If you know Moz, you know the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s the resource marketers the world over have used to learn SEO and get a taste for its potential and power. And while we offer a delectable buffet of guides in our content smörgåsbord, there hasn’t been one comprehensive resource to serve as a follow-up for those who’ve mastered the beginner level. That’s why we’ve developed the Professional’s Guide to SEO: a guide that will help folks take the next step, preparing them with all the baseline knowledge they need to practice SEO in a professional capacity.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing chapters and/or chapter excerpts here on the blog, with the full guide releasing at the end. Yes, we want to whet your appetite, but we’d also love to hear your feedback — if there’s something you know in your heart of hearts we should cover, get at us on Twitter (@moz) and let us know!
First up, we’re sharing a portion of our chapter on advanced SEO strategy. Brought to you by the inimitable Kavi Kardos, Moz alumni and SEO Manager at Automox, this chapter looks at getting started with a next-step strategy, tactics to implement, and resources for leveling up.
Bon appétit!
Advanced SEO Strategy
Getting started: SEO priorities & plausibility
In the beginning stages, it’s easy to audit a site and come up with long lists of pie-in-the-sky ideas for content, link building, technical, and so on. Most sites, especially those that have never been handled by an advanced SEO, need a lot of work, and the new strategist arriving on the scene often gets pulled in several directions by various teams seeking their expertise.
Prioritization of the tasks you’ll undertake and the tactics you’ll employ is a vital first step in developing an advanced SEO strategy. And it’s important to work on this step thoughtfully — ask questions, be realistic, and involve as many stakeholders as you’re able to meet with. A misstep in the prioritization stage can throw off your schedule for the whole quarter and cause important tasks to fall through the cracks.
Try a SWOT analysis
It may feel old-fashioned, but the classic SWOT analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a great way to frame your initial site audit because it will familiarize you with both the website itself and the competitive landscape in which it lives. As you explore both, jot down your thoughts in a Google Doc that you can return to whenever you discover something new.
Strengths: What is already working well? What high-value terms does the site already rank for? What high-authority sites already link to you? Does the site already score well in page speed and performance tests or avoid other common technical snafus?
Weaknesses: What is the site lacking? Is it difficult to navigate? Are its sitemaps and robots.txt file messy? Is the organization lacking insight because it doesn’t make use of basic reporting tools like Google Analytics? Does it have a lackluster content strategy?
Opportunities: What’s on the horizon that could be capitalized on as part of your strategy? Is there a highly valuable asset that’s already been created and is now begging for distribution? Is a tough competitor lagging behind in a certain content area?
Threats: What’s on the horizon that could be harmful to your search visibility? Is there an up-and-coming competitor with an obvious wealth of SEO resources? Is there a platform migration looming? Is the site likely to fall victim to the next algorithm update?
Being conscious of the site’s current standings, both in the SERPs and in terms of its overall health, will help you prioritize tactics based on urgency. The most dire threats should usually be addressed first, while minor weaknesses can often be moved to your “nice to have” list.
Assess the organization’s search maturity
Regardless of how urgent the need is or how simple a task seems to you, the difficulty of getting your SEO recommendations implemented will vary from organization to organization. The plausibility of executing your strategy depends largely on the organization’s search maturity, or how fully they understand and integrate SEO at all levels of the business.
The concept of search maturity was developed by Heather Physioc of VMLY&R, and her guidance on diagnosing where your organization falls along the maturity spectrum is an absolute must-read at this stage in the strategic planning process. Not only does using this model help you solidify your recommendations; it also makes it more likely that those recommendations will see the light of day because it allows you to communicate with stakeholders on their level.
How much buy-in can you expect from your department, your direct manager or client contact, and the rest of the larger team all the way up to the C-suite? If SEO has been socialized across the organization and is already a part of the company culture, you can probably expect your recommendations to be met with excitement. If not, you may experience some pushback when asking for necessary resources. At an agency, you’ll be dealing with the confines of existing SEO packages as well as the amount of time you’re expected to spend on each client each month. As an in-house SEO, you may have more autonomy but must often answer to more stakeholders and navigate more red tape.
How difficult will it be to get recommended changes implemented? If the content team has an existing calendar that tends to be jam-packed, new assets may not get slotted in as quickly as you’d like. If the web devs are slammed, working back-end fixes into their sprint cycle can be challenging.
What resources will be available for SEO? Resources come in many forms, and the most scarce of them tend to be headcount and tools. Are there writers on staff who are capable of creating best-in-class content? Does the marketing team have dedicated developers, or are the folks with access to the site’s code in a totally separate department? What tool subscriptions already exist, and how much budget is available to add to your tool kit?
Create an impact vs. effort matrix
Once you know which areas of the site need the most help the fastest, it’s time to make a list of recommended tactics and further prioritize that list by likely impact weighed against required effort, based on what you learned in the previous step.
