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How to Comply With ADA & WCAG

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How to Comply With ADA & WCAG

As the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) go live this month, a new light is being shined on website accessibility. But in honesty, this is something almost no SEOs think about!

Ensuring your website is accessible to everyone may not be a direct ranking factor. Still, if you’re driving traffic to a website and the users with disabilities can’t access and engage with the entire site, it’s going to impact your SEO efforts negatively. 

Over 61 million people have disabilities in the U.S. alone. Therefore, a vast percentage of your target audience will likely benefit from improved website accessibility. 

Plus, as more countries worldwide make website accessibility a legal requirement, not meeting government-issued accessibility guidelines could mean a lawsuit that might take down your online business. 

As someone whose mother is registered as legally blind, I appreciate the difference website accessibility can make to the quality of someone’s day-to-day life.

In this article, we are going to look at the importance of website accessibility, how it can boost your SEO efforts, as well as what you can do to ensure your site meets the most up-to-date accessibility regulations. 

What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a civil rights law that came into existence in the 1990s. It aims to protect those with disabilities against any form of discrimination and ensure they have equal access to public life, services, and accommodations. These include:

  • Employment
  • Transportation
  • Public accommodations
  • Communications
  • Government

In accordance with the ADA national network, a public accommodation is the:

  • Retail sector.
  • Restaurant industry.
  • Hotel industry.
  • Facilities dedicated to medical care.
  • Library.
  • Public park system.
  • Area for public use outside the home, school, or work.

The law itself does not specifically mention website accessibility. However, in recent years, there have been a number of public lawsuits around website accessibility and confusion from businesses as to whether the law applies to both physical premises and websites.

In fact, the well-established restaurant Domino’s Pizza even petitioned the Supreme Court to confirm if it needed to “satisfy discrete accessibility requirements with respect to individuals with disabilities” after it was sued by a blind man who could not order a pizza on its website. 

Excerpt from Supreme Court petition by Domino's Pizza
Excerpt from the Supreme Court petition by Domino’s Pizza.

Since then, the U.S. government has issued specific ADA guidance for website accessibility. According to its website, any business open to the public (B2C) or government body (or those funded by the government) must meet ADA regulations as detailed in Title III of the law.

The ADA states:

A website with inaccessible features can limit the ability of people with disabilities to access a public accommodation’s goods, services, and privileges available through that website—for example, a veterans’ service organization event registration form.

For these reasons, the Department has consistently taken the position that the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web.

Why does ADA compliance matter?

In today’s world, ensuring a website is accessible to all should simply be good practice. Especially for large corporations with teams of developers and SEOs working together, there is no valid reason not to make website accessibility a priority.

We’re going to look at some of the top reasons to take action and ensure your website is accessible.

Allowing people to live without restrictions

If we think back to the time of COVID-19 when all of us were stuck in our homes for months on end, many of us lived our day-to-day lives online. Whether it be attending Zoom classrooms, ordering groceries, or paying bills. 

Being able to easily access the things we need in a time of crisis is something many of us take for granted. However, for someone with a disability, having equal access to public services online can significantly impact their quality of life.

If you cannot leave your home or access websites that allow you to order food, pay a bill, or use a government service like voting, this can prevent you from living a normal life. Not to mention it can also cause a significant amount of stress.

Accessible websites are good for business

One benefit of improved website accessibility is that it is simply good for business. After all, more potential customers using your website can result in more leads and sales. 

Web accessibility is a legal requirement in most countries

The Americans with Disabilities Act is just the accessibility law covering the U.S. Outside of the U.S., there are several international laws covering accessibility. 

In 40 nations, it is necessary to ensure that your website is accessible—from Israel’s Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act to Taiwan’s Web Accessibility Guidelines. There is even a proposed European Accessibility Act, currently drafted by the European Union. 

Ensuring a website complies with local regulations can help you avoid facing legal action.

International accessibility laws
An example of some international accessibility laws. The full list can be found here.

If a website violates the ADA, a person with a disability may file a lawsuit against the site’s owner, which is happening more frequently than ever before.

A little over 800 complaints involving inaccessible websites were filed in federal court in 2017, according to accessible technology company UsableNet. After the release of WCAG 2.1, that number rose significantly to 2,200 in 2018.

Big-name brands and even famous people are not immune to these legal repercussions.

According to reports, Beyoncé Knowles’ firm, Parkwood Entertainment, was served with a class-action complaint alleging that customers who were blind or visually impaired were denied access to beyonce.com’s services—making it in violation of Title III of the ADA.

Excerpt from an accessibility class-action complaint
An excerpt from the class action accessibility complaint against Beyonce’s company.

