SEO
13 Effective (And Low-Cost) Ways to Promote a Product
Promoting a product while low on cash—every company goes through this phase.
But the good news is you don’t need to spend a ton of money to get your product in front of the right audience.
We’ll start with things you can do for a product launch and move on to promotion tactics you can use at any stage.
Social media can be used for pre-launch marketing in many ways.
For example, if you’re launching something you know people are going to be super excited about, you can capitalize on that by “leaking” product information before the launch.
This will help turn that potential demand for a solution into anticipation for your product.
Even simple means can do the job here, such as a countdown to launch day or a special pre-launch giveaway.
One important thing to note is this tactic has little chance of succeeding if you have zero networking.
However, this is something you should definitely try out:
- If you have at least some following on social media.
- If you’re an active member of relevant communities.
Oldie but goodie. A PR note, aka press release, is an official statement delivered to members of the media. It’s used to share something newsworthy with the aim of securing media coverage.
Brands have been sending out PR notes before you and I were born—and it still works today.
Why? Part of the job of news websites is to inform their readers about new and exciting products they can use to help them at work or make their life simpler—and that product could be the one you’ve been developing.
The key to this tactic is to send your press release ahead of your launch to give journalists time to prepare.
Moreover, you may want to shortlist a few important media outlets and offer them to be the first to get their hands on the product.
To learn the art of creating and distributing PR notes (and get a free template), check out our guide: How to Write a Press Release.
Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, Hacker News. These are some of the listing platforms you can use to tell the world about your product.
They’re great for product promotion for two reasons: the community and the distribution mechanism.
When adding your product to those platforms, you’re not launching to the void. People gather around those platforms to see new products, try them, and share their experiences. And when you launch something users truly appreciate, you get rewarded with more exposure on the platform. And so, the cycle continues: more viewers, more comments/upvotes, more exposure.
Some other benefits of listing platforms:
- Feedback – If you want to learn how to improve your product to get more customers, you’re likely going to get some. Of course, everybody will be able to see the comments, so keep in mind this is a double-edged sword.
- Credibility – The platforms act as social proof that can build trust in your product.
- Virality – In the best-case scenario, your product becomes really popular, and the community starts to recommend it outside the platform.
Check out Product Hunt’s case studies. They show how the above benefits helped grow popular products like Notion and Loom.
While most listing platforms will have that same community aspect, they will have their differences and unique features, so make sure to learn a bit about them.
For example, Product Hunt gives you the ability to advertise on its platform, while AlternativeTo allows you to list your product as an alternative to a staple in the industry and piggyback on its popularity.
Influencer marketing is about working with popular internet personalities to promote your brand’s message, products, or services.
Just to be clear, not all influential people in a given niche will be open for sponsored content. But for those who are, and there are a lot of them, sponsored content is one of the monetization methods without which their channel probably wouldn’t exist.
There are influencers “suitable” for just about any kind of budget and most industries. Since we’re talking about low-cost tactics here, I’d recommend reaching out to nano and micro influencers.
Their reach may be relatively low, but they may sit in the right niche for your product and have a strong engagement with their audience.
As a matter of fact, even big brands work with micro influencers. For instance, Peugeot, the European car manufacturer, invited micro influencers to the Brussels Motor Show to share their experience and promote the brand (case study).
While we’re talking about costs, it’s worth mentioning that some influencers may be open to non-cash compensation, such as:
- Sponsoring a giveaway for their audience.
- Receiving freebies/swag.
- Getting invites to exclusive events.
There are all sorts of ways an influencer can promote your product. These include hosting giveaways, doing product reviews, sharing your best content, or just doing product placements. And they don’t necessarily need to be one-off campaigns. They can be the start of a long business relationship.
How do you find the right kind of influencer? Luckily, there are tools for that: Social Blade, Heepsy, and SparkToro, among others.
Next, you need to vet them in terms of things like recognition and resonance, reach out, and develop an influencer agreement. We share some tips on how to go through all that in our guide to influencer marketing for beginners.
By an optimized landing page, I mean a page optimized for search engines like Google.