Create a matrix like the one above, perhaps in a meeting with relevant stakeholders. The likely impact of a tactic could be small, medium, or large, and the same scale will apply to the level of effort required to complete it. Plot each planned tactic into its own cell. Your list of tactics for the quarter, the year, or whatever time frame is dictated by your organization can include granular tasks as well as larger-scale projects — just make sure you’ve broken down any bigger ideas into pieces that make sense within the plot.
Taking urgency into account, tackle the tactics that will have the highest impact and require the lowest effort first. You may also want to set in motion some more demanding, high-impact tactics at kickoff if they can be chipped away at simultaneously. Low-impact, high-effort tactics can often be reevaluated.
Want more news about the Professional’s Guide to SEO? Don’t miss any of our future sneak peeks — make sure you’re signed up for Moz Blog email updates!
Last year was an incredible year for Core Updates, and for changes to how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs, led by developments in Google’s algorithms, and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.
Multimedia first
Why should you consider a multimedia-first SEO strategy?
MUM is the latest in Google’s suite of super-powerful algorithms, which help them to understand information in new and different ways. It runs alongside BERT, but it's actually much more powerful than BERT.
MUM stands for “multitask unified model”, and not only does it process natural language, but it does so in over 75 languages — and counting. It's also able to process text and images with a similar quality, and is increasing its ability to process video and audio in the near future. This means we’re likely to see the impact of this in the SERPs, specifically what they look like, which is also likely to shape some of the targeted algorithm updates in the future.
This shift in focus is a natural evolution of a mobile-first digital experience that allows users to engage with content dynamically using a mix of inputs, outputs, and tools, often simultaneously. Google’s push towards better understanding — and towards ranking media like image and video — will require SEOs to look at multimedia content with fresh eyes.
Which short-term multimedia optimizations should you prioritize in 2022?
Visual recognition for Google Lens
Google has invested significantly in image recognition solutions for almost 10 years, but they have recently picked up the pace and scale of its integration into everyday search.
As a result, improvements to and new uses for Google Lens have been front and center at flagship events like Google I/O and SearchOn during the last 12 months, while their future plans to move into health depend significantly on honing their visual search abilities.
In 2021, they added Google Lens directly into the search widget for Pixel, Android phones, and onto Chrome’s mobile search bar. Last year’s Google Lens updates included the ability to translate text in over 100 languages via AR and carry out targeted visual searches of screenshots. Add to this list of features their upcoming rollout of a MUM-enabled ability to “Add Questions” to Lens searches, and you can see that change is afoot.
How does Google Lens impact image SEO?
Standard image optimization elements like alt-text, schema markup, file names, image titles, and file sizes will continue to be important and relevant in regards to how search engines understand your image. Building upon this, though, elements like composition will also come to the fore. This means that SEOs might need to have more strategic conversations about what images look like, as well as how they’re rendered on a site.
This is because, while AI-driven image processing tools like Google Cloud’s Vision AI and Google Lens are developing rapidly, images that have clear composition will be better understood for visual search than images that are cluttered, complex, or partially visible.
Simply put, cleaner images mean that your content is surfaced with more relevant search results and business outcomes.
SEO value of image composition
Need to illustrate the point to stakeholders? Released in 2015, Vision AI’s image recognition tech underpins many of the functions of Google Lens, and their free demo tool can be used to demonstrate how images are interpreted at a high level. Pair this with real-time Google Lens results to illustrate where you should be concentrating your image optimization efforts as MUM matures.
Google's Vision AI API testing tool.
Case in point, in the diagram below, you can see two photos of the same enamel teapot as analyzed with Google Cloud’s Vision AI API testing tool and then with Google Lens.
In the image where you can’t see the handle and spout at the same time, the Vision AI interprets the photo as a Tableware object with 76% certainty and adds Kettle as the most relevant searchable label with 74% certainty. Conversely, the image with the teapot in the profile is understood as a Teapot with 94% certainty and given a Teapot label with 89% certainty.
How composition impacts Vision AI interpretation of images.
When we click through to the SERPs for kettle and teapot, we can see a clear difference in results. It is also clear that the latter is a much closer match to the actual object, thus more likely to satisfy customer needs, resulting in more click-throughs and driving better SEO for the site overall.
Left shows results for ‘Kettle’. Right shows results for ‘Teapot’
When we search the same images directly in Google Lens, the overall results are better: this time both are showing enamel teapots. But again, we see that the side profile photo is delivering near-exact matches to my IRL teapot. Thus, better photo composition equates to better search optimization.
Better images give more relevant in Google Lens.
In practice, this means that while there may be a desire to fill a site with stylish lifestyle or Instagram-ready images, for SEO purposes, it is important to prioritize clean, — dare I say “boring” — images, particularly for transactional pages like product listings.
While this methodology is not necessarily new, the accessibility and integration of “search what you see” tools in the daily search experience will make image composition considerations for SEO a priority moving forward.
