SEO
Everything You Need To Know
![Everything You Need To Know Everything You Need to Know](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Everything-You-Need-to-Know.jpg)
Maybe you’ve heard colleagues or industry experts talking about Microsoft Clarity. But what is it and how does it work?
Microsoft Clarity is a user behavior and website debugging analytics tool unlike any other.
What Clarity does is provide insights into how users interact with the site, making it completely different from other analytics tools, including Google Analytics.
Learn about its various features, limitations, why it’s not a competitor to Google Analytics, and how you can make the best use of Microsoft Clarity here.
User Experience Analytics
Other analytics tools focus on things like reporting on traffic, keywords, page popularity, and so on.
Microsoft Clarity focuses on the user experience to help publishers gain insights into how users are interacting with their site.
The user behavior data helps publishers identify areas to improve, find web page bugs, and gain insights into conversions, among many other useful insights.
Microsoft Clarity even provides machine learning and deep AI components in the background that automatically generate insights based on patterns created by website user behaviors. It provides these insights as suggestions for further investigation and tracking.
With Clarity, a publisher can see user engagement patterns on different parts of individual pages and can play back user sessions to learn how users interact with web pages.
Over 25 filters make it easy to zero in on user pain points to debug website issues or discover what works in order to replicate that experience on other pages.
All of these insights are delivered by Microsoft Clarity in near real-time.
Microsoft Clarity Versus Google Analytics
You might wonder whether you need Microsoft Clarity if you already have Google Analytics. Some believe that because they’re both analytics services, there may be overlap between the two.
However, there really is no comparison between Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity because they do very different things.
Google Analytics provides insights into traffic patterns.
Microsoft Clarity provides actionable insights into how users interact with web pages.
Microsoft Clarity is not a competitor of Google Analytics. Instead, it actually complements Google Analytics to the point that you can connect Google Analytics to Clarity and gain even more user behavior insights using the imported data.
Privacy Compliance
Although Microsoft Clarity tracks user behavior on the website, Clarity is fully compliant with the European GDPR and the California CCPA privacy requirements.
Microsoft Clarity Impact On Page Speed
Microsoft Clarity’s JavaScript is loaded asynchronously and, according to Microsoft, does not impact website performance.
“Visitors to your site won’t experience any difference in site speed or performance. The Clarity JavaScript is asynchronous so it does not slow down the page load time.”
Does Microsoft Clarity Have Traffic Limitations?
There are no limits to the amount of traffic that can be measured by Clarity.
Unlike other heatmap and analytics tools that impose traffic limits to the free versions of their tools, Microsoft imposes no limits based on traffic.
According to Microsoft:
“There are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account. Clarity can scale to support even the largest websites.
Clarity process more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month. Also, there are no traffic limits on these sites.”
Microsoft Clarity Features
The main features of Microsoft Clarity are:
- Clarity Heatmaps.
- Session Recordings.
- Clarity Insights.
Clarity Heatmaps
Clarity Heatmaps provides two kinds of heatmap data:
1. Click Heatmaps
Click heatmaps:
- Show engagement levels of different parts of a webpage.
- Reveal where people are clicking (including non-clickable page elements).
- And provide an idea of which page elements are important to most site visitors.
Click heatmap data can be shown for a single page or for a group of pages.
This data can be further refined and segmented with filters to drill down and see how different users are clicking on web page elements.
2. Scroll Heatmaps
Scroll Heatmaps show how far users are scrolling on a web page. Like all the other Clarity features, filters can be applied to the Scroll Heatmap in order to see how different users scroll through a page – by device, for example.
Scroll Heatmap data is incredibly useful because it can show how far users are scrolling before they click a call to action.
The Scroll heatmaps can also help identify if users aren’t reaching a call to action or important information.
If users aren’t reaching certain content and are backing out of the site without converting, then the scroll heatmap data will show at which point users are bailing on your site.
Actionable Heatmap Data
The Clarity Heatmaps can be segmented by filters such as traffic sources, devices, and browsers to identify patterns displayed by different visitors.
The heatmap data is useful for debugging web page issues by identifying where they are clicking, better understanding the user experience, and identifying where users linger.
Additionally, it helps to improve conversions by showing where users are bailing or if call to actions are scrolled past and not stimulating clicks.
In my opinion, the most important quality of the Clarity Heatmaps feature is helping to improve conversions because most sites have a conversion action they want users to complete whether it’s clicking an ad, buying a product, clicking an affiliate link, or signing up for a newsletter.
The Clarity Heatmap helps debug conversion issues and improve them.
The information in Clarity Heatmaps can also be shared with others in your company and with clients.
There are no traffic limits to the Clarity Heatmap feature, which makes it an attractive feature for publishers with large amount of traffic and those starting out.