An optimized page is set up to rank for relevant keywords and generate free, passive, and consistent traffic. It’s just like the landing page for our free website traffic checker, which was optimized for, you guessed it, the “website traffic checker” keyword. It ranks in the top 10 for this keyword and over 400 other relevant keywords.
Taking all keywords together, Google sends us about 31,000 visits each month without any ad spend from our side.
The key to optimizing a landing page for SEO is finding a relevant keyword with the right kind of search intent. This means that the current SERPs for this keyword should imply that the searcher might be looking for a page offering a product and not, say, curated lists of products or guides.
Let me unpack this with an example.
Below you will find a comparison of two keywords. The one on the left shows a strong presence of product landing pages—a good sign you may rank for this with a product landing page. The one on the right shows no product landing pages. Thus, trying to target that with a landing page is not impossible, but certainly hard.
Here’s a breakdown of how optimizing a product landing page works:
- Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find relevant keywords that imply that the searcher may be looking for a product
- Design the page for search intent; include information that should be helpful for the reader
- Optimize on-page SEO technicals (such as title tag, URL, and images)
- Add relevant internal links
- Build backlinks
Head on to our guide on optimizing landing pages and learn all the details.
Got some social media following or an email list? Great! Use it for promoting your new product.
These contacts already know your brand, and that’s the first step to them becoming paying customers.
On top of that, if you already have some satisfied customers, chances are they’ll be interested in the next product just because they liked the previous one. Statistically, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%–70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%–20% (source).
To illustrate, Apple values returning customers so much that it offers to buy back their old iPhones.
A couple of things to keep in mind when promoting to your existing audience. You should:
- Consider segmenting the audience before messaging them. You may want to craft messages adjusted for the stage of the buyer journey.
- Be careful with any special deals for selected groups; instead offer something for everyone.
- Follow up with the most engaged people directly. People who gave you constructive feedback or were vocal about new features are the ones you’d want to message directly.
- Be prepared to pay for reach boosts on social media. They likely won’t cost you a fortune, but don’t expect to reach your entire following for free (social media doesn’t work that way anymore).
- Make sure your followers and subscribers are not the last to learn about something.
Educational SEO content is content designed to rank in Google and show users how they can benefit from your product at the same time.
This kind of content promotes your product by bringing free, passive traffic from search engines to your website.
The key here is organic traffic potential. While typical educational content can be created around any topic that supports product adoption, for SEO content, you need keywords with search demand to start with.
For example, since Ahrefs is an SEO tool, we can create educational SEO content for topics such as keyword research, link building, technical SEO, online marketing, and so on.
When you add up hundreds of keywords together, you get a considerable sum of consistent traffic that brings you visitors even years after publishing the content.
Creating content like that follows the same, typical search engine optimization path:
- Find good keywords
- Create quality content
- Build links to it
The unofficial fourth point of that list is “wait.” Because the downside of optimizing for search engines is that it takes time to rank—typically three to six months. So while this is a great way to promote your product, it probably shouldn’t be the only one.
Also, the thing is this: If you don’t try to rank for your relevant keywords, your competitors will. And if so, you’re going to miss out on all of that traffic. So check out our guide to SEO content for beginners and learn how to bring home some of that search demand.
Affiliate marketing is when a third party (the affiliate) promotes a product of the merchant (you) and earns a commission.
There are basically two ways you can go about this marketing tactic:
While the latter option allows you more customization and you won’t be paying anyone any fees, the first option is probably the best choice for beginners. It’s less time consuming, less prone to errors, and it can likely be the most cost effective (fees are usually low, and you won’t need to build any infrastructure).
Prepare to hand out from 5% to even 50% of the revenue you get through affiliates. This may sound expensive. But remember: You don’t need to pay up front, and the affiliate does all the work.
Plus, until that affiliate makes a sale, that’s basically free promotion.
How do affiliates promote products? Similarly to influencers, they create the kind of content they are best at and distribute it on various channels.
Some of the most popular affiliate content formats are how-tos, tutorials, and reviews. Here’s an example from the prominent finance blog, Making Sense of Cents.