When site users with visual impairments attempted to buy concert tickets on Beyonce’s website, they found that images had no alt text, the website did not have keyboard access, and drop-down menus were not accessible.

Several other well-known brands, corporations, and institutes have been subject to high-profile ADA compliance lawsuits, including Nike, Burger King, Fox News, and even Harvard.

The number of accessibility lawsuits is increasing yearly. With the publication of WCAG 2.2 in April 2023, we’ll probably observe a sizable increase yet again.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are regulations that offer guidance to ensure all aspects of website features and web applications are accessible.

Currently, WCAG 2.1 guidelines released in June 2018 are in use and are intended for:

  • Web content developers (page authors, site designers, etc.).
  • Web authoring tool developers.
  • Web accessibility evaluation tool developers.
  • Others who want or need a standard for web accessibility, including mobile accessibility.

WCAG 2.2 standards are still in the development stage and won’t be complete until April 2023. However, despite this, WCAG 3.0 has already been drafted, albeit it won’t be made public for a while.

WCAG 3.0 proposed guidelines
An overview of WCAG 3.0’s proposed guidelines.

But keeping up with the most recent drafts of the WCAG rules and keeping track of any planned modifications or additions can assist you in ensuring your website continues to adhere to accessibility requirements.

The WCAG is divided into three levels of conformance. Each level is based on how they impact the design or appearance of the pages to meet the needs of different individuals and situations.

Definition of conformance
 The WCAG’s definition of conformance.

Let’s look at the basics of the three levels of compliance and what they include. We’ll look at the aspects that are important for SEOs in detail later.

Level A

This is the lowest and least complicated level of conformance to obtain. Level A does not provide a broad level of accessibility and sets an absolute minimum level of accessibility.

The following are some notable WCAG 2.0 Level A requirements:

Level AA

Regulations or legal settlements usually adopt or negotiate this level as a target conformance level. It sets a level of accessibility for all users, including those using assistive technology.

Level AA requirements of WCAG 2.0 include these:

  • A minimum contrast of 4.5:1 (3.1 in the case of large text)
  • For images that convey meaning, alt text must be used
  • No or low background audio 
  • Site navigation consistent throughout
  • Clearly labeled form fields
  • Headings arranged logically

Level AAA

All three success criteria are met at this conformance level, which is the highest level achievable. If some content cannot satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria, full AAA compliance is not achievable.

Below are a few noteworthy requirements for WCAG 2.0 AAA:

Although Level AA compliance criteria are thought to be reasonable, ensuring your website complies with level AAA will help you maintain accessibility standards going forward and make your website accessible to everyone.

Why does WCAG compliance matter?

WCAG compliance is the best way that digital marketers can ensure they are complying with local accessibility laws and avoid legal repercussions. Generally, WCAG-compliant websites should have a clear goal, speedy loading times, simple navigation, and user-friendly language. 

These are all essential elements of UX design, which aids users of search engines in finding the information they want. You should improve the UX of your website to provide consumers with the greatest experience possible.

Quote from Think With Google
Quote from Think With Google. 

Every company, from large corporations to startups, ought to strive to be compliant with the law and have websites that are WCAG-compliant.

The United Nations states: “Access to information and communications technologies, including the Web, is defined as a basic human right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”

The negative impact of inaccessible websites means that many disabled people lose the ability to perform actions that many people may take for granted, such as handling their accounts, obtaining work, or accessing the internet in general. 

Where accessibility meets SEO 

As mentioned, website accessibility is not a direct ranking factor. However, accessibility issues affect user experience. From the Page Experience Update in March 2022, we know this is of the utmost importance to Google.

John Mueller also previously commented that poor web accessibility might negatively impact other signals, which could result in a site being less visible in search:

In general though, when sites are hard to use, people steer away from them anyway, so over time things like recommendations and other signals tend to drop away, resulting in the site being less visible in search too.

Plus, considering many of the elements that cause accessibility issues also happen to be aspects we look at to improve technical SEO health, there is a significant amount of crossover between the two. 

Navigation

Effective navigation is beneficial for both accessibility and SEO. People with disabilities can utilize websites more easily when the navigation is simple and straightforward. 

Well-organized navigation can also facilitate crawlers’ understanding of a website’s content and structure and, thus, may improve a website’s position on the SERPs.

Links and breadcrumbs are examples of navigational components that can be included, depending on the page’s content.

Consistent navigation is a level AA requirement for the WCAG. That means, using the same elements repeatedly throughout the site. 

This can include a “skip to content” button at the beginning of each page (like a “skip to recipe” button on a food blog) and ensuring menus and submenus are in the same positions on each page.

