Link building, simply put, is the process of getting other websites to link back to your website. All marketers and business owners should be interested in building links to drive referral traffic and increase their site’s authority.
Why build links? Google’s algorithms are complex and always evolving, but backlinks remain an important factor in how every search engine determines which sites rank for which keywords. Building links is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings.
There’s a right way and a wrong way, however, to build links to your site. If you care about the long-term viability of your site and business, you should only engage in natural linkbuilding, meaning, the process of earning links rather than buying them or otherwise achieving them through manipulative tactics (sometimes known as black-hat SEO, a practice that can get your site essentially banned from the search results).
That said, natural, organic link building is a difficult, time-consuming process. Not all links are created equal: A link from an authoratative website like the Wall Street Journal will have a greater impact on your rankings on the SERP than a link from a small or newly built website, but high-quality links are harder to come by.
This guide will teach you how to build quality links that improve your organic rankings without violating Google guidelines.
Link building is important because it is a major factor in how Google ranks web pages. Google notes that:
“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
Imagine that we own a site promoting wind turbine equipment that we sell. We’re competing with another wind turbine equipment manufacturer. One of the ranking factors Google will look at in determining how to rank our respective pages is link popularity.
While the above example provides a general visual understanding of why link building is important, it’s very basic. It omits key factors such as:
The most important concept to understand is that, as Google says, you’re more likely to have your content rank higher for keywords you’re targeting if you can get external websites to link to your pages.
Simple Link Building Strategies: How To Get Other Sites to Link to You
There are a number of link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours:
Content Creation & Promotion – Create compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference and link to, and tell people about it. You have to spread the word before you can expect anyone to find your content and link to it!
Reviews & Mentions – Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with a large social media following.
Links from Friends & Partners – Ask people you know and people you work with to link to your site. Remember that relevance matters; links from sites that are in the same general industry or niche as your site will have more value than links from random, unrelated sites.
It can take a while to build a lot of links, but be patient, and remember that shortcuts like buying links are against Google’s guidelines and can be devastating for your SEO. Don’t take chances.
Build Links for Free with Internal Link Building
There’s an easy, underrated way to build links to the pages you’re attempting to improve search engine rankings for. And it’s a method you have total control over: Internal link building.
In attempting to get a Web page to rank, there are a few key factors to consider:
Anchor Text – One of the most important things search engines take into account in ranking a page is the actual text a linking page uses to talk about your content. So if someone links to our Good Guys Wind Turbine Parts site with the text “wind turbine parts”, that will help us to rank highly for that keyword phrase, whereas if they had simply used text like “Good Guys LLC” to link to our site, we wouldn’t enjoy the same ranking advantage for the phrase “wind turbine parts”.
Quality of the Linking Page – Another factor taken into account is the quality of the page that is sending the link; search engines allow links from high-quality, trusted pages to count more in boosting rankings than questionable pages and sites.
Page the Link is Aimed At – Many times, when people talk about your site they’ll link to the home page. This makes it difficult for individual pages to achieve high rankings (because it’s so difficult for them to generate their own link equity).
These are all elements we can’t control in attempting to get other sites to link to us. We can, however, control all of these elements in linking to our own pages from our own content. We can:
Determine what anchor text to use.
Decide which page to point that anchor text at.
Ensure that the quality and content of the linking page is high (since it’s our page!).
Building external links to your site is important, but in focusing more of your efforts on the optimization of these internal links you can build quality in-bound links with rich anchor text to the proper pages, which will provide you with an unparalelled ranking boost (for free!).
Internal Link Building Tools and Tips
So how do you go about building these great internal links? Well, you can set up a system for interlinking your pages in a few easy steps:
Keyword Research for Link Building – First, you need to utilize a keyword research tool to have numerous keywords suggested to you that are both relevant and popular.
Link Pages Using Targeted Anchor Text – The final step is to apply your keyword research to intelligent inter-linking; you do this by linking to content using the keywords you’ve discovered.
The execution of the third item is key. You need to be sure that you’re linking to the right pages with the right anchor text. Here are a couple quick tips for carrying that out effectively:
Use Your Site Search
This one’s pretty simple, and can be used for multiple purposes:
Finding pages on your site to link to a new page – When you create new content, you want to make sure you can search your site for mentions of similar keyword variations you might want to link to that page.
Finding a page that’s been created to link to – Your site may have multiple content authors. In this case, you may have a vague idea that a page about “wind turbine rotors” has been created, but you don’t know the page title or URL. In this case, you can either type the keyword into your site search to find the corresponding page, or use Google itself. To do this we’d simply type: “site:http://www.goodguyswindturbineparts.com intitle:wind turbine rotors” into Google. This would return all of the pages containing that phrase that Google has indexed.
Create an Internal SEO Link Building Wire Frame
To do this, you simply need to map the keywords you’d like to target to the most logical pages. So, let’s say we have three pages to choose from:
goodguyswindturbineparts.com/wind-turbine-parts
goodguyswindturbineparts.com/turbine-rotors
goodguyswindturbineparts.com/wind-turbine-shaft
Since the turbine rotors page definitely seems to be the best fit for our “wind turbine rotors” keyword, we’ll align that keyword with that page.
We can similarly match “wind turbine parts” and “wind turbine shaft” with the corresponding pages. In a spreadsheet, this might look something like this:
As you can see, each page is associated with mutiple keywords. By making this document available to all of your content writers, they can quickly see which pages are targeting which keywords; they can also instantly check your SEO wireframe to see which keywords have been targeted (with a simple ctrl F!).[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Wordstream by unknown author on December 30, 2008.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]All links are created equal, right?
They’re not! Link building used to be simple: you would go out there, write a bunch of articles, submit them to an article submission site and get an external link back to your site.
That doesn’t work in the post-Penguin era where this could get you a high PR (page rank). While the right inbound website link can grow your Google rankings, revenue, and brand, the wrong ones can get your site penalized. And, you never know what Google will do next.
For example, many people relied on private blog networks to help boost and achieve high PR. Then, Google threw a bomb, known as the PBN deindexing update, which tanked rankings for sites that had used that technique.
Though a lot of people were surprised, I could see that one coming and I’m betting that Google will do it again the next time people try to game search results. So, what should you do?
To be on the safe side, most SEOs would advise you to stop doing anything for link acquisition. If you’re doing business online, I think that this is the worst advice that you could ever get. Instead, you need to learn how to build a high-quality backlink the right way.