AI is allowing Google to make comparable strides with video and audio analysis, meaning investment in the knowledge of audio quality and video aesthetics could pay SEO dividends in the future.
Security for speed
Security and speed are both established ranking factors. During the great Core Web Vitals push of 2021, many came to understand that the two elements are closely linked. On an individual account level, I've seen server security optimization improve page performance for multiple clients. On a larger scale, when hosting platform Wix tripled their year-over-year CWV performance, enhancements like universal HTTP/2 to improve SSL times were critical to the task.
In the coming year, we will see Google prioritize security in its products and search services. Chrome promises the rollout of increased security and privacy tools, with updates that will include security features for <iframes> and cross-site navigation that add more checks as users transfer between links and use certain features.
This could give sites with top-tier security a competitive advantage for speed, page experience, and conversions in the coming year. And as the desktop page experience ranking update arrives in February 2022, the impact may be seen across many more domains.
Add to this trend the enthusiastic adoption of high-speed HTTP/3 by big tech players like Facebook and Google, and you can see that legacy tech will struggle to keep pace with user and bot expectations.
The use of HTTP/3, the latest HTTP protocol, has seen a fivefold increase across the web in the last year and is now live on about 25% of domains. Though this protocol is active on Cloudflare and many other top cloud providers, it is not yet standard. If you want to make the most of the benefits here, you may need to manually enable the update for your main server and/or CDN. And if you’re considering a new CDN or server partner in the coming year, this should be a deciding factor.
SEO specialisms for Google channel diversity
Google continues to reduce friction as users move between their dedicated channels and apps. In the process, they’re creating a more dynamic and niche SERP that requires SEO specialism to gain traction.
Click-throughs for some SERP results go to Google managed channels and apps.
From a user experience, this makes for rich mobile-friendly SERPs, which take users directly into high-performance apps like Google Maps and dedicated channels like Google Travel. Furthermore, it affords Google the opportunity to access and combine the information users need in a highly contextualized manner. Since Google-managed properties give them control over many informational feeds at once, enhancing and connecting existing channels will be essential to their aims to serve ever more nuanced search results.
While this has long been the preserve of transactional verticals like shopping and hotels, Google’s commitment to multi-modality means this is likely to become more prevalent amongst queries at the top of the funnel as well. This means SEO efforts must also be made to optimize profiles and performance within each of the most relevant channels in order to maximize visibility in the SERPs. Due to the rate of change for each channel, SEO generalism is increasingly less likely to build a critical mass for impact. Instead, coordinated teams for SEO specialisms are likely to see the most gains.
If we look at Local Inventory Ads (LIA) for instance, we can see optimizations for multiple channels converge to make a complex, high-value search feature. Introduced last year, this free and paid Google Shopping feature allows users to find products in stock at shops near their location. Google uses data and content from websites, Google Business Profiles, Maps, and Merchant Center to surface this information when users need it. Ongoing optimization for LIA requires expertise in each of these channels, running in tandem with a collection of SEO skill sets.
All of this is to say that assembling a well-rounded SEO team will be essential to top performance as multimodal search evolves. Consider nurturing in-house channel champions and/or engaging external product experts via an agency or freelance support, and coordinate to achieve business goals in search.
Borderless international SEO
In the coming year, three factors will become significant drivers for international SEO: the rise of borderless e-commerce, the maturity of AI translation tools, and the rollout of MUM.
Borderless e-commerce
Digital acceleration has changed our digital experience significantly.
The relevance of a business’s physical location, currency, and time zone is shifting, and the barriers to entry for brands to go global are being significantly reduced. Brick-and-mortar businesses still have a significant impact on local SEO and local pack SERPs, but customers are increasingly more willing (and more often, expecting) to buy from retailers outside their country. Research shows that tentative markets, where around 40% of consumers were willing to purchase from overseas sellers in 2016, had shifted to 55% willingness in 2021.
Shopify launched Shopify Markets at the start of Q4 2021, full of confidence in this global retail trend and its potential for sellers, meaning that competition here is likely to heat up in the coming months.
As SEOs, our task is to meet customers where they are, and this change in customer expectations brings opportunities for business growth. To get started here, consider tried-and-tested international SEO tactics alongside low-cost, low-friction market entry channels like free Google Merchant Listings.
If your international growth includes selling on top international marketplaces like Amazon, Wish, AliExpress, or eBay, consider optimizing your landing pages and on-site e-commerce E-A-T to build trust with new customers. Finally, think mobile-first for shoppers in Asia and other emerging markets.
In summary
All in all, I’m optimistic. As MUM matures we should see more varied content types emerge from around the web. Improvements to speed and security are a win for everyone. More layered SERP features help to demonstrate the importance of SEO. And building a borderless customer base helps to make brands more resilient in a changeable marketplace. Some of the changes we are likely to see are substantial, but they should move SEO in a positive direction.
A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:
The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.
Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content.
Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:
Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture
Remove duplicate paginated URLs
Create blog content for keywords with informational intent
Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data
We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:
Duplicate content
In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.
