Tag: Content SEO

A linguistic approach to creating content that ranks

Fleur Heesen

Search engines are trying to understand language: they want to understand what users are searching for, and they want to be able to provide them with the best results. Before I started working at Yoast, I studied linguistics: the scientific study of language. During my years at Yoast, I’ve noticed that linguistics and SEO have a lot of overlap. In this article, I want to give you some SEO insights from a linguistic perspective. Let’s dive in!

Different aspects of language

Before we can go into the linguistic approach to SEO, we first have to understand what language is. Language consists of many different aspects. Think about it: we make speech sounds or write letters, which together form words. We put these words in a specific order, so they form sentences and phrases. And these sentences mean something to us.

Sometimes we also want to achieve something with language. For example, when we say “it’s cold in here,” we might not only want to express we’re cold, but we could mean it as a request to close the window. To study all of these aspects, we distinguish different levels of language in the field of linguistics.

Linguistic levels of language

The most basic level is the level of sounds and letters, which we call phonology (when it comes to speech) and graphology (when we talk about writing). Then, there’s the morphological level, which studies how these sounds and letters together make words and different word forms. For example, the word “house” can be combined with “tree” to make “treehouse” and with “dog” to make “doghouse,” but we can’t really combine it with “banana.”

The next level, syntax, describes the rules we have for creating sentences. There are a million words we can choose from that we could use to form an infinite number of possible sentences. But these syntactic rules allow us only a small number of ways in which these words can be combined.

The level of semantics studies the meaning of different elements of language. What do we mean when we say something, and how do we understand others? Finally, pragmatics looks at meaning within a context. For instance, someone could say: “I’m getting hot, will you crack open the door?” Semantically, “crack” would mean “to break,” but pragmatically, we know that they don’t actually want us to break the door; they want us to open the door to let in some fresh air.

Level of languageField of linguistics
Sounds and lettersPhonology (speech) & graphology (writing)
Words and word formsMorphology
Sentences and rulesSyntax
MeaningSemantics
Context and language use Pragmatics
Sources: Crystal (1987), Hickey (2005)

Which levels of language can Google understand?

Okay, but what does this have to do with search engines? Well, search engines are trying to understand language the way humans do. And they’re getting better and better at it. A couple of years ago, search engines could only understand basic elements of language: they could recognize keywords in your content. Because of that, it was common practice to optimize just for keywords.

But times have changed. Search engines are becoming smarter and smarter, and they are getting better at understanding more levels of language. Google is now trying to understand language at the level of syntax, morphology, semantics, and even pragmatics. How? Let’s find out.

Understanding what characterizes high-quality content

With every update, Google tries to get closer to understanding language like the human brain. The Panda update (2011) addressed thin content and keyword stuffing. People could no longer rank high with low-quality pages filled with keywords. Since this update, Google is trying to understand language at the semantic and pragmatic levels. They want to know what people deem high-quality content; content that genuinely offers information about the search term they used.

Read more: Google Panda »

Understanding the meaning of phrases

A few years later, with the Hummingbird update (2013), Google took a deeper dive into semantics. This update focused on identifying relations between search queries. It made Google pay more attention to each word in a search query, ensuring that the whole search phrase is taken into account, rather than just particular words. They wanted to be capable of understanding what you mean when you type in a search query.

Google took that even further. Since they rolled out the RankBrain algorithm in 2015, they can interpret neologisms (words that have not yet been fully accepted into mainstream language, like “coronacation”), colloquialisms (casual communication, like “ain’t” and “gonna”), and they can process dialogues.

Read more: A brief history of Google’s algorithm updates »

Understanding different word forms

Google also has become a lot better at understanding different forms of a word or phrase. You no longer have to stuff your articles with the same keyword over and over again. If you’re writing an article about [reading books], Google will recognize various forms of these words, like [read], [reads], and [book]. What’s more, Google also understands synonyms. Write about [novel], [chronicle], and [volume], and Google will still rank you for [book]. Using some variations in your wording makes your texts nicer to read, and that’s what Google finds important, too.

Read more: What is keyword stemming? »

Understanding pragmatics

But Google is not just trying to understand content by analyzing text. To identify which results are useful for people, they also use user signals, like the bounce rate, click-through rate, and the time people spend on a website. They are even researching users’ emotions to adapt their search results based on, for example, the choice of wording for a search query.

Understanding context

You might have heard about the most recent big update, BERT (2019). With their latest innovation, Google is again becoming closer to understanding language at a human level. BERT is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model that uses the context and relations of all the words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. With this update, Google can figure out the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. This helps them provide their users with even more meaningful and fitting results.

Read more: Google BERT: A better understanding of queries »

A linguistic approach to SEO

So, what does this mean for how you should optimize your content? Google is trying to understand language like we do. And with every update, they are getting closer to understanding language at a human level. They want to provide their users with high-quality search results that fit their goals.

Simply put, this means you should write for your audience, and not for search engines. Research your audience, try to get to know them, and provide them with the information and solutions they are looking to find!

Write naturally and mix things up

Moreover, try to write naturally. Don’t just stuff your text with the keyphrase you’re trying to rank for. That’s not only unpleasant to read for your visitors, but also bad for your rankings. Google can understand synonyms, different word forms, and the context of words, so make use of that! If you’re trying to rank for [cat], don’t just use [cat] over and over in your text. Use synonyms, like [kitty] or [puss]. Mix things up and use the plural form, [cats], and related phrases, like [litter box] or [cat food].

Yoast SEO Premium can help you with this. Our plugin also recognizes synonyms, different word forms, and related phrases, and helps you optimize your content for these words. This allows you to write in a more natural way, so you can satisfy your users and rank high in the search results!