Backlinks will remain a vital Google ranking factor. But, effective link building is now about trust and popularity. Only a high-quality backlink works in this model. According to Copyblogger, domain trust/authority represents 23.87% of Google’s ranking algorithm.
A recent survey by Moz reveals that about 37% of business owners who responded spend between $10,000 and $50,000 per month on external link building. If you’re making that kind of investment, you need to have accurate information on how to build links that Google will trust.
In this in-depth post, I will show you a strategic link building technique that works. It is scalable, and when you apply it to your site, your rankings will improve. You will even improve your conversion rate because you are working as the high authority on the topic to search engines.
In this post I’m going to cover:
Understanding what Google wants
How to scale your link building efforts
Keyword research and targeting
How to earn editorial links
So, let’s get started…
Step #1: Understanding what Google wants
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing, Google dictates the pace. That’s why it’s important to get to know Google’s mission. Not only does this shape Google’s strategy, but it can guide you in shaping yours. Here’s what Google says about its mission:
Google also believes that there’s always more information out there. With external link building, organizing information (to help your reader) becomes your mission, too. When you pay close attention to what your readers and ideal buyers want, you don’t have to use hype to sell your products.
If you want to build links without getting penalized, you must understand and work closely with Google’s mission statement. If you fail to do that, the technique won’t work.
Before you start building a website link to your web page, ask yourself these questions, relating to Google’s mission:
Is my content well-organized?
Do I provide useful information to the sites that will link to mine?
Let’s talk about the first question, because, for effective link building, site organization matters.
When people come to your site, do you leave them wondering what else to do (especially the first timers)? Make sure that your site is easy to navigate. Here’s a great example:
And, here’s another site with disorganized navigation:
Getting the navigation right is the first step in organizing your content so that people and search engines can find information that’s useful and relevant. The second step is to build a foundation that will make other sites want to create an external link to yours.
How to develop a strong link building foundation: Let’s say that you have written and published a useful post and want to get it ranked in Google. Since you know that improved high PR results from links from quality sites (see the chart from LinkedIn), wouldn’t it make sense to build quality links as quickly as possible?
No. If you generate links to new content too quickly, it looks manipulative and that can be a red flag for Google.
How to help Google find and index your content: Some of the posts that I’ve written in the last month were indexed within six hours. To achieve this, I used a simple tool – Alexa.
Google’s spiders crawl Alexa.com all the time. When you input your site URL on Alexa and look up the metrics, Alexa adds a new, optimized page to the database:
When Google crawls the Alexa site again, your new content will be picked up by search engines as well.
Getting strong social signals suggests to Google that people find your content useful and choose to share it. That can help Google rate your high-quality content, which means that by the time you start building inbound links to it, any website link becomes natural.
To build social signals, I recommend that you share your post on Google+ (it’s a no-brainer since it’s Google’s own network).
This is simple. To share your post, log into your Google account and click the + tab at the top:
When the share box pops up, paste the URL of your post, choose the visibility (I recommend “public” for widest reach) and click share:
Follow the simple tips above and your content will be indexed within six hours. Then, you’re ready to start building trustworthy links to the page.
Note: Make sure that you write and share high-quality content and useful information. Every piece of content and link (including anchor text) should provide additional value for your audience.
Traditional website link building often ignores the end-user. The Google Penguin 3.0 update reminded us that focusing on what people want, why they should click a link, and the value that they will get when they land on the referred page is what truly counts in today’s SEO.
Step #2: How to Scale Your Link Building Efforts
Many people find link building and link acquisition stressful. One reason is because they are not producing great content that people will gladly share.
In Moz’s classic book, “How to Rank,” Cyrus Shepard recommends that “90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.” This is the 90/10 rule of link building.
As harsh as it sounds, Shepard says that if you are struggling to generate a high-quality backlink to your site, it’s likely that you have reversed the rule.
If you want to succeed with scalable link building, you need quality content that will warrant the high PR.
Link building is all about positioning your content and getting more people to link to you. In other words, a single post can be used to gain many quality links to your site.
A high-quality external link has two key advantages over traditional links: relevance and trust. Here’s the difference:
Let’s say that you have a dog training site and you get an inbound link from an article directory. Google won’t see that website link as relevant to the subject of your site.
But, if that link acquisition is from a site that’s related to dog training, like a dog food store or a discussion board that’s centered around dogs, you will not only improve your rankings, but your site will be relevant and valuable to those who visit it. And, that will help you get with more link acquisition and achieve a high PR.
How do you find authority sites where you can build relationships and start the process of gaining relevant links? One useful tool is Similar Site Search.
Type in your site URL (I’m using Quick Sprout in this example) and hit the “Search” button.
The result is a list of sites covering topics related to mine. This is only a first step, as I still need to build relationships with site owners, so they’ll want to link to my content.
Once you have identified some sites, then you need to research them further to figure out which ones will help most in your link building efforts. Here are some of the key metrics to look at:
Domain Authority: It’s important to know the domain authority of the sites that you consider for link acquisition. A great tool for this is the Moz Bar, which shows the authority status of any domain or keyword in the search results.
Domain relevancy: As I said above, getting links from relevant domains is a key part of scalable link building. Domain relevancy is also a key Google ranking factor and is especially important if you want to escape the impact of Google Penguin on your search engine rank.
Microsite Masters found that “every single site that they looked at that got negatively hit by the Penguin Update had a “money” keyword as its anchor text for over 60% of its incoming links.”
That tells you that if you want to scale your external link building efforts, you must combine domain relevancy with the right anchor text.
Trust flow: This is a metric, analyzed by Majestic, that provides a much better measurement of perceived quality. Trust flow was specially designed to determine the quality of links pointing to a site. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better. In this example, Bing has a trust flow of 86, which is excellent.
If most of your backlinks come from sites with high trust flow metrics, your SEO rankings will improve, you will have a high PR, and link acquisition will become easier.
Use Majestic to analyze the links that currently point to your site. Input the root domain into the box and click the search icon.
Scroll down and look at the backlinks. In addition to the URL and the trust flow, Majestic also shows citation flow, which I’ll discuss in a minute.
For the domain we are analyzing (nerdfitness.com), the first referring site is artofmanliness.com. Its trust flow is 46 and its citation flow is 47.