The demand for top products in any category is consistently high. You can see that in search queries. Here are some examples:
This means a lot of people are already looking for products like yours.
But the problem is the ranking difficulty for these search queries will be too high to try to rank with your own content. Because these kinds of queries are usually dominated by authoritative websites with tons of backlinks.
Solution: Get included in what’s already ranking. It’s your shortcut to the #1 page on Google for all of those hard-to-rank keywords.
Of course, this is easier said than done. It all depends on how good your product is, and the editors will always have the final say. However, what can definitely help is to work on your pitch:
- Show them why your product is a serious contender in comparison to what they already have on the list
- Make a strong case of why their audience will love your product
- Flash the recognition you already got
Also, note that people don’t just look for the “best” products. They also look for products that fill a specific need: for beginners, for marketers, for teams, under $100, etc.
Those keywords will likely have less search demand but could still have a high conversion potential. You can use a keyword research tool to find these keywords first and then pitch the sites that rank for them.
You can also find great opportunities if you follow links to your competitors. Here’s how it works in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:
- Enter your competitor’s URL
- Go to the Backlinks report
- Enter the word “tool” in the Ref. page URL filter
- Set the mode to Group by similar and sort the pages by Page traffic (to show the pages with the most organic traffic first)
- Open referring pages and see if you can get a good angle to pitch your product
Tip
Guest posting or guest blogging is when you write for other blogs.
The trick here will be to pitch only those topics where you can naturally feature your product. You don’t need to make the entire article literally about your product. A good, contextual mention can also create awareness about your product.
Another thing to consider when guest blogging is the SEO aspect. In fact, a lot of marketers pursue this tactic only for the links.
This means you can prioritize websites that can give you a good link.
You can learn how to tell the difference between high-quality and low-quality links in our full guide to link building. But for now, let’s focus on arguably the two most important link quality factors: authority and relevance.
While relevance is something you can quite easily infer from the topics that the site covers, authority is not that transparent.
To get a good idea of a site’s authority, you’ll need an SEO tool. You can use Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar as you use Google or check each site you want to pitch for free with our website authority checker.
Using podcasts as a promotional tactic works similarly to guest blogging: You talk about a topic relevant to your product, and that gives you an opportunity to introduce it to the audience. Plus, you can land a quality link too.
But the difference here is that the mere fact you’ve been invited to star on a podcast makes you and everything you do interesting. So I’d say it can help to generate awareness of your product even if it’s mentioned only in the description of the episode.
That said, the best podcast topics will be the ones that:
- Appeal to the podcast’s audience.
- Haven’t been covered already.
- Align with your experience.
And here’s a neat trick for finding uncovered topics (courtesy of Respona): use Google search operators. For instance, site:podcast.everyonehatesmarketers.com AND "omnichannel marketing" shows that this topic hasn’t been covered by the host of the show.
A referral program is a marketing tactic that encourages users to advocate your product in exchange for rewards such as cash, freebies, or product upgrades.
You’ve probably heard about some big companies like Dropbox, PayPal, or Uber using referral marketing. But don’t think this tactic is only restricted to big companies like them. In fact, referral programs were implemented in the early stages of these businesses and were found to be a crucial factor in their growth.
Statistically, a referral from a friend, family member, or colleague is one of the most effective ways to acquire customers since word of mouth is one of the most trustworthy marketing channels (source).
It can also be one of the most cost-effective ways to acquire customers, but it all comes down to the cost of your program.
To make your referral program successful, you need to consider three things.
First, the attractiveness of the reward. What will be more attractive to your users: a discount on their next purchase, an upgrade, or maybe a charity donation? Consider also two-way rewards: for the referrer and the referee.
Secondly, be careful about the cost of the reward to your business. PayPal basically gave out cash for signing up because the company figured out it’d be less expensive than ads. Indeed, it led to rapid growth, but you can imagine how much they spent without a promise of revenue. It’s a better idea to reward users who perform a specific action closely tied to your revenue.
Also, consider the customer acquisition cost (aka CAC) of other marketing tactics. Use this as a benchmark; ideally, you want to keep the CAC of your referral program lower than other tactics.