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What is keyword cannibalization?

Marieke van de Rakt

If you optimize your articles for similar terms, your rankings might suffer from keyword cannibalization: you’ll be ‘devouring’ your own chances to rank in Google! Especially when your site is growing, chances are your content will start competing with itself. Here, I’ll explain why keyword cannibalism can be detrimental to SEO, how you can recognize it and what to do about it.

What is keyword cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization means that you have various blog posts or articles on your site that can rank for the same search query in Google. Either because the topic they cover is too similar or because you optimized them for the same keyphrase. If you optimize posts or articles for similar search queries, they’re eating away at each other’s chances to rank. Usually, Google will only show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search results for a specific query. If you’re a high authority domain, you might get 3.

Why is keyword cannibalism bad for SEO?

If you cannibalize your own keywords, you’re competing with yourself for ranking in Google. Let’s say you have two posts on the exact same topic. In that case, Google can’t distinguish which article should rank highest for a certain query. In addition, important factors like backlinks and CTR get diluted over several posts instead of one. As a result, they’ll all probably both rank lower. Therefore our SEO analysis will give a red bullet whenever you optimize a post for a focus keyword you’ve used before.

But, keyword cannibalism can also occur if you optimize posts for focus keywords that are not exactly, but almost the same. For instance, I wrote two posts about whether or not readability is a ranking factor. The post ‘Does readability rank?‘ was optimized for [does readability rank], while the post ‘Readability ranks!‘ was optimized for the focus keyword [readability ranking factor]. The posts had a slightly different angle but were still very similar. For Google, it is hard to figure out which of the two articles is the most important.

Update: Did you see the same article? That’s correct, by now we’ve fixed this cannibalization issue, but we’ve kept this example for the sake of illustration.

How to recognize it?

Checking whether or not your site suffers from keyword cannibalism is easy. You simply do a search for your site, for any specific keyword you suspect might have multiple results. In my case, I’ll google site:yoast.com readability ranks. The first two results are the articles I suspected to suffer from cannibalization.

Googling ‘site:domain.com “keyword” will give you an easy answer to the question of whether you’re suffering from keyword cannibalism. You can check your findings by typing the same keyword into Google (using a private browser or local search result checker like https://valentin.app/). Which of your pages do you see in the search results, and what position do they rank? Of course, if two of your pages for the same keyword are ranking #1 and #2, that’s not a problem. But do you see your articles, for example on positions 7 and 8? Then it’s time to sort things out!

Solving keyword cannibalization

We have an extensive article written by Joost that explains how to find and fix cannibalization issues on your site. It clearly describes the four steps you should take to solve these kind issues:

  1. Audit your content
  2. Analyze content performance
  3. Decide which ones to keep
  4. Act: merge, delete, redirect

The first two steps will help you to decide which articles to keep and which ones to merge or delete. In many cases, the acting part will consist of combining and deleting articles, but also to improve internal linking on your site:

Merge/ combine articles

If two articles both attract the same audience and basically tell the same story, you should combine them. Rewrite the two posts into one amazing, kickass article. That’ll help your rankings (Google loves lengthy and well-written content) and solve your keyword cannibalization problem.

In fact, that’s exactly what we did with our two posts on readability being a ranking factor. In the end, you’ll delete one of the two articles and adapt the other one. And don’t forget: don’t just press the delete button; always make sure to redirect the post you delete to the one you keep! If that’s something you’re struggling with, Yoast SEO Premium can help: It makes creating redirects easy as pie!

Improve internal linking

You can help Google to figure out which article is most important, by setting up a decent internal linking structure. You should link from posts that are less important, to posts that are the most important to you. That way, Google can figure out (by following links) which ones you want to pop up highest in the search engines.

Your internal linking structure could solve a part of your keyword cannibalism problems. You should think about which article is most important to you and link from the less important long-tail articles, to your most important article. Read more about how to do this in my article about ranking with cornerstone content.

Keyword cannibalization and online shops

Now, if you have an online shop, you might be worried about all those product pages targeting similar keywords. For online shops, it makes sense that there are multiple pages for products that are alike. It’s very important to give site structure some thought in this case. A good strategy is to link back from every product page to your category page – the page you should optimize to rank. And keep an eye on old product pages that could potentially cannibalize more important pages, and delete and redirect those – Yoast SEO Premium could help make that easier with its handy redirect manager!

Keyword cannibalism will affect growing websites

If your site gets bigger, your chances increase to face keyword cannibalism on your own website. You’ll be writing about your favorite subjects and without even knowing it, you’ll write articles that end up rather similar. That’s what happened to me too. Once in a while, you should check the keywords you want to rank for the most. Make sure to check whether you’re suffering from keyword cannibalism. You’ll probably need to make some changes in your site structure or to rewrite some articles every now and then.

Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

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What is search intent?

Marieke van de Rakt

SEO is a way to get more traffic to your website. By ranking high in Google, you attract more people to your site. Eventually, your goal probably is to sell your stuff or to attract more regular visitors. To get more traffic to your site, you optimize your content for words people use. However, to increase your chances to rank and to really convince people to buy your stuff, subscribe to your newsletter or to come back to your website another time, you should take search intent into account. Here, I will tell you what search intent is and how to optimize your articles for search intent.

What is search intent?

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

Over the years, Google has worked hard to improve its algorithm to be able to determine people’s search intent. And, Google wants to rank pages that best fit the search term, as well as the search intent behind a specific search query. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your post or page fits the search intent of your audience.