Citation flow: This metric from Majestic is designed to predict how influential a website link in a site might be.
The downside of using citation flow as your benchmark is that it doesn’t measure the quality of inbound links, but their quantity. The more inbound links a site has, the better their citation flow. But this doesn’t necessarily mean a high PR. On its own, citation flow isn’t very useful, because quality is more important than quantity with link building.
However, when you use citation flow with trust flow, it works well to help you identify sites that are both trusted and influential.
Target sites with a high trust flow then focus on link acquisition in that group that also have a high perceived influence or citation flow.
In the example above, Nerd Fitness is a fitness site that helps you level up your life and feel better about yourself. Since Art of Manliness deals with men’s fitness and health, it is definitely related to content and target audience.
Branded keywords and anchor text: Anchor text is also important when assessing the quality of a site. In the image above, 704 sites are linking to Nerd Fitness through branded anchor text (nerd fitness).
When you are building an external link, you should use your brand name with other keyword variations. You could call this branded hybrid anchor text.
For instance, if your site is reiv.com.au, a real estate training site, you can use any of these anchor text variations to generate backlinks:
reiv real estate training
reiv realtors
reiv training for beginners
You could also vary the anchor text by using URLs with your target keywords:
http://reiv.com.au real estate
http://reiv.com.au estate training
real estate training at www.reiv.com.au
With the right approach to quality content, domain relevancy, trust flow and anchor text, you will enjoy the benefits of real traffic and external links to your site. But, link building is also about increasing the strength, juice, and potential of your inbound links. That’s why it’s essential to
But, link building is also about increasing the strength, juice, and potential of your inbound links. That’s why it’s essential to create a two-tier linking structure for your site.
Tier 1 backlinks are links you earn/build directly to your site.
Tier 2 backlinks are links that directly pass the ranking value to tier-one links.
If you get a link to your ‘money page’ from a new post on someone else’s blog, that website link may not add much value to your site ranking.
Most of the time, direct backlinks to your site can take a while to have an effect. But, when you strengthen those backlinks, you will see a bump in organic traffic and rankings.
One way to strengthen those links is with social signals. When you pass social signals to your tier 1 backlinks (i.e. sites that linked to you), you will ultimately boost their effectiveness and this will improve your overall Google rankings and get you that high PR you desire.
As for tier 2 backlinks, there are 3 simple steps that you need to follow…
Step #1: Write valuable articles and post them on web 2.0 sites, like Tumblr, Web Node and Blogger.
Let’s use Tumblr as an example. Log in or sign up, then click the drop-down arrow and select ‘create a new blog.’
Next, click “Add Text”:
Next, add your post title and content, then publish.
Step #2: Get your Tumblr page indexed by sharing the post URL on Google+ and Facebook and pinging it at Pingomatic. Pingomatic will syndicate your URL to major content aggregators.
Wait for the site to get crawled and indexed. This should take less than 6 hours. To check, go to the Google search engine and paste your Tumblr URL into the search box.
Step #3: Once indexed, use a branded keyword on the Tumblr page to link back to your site:
This backlink should point directly to your site, but it may not have a strong impact on your rankings. Not everything you do will be like a press release covered by the nightly news. But there is still value.
In that case, create a tier 2 structure for this Tumblr page. Remember that your link is already there, so all you have to do now is build more authoritative links to your Tumblr page.
Caution: when you’re using a tier 2 link building structure to strengthen your tier 1 backlinks, avoid anchor text over-optimization. Make sure that you aren’t just using this tactic for link acquisition. The new page or site that you create on platforms like Tumblr should be valuable and beneficial to users. From there, you can add a website link, if you feel it is beneficial for the reader.
Also, if the keyword you’re targeting is ‘UK military base,’ your anchor should be generic:
Learn more about military bases in the UK
Visit this UK military base
In other words, don’t link to your web 2.0 site with an exact match keyword/anchor text combination. This will actually hurt your site’s rank.
Step #3. Keyword Research and Targeting
When building links that scale, it’s all about providing relevant content, so that people will keep linking to it. Keyword targeting is an important aspect of that. By selecting a huge number of keywords across several ad groups, Alan Mitchell was able to increase a clients’ click-through rates by 461% and their return on investment (ROI) grew to 231% in 3 months.
How relevant are your keywords to the prospects’ needs? If you want to make your site more powerful through external link building, you can’t afford to ignore keyword research.
If you want to make your site more powerful through external link building, you can’t afford to ignore keyword research. Keyword research helps you to dig into the minds of your target audience.
For example, when you conduct a keyword search in your industry for this:
best social media strategist in NY
What do you think is happening?
First, the people searching for that long-tail keyword are interested in talking/working with a professional who understands social media marketing. They don’t want a newbie writing a boring press release, but a strategist; someone with a proven track record.
Second, they are only interested in social media strategists who live in New York, which means that they might be a local business owner wanting a face-to-face meeting.
If you were in that niche, let’s see how you could find suitable keywords to focus your content in the search engine and attract small business owners who need help with social media marketing.
Step #1: Log into your account and click “search for new keyword and ad group ideas.”
Type in “social media strategist.” Now, scroll down and click “Get ideas.”
Next, click on “keywords ideas” for a list of search queries that you can target:
The screenshot above shows the keywords that you can target in your content, if you want to attract small business owners looking for help with social media marketing:
social media strategist
social media marketing strategist
social media marketing company
social media consultant
Some of the other search engine keywords you find may not be relevant to your ideal prospects, such as:
social media strategist salary
social media jobs
The people searching for the two keyword phrases above are probably freelancers looking to make extra money through social media marketing. They are not your ideal target audience, so those aren’t the right keywords for you in link acquisition. Never target keywords that are off-topic or unrelated to your core message, products or services.
When you build a website link, you don’t want to use anchor text that will make site visitors bounce. Remember that scalable link building is concerned with the relevancy of the linking domain.
Targeting consumer demographics: This is another essential targeting element for link building. When you know your audience’s demographics (age, gender, education, and so on), you can get inside their heads. When you do, you’ll be able to create useful content that helps them solve their problems. That’s a key component in building organic links that gets you positive results with a high PR.
To find out the audience demographics for your site, visit Quantcast, sign up and input your site URL in the search bar. Scroll down to see the demographics:
This image shows the demographics at Metacafe. It clearly shows that most of the site’s target audience (readers) are male and aged 35 – 44. It also has many readers in the 25-34 age group. According to Pingdom, those two age groups dominate social media, which means that they are likely to share your content, if you take the time to make it useful. You also have to share your own content, if you want to build a higher external link ratio.