However, discretion is advised here. If you see that the users who come via referrals stay longer or spend more, a higher CAC could be justifiable.
On a last note, referral programs may be tough to operate without dedicated software that generates referral links and allows you to track them. So consider a tool like ReferralCandy or Viral Loops.
Last but not least, you can share positive feedback from early adopters of your product.
This way, you’ll build social proof that will establish your credibility and increase the likelihood of people signing up for your product or even buying it. I’m talking about sharing:
- Quotes
- Rankings
- Awards
- Case studies
- Photos and videos from customers
Some popular spots for placing social proof are sign-up forms, pricing pages, and product feature tours. But you can also experiment with their placement and see their impact on conversion.
It’s great if you have testimonials from high-profile influencers or celebrities, but the truth is the voice of “regular users” matters too. I’d argue that a product’s ability to consistently meet the needs of its regular users is more valuable than a few endorsements from famous people.
Final thoughts
If you can’t spend a lot of money on product promotion, don’t fret. You’ll find more than enough ideas that don’t rely on ads.
However, this doesn’t mean you need to give up ads completely. Something you can consider is reinvesting part of your revenue to try advertising tactics such as:
- Advertising on non-obvious platforms like Quora (case study).
- Targeting niche keywords with low cost per click but possibly high business potential.
- Using dayparting (available in Google Ads).
- Optimizing conversion on your landing page.
- Increasing ad quality score to reduce the cost of bids.
Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter or Mastodon.
SEO
2024 WordPress Vulnerability Report Shows Errors Sites Keep Making
WordPress security scanner WPScan’s 2024 WordPress vulnerability report calls attention to WordPress vulnerability trends and suggests the kinds of things website publishers (and SEOs) should be looking out for.
Some of the key findings from the report were that just over 20% of vulnerabilities were rated as high or critical level threats, with medium severity threats, at 67% of reported vulnerabilities, making up the majority. Many regard medium level vulnerabilities as if they are low-level threats and that’s a mistake because they’re not low level and should be regarded as deserving attention.
The WPScan report advised:
“While severity doesn’t translate directly to the risk of exploitation, it’s an important guideline for website owners to make an educated decision about when to disable or update the extension.”
WordPress Vulnerability Severity Distribution
Critical level vulnerabilities, the highest level of threat, represented only 2.38% of vulnerabilities, which is essentially good news for WordPress publishers. Yet as mentioned earlier, when combined with the percentages of high level threats (17.68%) the number or concerning vulnerabilities rises to almost 20%.
Here are the percentages by severity ratings:
- Critical 2.38%
- Low 12.83%
- High 17.68%
- Medium 67.12%
Authenticated Versus Unauthenticated
Authenticated vulnerabilities are those that require an attacker to first attain user credentials and their accompanying permission levels in order to exploit a particular vulnerability. Exploits that require subscriber-level authentication are the most exploitable of the authenticated exploits and those that require administrator level access present the least risk (although not always a low risk for a variety of reasons).
Unauthenticated attacks are generally the easiest to exploit because anyone can launch an attack without having to first acquire a user credential.
The WPScan vulnerability report found that about 22% of reported vulnerabilities required subscriber level or no authentication at all, representing the most exploitable vulnerabilities. On the other end of the scale of the exploitability are vulnerabilities requiring admin permission levels representing a total of 30.71% of reported vulnerabilities.
Permission Levels Required For Exploits
Vulnerabilities requiring administrator level credentials represented the highest percentage of exploits, followed by Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) with 24.74% of vulnerabilities. This is interesting because CSRF is an attack that uses social engineering to get a victim to click a link from which the user’s permission levels are acquired. This is a mistake that WordPress publishers should be aware of because all it takes is for an admin level user to follow a link which then enables the hacker to assume admin level privileges to the WordPress website.
The following is the percentages of exploits ordered by roles necessary to launch an attack.
Ascending Order Of User Roles For Vulnerabilities
- Author 2.19%
- Subscriber 10.4%
- Unauthenticated 12.35%
- Contributor 19.62%
- CSRF 24.74%
- Admin 30.71%
Most Common Vulnerability Types Requiring Minimal Authentication
Broken Access Control in the context of WordPress refers to a security failure that can allow an attacker without necessary permission credentials to gain access to higher credential permissions.