4 types of search intent

There are a few distinct types of search intent, these four are most commonly used:

Informational intent

First, there is informational intent. Lots of searches on the internet are done by people looking for information. That could be information about the weather, information about educating children, information about SEO, you name it. People with informational intent have a specific question or want to know more about a certain topic.

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

Navigational intent

The second type of search intent is called navigational intent. People with this intent want to visit a specific website. For example, people who search for [Facebook] are usually on their way to the Facebook website.

Keep in mind that ranking high for a navigational term is only beneficial for your organic traffic if your site is the site people are looking for. For example, a few years ago, Yoast had a Google Analytics plugin, and we ranked pretty well for the term [Google Analytics]. But that didn’t drive any traffic to our site. People searching for [Google Analytics] were looking for the Google Analytics website and were hardly ever interested in our plugin.

Transactional intent

The third type of search intent is transactional intent. Lots of people buy stuff on the internet and browse the web to find the best purchase. People are searching with transactional intent when their purpose is to buy something.

Commercial investigation

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

Keyword intent

The words people use in their search queries will give insight into user intent. This works the other way around, too, when you formulate keywords with intent-specific words.

Keywords with transactional intent will often contain words like:

  • buy
  • deal
  • discount
  • product names

Informational searches can (but don’t necessarily have to) contain words like:

  • information
  • how to
  • best way to
  • why

How to optimize your content for search intent

You want to make sure that a landing page fits the search intent of your audience. If people search for information, you don’t want to show them a product page. At least, not immediately. You’d probably scare them away. If people want to buy your product, do not bore them with long articles. Lead them to your shop.

Optimizing your product pages for more commercial driven keywords is a good idea. If you sell dog vitamins, you could, for instance, optimize a product (category) page for [buy dog vitamins]. Perhaps you also have an article about administering vitamins. You could, for example, optimize that article for the search term [how to give vitamins to my dog].

It can be quite hard to determine the search intent of a query. And, perhaps different users will have a (slightly) different user intent, but still land on the same page. Luckily, there is a direct source to look at if you want to know which intent fits your keywords: the search results pages. Find out how you can use the results pages to create intent-based content.

If you want to know more about the search intent of your audience, another way is to ask them. You could make a small survey, containing questions about what people were searching for and make that survey pop up if people enter your website. That’ll probably give you many valuable insights into your audience.

Conclusion

It’s crucial to ensure that the content you’re writing fits both the terms people are searching for, as well as the search intent of your audience. Make sure your post or page is informational, when people are searching for information. But lead people to your sales pages if they are looking to buy one of your products.

Read more: Keyword research: the ultimate guide »

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Adapting your content strategy to changing times

Edwin Toonen

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.

adapting your content strategy
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. 

A special mention goes to SEOMonitor for their awesome Search Trends after COVID-19 tracker. 

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.

Stay safe and good luck!

Read more: Articles on SEO Copywriting »

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4 tips to quickly improve your website in the current situation

Melina Reintjens

Everything is happening online, now that the situation with COVID-19 has everyone staying at home as much as possible. You’re not going to events, you’re not sitting down with customers. So, your online presence is more important than ever. Your website is your business card. And you want it to be found! But many people were probably not prepared for a situation like this and for their site to suddenly become this important. So, what can you do to quickly improve your website? In this blog post, I’ll share some tips on what you can do to improve your site ASAP.

1. Improve your site’s structure

A relatively quick way to boost your site is by working on your internal linking structure. If you make sure your most important pages get relevant internal links, they have a much better chance of ranking in the search engines. That’s because a good internal linking structure helps Google understand your site and figure out which pages are most prominent.

The best way to do this depends on the kind of site you have. As an online shop, you probably want to boost your category pages, but as a restaurant, you may want your brand new ‘delivery’ page ranked ASAP. Check out our ultimate guide to site structure for some tips that fit your site best. 

In any case, you can use the Yoast SEO text link counter to check how many internal links a post or page already has to it. That’ll quickly give you an idea of which posts need a more prominent place in your site structure. Need more help? Yoast SEO Premium includes an internal linking tool that gives you linking suggestions for posts or pages to link to. It’ll help you improve your site structure and save a lot of valuable time!

2. Work on your most important pages

Quality content remains crucial for every website. So, think about how you can improve your important existing pages. Perhaps you didn’t have the time yet to give them the attention they deserve. If you can, invest time and effort to demonstrate your expertise on those important pages; that means research into your topic, your audience and what they’re looking for. 

A quicker way to improve your (most important) pages is to look through your post overview and work on the content that has an orange or red bullet for either the SEO score or readability score. Getting that green bullet will give you the edge, as it means your content is well-optimized and readable for a wide audience. Take a look at how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool, or more specifically, how to use the readability analysis.  

Another tip: Don’t forget to keep the information on your informational pages and contact pages accurate and up to date, so your visitors have the latest details. In times like these, communication is important, so people know where they stand! 

3. Upgrade your site speed

Site speed plays an important part in SEO, so if you want to boost your site that’s definitely an aspect to focus on. There are several things you can do to improve your site’s speed relatively easily. Firstly, you could install a caching plugin. A caching plugin keeps static parts of your site saved on your server and serves users these lighter HTML pages instead of processing the relatively resource-intensive WordPress PHP scripts. There are both free and paid caching plugins available and they can significantly speed up your site, check out our post on improving site speed for more information. 

If you don’t feel comfortable making changes like that right now: optimizing your images is also a quick win when it comes to speed. Odds are you’ve uploaded big, high definition images here and there on your site. These take a long time to load, while most of the time, a lower resolution image will do just fine. Time to resize your images! You can do that using an image optimization tool, such as jpeg.io.