Session Recordings
Clarity session recordings is a feature that records and plays back user journeys through the web site. It shows how users interact with site navigation, calls to action, search features, and other on-page elements.
Session recordings shows publishers if site navigation and links help users find the content they want and can also show what on-page factors aren’t working, like the calls to action.
![Everything You Need To Know Screenshot of Session Timeline](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642674029_587_Everything-You-Need-To-Know.png)
The session recordings can identify rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs, and excessive scrolling.
Rage Clicks
Rage clicks indicate areas of a web page that may not be interactive when a user expects them to be. The typical rage click is characterized when a user repeatedly clicking on a web page element like a link, button, or image.
For example, if a link isn’t working because the page hasn’t fully loaded or an image seems like a link but it isn’t one at all. Rage clicks are highlighted by Clarity to point out areas of the user experience that indicate user frustration with the web page.
Dead Clicks
A dead click is what happens when an interactive element does not respond in a reasonable amount of time or doesn’t respond at all.
This is also a signal of user frustration.
Quick Backs
The quick back is when a user clicks away from your site to another site but then returns.
Microsoft indicates that this data point will be updated to include the origin site so that it will record when a user clicks from one page in a site to another page in the same site and then returns to the original page, indicating dissatisfaction with the page they clicked to.
Excessive Scrolling
Session recordings can also reveal what Microsoft calls “excessive scrolling.”
Excessive scrolling is when Clarity detects that a site visitor scrolls up and down in an unusual pattern that indicates a poor user experience.
This data point could indicate that the user is not finding what they expect to find and is likely frustrating the site visitor in some other way, enough to cause them to leave the site.
Clarity Session Recordings provide valuable insights that can help increase sales, affiliate clicks, ad clicks, and site visitor satisfaction.
A useful feature of Session Recordings is that these data points can be segmented by browser, campaign, and 23 other filters.
Clarity Session recordings is a powerful way to gain insights into user behavior and improve web page and website performance.
![Everything You Need To Know Clarity Analytics Recordings Dashboard](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642674029_591_Everything-You-Need-To-Know.png)
The session timeline, shown in the screenshot above, is like a movie of the user interaction with a page. Cursor movements are shown.
The session panel on the left allows a publisher to filter the data to isolate a wide range of data types.
The individual sessions seen in the boxes can be selected and viewed.
Additionally, one can click on the Filters button at the top in order to select for a large amount of data types, like user device and so on.
Clicking on the Filters button results in an entire web page of filters.
To save space and provide a closeup, I sliced the filters page in half, a left side and a right side.
![Everything You Need To Know Microsoft Clarity Analytics Sessions Filter](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Everything-You-Need-To-Know.gif)
Clarity Insights
Microsoft Clarity Insights is a feature that applies the power of Deep AI and Machine Learning algorithms to automatically surface actionable insights from the analytics data collected by Clarity.
![Everything You Need To Know Screenshot of the Microsoft Clarity](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642674029_531_Everything-You-Need-To-Know.png)
Clarity watches for session recordings with JavaScript errors, rage clicks, and dead clicks, as well as identifies browsers and also user groups to watch.
Users can save groups for tracking.
The Clarity Insights documentation says:
“Clarity Insights are a set of Machine Learning (ML) based filters and recommendations on what content should be most important for you.
…Through the dashboard, you can understand the users without having to analyze the ocean of data derived from user interactions on the website.
There comes a central question: If Clarity can record every user interaction, how can it surface the sessions and pages that matter the most? One solution comes via the Clarity Insights platform.
Clarity Insights lean on Microsoft’s decades of experience in Data Science and Machine Learning to identify key trends and patterns in your site activity.
…Providing accurate, accessible, and proactive analytics is a foundational feature of Clarity.”
![Everything You Need To Know Screenshot of a closeup of the Microsoft Clarity](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642674029_351_Everything-You-Need-To-Know.png)
Adding Microsoft Clarity Analytics To Your Stack
The big question many have is whether they should use Clarity considering that they already use another analytics program.
Clarity provides actionable insights for improving website earnings and the user experience, which is something many analytics programs do not provide.
It’s clear that Microsoft Clarity is not a competitor to Google Analytics, it is complementary to it.
Thus, it could be said that it is not appropriate to compare the two because they both solve different problems.
Clarity is a good product because it helps publishers improve conversions and sales, as well as the site visitor user experience.
What Clarity does is to help publishers identify shortcomings in their site(s) and improve them.
There is no pricing model for Microsoft Clarity – it is free, regardless of how much traffic a site attracts.
The only limitation to Clarity is that financial, government, and medical websites are not recommended by Microsoft to onboard to Clarity.
The answer to the question of whether you should use Microsoft Clarity, aside from the above caveat, depends on how important it is to you to improve earnings and site visitor user experience.
Citations:
More resources:
Featured Image: Ollyy/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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