In the section of the report that looks at the occurrences and vulnerabilities underlying unauthenticated or subscriber level vulnerabilities reported (Occurrence vs Vulnerability on Unauthenticated or Subscriber+ reports), WPScan breaks down the percentages for each vulnerability type that is most common for exploits that are the easiest to launch (because they require minimal to no user credential authentication).
The WPScan threat report noted that Broken Access Control represents a whopping 84.99% followed by SQL injection (20.64%).
The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) defines Broken Access Control as:
“Access control, sometimes called authorization, is how a web application grants access to content and functions to some users and not others. These checks are performed after authentication, and govern what ‘authorized’ users are allowed to do.
Access control sounds like a simple problem but is insidiously difficult to implement correctly. A web application’s access control model is closely tied to the content and functions that the site provides. In addition, the users may fall into a number of groups or roles with different abilities or privileges.”
SQL injection, at 20.64% represents the second most prevalent type of vulnerability, which WPScan referred to as both “high severity and risk” in the context of vulnerabilities requiring minimal authentication levels because attackers can access and/or tamper with the database which is the heart of every WordPress website.
These are the percentages:
- Broken Access Control 84.99%
- SQL Injection 20.64%
- Cross-Site Scripting 9.4%
- Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload 5.28%
- Sensitive Data Disclosure 4.59%
- Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) 3.67%
- Remote Code Execution 2.52%
- Other 14.45%
Vulnerabilities In The WordPress Core Itself
The overwhelming majority of vulnerability issues were reported in third-party plugins and themes. However, there were in 2023 a total of 13 vulnerabilities reported in the WordPress core itself. Out of the thirteen vulnerabilities only one of them was rated as a high severity threat, which is the second highest level, with Critical being the highest level vulnerability threat, a rating scoring system maintained by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
The WordPress core platform itself is held to the highest standards and benefits from a worldwide community that is vigilant in discovering and patching vulnerabilities.
Website Security Should Be Considered As Technical SEO
Site audits don’t normally cover website security but in my opinion every responsible audit should at least talk about security headers. As I’ve been saying for years, website security quickly becomes an SEO issue once a website’s ranking start disappearing from the search engine results pages (SERPs) due to being compromised by a vulnerability. That’s why it’s critical to be proactive about website security.
According to the WPScan report, the main point of entry for hacked websites were leaked credentials and weak passwords. Ensuring strong password standards plus two-factor authentication is an important part of every website’s security stance.
Using security headers is another way to help protect against Cross-Site Scripting and other kinds of vulnerabilities.
Lastly, a WordPress firewall and website hardening are also useful proactive approaches to website security. I once added a forum to a brand new website I created and it was immediately under attack within minutes. Believe it or not, virtually every website worldwide is under attack 24 hours a day by bots scanning for vulnerabilities.
Read the WPScan Report:
WPScan 2024 Website Threat Report
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ljupco Smokovski
SEO
An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO
Over the years, search engines have encouraged businesses to improve mobile experience on their websites. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile, and in some cases based on the industry, mobile traffic can reach up to 90%.
Since Google has completed its switch to mobile-first indexing, the question is no longer “if” your website should be optimized for mobile, but how well it is adapted to meet these criteria. A new challenge has emerged for SEO professionals with the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay (FID) starting March, 12 2024.
Thus, understanding mobile SEO’s latest advancements, especially with the shift to INP, is crucial. This guide offers practical steps to optimize your site effectively for today’s mobile-focused SEO requirements.
What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?
The goal of mobile SEO is to optimize your website to attain better visibility in search engine results specifically tailored for mobile devices.
This form of SEO not only aims to boost search engine rankings, but also prioritizes enhancing mobile user experience through both content and technology.
While, in many ways, mobile SEO and traditional SEO share similar practices, additional steps related to site rendering and content are required to meet the needs of mobile users and the speed requirements of mobile devices.
Does this need to be a priority for your website? How urgent is it?
Consider this: 58% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices.
