation of the process — this helps you to define the scope of the user journey. Keep in mind, you won’t know the exact user journey until you do the research. Don’t stick to these assumptions, please.
By mapping out a journey from A to Z, you get everything and the kitchen sink but that’s probably not what you need. It’s often better to focus on a sub-journey powered by a specific scenario. This makes it easier to develop, maintain and improve.
For instance, if you offer SEO training courses, you might want to map a journey for people unaware of SEO that encompasses everything from becoming aware of the plusses of SEO to learning of SEO courses to finding your specific SEO course. That’s a whole lotta journey, so to say. In this case, you could make a high-level overview and fill these in with more detailed sub-journeys. That makes creating and mapping content to them easier as well.
In addition, it is good to think about who you are targeting. Are you targeting everyone? Probably not! By narrowing down the user profiles, you can get more specific in your journeys. This way, you can take the experiences of a user, for instance, into account.
Start researching what you have
If you’ve been in business for a while, it might be that you’ve done a lot of user research already — both qualitative and quantitative data. Maybe you know your customers inside out. Have you interviewed customers, cool! Asked them how they use your newsletter? Nice. Got a whole bunch of keyword research sheets? Awesome. Did eye tracking tests on your new website? Epic. Go over every bit of research you have done and collect the most valuable insights that can help advance the development of the user journey.
Take special note of your keyword research. If you haven’t done keyword research properly, you need to get to it. Search volumes and popularity of certain phrases can be helpful insight into what people want/need, and you can react accordingly. In addition, looking at the kinds of sites which rank for those keywords is useful. If the results for a particular keyword are mostly informational, for example, it’s probably worth considering that those searches are from people early on / in research phases, and your content/ui/etc should react accordingly.
Determine what you need
Once you’ve pored over the available research, you get an idea of what you need to form a full picture of your user/customer. You might notice a couple of patches that haven’t been discussed or questions that haven’t been asked by your customer. Make lists of all the questions you still need to answer before you know to fill in the user journey. Don’t assume anything. Don’t fill in the gaps yourself before doing the research.
Perform your research
It’s time to fill in the gaps. Once you’ve written your research plan, you can start your research. To get a good grasp on the way users are behaving, you can use all kinds of ways to get those answers:
Conduct customer interviews with specific questions
Direct observations
Field studies
Competitive analysis
You can combine these qualitative insights with quantitative insights, from survey data, Google Analytics, sentiment analysis et cetera.
Structure the results
Once you’ve gathered all the data, you can start structuring the results. How you do this is up to you, but you could use the following buckets to structure your data and the user’s thoughts and expectations.
Actions: which steps does a user take to advance the journey?
Motivations: how do they feel about the process?
Questions: which questions do users ask themselves while trying to advance the journey?
Obstacles: what stops them from advancing?
Combined, you’ll get a clear sense of the user journey. In addition, you’ll also get an idea of the obstacles you need to take down to help the user progress without too much friction.
Visualize the results
The most recognisable part of the user journey is the visual that supports it. User journey visualizations come in all shapes and sizes. Pick one that you can understand and that fits what you want to achieve. Here are a couple of examples:
Once you’ve built up the user journey, it’s a good idea to try it for yourself. Maybe even let real customers or users do the journey. Ask them if it seems logical? Do the steps jump around? Maybe it’s too narrow or too broad? This all helps to validate the journey and take out any assumptions you might have made.
Map content to journey touchpoint
Now, you’ll have the full scope of the user journey in focus, so you’ll notice all the points where a user or customers comes into contact with you or your product. These so-called touch points are great entrance points for high-quality, and extremely relevant content that answers all the questions the user has at that particular moment in the user journey.
It’s time to start mapping your content to these specific touch points. We’ll explain how to do that in another post. While thinking about your content, keep the old AIDA model in your mind: how do you get attending and arouse interest? And once you have that, how do you get people from visitors to customers — and keep them there?
SEO is only part of the user journey
The user journey contains, more often than not, almost everything you do as a company. If you want to successfully help a potential customer from A to Z, you need to have everything in order. As users often start their journey by typing a query in a search bar, SEO plays an important role to get them relevant content when they need it. SEO, however, is merely a part of the machinery that forms a successful journey.
This probably goes without saying, but your product or service should be truly valuable and good. There’s no sense in getting people to try a subpar product. Marketing 101, right? The same goes for your branding. It has to be recognisable, genuine, unique and befitting of your company. Your site has to be technically awesome, filled with relevant content and looking incredible and trustworthy. The user experience should be stellar. Practice holistic SEO!
The consumer experience should be impeccable as well. Your potential customer is going to do a lot of research, both online as well as offline. So make sure that your companies profiles are well-tended. Get those five star online reviews and respond to the negative ones. Have active social media accounts that send out relevant content and respond to users’ questions.
Also, think about what you are doing offline. Are you running ads anywhere? Sponsoring events? Holding your own event? Think about ways to get into the minds of people without having to resort to the internet. Many people will want to form a good picture of how you are, what you do and if you are deserving of their money, so to say.
A primer on user journeys for SEO
This post gives you a solid overview of the use of user journeys for SEO. User journeys help you make sense of how users behave and they help you produce relevant content that answers questions and converts. Even if you don’t launch a full scale research project for this, thinking about how a user behaves and maybe even talking to a couple of them gives you great insights that might further your business.