Example of footer navigation menus

A navigation element with the label “breadcrumb” defines the structure as a breadcrumb trail and designates it as a navigation landmark to make it simple to find.

It helps users to navigate where they are on a website, as well as how far away from the homepage. It looks something like this:

Home > Blog > Technical SEO > How to Do a Technical SEO Audit

Breadcrumbs also help search engines navigate a website and categorize its pages. Google also displays breadcrumbs in search results.

Example of breadcrumbs in search results

Sitemaps

Sitemaps help both users and search engines navigate your website. Especially for users with disabilities, sitemaps help them find the pages they need to access more easily. 

The World Wide Web Consortium states:

The sitemap serves several purposes.

  • It provides an overview of the entire site.
  • It helps users understand what the site contains and how the content is organized.
  • It offers an alternative to complex navigation bars that may be different at different parts of the site.
Sitemap example

Titles and headings

Screen readers use title tags to offer users an overview of a page’s content when it first loads. Additionally, they provide page summaries and nudge visitors to click through tabs and search engine results.

Make your information easier to read for users with screen readers by using headers appropriately. Make use of the right header tags (e.g., H2, not just bigger or bolder text). 

A logical hierarchy should be observed while using cascading headers, with H1s coming before H2s, H3s after H2s, and so on. Both visitors and search engines can then easily comprehend the content’s structure. 

A great tool to help with this is Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, which allows you to see the page title, content length, and headings (as well as the hierarchy) directly on any page. 

"Content" section in Ahrefs' SEO Toolbar

Internal links

Anchor text is clickable text used to build links to other webpages. Users must understand what to anticipate when they click a link. For accessibility, a precise description is essential.

Anchor text example

Search engines may evaluate the content of a linked website with the help of the anchor text. Anchor text aids in your understanding of the website’s structure, page layout, and keywords.

Alt text

Alt text allows screen readers to comprehend what a picture implies. Additionally, alt text helps search engines understand the content of photos, improving a page’s SEO and enabling images to appear in image results pages, which can increase traffic to your website.

How to test website accessibility

To make your website accessible, you need to be able to run an accessibility audit. 

Many of the key elements for SEOs that we have discussed can be assessed using Ahrefs’ Site Audit. The tool will show issues for:

  • Sitemaps
  • Robots.txt
  • Internal linking
  • Headings
  • Titles
  • Alt text

Of course, if you want to perform a detailed accessibility audit so you can forward accessibility-specific issues to a developer, there are several tools that identify which SEO elements can be improved to make your site more accessible. 

Audit your accessibility with the Accessibility Checker

Start by heading over to the Accessibility Checker. Enter the website you want to audit and select the country you want to comply with.

Accessibility Checker homepage

Once you’ve done that, it will take about 30 seconds to run the audit and bring up your results.

Accessibility Checker showing an audit score

Below this, it will give you a breakdown of any critical issues and how to fix them. You can also download the report to work on later or forward to a developer.

Accessibility Checker showing a list of issues

Check accessibility with Google Lighthouse

Along with security and SEO, Google Lighthouse examines a site’s accessibility and Core Web Vitals.

Page titles and the color contrast between the background and the foreground are two accessibility criteria. The title tags, link names, and scalability of the viewport are also included.

Some Lighthouse Accessibility standards that aren’t accessible for automatic assessment can also be checked manually. Lighthouse may be used in various ways, including as a free Google Chrome plugin so that both technical and non-technical people can utilize it.

You can easily access a Google Lighthouse – accessibility audit directly in Google Chrome by either right-clicking the page and selecting “Inspect” or pressing F12 on your keyboard.

Select "Inspect" on a page in Google Chrome

Then, in the developer tools window, navigate to the “Lighthouse” tab.

Navigating to Lighthouse in developer tools

Adjust your Lighthouse settings and choose to audit only “Accessibility” and then “Analyze page load.”

Lighthouse audit options

Lighthouse will then analyze the page and give you a score out of 100, as well as a list of issues.

Lighthouse accessibility score

Use WAVE’s accessibility evaluation tool

Wave’s accessibility evaluation tool gives you a detailed breakdown of the accessibility issues your website faces and is great to use in addition to the Accessibility Checker and Lighthouse. 

Start by heading over to the WAVE website and entering the website address of the site you want to audit.

Wave's homepage

When the audit is complete, the audit overview will open in a docked window.

WAVE audit overview

You can expand the different issues to give a detailed breakdown. The nice thing about Wave is if you click on an issue in the report, it will highlight it directly on the page. For example, highlighting exactly which images are missing alt text or links without descriptive text.