If you aren’t focused on mobile users, there is a good chance you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic.
Mobile-First Indexing
Additionally, as of 2023, Google has switched its crawlers to a mobile-first indexing priority.
This means that the mobile experience of your site is critical to maintaining efficient indexing, which is the step before ranking algorithms come into play.
Read more: Where We Are Today With Google’s Mobile-First Index
How Much Of Your Traffic Is From Mobile?
How much traffic potential you have with mobile users can depend on various factors, including your industry (B2B sites might attract primarily desktop users, for example) and the search intent your content addresses (users might prefer desktop for larger purchases, for example).
Regardless of where your industry and the search intent of your users might be, the future will demand that you optimize your site experience for mobile devices.
How can you assess your current mix of mobile vs. desktop users?
An easy way to see what percentage of your users is on mobile is to go into Google Analytics 4.
- Click Reports in the left column.
- Click on the Insights icon on the right side of the screen.
- Scroll down to Suggested Questions and click on it.
- Click on Technology.
- Click on Top Device model by Users.
- Then click on Top Device category by Users under Related Results.
- The breakdown of Top Device category will match the date range selected at the top of GA4.
You can also set up a report in Looker Studio.
- Add your site to the Data source.
- Add Device category to the Dimension field.
- Add 30-day active users to the Metric field.
- Click on Chart to select the view that works best for you.
Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024You can add more Dimensions to really dig into the data to see which pages attract which type of users, what the mobile-to-desktop mix is by country, which search engines send the most mobile users, and so much more.
Read more: Why Mobile And Desktop Rankings Are Different
How To Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Now that you know how to build a report on mobile and desktop usage, you need to figure out if your site is optimized for mobile traffic.
While Google removed the mobile-friendly testing tool from Google Search Console in December 2023, there are still a number of useful tools for evaluating your site for mobile users.
Bing still has a mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you the following:
- Viewport is configured correctly.
- Page content fits device width.
- Text on the page is readable.
- Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly.
- Any other issues detected.
Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension provides you with an evaluation of your site’s performance across several factors, including load times, accessibility, and SEO.
To use, install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.
- Go to your website in your browser.
- Click on the orange lighthouse icon in your browser’s address bar.
- Click Generate Report.
- A new tab will open and display your scores once the evaluation is complete.
Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024You can also use the Lighthouse report in Developer Tools in Chrome.
- Simply click on the three dots next to the address bar.
- Select “More Tools.”
- Select Developer Tools.
- Click on the Lighthouse tab.
- Choose “Mobile” and click the “Analyze page load” button.
Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024Another option that Google offers is the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. Simply add your URL into the field and click Analyze.
PSI will integrate any Core Web Vitals scores into the resulting view so you can see what your users are experiencing when they come to your site.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024Other tools, like WebPageTest.org, will graphically display the processes and load times for everything it takes to display your webpages.
With this information, you can see which processes block the loading of your pages, which ones take the longest to load, and how this affects your overall page load times.
You can also emulate the mobile experience by using Developer Tools in Chrome, which allows you to switch back and forth between a desktop and mobile experience.
Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024Lastly, use your own mobile device to load and navigate your website:
- Does it take forever to load?
- Are you able to navigate your site to find the most important information?
- Is it easy to add something to cart?
- Can you read the text?
Read more: Google PageSpeed Insights Reports: A Technical Guide
How To Optimize Your Site Mobile-First
With all these tools, keep an eye on the Performance and Accessibility scores, as these directly affect mobile users.
Expand each section within the PageSpeed Insights report to see what elements are affecting your score.
These sections can give your developers their marching orders for optimizing the mobile experience.
While mobile speeds for cellular networks have steadily improved around the world (the average speed in the U.S. has jumped to 27.06 Mbps from 11.14 Mbps in just eight years), speed and usability for mobile users are at a premium.
Read more: Top 7 SEO Benefits Of Responsive Web Design
Best Practices For Mobile Optimization
Unlike traditional SEO, which can focus heavily on ensuring that you are using the language of your users as it relates to the intersection of your products/services and their needs, optimizing for mobile SEO can seem very technical SEO-heavy.