Automate for social signals: If you’re going to build social signals, you need to leverage automation. Mingl Marketing Group grew their client’s traffic by 590%, using the HubSpot social automation tool.
And, TREW Marketing used Hubspot to grow web traffic by 130% and lead generation by 150%.
If you want to get social signals to scale link acquisition and achieve great results, you need to create them continuously by sharing your content. Manual syndication can be time consuming. Imagine how long it would take for you to share your latest post on the top 20 social media networks. Trust me, it would take a while.
That’s why you have to set up automatic updates on social media networks. Think of these as a social press release.
Buffer is my favorite social automation tool. You can use this social media management tool to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook and several other social networks.
One of its best features it the ability to queue your campaign in its reservoir and syndicate your content later. So, even if you’re catching a plane, your next piece of content will get to your audience.
Other link building tools: Here are some more external link building tools that you can use to analyze keywords, referring domain names, anchor text and so on:
Quick Sprout – helps you identify why your site isn’t getting enough traffic.
Open Link Profiler – a powerful tool for link diagnosis and industry checks.
Open Site Explorer – use this tool from Moz to determine the number of backlinks and the domain authority of referring domain names.
nTopic – a simple tool for topic analysis. It helps you plan content creation from scratch, so that you can effectively target the right keywords and improve your rankings.
Step #4: How to earn editorial links
Earning editorial links from authority sites will really skyrocket your external link building strategy. But, to earn those links, you have to provide immense value. You can’t just put some text together and pray for miracles. Did you know that over 2 million blog posts are published daily?
Link building can be stressful, but’s easier if you focus on creating link-worthy and sharable content. If you create great content consistently, people will naturally (on their own) cite, recommend, share, link, tweet and send links to your page.
After several years of struggling to get traffic, Brian Dean finally cracked the external link building code. Once he implemented it, hundreds of people started linking to his first-ever infographic and he received a little above 50,000 unique visitors with tremendously high PR:
Creating a viral content campaign: To get the most from your website link building, you have to create content that people are willing to share. Why would they share it? It’s because it’s helpful, valuable and you blow them away. Instead of making assumptions, study posts that went viral in the past and use their strategy to dominate the major social media platforms.
The first tool I recommend is Open Site Explorer.
Step #1: visit the site and input your competitor’s blog URL. Let’s see which of their posts got the most shares and comments (engagement).
Go ahead and click the “Search” button, then look at the left hand side and click the ‘Top Pages” tab:
When you click on the URL, you’ll be able to see the post title and how many shares it has gathered. Here’s what I saw, when I clicked on the third URL in the image above (http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/):
The topic is: content marketing
The title is: Content Marketing: How To Build An Audience That Builds Your Business
When you visit the page, you’ll see that it already has thousands of tweets and Facebook likes, which shows it is a viral post. This is the type of link acquisition to seek out.
Step #2: Write a better headline/title
Who says that you can’t write a more clickable headline than Brian Clark? I’m going to give it a good try. 🙂
Although the original headline went viral, I think that “build your business” is too vague.
Everyone wants to build a business, but they want to take actionable steps. Let’s see how we could improve that headline to be more specific and that targets specific business types in the search engine. Here are three examples:
How You Can Grow Your Email List Through Content Marketing
6 Steps To Attract More Customers To Your Store Through Content Marketing
How a Simple Content Marketing Strategy Improved My Google Rankings by 110%
Adding numbers in titles works. I’ve seen a lot of articles go viral because the headline has a number. For example, all of the titles below performed better than the Copyblogger post that we’re studying:
If you can write better headlines, the chances of your post going viral are high.
But, you also have to provide value within the content. Here are some ways to do that.
Checklist – simple ways to make your content more useful:
Craft more clickable, specific and benefit-driven headlines.
Use charts, screenshots and quality images to back up your points, not just text with an external link.
Avoid personal opinions and include scientific research studies and experiments.
Link out to relevant authority blogs to provide more value.
Ask emotional questions.
Mention power users, experts and popular bloggers.
End with a call-to-action (you can include a giveaway of a checklist related to your topic).
If you follow this proven checklist, you’ll be able to write more thorough, useful and data-driven blog posts that will stand the test of time. This is how you get a high PR.
Send thank you emails: when you mention authors and site owners in your post, you can get them to link back to you, if you send a thank you email.
The email template below was introduced to Backlinko’s founder by Peep Laja of ConversionXL.com. It may be brief, but it helped Laja to grow his blog to 100,000 visitors in less than 12 months:
Use guest blogging to earn authority links: Guest blogging used to be very powerful. In fact, Danny Iny used guest blogging to recover from losing his company and being $250,000 in debt.
He started building networks with other A-list bloggers and wrote a lot of guest posts and quality link acqusition. Within six months, he had built a new consulting business with a full client list. His Firepole Marketing blog receives thousands of visitors per month.
When you guest blog, you provide useful content for other people’s blogs, but your traffic also improves, as Michael Hyatt found:
If you’re looking to scale your link building process, guest blogging can help you. Aim to produce helpful and sharable posts – people will naturally want to add a website link to you.
How to gain trusted links with comments: Don’t comment spam. Just … don’t! But, you can still use commenting to gain authoritative links.
Links from comments may not have much SEO value, but they can be natural and relevant, which are among the key factors that Google values. Here’s how you get those links:
Search for blogs with the dofollow CommentLuv plugin installed.
Subscribe to post updates for at least 5 blogs.
Speed matters. Once you get an alert that a new post has been published, quickly read the post (if it’s a long one, read the first two paragraphs and then the last part to get the main points).
Write a valuable comment. Avoid comments like, ‘nice post’, ‘awesome write up’ or ‘this post helped me.’
Here’s the kind of comment that can generate traffic and links back to your site:
This comment is rich, helpful and well written, so readers can benefit not just from the blog post, but from the comment, too. And, of course, the commenter has linked back to his site in the URL field.
Here’s another example, from a guy at Moz who left a wonderful comment and then linked to his blog post:
Conclusion
In 2013, about 10% of SEOs invested up to $50,000 in website link acquisition and building. But, in 2014, 81% of SEOs decreased their link building budget? Why?