We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:
Duplicate product pages
Duplicate collections pages through pagination
Duplicate product pages
Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:
Canonical URL path: /products/
Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/
Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:
While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.
As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.
Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:
“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”
“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”
While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.
Adjusting internal linking structure
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.
Duplicate collections pages
As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:
However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.
Product variant pages
While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.
It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG
If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:
Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?
Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?
Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?
For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.
Crawling and indexing
After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.
Robots.txt file
By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:
Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:
Admin area
Checkout
Orders
Shopping cart
Internal search
Policies page
However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file.
In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.
In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:
Login to your Shopify admin area
In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes
Choose Actions > Edit code
In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link
Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”
Choose “Create template”
This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.
Sitemap.xml
By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:
Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.
One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.
Adding the “noindex” tag
While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.
As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:
Redirects
Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:
Online Store
Navigation
URL Redirects
The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.
Log files
As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.
Fast Simon implementation
Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation.
Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here.
Structured data
Product structured data
Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.
Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.
Article structured data
As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog
BreadcrumbList structured data
One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.
Implementing structured data on Shopify
If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.
However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.
Improving Shopify site speed
One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.
First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds
Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds
Total Page Size: 4.41 MB
Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB
Requests: 171
In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:
Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages
Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager
Keyword research
Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.
Some general ways to generate keywords are:
Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.
Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.
Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.
Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.
If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.
Keyword optimization
Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.
To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:
Adding content to product pages
If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.
However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.
By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.
Shopify blog
Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.
However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:
While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.
By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.
If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:
Identify your highest priority keywords
Manually perform a Google query for each one
Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?
If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.
If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent
As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):
The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.
Apps
Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.
Shopify apps for SEO
While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.
Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.
Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.
Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD
Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.
Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.
Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?
Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.
Limiting your Shopify apps
Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.
Client results
We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.
In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).
In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.
Moving forward
As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.
Please welcome back guest host, Andy Crestodina, for an episode all about the connection between people, relationships, and SEO outcomes. Specifically, how influencer marketing can drive SEO and authority.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. This is Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios here in Chicago, and I want to explain something that I love very much and that is kind of a familiar theme if you've been following the Moz content. It's about the relationship between people, relationships, and SEO outcomes. Specifically I want to talk about how influencer marketing can drive SEO and authority.
There's a lot of approaches to building links and building authority. Cold outreach, can we please stop doing that? This is what my inbox looks like. It's a mess. Yeah, okay, so let's just pause that and try something different.
Link swaps? Interesting. It doesn't feel like we're adding a lot of value to the world, but okay, maybe.
Guest blogging, a lot of work for a little outcome. Depending on the audience, it could have lots of other benefits. So not necessarily a fan. I'm still a guest blogger, have been forever.
But link attraction, how does that work? Is it possible to do something in marketing that will spontaneously lead to like new links from high authority sites on a regular basis? There is. It is possible. It happens all the time. It's something that we do here. In fact, it's our main approach to growing authority.
Link attraction
So I'm going to break it all down starting with the outcome. Starting with the lead, demand. This is the goal. That's the point of digital marketing, right, is to build a bridge from a traffic source to your thank you page. That's what we're all doing here, right?
So to do that you need two things. What are they? Traffic and a conversion rate. Traffic times conversion rate equals demand. Conversion rate, that means having a web page that is persuasive, it's compelling, it's filled with social proof, it's addressing objections, it's answering questions. It has clear, specific calls to action. That times the number of qualified visitors to that page equals success.
So traffic, where does traffic come from? Well, there's a lot of sources of traffic. I'm a digital marketer that uses more than just search. We'll set those aside for now. But search traffic, how does that happen? That's driven from ranking for relevant, commercial intent key phrases. What are those? That happens when you have two main things, two main search ranking factors, which are basically authority and relevance, as in links and keyword focused content. So now we're going to set aside relevance.
I'm going ask one of the most important questions in all of digital marketing, which is, "Why do people link to things? Why does that happen? How do we make that happen organically on a regular basis all the time?" That's what I want to address here, and I'm going to do it by combining two different things — influencers and content, relationships with people who create content and therefore create links and also link worthy content, content that's worthy of that citation, content that ends up in their bibliography, content that is something that when people see it they say, "Wow, this is supporting something that I'm working on. Therefore, if I link to this, it will make the thing I'm making more credible." Otherwise, without your content, what they're making is just going to be kind of unsupported. So we want to make content and we want to combine that with influencers. Let's break that down.
What attracts links?
What kind of content attracts links? There's play of research on this, much of it conducted by Moz, which comes down to two main things — original research and strong opinion. That's basically it. When you put those together, you have the main ingredients for legit thought leadership. We hold high standards for that label.
But original research literally supports what they're creating. Therefore, by making it, you are giving people ways to add evidence to the things that they're creating. So new, original data points, kind of sound bites, kind of new statistics for the world.