Read more: Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines »

4. Add some structured data!

Structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand your website. What’s more, certain types of structured data can get you a featured snippet in the search results, and that’s a great way to stand out! 

If you use Yoast SEO (version 11.0 or higher), relevant structured data is already added for your site. But, there’s more you can do! For instance, use Yoast’s FAQ blocks to answer questions that might come up for your users. As mentioned before, clear communication is more important than ever. Also, Yoast’s HowTo blocks come in handy to easily explain to people at home the steps of how to do something. Whether you explain how to bake a nice loaf of bread, make a craft project for your children’s schoolwork or how to stay fit during quarantine with bodyweight workouts: don’t forget to use Yoast’s HowTo blocks for a shot at a featured snippet!

If you’ve had to reschedule events and are comfortable adding structured data yourself, you could also add schema for rescheduled events. 

Bonus tip: Focus on social media 

While not strictly SEO, in these times, it’s a good idea to pay extra attention to social media. Many people are using it (again) to stay connected and find the latest information. So, make sure you’re active on your social media profiles to stay in contact with people. Keep them informed about your activities, about how you can help, or about how people can help you. I’m seeing a lot of creativity on social media, such as online dance classes, or a ‘sew-along’ through video calls. Whatever your niche might be, there are many ways to stay in touch and connect with your audience in a positive way, so give that some thought!

Keep reading: Social media strategy: Where to begin? »

Do what you can to quickly improve your website

There we have it, four ways to quickly improve your website, for both content-related and technical aspects. These are uncertain times; it may be hard for you to do all the things mentioned above, and that’s OK. But hopefully, these tips will help you boost your online presence and get your business through the situation. If you’re eager to learn more about SEO, have a look at our All-around SEO training, which is currently available for free, to help you improve your site even further!

The post 4 tips to quickly improve your website in the current situation appeared first on Yoast.

Why and how to use the search results to create intent-based content

Melina Reintjens

Search intent is becoming more and more important. Google is getting better and better at guessing exactly what searchers are looking for when they type in their – sometimes cryptic – search terms. That’s why you need to focus on it as well! What is search intent, again? How do search engines approach user intent? And how can you assess if you target the right type of intent with your content? This post is all about that!

Search intent?

Let’s start with a quick refresher on the term ‘search intent’. You’ll recognize from your own online behavior that each search term is entered with a particular intent in mind. Sometimes, you want to find information. Other times, you’re looking to research or buy a certain product. And don’t forget all those times you enter a brand name because you don’t want to type out the site’s entire URL. We generally distinguish four types of searcher intent: informational, commercial, transactional and navigational. If this is new to you, head over to our SEO basics article on search intent, that’ll make understanding this post a bit easier.

Search engines try to predict user intent

Of course, for each of these four categories of user intent, there can still be a lot of variation in what exactly a user is looking for. Search engines use data to interpret what the dominant intent of a query is. They want to present results that match user intent exactly. Before we can use the search results to create our intent based content, we need to understand how search intent works for different queries. 

Search terms with dominant intent

Sometimes, a search term has one dominant interpretation. Those terms can be very straightforward, like [buy King Louie Betty dress] or [symptoms of diabetes]. For the first term, results will mainly show pages offering that particular model of dress for sale, or similar dresses by that brand. For the second, results are filled with answer boxes and websites offering medical information. 

Google also understands the intent behind terms that aren’t as literal. For example, whenever people all over the world enter [white house] as a search term, they’re not looking for information on painting their house white. They want to know something about the residence of the president of the United States, and search engines show results accordingly. 

Search terms referring to several entities 

In many cases, the same term can be used to look for very different things. Let’s take the search term [Mercury]. Some people will be looking for the planet, others for the element, even others for the Roman god of commerce, and a few might actually be looking for the lead singer of the band Queen. The reason for that is that this one word can be used to describe several distinctly different things – also described as entities. The context makes clear which entity a word is referring to. It’s important to be aware of how this works in search engines, so read up on the topic in Edwin’s post about entities and semantics.

All these searches probably have informational intent, but they’re not looking for the same thing. While it’s difficult – especially from one word, like in this example – search engines still try to figure out what their users really want when typing in their search term. So, if, for example, less people click to the ‘mercury-element’ results, than to the ‘mercury-planet’ results, they’ll deduce that more people want information about the planet Mercury, and alter the results pages accordingly. If we take a look at the search results for the term [Mercury], we’ll indeed see that most results relate to the planet. From that, we can conclude from that it’s the dominant intent: most people who type in this term are looking for the planet. 

Google tries to satisfy multiple intents for the search term [mercury]

Search terms without dominant intent

Some search terms don’t have one clear-cut intent, which leaves search engines guessing at what to show. You can recognize these searches when the results pages show many different results. Take the query [tree house], for example. Depending on your exact location, the search results show images of tree houses, information and videos on how to build one, advertisements for buying one, and businesses called ‘Tree house’, including a brewery, restaurants, holiday homes, and a code learning web platform. This variety means that Google has most types of intent behind this query covered. But it may make ranking more difficult.

Why should you use the search results to create intent-based content?

Simply put: because the search results give direct insight into what people are looking for when they’re typing in your keywords. You can easily lose sight of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as your most direct source of information. But if you focus on your site alone, or only look at things through the eyes of tools, you miss invaluable information about what your audience is looking for. Search results pages not only show you how you and your competitors are doing, but also where new opportunities are and whether you need to adjust your SEO strategy. For instance, if you see a lot of images in the results pages for your keyphrase, and you don’t have any, that’s an opportunity! 