The truth is that SEOs are skeptical about building links. They’re scared of the next Google update. But, I don’t think that you should be.
Link building has been an effective strategy for achieving high PR with Google rankings, even before the first Panda update. I believe it still is… as long as you do it right.
Have you experimented with scalable external link building?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Neil Patel by Neil Patel on December 30, 2014.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I know what you are thinking, this isn’t impossible.
Because the more content you have and the more links you have, the higher your rankings will be.
Although that is true, it doesn’t mean that content marketing and link building are the only ways to increase your rankings.
It doesn’t matter what update Google rolls out, I’ve found that there are a few hacks that consistently work to boost your rankings without creating more content or building more links.
So, are you ready to find out what they are?
What does Google want to rank at the top?
Before I get into the exact “hacks” and tactics that can boost your rankings, I want to first help you change the way you think about SEO.
Do you think Google really cares about on-page SEO and link building?
Sure, it matters to some extent, but that’s not what Google cares about the most.
Google wants to rank websites that people love. If they ranked websites that you hated, then you would slowly stop using Google.
And if people stopped using Google, then there would be fewer people to click on their ads, which means they would make less money.
That’s why Google cares about what you think and they ideally want to rank the websites that you love.
Now let’s dive into some hacks that will make people love your site, which will boost your rankings.
And don’t worry… I am not going to give you some fluffy tactics, I have data to back up everything. 😉
Hack #1: Optimize your click-through-rate
Let me ask you this:
If 10,000 people performed a Google search for the term “SEO” and clicked on the number 2 listing instead of the number 1 listing, what would that tell Google?
It would tell them that the number 2 listing is more relevant and that Google should move that listing to the number 1 spot.
Rand Fishkin ran an experiment where he told all of his Twitter followers to perform a Google search for the term “best grilled steak” and to click on the first listing, hit the back button, and then click on the 4th listing.
Within 70 minutes the 4th listing jumped into the top spot.
And that page even started to rank at the top of page 1 for the term “grilled steak”.
The ranking eventually slipped back down because people didn’t really feel that the listing was that great compared to some of the other listings.
Instead, it only climbed because Rand has a loyal following and everyone helped trick Google to believe that it was more relevant (at least in the short term).
But this should give you a sense that Google cares what you think. So much so that they will adjust rankings in real time because they don’t want to show you pages that you feel are irrelevant (no matter how many backlinks the page has or how well its on-page code is optimized).
And Rand wasn’t the only person who tested out this theory. It’s been done a countless number of times and each time it produced similar results.
You want people to click on your listing more than the other ones out there. It’s that simple.
If you can generate more clicks (in a legitimate way) than the listings above you, eventually you’ll notice your rankings climb without having to write more content or build more links.
So, how do you get more clicks?
Well, you have to adjust your title tag and meta description tag to be more appealing.
Anytime you perform a Google search, you see a list of results. And each result has a title, URL, and description:
The link part is the title (also known as the title tag), then there is the URL (which is green in color), and lastly, there is the description (black text… that is also known as the meta description).
If you are running a WordPress blog, you can easily modify your title tag and meta description using the Yoast SEO plugin.
There are a few ways you can generate more clicks on your listing over the competition:
Include keywords – people tend to click on listings that include the keyword or phrase they just searched for. Make sure you are using the right keywords within your title and description (I will get to this in a bit). This may sound basic, but when your web pages rank for thousands of terms, which one do you include in your 60-character title tag?
Evoke curiosity – titles that are super appealing tend to generate clicks. For example, if the keyword you were going after is “green tea,” a good title would be “11 Proven Benefits of Green Tea (#6 Will Shock You)”. I know it may seem a bit long, but it works because a lot of people will wonder what number 6 will be.
Copy magazines – anytime you see a magazine, you’ll notice that they have appealing titles and headlines on the cover. A lot of their titles contain “how to” or are list oriented. Look at magazines for inspiration.
Improving your search listings isn’t rocket science. Where most people mess up is that they pick the wrong keywords or they are terrible at writing copy. Remember, humans are reading your title tag and meta description tag, so they need to be appealing.
Log into Google Search Console, then click on “Search Traffic” and then click on “Search Analytics”:
You’ll see a page that looks something like this:
Scroll back up to the top and click on the “pages” radio button and “CTR” checkbox:
You’ll see a list of results sorted by your most popular URLs and their respective click-through-rate (also known as CTR):
Look for pages that have high traffic but a CTR of less than 5%.
Click on one of the listings with a CTR of less than 5% and then click on the “queries” radio button:
You’ll then want to look for the keywords with the highest amount of “clicks” and the lowest CTR.
Those are the keywords you want to focus on in your title tag and meta description.
Remember, your title tag is limited to roughly 60 characters, which means you won’t be able to fit more than 2 or 3 keywords.
So, you want to pick the keywords that typically have the most clicks. They should also have a low CTR because you selected pages with a CTR rate lower than 5%.
By adjusting your title tag and meta description to include the right keywords and by evoking curiosity, you’ll be able to increase your clicks. This will get you more search traffic in the short run and boost your rankings over time.
Here are 3 tests that worked well for me when I adjusted my title tag:
I noticed I was getting a lot of traffic for the term “marketing digital” from countries outside of North America on one of my posts.
So, I adjusted my title tag from saying “digital marketing” to “marketing digital” which took my CTR from 3.36% to 4.45%. It also increased my search traffic by 1,289 visitors a month.
With the key phrase “social media marketing,” I adjusted my title tag based on an idea I got from a magazine. My CTR went from 2.38% to 2.84%. In total, that increased my traffic by 932 visitors a month.
With my social media marketing title tag, I added the phrase “step-by-step guide.”
This lets people know it is a how-to related post and it is action oriented. I also added the word “social media” a few times within the meta description.
And with the query “Google AdWords,” I noticed that Google announced that they are switching their ad platform name from Google AdWords to Google Ads, so I did the opposite and focused more on the term “Google AdWords” because very few people knew about the name switch.
This helped drive an extra 1,355 visitors per month.
I’ve also had instances where the changes I’ve made had hurt my Google traffic.
So, whenever you adjust your title tag and meta description, mark that date down and look at the data within Google Search Console after 30 or so days to see if it hurt or helped.
If it hurt, revert it back and wait another 30 days. It can hurt your rankings if you continuously test. So when you have a losing variation, no matter what, wait 30 daysas it will stabilize your rankings.