Fundamentally, there are two kinds of content programs — content programs that create new, original data and everybody else. If I was doing a content audit for a brand, I would probably look at that first and say, "Is there anything for which this website is the primary source?" Very different. It feels different. It feels different when you make it. It feels different when they read it. It feels different when they come across it later and they think they might publish it, something that references it.
Who creates links?
So who are they? Who creates links? Who are the content marketers or who are the people on the internet? It's sometimes called the 1% rule. Ninety-nine percent of people consume content. They're sort of lurkers. They're just consumers of content. The 1% of us actually make stuff. They press that Record button or they type and they hit the Publish button. They are bloggers, obviously, editors, clearly, journalists, researchers, podcasters, even event producers. All these people make stuff, therefore they're adding new content, new URLs to the internet, and when they do, they often look for things to support their assertions, in other words original research. Or they're responding to someone who planted a flag out there and adding their voice to some strong opinion that was put out.
Influencer marketing
So basically these are the two key ingredients. That's really all you need. This is how it really happens. Original research combined with relationships with people who create content and links on the internet. So let's go a little deeper on that and I want to talk about specifically how to make that happen and what it looks like.
Step 1: Network, connect
Step 1, network, connect. Start a conversation. That's why I don't like cold outreach. I keep drawing X's here. Cold outreach fails to just take that first step and warm it up a little bit. You didn't have to do that to my inbox. Why don't we start a conversation? Why don't you like, comment, share, interact, engage, ask, thank, connect? So that's Step 1. It's a networking thing. It really benefits people that value relationships and are playing the long game.
Step 2: Polite request
Then the polite request. "Hey, I'm making something. Would you like to be part of this thing that I'm making?"
Step 3: Include them
Then actually include that person in the thing that you are making. I've got a little example over here, look. Their face, that person that I one day hope to build a relationship with, I'm giving them the thing that I hope to get from them one day, by literally their face, their name, a link to them. Their quote, their insights, their added value is in my piece.
I do this all the time. In fact, I would never publish a piece of content without putting contributors in it. Journalists don't write articles without including a source. Why do content marketers keep creating content without adding contributor quotes? It's a missed opportunity. Your content is, in fact, one of your best networking tools.
So literally I'm linking to the people that I'm hoping to one day get a link from. I'm learning while I'm creating my own content. This happened to me yesterday. I was working on an article, reached out to some experts, they gave me their insights, and I have new ideas based on their input. I learn by creating my own blog. That's kind of magical, right, and very cool.
Step 4: Stay in touch
Then, obviously, really the long game, like I said, we're going to keep in touch. We're going to follow up. We're going to offer to help them if they're making something. We're going to keep that conversation going because we care. Really, the ultimate form of influencer marketing is called friendship, real, legit relationships, to the extent you get to the point where if you really need a link to something, you could actually just send them a quick text message and they'll probably help you out right away, the way I do for people that I'm trying to help. We all do this all the time. In other words, empathy in your relationships and quality in the stuff you create when combined lead to link attraction, and as we saw that's going to connect every dot down to demand.
Hope this was helpful. Really fun to make. Thank you, thank you, Moz, for the opportunity to create another Whiteboard Friday video. We hope this is helpful. If you find someone who keeps like spamming you, maybe just send them this. Maybe they'll leave you alone. Maybe you can just reach out and start a conversation and make a friend.
Again, Andy from Orbit and we'll see you next time.
More brands than ever are investing and producing quality journalism to drive their earned media strategy. They recognize that it’s a valuable channel for simultaneously building authority while finding and connecting with customers where they consume news.
But producing and distributing great content is no easy feat.
At Stacker and our brand-partnership model Stacker Studio, our team has mastered how to create newsworthy, data-driven stories for our newswire. Since 2017, we’ve placed thousands of stories across the most authoritative news outlets in the country, including MSN, Newsweek, SFGate, and Chicago Tribune.
Certain approaches have yielded a high hit rate (i.e., pick up), and one of our most successful tactics is helping add context to what’s going on in the world. (I mentioned this as a tactic in my Whiteboard Friday, How to Make Newsworthy Content: Part 2.)
Contextualizing topics, statistics, and events serves as a core part of our content ideation process. Today, I’m going to share our strategy so you can create content that has real news value, and that can resonate with newsroom editors.
Make a list of facts and insights
You likely have a list of general topics relevant to your brand, but these subject areas are often too general as a launching point for productive brainstorming. Starting with “personal finance,” for example, leaves almost too much white space to truly explore and refine story ideas.
Instead, it’s better to hone in on an upcoming event, data set, or particular news cycle. What is newsworthy and specifically happening that’s aligned with your general audience?
At the time of writing this, Jack Dorsey recently stepped down as CEO of Twitter. That was breaking news and hardly something a brand would expect to cover.
But take the event and try contextualizing it. In general, what’s the average tenure of founders before stepping down? What’s the difference in public market success for founder-led companies? In regard to Parag Agrawal stepping into the CEO role, what is the percentage of non-white CEOs in American companies?