To get the most objective idea of the search results for a query, make sure you use a private browser window. A local SERP-checker, such as https://valentin.app/ can also help you get even more objective results, and find out what the results look like in other cities. 

Creating intent-based content yourself

There are a few steps you can take to attune your content better to user search intent and work towards creating intent-based content.

  1. Choose keywords from your keyword research and enter them in a private browser window or SERP-checker.
  2. Analyze what you see on the results pages. Which type of intent is most common? (informational, commercial, etc?) Is there one dominant interpretation and if so, what is it? Do you see videos? Images? Related searches?
  3. Evaluate whether the content you have – or plan to publish – is in line with the things you found on the results pages. Do the types of intent match? Is your content in the right form?
    1. If yes, great! Perhaps you can find ranking ideas in related searches. And, have a quick peek at the competition, to see what you’re up against.
    2. Do you notice that things don’t match up, and the SERPs show intent that doesn’t align with what you offer in your content? Depending on what you find in the SERPs, you might still be able to rank. For example, perhaps there isn’t a dominant type of intent, in which case your content could still make the cut. However, if you find intent that unanimously doesn’t match what you have to offer at all, ranking will be difficult, unless you’re having a high authority site. In that case, consider whether it’s worth the effort to create your content, or if you need to adjust your strategy a little. A solution could be to target a slightly different related keyword, with better matching user intent, or to adjust your content. 

This all still sounds a bit abstract. So, let’s look at a few examples to give you a better idea of this process in practice!

Examples of research to create intent-based content

Using the right terminology in informational content

Results page for the search term [website maintenance]

Here at Yoast, we write about all aspects of SEO. One of those aspects is keeping your website in good shape. We had an article planned on this topic, and one of the most important terms we used in this article was ‘Website maintenance’. Our article was about keeping your site content fresh and your site’s structure well-maintained in the process. However, when we started looking at the SERPs, we noticed that wasn’t what people were looking for at all when they used that term. The content in the answer box wasn’t really related, and the other results almost exclusively consisted of companies offering services to work on technical site maintenance and hosting, with some results stressing the importance of this.

So, from analyzing the SERPs, we got two important insights. Firstly, many people using the search term [website maintenance] have commercial intent, rather than informational. Secondly, they were actually looking for something completely different. So, while we could write an article about website maintenance, to rank, it needed to be a completely different article. It should discuss things like hosting, technical site performance, etc, as that’s what searchers are looking for. 

We realized we had to make changes to the article, adapt our strategy and target a keyword with better matching intent. We changed some of the wording in this article (and related ones as well) from ‘maintenance’ to ‘keep old content’, ‘update or delete’ and ‘cannibalization’. Of course, you could argue that we didn’t pick the right words here in the first place. The reason for that might’ve been that we got a bit stuck in our own content bubble, and forgot about the user. Looking at the SERPs helped change perspective in this case.

Business case: selling recycled jewelry

Let’s look at another example, one that small business owners might relate to. Say, you run an online shop that sells jewelry made with recycled materials. One of your product groups is jewelry made of recycled nespresso pods. So, you’re thinking of trying to rank for [recycled nespresso pods] with a product page or category page. Is that a good idea? Time to look at the search results pages!

Of course, it somewhat depends on location, but prominent on the results page for [recycled nespresso pods] are results about how the pods are recycled. A few are from Nespresso itself, and you could also find some of their videos on recycling. Other results cover the process of recycling and how consumers can get their pods recycled. There is nothing on using recycled pods as a crafting material. So, now you know that this phrase will be difficult to rank for, as it’s not what users are looking for. 

the search results pages for the term recycled nespresso pods jewelry.
Results page for [recycled nespresso pods jewelry].

What about [recycled nespresso pods jewelry], then? As can be expected, the results align a lot better with what you have to offer. However, most results are geared towards informational intent. While the top result is Etsy -which would be difficult to compete with- other results show lists of ideas and tutorials. This means, again, it would be hard to get your commercial or transactional product (category) pages on this list. However, you could still rank if you’d change your strategy, and wrote a tutorial on crafting a basic piece of nespresso jewelry. In such a tutorial, you could easily refer people to your products if they’re looking for more intricate pieces. It might even be worthwhile to make a video tutorial, as there are video results on the results pages.

Conclusion

This post covers a lot of different aspects of search intent in this post. It deals with which types there are, whether or not there is a dominant interpretation and looking at the SERPs to gauge a query’s intent. The exact steps to take will differ on a case to case basis. A good takeaway, in any case, is to always take a good look at the results pages for keyphrases you’re targeting. Analyze what you see, as it’s valuable, first-hand information. Be realistic and be prepared to put in the work if you find you need to change your strategy. We’ve said it time and again: SEO is a lot of work, and you need to work hard to be the best result – for the right query.

Read more: On-SERP SEO can help you battle zero-click results »

The post Why and how to use the search results to create intent-based content appeared first on Yoast.

What is the user journey in SEO?

Edwin Toonen

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:

Here’s an example by NN Group »
A more complex one by Columbia Road »
Or this one by GatherContent »

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. 

The post What is the user journey in SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

Semantically link entities to your content with Yoast SEO

Edwin Toonen

Search engines love entities. Entities can be people, places, things, concepts, or ideas and they will often appear in the Knowledge Graph. Lots of search terms can be an entity, but specific search terms can also have different meanings and thus, be different entities. Take [Mars] for example; are you talking about the planet entity or the candy bar entity? The context you give these entities in your content determines how search engines see and file your content. Find out how to link entities to your content using Yoast SEO.