While you still need to be focused on matching your content with the needs of the user, mobile search optimization will require the aid of your developers and designers to be fully effective.
Below are several key factors in mobile SEO to keep in mind as you’re optimizing your site.
Site Rendering
How your site responds to different devices is one of the most important elements in mobile SEO.
The two most common approaches to this are responsive design and dynamic serving.
Responsive design is the most common of the two options.
Using your site’s cascading style sheets (CSS) and flexible layouts, as well as responsive content delivery networks (CDN) and modern image file types, responsive design allows your site to adjust to a variety of screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions.
With the responsive design, elements on the page adjust in size and location based on the size of the screen.
You can simply resize the window of your desktop browser and see how this works.
Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024This is the approach that Google recommends.
Adaptive design, also known as dynamic serving, consists of multiple fixed layouts that are dynamically served to the user based on their device.
Sites can have a separate layout for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users. Each design can be modified to remove functionality that may not make sense for certain device types.
This is a less efficient approach, but it does give sites more control over what each device sees.
While these will not be covered here, two other options:
- Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which can seamlessly integrate into a mobile app.
- Separate mobile site/URL (which is no longer recommended).
Read more: An Introduction To Rendering For SEO
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Google has introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a more comprehensive measure of user experience, succeeding First Input Delay. While FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicking a link, tapping a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. INP, on the other hand, broadens the scope by measuring the responsiveness of a website throughout the entire lifespan of a page, not just first interaction.
Note that actions such as hovering and scrolling do not influence INP, however, keyboard-driven scrolling or navigational actions are considered keystrokes that may activate events measured by INP but not scrolling which is happeing due to interaction.
Scrolling may indirectly affect INP, for example in scenarios where users scroll through content, and additional content is lazy-loaded from the API. While the act of scrolling itself isn’t included in the INP calculation, the processing, necessary for loading additional content, can create contention on the main thread, thereby increasing interaction latency and adversely affecting the INP score.
What qualifies as an optimal INP score?
- An INP under 200ms indicates good responsiveness.
- Between 200ms and 500ms needs improvement.
- Over 500ms means page has poor responsiveness.
and these are common issues causing poor INP scores:
- Long JavaScript Tasks: Heavy JavaScript execution can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to respond to user interactions. Thus break long JS tasks into smaller chunks by using scheduler API.
- Large DOM (HTML) Size: A large DOM ( starting from 1500 elements) can severely impact a website’s interactive performance. Every additional DOM element increases the work required to render pages and respond to user interactions.
- Inefficient Event Callbacks: Event handlers that execute lengthy or complex operations can significantly affect INP scores. Poorly optimized callbacks attached to user interactions, like clicks, keypress or taps, can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to render visual feedback promptly. For example when handlers perform heavy computations or initiate synchronous network requests such on clicks.
and you can troubleshoot INP issues using free and paid tools.
As a good starting point I would recommend to check your INP scores by geos via treo.sh which will give you a great high level insights where you struggle with most.
INP scores by GeosRead more: How To Improve Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
Image Optimization
Images add a lot of value to the content on your site and can greatly affect the user experience.
From page speeds to image quality, you could adversely affect the user experience if you haven’t optimized your images.
This is especially true for the mobile experience. Images need to adjust to smaller screens, varying resolutions, and screen orientation.
- Use responsive images
- Implement lazy loading
- Compress your images (use WebP)
- Add your images into sitemap
Optimizing images is an entire science, and I advise you to read our comprehensive guide on image SEO how to implement the mentioned recommendations.
Avoid Intrusive Interstitials
Google rarely uses concrete language to state that something is a ranking factor or will result in a penalty, so you know it means business about intrusive interstitials in the mobile experience.
Intrusive interstitials are basically pop-ups on a page that prevent the user from seeing content on the page.
John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, stated that they are specifically interested in the first interaction a user has after clicking on a search result.
Not all pop-ups are considered bad. Interstitial types that are considered “intrusive” by Google include:
- Pop-ups that cover most or all of the page content.
- Non-responsive interstitials or pop-ups that are impossible for mobile users to close.