As you can see, when you contextualize, it unlocks promising avenues for creative storyboarding.
Here are some questions to guide this process.
Question 1: How does this compare to similar events/statistics?
Comparison is one of the most effective ways to contextualize. It’s hard to know the true impact of a fact when it exists stand alone or in a vacuum.
Let’s consider hurricane season as an example. There’s a ton of stories around current hurricane seasons, whether it’s highlighting the worst hurricanes of all time or getting a sense of a particular hurricane’s scope of destruction or impact on a community.
This approach prompts a personal experience for the readers to compare what hurricane seasons are like now compared to a more specific “then” — one that feels particularly relevant and relatable.
I’ll talk more about time-based comparisons in the next section, but you can also compare:
Across industries/topics (How much damage do hurricanes do compared to tidal waves?)
Across geographic areas (Which part of the ocean is responsible for the most destructive hurricanes? Where has the most damage been done around the world?)
Across demographics (Which generation is most frightened of hurricanes?)
There are dozens of possibilities, so allow yourself to freely explore all potential angles.
Question 2: What are the implications on a local level?
In some cases, events or topics are discussed online without the details of how they’re impacting individual people or communities. We might know what something means for a general audience, but is there a deeper impact or implication that’s not being explored?
One of the best ways to do this is through localization, which involves taking a national trend and evaluating how it’s reflected and/or impacts specific areas. Newspapers do this constantly, but brands can do it, too.
For example, there are countless stories about climate change, but taking a localized approach can help make the phenomenon feel “closer to home.”
We put together a piece that illustrated significant ways climate change has affected each state (increased flooding in Arkansas, the Colorado River drying up, sea levels rising off South Carolina, etc.). You could take this a step further and look at a particular city or community if you had supporting data or research.
If you serve particular markets, it’s easy to implement this strategy. Orchard, for example, does a great job publishing real estate market trend reports in the areas they serve.
But if you’re a national or international brand that doesn’t cater to specific regions, try using data sets that have information for all countries, states, cities, ZIP codes, etc., and present all of it, allowing readers to identify data points that matter to them. When readers can filter data or interact with your content, it allows them to have a more personalized reading experience.
Question 3: What sides of the conversation have we not fully heard yet?
The best way to tap into the missing pieces of a story is to consider how other topics/subject areas interact with that story.
I’ll stick with our climate change theme. We did the story above on how climate change has impacted every state, which feels comprehensive about the topic, but there’s more to dive into.
Outside of just thinking how climate change is impacting geographic areas, we asked ourselves: How is it affecting different industries?
When you have a topic and want to uncover less-explored angles, ask yourself a set of questions that’s similar to the compare/contrast model:
How does this topic impact different regions? (E.g. What is wine’s cultural role in various countries?)
How does this topic impact different demographics of people? (E.g. Who profits most from wine making?)
How does this topic impact different industries? (E.g. How have wineries/vineyards impacted tourism?)
How is this topic impacted by these various things? (E.g. How is the flavor of wine impacted by region? Who buys the most wine, and where do they live?)
This should create a good brainstorming foundation to identify interesting hooks that aren’t often explored about a really common topic.
Conclusion
Not only will taking the approach of contextualizing differentiate your story from everything else out there, it will also allow you to re-promote it when a similar event occurs or the topic trends again in the future. Contextualized content is often this perfect blend of timeliness and evergreen that’s really difficult to achieve otherwise.
Way back in April 2021, I had the honor of announcing a new beta Moz product: Performance Metrics. It arrived just in time for SEOs to track and improve their sites through the anticipated May launch of Google’s Page Experience update. We uniquely offered at-scale tracking and issue identification against Core Web Vital metrics for hundreds of URLs per campaign, rather than the handful of URLs available in competing tools at the time.
Back then, we (correctly) anticipated a minimal initial impact from the update, but even we didn’t foresee Google’s delay of the full rollout until August. However, sites are now seeing a real world impact from Core Web Vitals, as our recent study showed back in October. Google is talking about extending that impact to desktop from February or March 2022 (something that our tool has always allowed you to compare cohesively in one campaign), and it seems likely that the importance of these ranking factors will only increase.
Now is the time, then, for us to bring Performance Metrics out of beta and help our customers prepare for the next stage of Google’s Page Experience update this spring. Today, we’re announcing the full launch of Performance Metrics, including a host of new features and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received from early adopters, as well as our own experts and data.
Many users have already been enjoying the bulk analysis, issue identification, and tailored, tactical advice we’ve been offering in Performance Metrics. However, since the beta launch, customers have consistently asked for automated, scheduled testing of lists of URLs, and displays of page performance over time. This makes total sense to us — tracking improvements to see the fruits of your efforts, and identifying when any issues appear, are both great uses for the tool. As such, we’ve included both of these features in the full launch.