Wave highlighted errors

Plugins and widgets that test and improve accessibility

It may take considerable time and effort to make your website accessible. But you’re in luck if you use WordPress as your content management system.

At the very least, WordPress accessibility plugins can point you in the right direction when it comes to making your site accessible. Some can even help you make changes without the assistance of a developer.

I’ve listed three of my top choices below (you only need one).

WP Accessibility

Many common accessibility problems in WordPress themes can be resolved using the WP Accessibility plugin. The accessibility-enhancing features of the free plugin may be enabled or disabled by administrators without writing any code. 

Color Contrast Tester allows you to compare the contrast between two colors. Using the plugin, you can also distinguish between photos without alt text.

One Click Accessibility

WordPress site administrators can set up and maintain accessibility settings with One Click Accessibility. The plugin brings up an accessibility menu at the side of the screen that website users can utilize for different accessibility functions.

One Click Accessibility user menu

ARIA (Accessible, Rich, Internet Applications) landmarks, outline emphasis, target characteristics for links, and skip links are a few of its helpful features. It also enables you to create sitemaps, underline links, use negative contrast, and scale fonts.

One Click Accessibility menu function
An example of One Click Accessibility’s site menu functions in use.

WP Accessibility Helper

By addressing issues with font size, contrast, and alt text, the WP Accessibility Helper can help to make your website more accessible. You can simply use the toggle buttons to turn on the options you want.

WP Accessibility Helper toggle buttons

You can customize your front-end accessibility sidebar by using WP Accessibility Helper’s pro edition. It’s simple to adjust the font size, color, and other features.

ADA Okay!

ADA Okay is a premium tool that uses an onsite widget that site users can control to make your website accessible.

I’ve personally added ADA Okay to dozens of small business sites, and it has always worked perfectly simply by copying and pasting a short piece of code into the website’s footer.

By presenting an accessibility menu in a tiny pop-up (similar to a chat widget), ADA Okay works to increase accessibility and guarantee that your website complies with ADA standards.

ADA Okay pop-up

A website user can alter the text’s size and color, expand the cursor, and highlight links using the menu. You can also disable functions like autoplay and other animations that may trigger seizures.

Final thoughts

Website accessibility is not only a legal requirement, but it is also an extremely important aspect in ensuring people with disabilities can live a normal day-to-day life. 

As SEOs, we can contribute to improved accessibility by ensuring the technical and on-page aspects that promote accessibility are properly implemented and maintained. 

By doing so, you can improve the ROI for your clients by ensuring their website is accessible to every potential customer and prevent them from being subjected to an accessibility lawsuit. 

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.



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The Lean Guide (With Template)

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The Lean Guide (With Template)

A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers.

However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if you choose to outsource). 

A solution to that is a lean approach to the process — and that’s what this guide is about. 

In other words, we’ll focus on the most important data you need to answer the question: “Why would people choose them over you?”. No boring theory, outtakes from marketing history, or spending hours digging up nice-to-have information.

In this guide, you will find:

  • A real-life competitive analysis example.
  • Templates: one for input data and one for a slide deck to present your analysis to others.
  • Step-by-step instructions.

Our template consists of two documents: a slide deck and a spreadsheet. 

The Slide deck is the output document. It will help you present the analysis to your boss or your teammates.

The spreadsheet is the input document. You will find tables that act as the data source for the charts from the slide deck, as well as a prompt to use in ChatGPT to help you with user review research.

Competitive analysis template — spreadsheet sneak peek.Competitive analysis template — spreadsheet sneak peek.

We didn’t focus on aesthetics here; every marketer likes to do slide decks their own way, so feel free to edit everything you’ll find there. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the process. The template consists of these six tasks: 

  1. Identify your direct competitors. 
  2. Compare share of voice. 
  3. Compare pricing and features.
  4. Find strong and weak points based on reviews.
  5. Compare purchasing convenience.
  6. Present conclusions.

Going forward, we’ll explain why these steps matter and show how to complete them. 

1. Identify your direct competitors

Direct competitors are businesses that offer a similar solution to the same audience. 

They matter a lot more than indirect competitors (i.e. businesses with different products but targeting the same audience as you) because you’ll be compared with them often (e.g. in product reviews and rankings). Plus, your audience is more likely to gravitate towards them when considering different options. 

You probably have a few direct competitors in mind already, but here are a few ways to find others based on organic search and paid search ads

Our basis for the analysis was Landingi, a SaaS for building landing pages (we chose that company randomly). So in our case, we found these 3 direct competitors. 

Slide 1 — direct competitors.Slide 1 — direct competitors.