- Pop-ups that are not triggered by a user action, such as a scroll or a click.
Read more: 7 Tips To Keep Pop-Ups From Harming Your SEO
Structured Data
Most of the tips provided in this guide so far are focused on usability and speed and have an additive effect, but there are changes that can directly influence how your site appears in mobile search results.
Search engine results pages (SERPs) haven’t been the “10 blue links” in a very long time.
They now reflect the diversity of search intent, showing a variety of different sections to meet the needs of users. Local Pack, shopping listing ads, video content, and more dominate the mobile search experience.
As a result, it’s more important than ever to provide structured data markup to the search engines, so they can display rich results for users.
In this example, you can see that both Zojirushi and Amazon have included structured data for their rice cookers, and Google is displaying rich results for both.
Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024Adding structured data markup to your site can influence how well your site shows up for local searches and product-related searches.
Using JSON-LD, you can mark up the business, product, and services data on your pages in Schema markup.
If you use WordPress as the content management system for your site, there are several plugins available that will automatically mark up your content with structured data.
Read more: What Structured Data To Use And Where To Use It?
Content Style
When you think about your mobile users and the screens on their devices, this can greatly influence how you write your content.
Rather than long, detailed paragraphs, mobile users prefer concise writing styles for mobile reading.
Each key point in your content should be a single line of text that easily fits on a mobile screen.
Your font sizes should adjust to the screen’s resolution to avoid eye strain for your users.
If possible, allow for a dark or dim mode for your site to further reduce eye strain.
Headers should be concise and address the searcher’s intent. Rather than lengthy section headers, keep it simple.
Finally, make sure that your text renders in a font size that’s readable.
Read more: 10 Tips For Creating Mobile-Friendly Content
Tap Targets
As important as text size, the tap targets on your pages should be sized and laid out appropriately.
Tap targets include navigation elements, links, form fields, and buttons like “Add to Cart” buttons.
Targets smaller than 48 pixels by 48 pixels and targets that overlap or are overlapped by other page elements will be called out in the Lighthouse report.
Tap targets are essential to the mobile user experience, especially for ecommerce websites, so optimizing them is vital to the health of your online business.
Read more: Google’s Lighthouse SEO Audit Tool Now Measures Tap Target Spacing
Prioritizing These Tips
If you have delayed making your site mobile-friendly until now, this guide may feel overwhelming. As a result, you may not know what to prioritize first.
As with so many other optimizations in SEO, it’s important to understand which changes will have the greatest impact, and this is just as true for mobile SEO.
Think of SEO as a framework in which your site’s technical aspects are the foundation of your content. Without a solid foundation, even the best content may struggle to rank.
- Responsive or Dynamic Rendering: If your site requires the user to zoom and scroll right or left to read the content on your pages, no number of other optimizations can help you. This should be first on your list.
- Content Style: Rethink how your users will consume your content online. Avoid very long paragraphs. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to quote Shakespeare.
- Image Optimization: Begin migrating your images to next-gen image formats and optimize your content display network for speed and responsiveness.
- Tap Targets: A site that prevents users from navigating or converting into sales won’t be in business long. Make navigation, links, and buttons usable for them.
- Structured Data: While this element ranks last in priority on this list, rich results can improve your chances of receiving traffic from a search engine, so add this to your to-do list once you’ve completed the other optimizations.
Summary
From How Search Works, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
If Google’s primary mission is focused on making all the world’s information accessible and useful, then you know they will prefer surfacing sites that align with that vision.
Since a growing percentage of users are on mobile devices, you may want to infer the word “everywhere” added to the end of the mission statement.
Are you missing out on traffic from mobile devices because of a poor mobile experience?
If you hope to remain relevant, make mobile SEO a priority now.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
HARO Has Been Dead for a While
I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.
I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.
After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:
So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.
Here’s one of them:
Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…
I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!
Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:
Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:
- I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
- I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)
So… I decided to confront him 😉
Here’s what he said:
Shocker.
I pressed him for more details:
I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.
I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:
But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…
If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.
No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.
Sidenote.
Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?
If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.
My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.
For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉
I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).
Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.
Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉
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