Faster is better. 

That’s been common knowledge for a while now. Unless there’s a noticeable gap in quality,  a faster website will almost always outperform slower sites in the same niche. We aren’t solely talking about search engine optimization (SEO), either. 

More than half of mobile users abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Bounce rates increase exponentially for each additional second it takes a page to load, topping out at 123% for 10 seconds. On top of this, for every second above the average a page takes to load, customer satisfaction plummets further. 

All this is to say that if your website is slow, you’re getting hit from multiple angles—by Google’s algorithms as well as a dissatisfied audience. 

How to Optimize Your Website for Speed

So, we’ve established the importance of page speed. Let’s wrap things up with a brief overview of what you can do to optimize yours. We advise the following while also using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check on your progress as you do: 

• Minimize HTTP requests wherever possible. 
• Implement a content delivery network positioned geographically close to your primary audience. 
• Leverage browser caching. 
• Use adaptive web design, including both images and layout. 
• Compress your website’s content. 
• Minify your code, and only use scripts where absolutely necessary.
• Avoid using rich media where possible.
• If you must use JavaScript or rich media, asynchronous loading is your friend.  
• As an addendum to the above, defer resource-heavy files so that they only load after the most crucial elements on your site. 
• Work with your host to improve your backend and minimize time to first byte.  Note that this may require you to choose a new web host if your current one does not meet your needs. 
• Consider running a compression audit with a tool like GIDNetwork. 
• If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, assess your plugins and uninstall any that you don’t absolutely need. Factors to look for include: 
  • Overlapping functionality.
  • Tasks that can be easily accomplished manually.
  • Poor performance optimization. 
  • Lack of consistent updates.
  • Security flaws.
• Cut down on redirects. 
• Optimize for mobile first, desktop second. 

We realize that’s a bit of a comprehensive list. But we also promise it’s worth the effort to incorporate every piece of advice. Not only will Google’s algorithms like your website a lot more, your audience will thank you for your efforts. If you want to see other ways you can increase the SEO performance of your site, check out our post on the role of Backlinks in SEO.

Remember that you also don’t need to incorporate all of our advice overnight. SEO has always been a gradual, ongoing process. This is really no different—ironically, if you try to rush your page speed optimization, you might end up shooting yourself in the foot before you even manage to get off the ground. 

Given that it’s been plaguing the IT sector for years, it was inevitable that the ongoing digital talent shortage would eventually sink its talents into marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). As noted by MarketingWeek, upskilling has become crucial for specialized agencies and ordinary businesses alike. An annual survey from online marketing agency Verbli, meanwhile, found that SEO expertise is one of the most desirable skills in marketing.  

It follows that, if you currently lack that expertise internally, you need to start looking for ways to bridge that gap. We’ll walk you through how to accomplish that.

Start With a Decent Tool

Tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush can seem incredibly overwhelming at first glance.  But they also provide an excellent—albeit temporary—solution to a lack of internal SEO knowledge. All three tools are relatively simple to use once you get past the initial growing pains, and all three organizations maintain comprehensive knowledge bases to help you and your employees learn the basics of SEO.

In some cases, this might even be enough. These tools could serve as the foundation from which your business builds up skills in everything from content marketing to PPC advertising. On the other hand, you might find that you simply aren’t getting your money’s worth. 

At this point, you have three options—though there’s no rule saying you can’t attempt all three:

• Initiate a hiring push to bring in the necessary expertise
• Hire an agency to manage marketing and SEO for your business
• Implement training and reskilling programs to develop SEO professionals internally 

Handling Things Yourself

If you’ve decided to take the talent acquisition route, start by looking at a few job listings for similar roles in your industry. This will give you an idea of what constitutes a competitive offer, as well as what to look for in a candidate. Ideally, you’ll want to hire someone with a proven track record—but failing that, they should at least be able to demonstrate a baseline knowledge of SEO. 

If instead you choose to develop SEO skills within your existing staff, start by looking at materials like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Consider how you might translate that into hands-on, self-directed training courses—if possible, allow anyone interested in this training to engage with it while on the clock. 

Bringing In an Agency

Believe it or not, hiring an agency has a great deal in common with hiring someone internally. Here as there, you’re looking for someone with a proven track record, an established client base, and clear expertise. A prospective agency should be willing to sit down with you in a discovery call to hash out your requirements, expectations, and budget. 

Be wary of anyone who over-promises. We’d also advise establishing at least a baseline understanding of SEO so you’re able to spot the scammers. Their knowledge is often only surface-level, and they rely on their targets knowing even less than they do. Want to learn more about how to avoid missing out on opportunities to increase traffic with SEO? Check out our blog where we cover SEO-related topics monthly!

Like most content creators with a mind for search engine optimization, you understand the importance of thorough keyword research. It’s at the heart of developing an effective inbound marketing strategy. And for any given piece of content, it’s crucial in determining which keywords you should focus on when it actually comes time to write. 

What you may not realize, however, is that keyword research is only part of the equation. It’s not enough to devise a list of potential topics without context. You also need to know what people are saying about those topics and how they feel about them.