Of course, the on-demand analysis you might have already been enjoying in the beta is still there, but with some UI improvements along the way. In particular, you can now re-test the same page multiple times per day, if you want to take some new changes for a quick spin.
Last but not least, as this tool is no longer in beta, you can now also track all of this alongside metrics like visibility, DA, Spam Score and any and all other Moz Pro data in custom scheduled reports.
Why now?
Core Web Vitals are for life, not just for Christmas. Yes, the update finally arrived in August 2021, but that was only the start of the journey — we can and should expect Google to ramp up the importance of these metrics as they gain confidence in the quality and coverage of their own data, and in the health of affected websites.
There’s also the desktop rollout this spring that I mentioned above. Lastly, there may be two new metrics coming — which we’ll of course be integrating into our product once they’re confirmed — probably relating to smoothness and responsiveness. Google has previously indicated an annual cadence of updates to Core Web Vitals, so as an industry we shouldn’t be surprised by this.
As a reminder, by late last year we were already seeing slower pages suffer in rankings, and Google’s methodology of using CrUX data means that sites will often be judged by their most highly trafficked pages.
Our Performance Metrics tool, even in beta, was designed to help marketers prioritize pages to work on, and then issues to address, within this paradigm — we let you sort pages by traffic or ranking or PA, analyze or track whichever ones interest you without limiting you to one page at a time, then see which pages are failing in which areas, and what specific issues and elements are causing those problems. Which might be leaving you wondering…
How to use Performance Metrics in Moz Pro
When you log into Performance Metrics (Moz Pro -> Campaigns -> Site Crawl), you’ll now see there are two tabs in the overview:
The second tab shows URLs which will be automatically tracked over time. You can add to this list using the same filters and menu that you might be familiar with from the beta. Just scroll down on the first tab, and you’ll see a table like this:
Here you can add URLs in bulk or individually to analyze, track, or perform other actions.
To make things even easier, you can filter the table and charts even further, to include only your top ranking, top traffic, or top Page Authority pages:
Within the tracked tab, you’ll then gradually start to see charts form like this one:
And, when you inspect the individual URLs, you can see their own performance over time, as well as specific changes to individual metrics, and tailored advice on what to improve - down to individual resources or elements that need to be addressed, and jargon-free tips from the Moz team.
There’s more detailed guidance available over at the help section, and of course our customer support team is there for you with any questions.
Focus for 2021
There’s more to SEO than Core Web Vitals, but that doesn’t mean you can take your eye off the ball. Focus on a holistic user experience that will be robust to future metrics and tweaks from Google, and particularly on your high traffic pages that are more likely to be the basis for any judgment cast on your site. Lastly, remember your competitors aren’t standing still — they may even be reading this very blog post and using our Performance Metrics suite. The goal posts march inexorably forth.
Google search result pages are becoming more diverse and even interactive, which makes any clickthrough study out there much less reliable, because no two sets of search results are the same.
But how much control do writers and content creators have over how their content is represented in search? As it turns out, they do have quite a few options when it comes to optimizing their search snippets!
The anatomy of a standard search snippet
The standard Google search snippet has changed over the years, but in essence all the key elements are still there:
The clickable title or headline of the snippet (in blue)
The description of that page (about two lines long — it was lengthened for no particular reason a few years ago, but now seems to be back to two lines)
The URL path (used to be in green, now it is black)
On a mobile device, there’s also a tiny logo next to the URL:
Here’s how much control you have over these standard elements of your search snippet (in the order they currently appear):
Logo
Google will use your site favicon when deciding which image to show next to your URL. This means that you have full control over this part of the search snippet.
URL path
These days, Google will do its best to show the meaningful URL path (almost like a breadcrumb) instead of simply the URL of the page. This consists of:
The domain: I don’t have any research to support this, but I personally always scan domain names when choosing what to click. That being said, your choice of a domain name may somewhat impact your clickthrough (if you do a particularly good job picking a snappy domain name that intrigues) and you do have full control over this part of the snippet. Tools like Namify specialize in finding exactly that type of domains that are short, memorable, and witty.
The breadcrumb or the truncated URL: You can use breadcrumb schema to force Google to use breadcrumb instead of the URL, and watch your Search Console to see if that helped clickthrough:
That being said, it is still recommended to optimize your title to include keywords and entice more clicks — and hope Google will keep it intact.
Description
Google has been generating the search snippet description for years without using the associated meta description: recent studies show that Google ignores meta descriptions in about 70% of cases.
You may still want to create meta descriptions in case Google needs some clues, but expect them to figure this part out on their own.
Another way to try and trick Google into using your chosen snippet description is to create concise summaries of the content and add it at the beginning of the article. Using semantic analysis tools like Text Optimizer, you can also ensure these summaries are semantically relevant to the topic:
Now, let’s see how we can enhance that standard search snippet to let it stand out and attract more clicks.
Rich snippets for content-based pages
Rich snippets are search snippets enhanced with some additional details. Web publishers can control rich snippets by adding schema markup, so they are thus under website owners’ control.