Let’s talk semantics

Semantics is the search for meaning in words. In theory, you could write an article about Mars without ever mentioning it directly. People would understand it if you provide enough context in the form of commonly used terms and phrases. To illustrate this, we’ll take the keyword [Mars]. Mars is a so-called entity, and search engines use these to determine the semantics of a search. You can use structured data to support the discovery of entities on your page.

According to Google’s definition, an entity is:

“a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. For example, an entity may be a person, place, item, idea, abstract concept, concrete element, other suitable thing, or any combination thereof. Generally, entities include things or concepts represented linguistically by nouns.”

If you search for Mars on Google, you’ll most likely get results about the planet Mars. But why? Why isn’t the Mars candy bar in the top listings? Or Mars the chocolate company? Or the discovery district MaRS in Toronto? Maybe the Japanese movie called Mars? Or one of the many Mars-related movies made over the years? This is because Google makes an educated guess using search intent and your search history. Also, it uses co-occurring synonyms, keywords, and phrases to determine which page is about one of these specific search variations and which ones to show.

Co-occurring terms and phrases

Co-occurring terms and phrases are those that are commonly used to describe an entity. These are the terms that are most likely to pop up in content about that entity. Content about the planet Mars will probably contain mentions of the following terms:

  • ‘red planet’
  • ‘northern hemisphere’
  • ‘low atmospheric pressure’
  • ‘martian craters’
  • ‘red-orange appearance’
  • ‘terrestrial planet’
  • ‘olympus mons’
  • ‘second-smallest planet in the Solar System’
  • Etc.

Pages with Mars candy bar content might feature phrases like:

  • ‘chocolate candy bar’
  • ‘nougat and caramel covered in milk chocolate’
  • ‘limited-edition variants’
  • ‘ingredients’
  • ‘nutritional information’
  • Etc

While content about the 2016 Mars movie will probably mention its main protagonists Rei Kashino and Makio Kirishima.

All these words are co-occurring keywords and phrases. It’s a type of content that is semantically related to the main keyword, but that doesn’t contain the keyword itself. This might include synonyms but often expands on that because they clarify the knowledge of the term, instead of saying the same thing differently. Search engine spiders scan your content for these related terms to paint a picture about the nature of your page. This way, it can correctly index the page, ie. file under [planet Mars], not [Mars the candy bar].

Optimize for phrase-based indexing

Over the years, Google was awarded several patents that suggested the development of a phrase-based indexing system and systems using word co-occurrence to improve the clustering of topics. This information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe content. By analyzing the context surrounding an entity – meaning all the phrases that are commonly connected to an entity – Google can truly understand what a piece of content is about.

That might sound complex, but it is something you can optimize for. And you are probably already doing that – to a certain extent. First, do keyword research to uncover the terms people generally search for and keep search intent in your mind at all times. After that, provide context in your articles.

When writing about an entity in your content, it makes a lot of sense to give search engines – and readers for that matter – as much context as possible. Use every meaningful sentence you can think of. This way, you can take away any doubt about the meaning of your content.

If your subject is the planet Mars, you need to take a look at the Knowledge Graph in Google. Scour Wikipedia. Find out what kind of common terms and phrases co-occur in search results and incorporate them into your content so you can give your term the right context. Also, run a search and open the sites of competitors that rank high for your search terms. What are they writing about and how do they describe the entity? What terms and phrases can you use in your content? By doing this, you’ll find out that there will be much overlap with what you had in mind, but there will be many new – and maybe better – nuggets for you to use.

Feed the Topic Layer

Topics are groups of terms that share the same concept. Google’s obsession with entities and knowledge graphs comes to a head in something called the Topic Layer. This Topic Layer is built on top of the knowledge graph and works as the glue that connects entities to topics making it easier for them to surface the correct content once needed. Because the Topic Layer knows a topic inside out — or it should —, it can adapt whatever it shows based on knowledge and need.

Google uses the Topic Layer to power Discover, the mobile app with an endless stream of cool stuff you are bound to like. It is meant as a tool to give you content you weren’t even looking for, so to say. To make your content stand out in this new world, you need to connect your topic to all entities and make sure that this matches what people are looking for as well.

Helpful tools to find topics, entities and concepts

Knowing your topic inside out is key in producing a piece of content that incorporates all essential terms naturally. This is why you should do research. Not just keyword research, but research your topic in general. Leave no stone unturned.

Luckily, there are a lot of tools that can help you fill in those topics, phrases and entities. Try the following to get a good idea of what you are looking for:

How to use Yoast SEO to improve your entity 

After you’ve found concepts related to your topic and entities, you can use Yoast SEO to write awesome content. The various analyses help you keep on topic and guide you to producing quality content that not only fits what users want but search engines as well. Yoast SEO Premium lets you do even more.

One of the things you can do with Yoast SEO Premium, is analyze and improve your text for synonyms and related keyphrases. Filling these in, makes sure that your content fully utilizes the power of relatedness.

In short, here’s how to do that:

  1. Research your subject
  2. Structure the topic (mind mapping rules!)
  3. Pick your main focus keyphrase for this post
  4. Collect synonyms
  5. Find related keyphrases or concepts
  6. Find synonyms for these terms
  7. Enter your focus keyphrase in Yoast SEO 
  8. Enter the synonyms of the focus keyphrase
  9. Fill in the first related keyphrase
  10. Include all the synonyms for that term
  11. And another related keyphrase, if necessary
  12. Including synonyms
  13. Write an epic post!
  14. Check the feedback you get from Yoast SEO and adjust accordingly (remember, not everything has to be green)

With enough research you know your topic inside out so you should be able to write a post that naturally encompasses all important concepts, entities and phrases. Yoast SEO Premium will now help you describe your topic as well as possible. 