This is especially important with topics where there may be some degree of controversy. And if you don’t know what side of an issue your audience falls on prior to writing? There’s a very good chance you’ll end up leaving a significant portion of your audience feeling alienated. 

Let’s say, for instance, that you decide to write about non-fungible tokens (NFTs). If your audience is against them and you attempt to cast them in a positive light, you can and will lose their interest and likely their trust. Similarly, if your audience is involved in cryptocurrency and you try to claim NFTs are the same as Bitcoin, most people probably won’t appreciate the comparison. 

As for where you can conduct this kind of research? That’s the good news. You have a nearly limited well of information upon which you can draw, including: 

• Social media. Figure out the social networks on which both your audience and your competitors are most accurate, and pay careful attention to comments, shares, mentions, and hashtags. This will not only allow you to gauge sentiment around a broad range of topics, but also regarding your brand as a whole. For ‘trendy’ news, Twitter will typically be the best bet.
• Ratings and reviews. Although generally more useful for determining direct sentiment around your brand, customer reviews also have the potential to provide unexpected inspiration for both possible topics and the approach you should take with them. 
• Customer surveys. Provided you can properly incentivize your audience to take them, surveys are easily the best way to gauge sentiment on virtually any topic. These could be offered via email, on your website, or even through your existing social channels. 

Ultimately, sentiment analysis is about more than simply figuring out tone and angle. That’s really only part of it. What’s more important is that it helps you understand who your audience is and how they think. 

And from that understanding, you can brainstorm more compelling topics and express them in a way that’s much more likely to resonate.

If you’re like many people, you probably believe in the unimpeachable word count. The notion is that the longer you make a piece, the better it will perform on the search engine results page. The idea is that there’s some sort of magic ‘sweet spot’ for content length that will land you on the first page of Google.

It’s somewhat unclear how these became such common beliefs in the search engine optimization space.  Because the truth is that content length has no direct bearing on PageRank. It never has. 

This isn’t just us saying this, either. As noted by Search Engine Journal, Google has stated as much on more than one occasion. More specifically, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, who’s posed the question on a regular basis. 

“Word count is not a ranking factor,” wrote Mueller on Reddit. “Save yourself the trouble.” 

“Word count is not indicative of quality,” Mueller explained, this time on Twitter. “Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.”

Search Engine Journal noted in another piece that Mueller has also stated that word count is a quality factor rather than a ranking factor. Adding more text without good reason will do nothing to improve your content. In short, there is no arbitrary ‘perfect’ word count. 

Content should be exactly as long as it needs to be in order to convey its message. A piece with 1000 words is no more likely to be relevant than a piece with 100 lacks relevance—in actuality, longer content could potentially perform even worse than short form, depending on device and audience. 

Therefore, the best advice we can give you is to stop stressing about length. Just focus on creating high-quality, compelling content, and everything else will fall into place. And remember that there are many elements that are significantly more important than meeting some milestone that doesn’t actually exist:

• Page speed
• Performance
• Ease of use
• Bounce rate
• Domain age, history, authority, and registration length
• Keywords—primarily whether or not they appear in your title tag, header tag, and copy 
• Backlinks
• Optimization

If you’re looking for affordable web hosting that is built around SEO development, check out our services! In an era of microblogging and mobile Internet, length is functionally irrelevant. What matters isn’t how much space something takes up on a page. What matters is that it fulfills your audience’s search queries. What matters is that it provides people with genuine value.

Beyond that, everything else is ultimately secondary. 

Google May Be Forced to Reveal its Search Algorithm to an SEO, the headline on Search Engine Journal announces. 

For those not in the loop, back in 2012, a company called Foundem filed a suit against the search engine giant. A price comparison search engine, Foundem alleges that it was the victim of anti-competitive practices by Google in 2006. Specifically, it claims that Google intentionally manipulated its search engine results page (SERP) to bury the site. 

The accusation, notes SFGate, was tied to several algorithm changes that penalized sites with large quantities of duplicate content and changed how Google handled URL canonization—known respectively as Gilligan, Jagger, and Big Daddy, per Moz. At first glance, the whole suit may seem cut-and-dry. 

Foundem simply doesn’t want to acknowledge that its business model became irrelevant, which was ultimately the real reason it foundered, claims the International Center for Law & Economics.

The courts clearly disagreed, and the fact that Foundem continued to perform well in other search engines was admittedly suspicious. So it was that the two companies found themselves embroiled in a years-long legal dispute. And here’s where it gets interesting.

Let’s circle back to the Search Engine Journal piece we cited at the beginning. As part of the court proceedings, Google revealed documents detailing its algorithm to the court—confidentially, of course.  In April 2020, Foundem reportedly demanded that the company bring in SEO expert Philipp Kloeckner to interpret them.  

Google’s response, understandably, was that doing so would compromise the integrity of the entire search engine. Foundem responded that it could simply withdraw the documents afterward—seemingly forgetting the extreme competitive advantage Kloeckner would gain as a result of the process. It couldn’t withdraw them either, however—the documents were key to its defense.