If the change helped boost your CTR and rankings, then you are off to a good start.
Now that you’ve optimized your click-through-rate, it’s time for you to optimize your user experience.
Hack #2: Show people what they want when they want it
If you go back to the experiment Rand Fishkin ran above, you’ll notice he told people to click the “back” button.
You don’t want people going to your site and clicking the back button… it will hurt your rankings.
People tend to click the back button because they don’t like what they see. If you can optimize your website for the optimal user experience, people will be less likely to click the back button.
I do this through 2 simple steps.
The first is to use Qualaroo and survey people. By asking people (right when they are on your website) a simple question of “how can I improve this page,” you’ll get tons of ideas.
You can even use Qualaroo to find out why people are visiting your website, which again will help you understand the type of people visiting your site. This will allow you to tailor your experience to them.
I ran a Qualaroo survey on my main blog page. The biggest feedback I got from you was that it was hard to find the exact content you were looking for.
And I know why too. It’s because I have marketing related content on everything. From ecommerce to SEO to content marketing…
I decided to try something out where when you land on the blog page, you can select the type of content that piques your interest and then all of the content gets tailored to your needs.
I also ran a Crazy Egg test to ensure that you like the change I made. Based on the Crazy Egg heatmap below, you can see that it was successful.
The bounce rate on my blog page dropped by 21% as well. 🙂
I then looked at the Crazy Egg scrollmap to see which elements/areas of the page have the most attention. This helped me determine where I should place the content filtering option.
The Crazy Egg scrollmap of my blog page shows that the content filtering option generates 70% of the page’s attention.
Placing the filtering in a place where there is a lot of attention ensures that I am giving you what you need in a place that is easy to find.
After you optimize your user experience, you want to focus on building a brand.
I recommend that you look at the pages on your site with high bounce rates and consider running this process in order to improve the user experience. When selecting the pages, make sure you are also picking pages that have decent traffic.
Hack #3: Build a brand
If you build a brand like Facebook or Amazon or any of the popular site, you’ll rank higher.
Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
I ran an experiment, which helped build up my brand and my search traffic skyrocketed (unintentionally).
My traffic went from 240,839 unique visitors per month in June 2016:
To 454,382 unique visitors per month by August 2016:
Once I realized the power of branding, I started a podcast called Marketing School, and I started to publish videos on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn multiple times per week.
This has led me to generate 40,412 brand queries per month:
I’m even getting 3,806 brand queries per month on YouTube alone:
But as you know, producing good content doesn’t guarantee that your brand will grow.
Even if you build tools like me and release them for free (like what I did with Ubersuggest), it still won’t guarantee success.
But the one thing I have learned that works is the rule of 7.
When someone hears your message 7 times or sees it 7 times, they are more likely to resonate, build a connection, and continually come back.
So how do you get people to come back to your site?
The simplest solution that I’ve found to work is a free tool called Subscribers.
It leverages browser notifications to get people to “subscribe” to your website. It’s better than email because it is browser-based, which means people don’t have to give you their name or email address.
And then every time you want to get people to come back to your website, you simply send them a notification.
Look at how I’ve gotten over 42,316 people back to my site 174,281 times. That’s roughly 4 times per person.
Based on the rule of 7, I only have 3 more times to go. 😉
The way I use Subscribers is that I send out a notification blast every time I release a blog post.
The push looks something like this:
And instantly I’m able to get people back to my site:
When you start using Subscribers you won’t see results right away. It takes time to build up your subscriber base, but it happens pretty fast.
Typically, you’ll generate a browser notification subscriber three times faster than an email subscriber.
Conclusion
If you only focus on things like on-page SEO, link building, or even blogging, you won’t dominate Google.
Why?
Because that is what everyone else focuses on. You have to do more if you want to beat the competition.
By doing what’s best for the user, you’ll have a better chance of beating everyone else.
Just look at me, I do what every other SEO does plus more. Sometimes this causes my traffic to dip in the short run, but in the long run, it generally climbs.
From creating compelling copy so people want to click on your listing, to optimizing your user experience, to building a brand… you have to go beyond the SEO basics.
SEO has become extremely competitive. 5 years ago, it was much easier to rank at the top of Google.
If you use the 3 hacks above, here’s how long it will typically take to notice results.
Optimizing title tags – assuming you run successful tests, you can see small results in 30 to 60 days. Over time the results get even better.
Improving user experience – making your user experience better will instantly improve your metrics such as bounce rate, pageviews per visitor, time on site, and conversion rate. As for search rankings, it does help, but not instantly. Typically, it takes about 4 to 6 months to see results from this.
Brand building – sadly it takes years. Sure, tools like Subscribers will instantly grow your traffic, but it won’t impact your search rankings right away. You have no choice but to build a brand.
So which one of these hacks are you going to test out first?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Neil Patel by Neil Patel on August 28, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
A new notification from Google My Business will tell businesses when their local listings go live.
Google My Business (GMB) is rolling out a new feature to notify business owners when their local listings go live in Google Maps and Google Search.
Allyson Wright, community manager, Google My Business, announced this in the forums, saying “We’re in the process [of] launching a new notification that informs you when your business goes live on Google services, like Search and Maps.”
This feature will not work for those who do bulk submissions or have over 100 listings in their account. It’s only available for those who have their user-language preference is set to “en-US.”
Even if you haven’t yet signed up for Google My Business, you’ll receive two separate notifications: a welcome email and another one when the listing is live — assuming GMB has your proper email address.
If you don’t see this feature yet, don’t worry, Google said. “This will be rolling out more broadly soon.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz on July 18, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
Now a single registered account on GMB will be able to manage an unlimited number of locations.
Google said this morning that local search on mobile devices is growing faster than mobile search overall — 50 percent year over year. Partly in response, Google has been regularly adding new features to the Knowledge Panel and Google My Business (GMB).
Today, Google announced a new GMB API, new agency dashboard and new agency partner program. The API will enable agencies to manage additional categories of content, such as merchant descriptions and Posts for multilocation brands and small businesses at scale.
Google developed the agency dashboard in collaboration with a couple of its agency partners. The new dashboard promises to be fast. And it enables:
A single registered account on GMB to manage an unlimited number of locations.
User Groups to manage internal teams and control access to locations.
Easier product workflows to manage listings.