Don’t forget to optimize your post with related keyphrases and synonyms, available in Yoast SEO Premium
Synonyms let you add a lot more context to your articles

One more thing: no LSI keywords

Over the years, the term “LSI keywords” started to pop up again and again as a magical way to play into one of Google’s ranking factors. They are not. Yes, you have to provide search engines context. No, latent semantic indexing has nothing to do with it. There’s no evidence whatsoever that search engines have ever used latent semantic indexing to determine rankings. Latent semantic indexing was a document analysis patent from the 90’s that only seemed to work on a limited set of documents, and it has no place in SEO.

The post Semantically link entities to your content with Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

Readability: Dumbing down or opening up?

Marieke van de Rakt

Writing a readable text can be daunting. Especially if the topic of your blog is difficult or extremely technical. Is it really necessary to focus on readability if your audience is used to your jargon? Well, although your audience might be up to the task of reading your lingo, the entire purpose of SEO is to attract traffic beyond the audience you already reach. If you aim for the top positions in the search engines, you should have texts that are readable and understandable for a large audience. This doesn’t mean you’re dumbing down your copy. Here, I explain why, and how you should make sure your text is readable.

Writing a readable text is hard

We do feel your pain. We understand you chase those green readability bullets and that can be hard if you’re writing for an advanced audience. Sometimes, people ventilate their frustrations on twitter. One of our users tweeted: ‘My blog posts are written for grownups and I write at the college level. Sorry, but I don’t know how to dumb myself down.’

We get that it might feel like you need to dumb yourself down in order to get the readability bullets green. However, you could also try to think of it as opening your content up to an audience you’ve not yet reached. And that’s the goal of any SEO-strategy: getting that traffic to your website!

Why should I care about readability?

Readability is important for your user. Reading from a screen is hard and people get distracted quickly. But, most importantly, you want people to understand what you’re writing. You want to get your message across. Nobody likes to read something that’s incomprehensible, boring or stuffed with keywords. If you write a text that people don’t understand, you won’t help people find what they need. 

Moreover, readability is also important for Google. Of course, if your text is better for the user, it will rank better, as Google optimizes for that same user. And, it is very important to realize here that Google’s algorithm is trying to mimic humans. It tries to read texts the way humans read texts. As Google becomes more capable of understanding and scanning texts in a human-like way, the demands on the readability of text also rise. Google will have a hard time reading sentences that are very long or that have complicated grammatical structures. For these texts, it will be harder for Google to figure out what they’re about. And this will result in lower rankings as well.

Read more about the importance of readability in our blog post ‘Does readability rank?’

Is ‘dumbing down’ really necessary?

Some niches require lingo. For technical blogs, you’ll probably use difficult, technical terms. You cannot avoid that. Nevertheless, that does not mean that such a text can’t comply with our readability analysis. In a previous life, I wrote a PhD-thesis called ‘The intergenerational transmission of criminal convictions over the life course.’ This was a hard topic. It involved many technical terms, cryptical hypotheses and boring analyses. However, the introduction of my PhD-thesis complies with the Yoast readability analysis (I did not enter the entire thesis as it contains a lot of tables and references). I needed to add subheadings and white spaces between paragraphs, because that is not particularly common in the field of research I did my PhD in.

Without wanting to brag: I have a green bullet for readability on all the blog posts I write. However, I often fail to comply with at least one of the checks. For this blog post, I had a hard time complying with passive voice (but still got a green bullet in the end). In other cases, I got orange bullets for transition words.

The readability checks for this post

It’s important to realize that one red bullet is not really a problem, yet. You should focus on getting your overall bullet green. If your sentences are a little bit too long, but you compensate that with short paragraphs, your text will be a good read overall. The following tips will help you improve the readability of texts with complex topics.

The overall score in the Yoast SEO content analysis
If your ‘overall’ readability bullet is green, your post’s readability is usually well-suited for a large audience!

Tips on opening up your writing style

What to do if you’re failing our readability analysis and writing about a complicated topic? First of all, I would recommend you shorten your sentences. You should probably not avoid the technical lingo you’re using, but you can try writing about complicated matters in short sentences. Usually, when a sentence is rather lengthy, you’ve created a combined sentence. Such sentences can be easily split into two (or three even). Our readability analysis lets you highlight your lengthy sentences. That makes it pretty easy to find and shorten them.

The second thing you can do if you’re writing about something complicated is to pay attention to your paragraphs. Start a paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate on that sentence. This helps a reader to grasp the concept of your article, just by reading the first sentence of each paragraph. Make sure your paragraphs aren’t too long either (7 or 8 sentences is quite long enough). And, add a subheading that tells the reader what to expect in that paragraph. That will help your reader to grasp the meaning of your text much more easily.

A final tip on how to quickly improve readability is to use transition words. You can make your writing much more readable by using proper transition words like ‘most important’ and ‘because’. The Yoast readability analysis allows you to check your use of transition words. If you use too few, you can add extra transition words in pieces of your text where you have very few. Using transition words is a bit like putting cement between your sentences. The relationship between two sentences becomes apparent through the use of transition words. Readers will understand your content much better if you use these kinds of words properly.

Conclusion: open up to a large audience!

The goal of SEO is to attract new visitors to your website. You want to rank high in Google in order to get people to click on your results. And you want those visitors to stay and read your post. No matter how difficult the topic you’re writing about, if you care about SEO, you should try to make your text readable. Your users and Google will reward you for it!