And so it was that Google faced an ultimatum. If Google neither withdraws the documents nor consents to provide them to Kloeckner, the judge will simply give them to Kloeckner himself. And that could ultimately lead to the documents being released to the general public. 

We expect one of two things would happen as a result of this.

If we were to be optimistic, this could completely change the face of the web. Armed with a complete understanding of content quality and ranking signals, SEOs and marketers could create better, more relevant content than ever before. It would be a golden age for search.

If we’re being realistic? We’d probably regress to the early days of SEO—a chaotic mess where the SERP is poisoned by black hats and spammers. Not exactly ideal, in other words. 

Either way, we don’t think it’s likely that Google will reveal its algorithm. Far likelier that it will choose to withdraw the documents and eat the fine. That small dent in its revenue would be far smaller than the damage it would incur from its algorithm being made public.

We’ve received a sobering reminder that no matter what we do, our search engine optimization efforts are ultimately at Google’s mercy. At least that’s the message the search engine giant sent in August. Midway through the month, SEO experts noticed some massive changes to how titles were generated on the search engine results page, as reported by Search Engine Journal.

Rather than pulling SERP headlines from a page’s title tag, Google instead began replacing them with everything from H1 tags to anchor text from internal links. Per Search Engine Land, it didn’t take long for the company to confirm that yes, it had indeed changed how SERP titles were generated. It claimed that its algorithms now generate titles that describe what a page is actually about — regardless of the query or title tag.

There’s just one problem. Evidence suggests that, at least in this case, those algorithms aren’t exactly working as intended. Some of the changes seem, to put it bluntly, absolutely nonsensical — one expert noted an instance where they replaced a page’s title text with copy from a completely different page.  

At first glance, this seems like a huge problem. After all, what’s the point of planning out metadata like title tags if Google is simply going to ignore it? As is often the case, however, there’s a bit more going on here than one might at first assume.

First and foremost is the fact that, according to Google, 80% of results will still use your title tag on the SERP. This means that instances where Google uses a different or ‘wrong’ tag will be relatively rare. Google further lists a few specific cases in which it will replace the title tag:

• It’s too long
• It’s stuffed with keywords
• It’s boilerplate, containing generic copy or lacking keywords

“A focus on good HTML title tags remains valid,” the company maintains. “Our main advice…to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used.” 

Further, as noted by SEO expert Brodie Clark, most scenarios in which Google replaces a page’s title tags actually end up being beneficial.  For the most part, the changes end up being an improvement, providing “a better preview of the content to come.” And in the rare cases where they end up being detrimental, a site owner’s best bet is to take a step back and re-evaluate.

And more importantly, to double-check that their existing HTML titles follow SEO best practices.  

Search engine optimization (SEO) need not break the bank — and anyone who tries to tell you it does is in all likelihood trying to sell you something. While it’s certainly true that there’s no shortage of premium SEO tools available, they mostly just cut down on a lot of work you’d otherwise need to do manually. And while there are certainly SEO firms that can do an excellent job of managing your website, you don’t strictly need them in order to succeed. 

It’s entirely possible to take care of all the SEO on your website while barely spending a cent — here are some tips to help you do exactly that. 

Leverage Your Own Expertise With a Blog

Here’s a question for you — what are you good at? What skills do you possess that the layperson lacks? What might you be able to teach others if you took the opportunity to share your expertise? 

Whatever your business or industry, you’re bound to know something you can share with your audience. Something they might be interested in learning. Translating that into a thought leadership blog could be a valuable means of bringing in new traffic, particularly if you’re keyed into the kinds of questions your audience is asking. 

Use Any of a Number of Free SEO Tools

Just because there’s such a wealth of premium tools available on the web, that doesn’t mean you’re completely adrift if you don’t use them. There are actually quite a few free tools that can help you achieve most of what you could with a paid subscription if used in tandem with one another. Some examples include: 

• Answer The Public
• Also Asked
• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• Google Data Studio
• Google Analytics
• Keyword Hero
• Keyword Sheeter

Draw in Traffic With User-Generated Content

Depending on your industry, you might actually be able to create some buzz on social media through your audience itself. Not only will this show other people that you have an audience engaged enough to actively work with your brand, but it also shows that your brand is trustworthy and open to conversation. Plus, if a contest or campaign on social media goes viral, you’re looking at a massive influx of traffic. 

Pay Attention to Local SEO

Local SEO is unique in that it doesn’t actually require much in the way of expenditure. All you really need to do is fill out your Google My Business page. Once that’s done, simply ensure you have your business’s name, address, and phone number on each page of your website, and keep an eye on local reviews. 

Manually Take Care of Internal SEO

For most smaller websites, internal/technical SEO isn’t terribly difficult to manage. Particularly if you’re using a content management system like WordPress, you’ll have access to multiple plugins that allow you to take care of everything from website performance to mobile friendliness to your sitemap. And if you’re uncertain where to start, tutorials like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO can be a great help.