Here are the types of rich snippets that will work for content-based pages:
FAQ page
Your page doesn’t have to be FAQ to qualify for this rich snippet. All you need to do is answer two or more subsequent questions somewhere on that page to use the code. There are several Wordpress plugins — including this one — that help you code that section.
HowTo schema
The HowTo schema was introduced for the DIY niche as a way to feature snippets that include step-by-step instructions.
These days, I see HowTo rich snippets implemented for just about any tutorial:
Video schema
More often than not, these rich snippets show up only on mobile devices, but they seem to be very common. A video rich snippet includes a video thumbnail:
Video schema will help you ensure the rich snippet is indeed generated, although I’ve seen dozens of cases when Google creates a rich snippet once you simply embed a video on the page, no schema required.
That being said, using the rich code won’t hurt, especially given there’s an easy video schema generator for you to create a code easily.
Structured snippets
Structured snippets are less popular than rich snippets, even though they are very common on search.
Structured snippets import tabular data to formulate a more informative search snippet:
All it takes to qualify for this type of a snippet is to create an HTML table. It is a good idea to use tables for summaries, feature comparisons, lists, etc.
Image thumbnails
Image thumbnails are very rare on desktop. Yet on mobile devices, images show up inside most search snippets:
There’s no particular optimization tactic here, but there are best practices that may or may not help:
Obviously, make sure there’s at least one image on your landing page (make it featured on Wordpress).
Google shows dates within a search snippet when they think this may be useful to a searcher. Obviously, dates may have a big impact on clicking patterns: Based on the research by Ignite Visibility, about half of searchers claim that dates in search snippets are either “important” or “very important” clickthrough factors.
People may feel willing to click on a search snippet with a more recent date.
They can scroll past an older date even when the page ranks on top.
Google has clear guidelines as to how web publishers can keep those dates fresh:
Don’t try to hide dates, because they are useful.
When updating a piece, re-publish it on a new date only when you’ve basically rewritten it.(I.e., don’t redirect, better to update the old piece and change the publish date).
Include an “Updated on” note on top of the article if you updated it (Google will pick up on that date).
Using schema “datePublished” and “dateModified” is not required but will be helpful.
Google will understand all of the following date formats:
Published December 4, 2019
Posted Dec 4, 2020
Last updated: Dec 14, 2018
Updated Dec 14, 2021 8pm ET
Mini sitelinks
Mini sitelinks are probably the most unpredictable element of a search snippet. Google may randomly pick links from navigation, tag, or category links, etc. There’s also no way to tell Google they made a poor choice.
Unlike sitelinks, which usually show up for the top-ranking result and mostly for branded searches, mini sitelinks can be generated for just about any result out there.
Mini sitelinks represent a very useful feature, though, because they increase your odds that your search snippet will get a click (by adding more clickable links to your snippet).
One way to increase your chances that Google will show mini sitelinks within your search snippet is to use an on-page table of contents (which is powered by HTML anchor links).
Here’s an example of the table of contents:
And here are the mini sitelinks they generate:
Featured snippets
As of January 2020, featured snippets were officially considered the #1 organic result (previously they were “position zero” — appearing before the top organic result).
It still remains a big question whether they get clicked more than “normal looking” search results, or whether they are comprehensive enough to get fewer clicks. However, recent research suggests they’re still important for SEO.
With that being said, featured snippets are not easy to predict, but if you choose to optimize for them, be sure to check my older Moz column that is still very valid: How to Optimize for Featured Snippets. Just don’t forget to monitor your clickthrough to ensure getting featured didn’t hurt.
Complementing your product page with how-to content on the same topic may be a good idea (Google may decide to rank both as indented results). At least this is something to experiment with.
Monitoring and measuring
While rank monitoring is pretty straightforward, this kind of optimization is harder to monitor because your rankings remain the same. Here are two tools you can use:
1. Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides clear clickthrough data that can help you signal of positive or negative impact of your optimization efforts:
In the Performance tab, click in the date range filter (it usually defaults to three months), go to “Compare” tab and select “Compare last 3 months year over year”:
From there, you can click to “Pages” or “Queries” tab to identify pages or search queries that have lost organic traffic from the past year (especially if there was no substantial position change):
2. WebCEO
WebCEO provides a more convenient way to keep an eye on your keywords that are losing clicks. The tool has a separate tag and a notification system alerting you of any queries that see a decline in clicks:
3. Visualping
Another useful tool here is Visualping that you can set to monitor your exact search snippet to be alerted when it changes:
This is a great way to correlate your optimization with the actual change that happened (and then clickthrough change).
Whether it is good or bad news, organic traffic is no longer about rankings. In fact, you may well be ranking #1 (i.e. get featured) and notice a decrease in clickthrough once your page is promoted. But, you can experiment with all kinds of ways to improve your organic clickthrough without investing more into your rankings, even though organic CTR is much harder to predict these days.