Registered agencies are also being given early access to new GMB tools and features. They’ll have a dedicated partner manager and other benefits. There will also be a new partner directory.
Google said that multiple criteria were involved in evaluating potential agency partners for the new program. There isn’t a specific “number of locations under management” requirement, but Google wants to initially focus on agencies that are growing. You can sign up for the agency partner program here.
The new dashboard will become available in the next three weeks.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Greg Sterling on May 1, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Google announced both on Twitter and in its forums that it will notify customers or users who leave reviews on Google Local results after owners respond to their reviews.
Reviewers will receive an email notification when a business responds. Google also plans to add mobile push notifications at a later date.
Marissa Nordahl, community manager at Google My Business, said:
When businesses respond to, or update responses to customer reviews, the customer now receives an email notification. The business’s response is published immediately and 5 minutes later, the notification is sent. This 5 minute delay allows time for the merchant to make any corrections to their response after submitting.
The notification email informs the customer of a reply to their review, and contains a link to a page with the full owner response.
Note: The review response is published immediately on Search and Maps.
Here is a screen shot of the email notification:
If businesses are aware their responses to reviews will be seen by those who leave the review, it may impact the type of responses they leave.
Mike Blumenthal, a local SEO expert who covered this news, says that this is Google “positioning itself vis-a-vis Yelp and Facebook to become THE local platform of choice for both businesses AND users.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz on May 14, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
Contributor Janet Driscoll Miller points out three page load speed issues and provides simple but effective workarounds that will enable web pages to load faster and gain favor with Google.
There are multiple reasons to improve how quickly your web pages load. One of them is page abandonment.
If your pages load slowly and customers leave before seeing your services, how will you grow a business and be successful?
A recent Google study shows that 53 percent of mobile site visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.
I’ve seen a few common mistakes that can drastically impede a page’s load speed. Thankfully, many of these mistakes can be fixed quickly and easily, which is a good thing, since every little bit helps when it comes to improving page load speed!
Let’s look at three common issues that affect page load speed and how to correct them.
Image file size
Image file size may be the most common mistake I find when it comes to slow-loading pages.
Often, webmasters uploading content to our websites may not be well-versed in image optimizationor really understand why it’s important. The result can be very large image files used where a reduced size image could have been used just as easily and with the same visual result.
Here’s an example.
This image is from a blog. The top image represents the size of the image as it was displayed in the blog post.
The bottom image is the actual size of the source image used. Notice how much larger the source image is than the displayed version on top. The larger the image, the more pixels it must load. To save load time, try to size your image to the display size before uploading instead of just resizing the image using hypertext markup language (HTML) parameters.
If you use a content management system (CMS), there are also many plugins you can use to help resize images as you upload them to the page. If you search on “WordPress plugins to resize images,” you’ll find many to choose from, like Compressor, which is free. It will compress your image further without losing any quality.
Look for a resizing tool that will show you a preview of what the compressed image will look like before you take the leap and compress the image. That can be particularly helpful when working with a web designer who may have concerns about sacrificing image quality for compression.
Unused JavaScript
It is common for websites to use a header file and a footer file to set up the heading/navigation area and footer area of the pages respectively. Since these areas usually stay fairly constant on a website, including these files means you can program it once and use it on every page.
It’s really efficient, especially when making updates. For example, if you have a change to your navigation, make the change once in your header file, and it’s automatically updated on every page that includes that header file.
A problem arises with some JavaScript. There are definitely JavaScript elements you need on every page of your website – like Google Analytics tracking JavaScript. But other JavaScript elements may only be needed on certain pages of the website.
For example, we work with a hospital that has an events page on their website for Lamaze classes for expectant moms.
On the Lamaze class page, they have a feature to save the class event to your Outlook calendar, enabled by a JavaScript element contained in the header file. This is a great feature and helpful for the events section of the website, but the rest of the website doesn’t need or use this JavaScript element.
The JavaScript from the Lamaze page loads on every page of the website, whether it is needed or not on the page. Pages not utilizing that JavaScript have to load that script, increasing page load time because of an element that isn’t even needed on the page.
Evaluate the JavaScript you use in your header file. Is it necessary for it to be there? If not, can it be moved to the body area so that the script loads on just that one page and not every page? Hopefully, the answer is yes.
Loading items from third-party websites
If you need to load items such as social sharing buttons, video player embeds, trackers and advertisements from third-party websites, try to minimize when possible.
Why?
You do not control how fast a third-party server and assets on that server will load. If you happen to load assets from a third party that are slow-loading because of server issues, it could potentially affect your page load time. Here’s what Google has to say:
Third-party scripts provide a wide range of useful functionality, making the web more dynamic, interactive, and interconnected. These scripts may be crucial to your website’s functionality or revenue stream. But third-party scripts also come with many risks that should be taken into consideration to minimize their impact while still providing value.
Why do you need to be careful about third-party scripts?
They can be a performance concern
They can be a privacy concern
They might be a security concern
They can be unpredictable and change without you knowing.
They can have unintended consequences
Use third-party assets if you need to, but be sure to do this only when necessary.
To close
If you can tackle these three common issues, you’re likely going to have a faster page load speed and help your SEO efforts. Sometimes a small amount of effort can yield a big difference![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Janet Driscoll Miller on May 10, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As mobile-first indexing nears, the need to optimize for mobile has never felt so pressing. Even in its current iteration, mobile search is incredibly important for advertisers and businesses of all sizes. Consider these statistics:
50 percent of local mobile searches are for local business contact information, says Hubspot:
According to BrightEdge, 69 percent of mobile searchers stated they were more likely to buy from a brand with a mobile site that addressed their concerns.
Now, with mobile web design, speed takes precedence over almost any other ranking factor. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if half of the web is seriously optimized for mobile search.
According to Think with Google, 70 percent of mobile web pages take 7 seconds to load visual content above and below the fold.
Common mobile site errors include:
Blocked JavaScript and cascading style sheets (CSS) files.
Failed redirects.
Poor graphical interfaces (e.g., tiny text and poor image pixelation).
Clunky search functions.
Obtrusive interstitials.
Fixing many of these issues requires investing in a responsive content management system (CMS) and the right configuration for your mobile site.
Yet many questions remain as to what configuration truly works best for your website. Responsive web design has dominated the industry as the preferred configuration, but as the mobile web becomes more competitive, should the industry move on?