Read more: “Yoast SEO hates my writing style!” – Common misconceptions about the Yoast plugin »

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Timeless SEO tips: 6 universal SEO tactics that never go out of fashion

Melina Reintjens

Things are always on the move in the SEO world. Google regularly updates its algorithm and the competition is never far behind. And the current situation is only making things harder, with the shift to online for businesses that might not be prepared. So if you’re not sure what to do, wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of timeless SEO improvements to focus on? We thought it might be! Arm yourself with these timeless SEO tactics and you’ll never go wrong.

1. Stay on the light side

If you’re desperate for quick results, you may be tempted to use blackhat SEO tactics. Well, don’t! Never, ever buy links, try to trick search engines or visitors with redirects or spam links on other sites. It may work for a short while, but search engines actively discourage this kind of thing, so it always backfires in the end and harms your rankings. You don’t want those tricks or bought links coming back to haunt you, do you?

Here at Yoast, we advocate Holistic SEO, which means you need to be the best result! Give your visitors high-quality content, a great user experience and a secure, technically superior website. It may take more time and effort, but it’s much more sustainable in the long run. Let’s take link building as an example: approached holistically, you produce quality content that people actually want to share. You can then reach out to relevant websites to see if they’ll consider linking to you. The links you’ll get this way will be much more valuable than any link you can buy. So go the extra mile and stay on the light side of SEO. Your website will benefit in the long run.

2. Optimize your site speed

In SEO, faster is better. We’re pretty confident that this will always be the case, as people expect to get content served to them quickly. Nobody likes waiting, even for a split second, so it always pays to invest time in improving your site’s speed.

There are several ways to speed up your WordPress site. We can’t cover them all in this article, but a good start is to install a caching plugin. This keeps static parts of your site saved on your server, and serves users these lighter HTML pages instead of processing the relatively resource-intensive WordPress PHP scripts. There are both free and paid caching plugins available and they can significantly speed up your site.

Read more: Improving site speed: tools and suggestions »

Images are another factor that’s often overlooked as people build their website. Big, high definition images will take a long time to load, while most of the time, a lower resolution image will do just fine. Always take the time to resize your images using an image optimization plugin.

And a final speed optimization tip: if your visitors come from all over the world, it may be worthwhile to use a CDN (or Content Delivery Network). It’ll direct visitors to the servers closest to their location, thereby greatly improving loading times. 

3. Work on excellent content

Another timeless SEO tip: don’t compromise on the quality of your content. Create the best quality content that you can, and consistently review and improve on it wherever possible. SEO isn’t just about improving your website, it’s also about beating the competition. In many cases, this means content that’s only ‘good enough’ simply won’t do. You have to demonstrate your expertise and stand out from the crowd. That means a big investment of time and effort; research into your topic, your audience and what they’re looking for.

Keep reading: It’s not enough to ‘write content’-you have to publish resources »

You may not always be able to do this right away, which is why you need to keep improving your articles, so they become valuable resources for your audience. How? Well, that all depends on your topic and what you’re trying to achieve. It’s always a good idea to ask yourself whether your questions would be answered by visiting your pages, and whether it aligns with what you’re seeing in the search results. These next tips will also help you improve the overall quality of your content.

4. Keep your audience in mind

Whether the aim of your website is to help you sell your product, or to attract followers for your blog posts, you will only succeed if you focus on what your audience wants and needs. That’s something that isn’t going to change, as search engines always aim to give users what they’re looking for. This is evident from the growing importance of search intent, so doing keyword research without first considering search intent is no longer an option. Are you really offering searchers what they’re looking for when they type in their search term -your keyword? Are they looking for information or to take action, and what do they need from you? Take a good look at the search results for your keywords to answer those questions.

There’s another reason to really focus on what your audience needs: the competition for people’s attention is fierce. So users can be picky, and they want to know whether you can solve their problem, or what they will get out of reading your blog post. They don’t much care about your product-related jargon, or why you want them to read your blog post. So, don’t overlook your visitor’s perspective in your SEO copy. That also includes not writing too much ‘I’ in your content. Make it about your user, not yourself!

Read on: Engaging your online audience: 8 practical tips »

5. Improve your internal linking structure

It’s always a good idea to make it easy for search engines to crawl your site to work out which articles are most important and to help your users find what they’re looking for. That’s why you can’t go wrong by improving your internal linking structure. Make sure that your most important articles also have the most internal links pointing to them. And don’t forget to add links to your most recent posts, to avoid orphaned content. It’s key to make sure that links are relevant to the context of a post or they won’t make sense to either the search engine or the user.

6. Keep your content well-maintained

A final timeless SEO tip: staying on top of your content maintenance always pays off. Not only will you save yourself the effort of cleaning up a load of posts in one go, but your content also stays fresh and relevant. Both search engines and users like that! What’s more, keeping track of your content and the topics it covers helps you avoid keyword cannibalization. And, you don’t want to impair your own chances of ranking by offering too much similar, competing content.

Of course, cleaning up is not generally people’s favorite task, so this is easier said than done. It helps to approach things systematically. Do a site search for one of your most important keywords and see what comes up. Do articles overlap, and do you still need to keep everything? How are pages performing? You’ll probably see some articles that can be deleted or merged. Doing this regularly helps to keep on top of things.

Timeless SEO: Be the best result! 

In the end, these timeless SEO tips boil down to the same thing: if you want to rank, you need to put effort into being the best result. Search engines may change their algorithms, but they ultimately want to offer their users what they’re looking for: high quality content that’s up to date and served on a fast loading website with no dirty tricks. It may seem like a lot of work, but at least it’s a clear objective to work on, right? So, let’s get on with it!

Keep on reading: WordPress SEO: the definitive guide »

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