Now, creating a standalone mobile website is good from the end-user perspective, but it severely diminishes your website’s equity from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.
Beyond this, mobile domains can be a costly investment and even more costly to maintain.
My digital marketing firm uses responsive web design (RWD), as well as accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to create a truly mobile-friendly website for our clients. But we must remember that responsive web design was not designed for speed, it was designed for designers.
Chances are your CMS has a responsive web design plug-in.
RWD web pages take advantage of fluid grids to render images and on-page elements in proportion to their device. For technical teams, this presents clear advantages to mobile design, including:
Responsive handling of on-page layout for different devices.
Retaining all content on a single uniform resource locator (URL), as opposed to an m. domain.
More cost-effective than creating a standalone mobile site.
Sites can be accessed offline using hypertext markup language 5 (HTML5).
While RWD does have its advantages, it was mostly created as a low-cost way to optimize websites for mobile search devices. It was also a way to complete this with little effort as possible.
Problems with RWD websites still persist:
Slow loading speeds: above 10 seconds without proper onsite optimization
Designers still need to optimize for touch, as opposed to scroll-and-click interfaces
Data visualizations need to be optimized for small screens (i.e., charts and graphs)
So, why is this important? While RWD is an effective solution for small businesses and publishers on a budget, many established businesses are already making the switch to higher-speed configurations, such as accelerated mobile pages and progressive web applications (PWA).
As a quick primer, AMP is essentially an HTML framework that works the same as a content delivery network, serving stripped-down versions of web pages to increase page speeds. AMP is ideal for publishers who serve news articles and blog posts. It’s very similar to Facebook’s Instant Articlesformat.
AMP is currently being employed by multiple search engines, and even AdWords ads. Using the “Fast Fetch” tag, AMP continues to become faster and easier to implement.
According to Google, over 900,000 domains have already adopted AMP, and that number continues to grow.
In fact, numerous publishers have reported astounding success after switching to AMP:
Google has also made it no secret that it prioritizes AMP web pages for its mobile news carousels.
Mobile web speed obviously has a huge impact on the user experience and your conversion rate.
Using Google’s cache, web pages with AMP load 2x faster at one-tenth the latency of traditional web pages. But herein lies the issue with AMP.
While we’d consider faster loading speeds as contributing to more valued user experience, it’s the sacrifice that AMP needs to undergo that has severely limited its digital marketing value and adoption.
Since AMP is loaded using Google’s cache and served as a different version of the original document, clicks are hard to track since they technically don’t occur on the publisher’s website. This has a significant effect on engagement. By serving a watered-down version of a web page, AMP is great for serving informative blog posts, but there’s an obvious disconnect between the initial click and further engagement with the site.
This means that publishers and e-commerce stores must theoretically offer two different versions of their offerings. AMP is essentially search-result ad copy.
As a side note, another thing affecting AMP’s adoption is Google’s failure to communicate with its customers.
Ask the average web user what an AMP article is or if they could recognize one, and you’ll probably receive a blank stare. Ironically, Google is doing a disservice to its own user experience by not properly communicating the importance and advantages of AMP to individual users. Instead, it’s relied on publishers to make the switch of their own volition.
Does this mean that AMP is a red herring that should be ignored? Not exactly, and it all depends on your website. Unfortunately, there’s another configuration that threatens RWDs hegemony and AMP’s burgeoning adoption.
What about progressive web apps?
You may be familiar with PWAs, although very few sites actually leverage this genius technology.
PWAs are accessed through the web browser and utilize Javascript or CSS, along with HTML, to create nearly instantaneous load speeds. Leveraging their universal resource identifiers (URI), PWAs are linkable when bookmarked or shared by a web user.
The main advantages of PWAs include:
Ability to work offline.
Universal access on all devices and web browsers.
Comparable load speeds with AMP.
Faster transitions between web pages and navigation than traditional mobile domains.
Native app-like interfaces.
Indexable and linkable.
Ability to send push notifications.
Primarily, PWAs are used by e-commerce stores to create faster checkout times and a better end-user experience. PWAs can increase engagement on your site and increase conversions through their ability to leverage offline resources and push notifications to continually communicate with users.
But there are also drawbacks to PWAs. It’s a rather costly investment and incredibly difficult to implement, meaning you’ll probably have to hire a professional web designer to do so.
A larger concern would be: why not just invest in an app? Users visit hundreds of websites weekly and have numerous apps stored on their phone. Their primary demand, above all else, is fast loading speeds, which AMP provides.
With this in mind, which mobile configuration is best for your website, as we embark on the mobile-first era?
Which mobile configuration is best?
AMP is ideal for publishers who only seek to drive more traffic to their blog or publication. Many website owners have struggled to implement AMP because many CMS’s still don’t have a plug-in available. Even still, with Google’s new mobile “AMP Stories,” WordPress and many notable CMS’s struggled to properly implement AMP.
On the other hand, PWAs work across all browsers, and progressive enhancements have made them secure from viruses and unwanted content.
In terms of speed, PWAs and AMPs both have nearly instantaneous load times. The biggest difference here is the speed of navigation that comes from PWAs, as all web pages will be hosted in this format, unlike AMP.
From a ranking perspective, AMP may be a ranking signal (no one knows yet), but if PWAs host nearly identical loading speeds, I don’t see AMP as possessing a clear advantage over PWAs.
From a web design perspective, AMP is a nightmare, as it strips away many of the graphical and user interface elements of the native design. On other hand, PWAs are able to render and serve all of your design elements in an app-like display, which makes them more user-friendly.
After switching a hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) PWA, AliExpress improved its conversion rate by 104 percent across all browsers.
Finally, PWAs are responsive to different browsers and can react to user permissions to create a smooth checkout experience.
In the end, the best solution is to combine both for a truly fast, homogenous experience. Major brands, such as The Washington Post, have already done this. With the greater search visibility and speed of AMP articles and the app-like interface of PWAs, combining both could significantly increase your user signals and offer a better experience for users.
Conclusion
The need to go mobile cannot be overstated, although we’re already past beating the dead horse. Responsive web design is a great first step, but I don’t believe it goes far enough for businesses competing in a competitive niche. This is especially true for publishers.
For e-commerce platforms, combining AMP with a PWA design truly offers the best mobile configuration available today. All I can say is, make the switch to a mobile-friendly website before it’s too late.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Kristopher Jones on April 30, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]