Look at keyword overlap

Keyword overlap uncovers sites that target the same organic keywords as you. Some sites will compete with you for traffic but not for customers (e.g. G2 may share some keywords with Landingi but they’re a different business). However, in many cases, you will find direct competitors just by looking at this marketing channel. 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your site’s address. 
  • Scroll down to Organic competitors
  • Visit the URLs to pick 3 – 5 direct competitors.
Top organic competitors data from Ahrefs.Top organic competitors data from Ahrefs.

To double-check the choice of competitors, we also looked at who was bidding for search ads on Google.

See who’s advertising 

If someone is spending money to show ads for keywords related to what you do, that’s a strong indication they are a direct competitor. 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
  • Type in a few broad keywords related to your niche, like “landing page builder” or “landing page tool”. 
  • Go to the Ads history report. 
  • Visit the sites that have a high presence of ads in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). 
Ads history report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Ads history report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Once you’re done checking both reports, write down competitors in the deck. 

You can also take screenshots of the reports and add them to your deck to show the supporting data for your argument. 

 Slide 2 — direct competitors by organic traffic. Slide 2 — direct competitors by organic traffic.

2. Compare share of voice

Share of voice is a measure of your reach in any given channel compared to competitors. 

A bigger share of voice (SOV) means that your competitors are more likely to reach your audience. In other words, they may be promoting more effectively than you. 

In our example, we found that Landingi’s SOV was the lowest in both of these channels. 

Organic: 

Slide 3 — share of voice on Google Search.Slide 3 — share of voice on Google Search.

And social media:

 Slide 4 — share of voice on social media. Slide 4 — share of voice on social media.

Here’s how we got that data using Ahrefs and Brand24.

Organic share of voice 

Before we start, make sure you have a project set up in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker

Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.

Now: 

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis and enter your and your competitors’s sites as shown below. 
Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.
Create a new project in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.
  • On the next screen, set the country with the most important market for your business and set the filters like this:
Content gap analysis filter setup.Content gap analysis filter setup.
  • Select keywords that sound most relevant to your business (even if you don’t rank for them yet) and Add them to Rank Tracker
Common keywords found via Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis.Common keywords found via Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis.
  • Go to Rank Tracker, open your project, and look for Competitors/Overview. This report will uncover automatically calculated Share of Voice
Organic share of voice data in Ahrefs.Organic share of voice data in Ahrefs.
  • Add the numbers in corresponding cells inside the sheet and paste the graph inside the slide deck. 
Filling the share of voice template with data.Filling the share of voice template with data.

It’s normal that the numbers don’t add up to 100%. SOV is calculated by including sites that compete with you in traffic but are not your direct competitors, e.g. blogs. 

Social share of voice 

We can also measure our share of voice across social media channels using Brand24.

  • Go to Brand24.
  • Start a New project for your brand and each competitor. Use the competitors’ brand name as the keyword to monitor. 
  • Go to the Comparison report and compare your project with competitors. 
Using Brand24's Comparison tool for competitive analysis.Using Brand24's Comparison tool for competitive analysis.
  • Take a screenshot of the SOV charts and paste them into the slide deck. Make sure the charts are set to “social media”.
Social media tab in share of voice report.Social media tab in share of voice report.

3. Compare pricing and features

Consumers often choose solutions that offer the best value for money — simple as that. And that typically comes down to two things: 

  • Whether you have the features they care about. We’ll use all features available across all plans to see how likely the product is to satisfy user needs.
  • How much they will need to pay. Thing is, the topic of pricing is tricky: a) when assessing affordability, people often focus on the least expensive option available and use it as a benchmark, b) businesses in the SaaS niche offer custom plans. So to make things more practical, we’ll compare the cheapest plans, but feel free to run this analysis across all pricing tiers.

After comparing our example company to competitors, we found that it goes head-to-head with Unbounce as the most feature-rich solution on the market. 

Slide 5 — features vs. pricing.Slide 5 — features vs. pricing.

Here’s how we got that data. 

  • Note down your and your competitors’ product features. One of the best places to get this information is pricing pages. Some brands even publish their own competitor comparisons — you may find them helpful too. 
  • While making the list, place a “1” in the cell corresponding to the brand that offers the solution.
Filling data in the spreadsheet.Filling data in the spreadsheet.
  • Enter the price of the cheapest plan (excluding free plans). 
Adding pricing data inside the spreadsheet.Adding pricing data inside the spreadsheet.
  • Once finished, copy the chart and paste it inside the deck. 

4. Find strong and weak points based on user reviews

User reviews can show incredibly valuable insight into your competitors’ strong and weak points. Here’s why this matters:

  • Improving on what your competitors’ customers appreciate could help you attract similar customers and possibly win some over.
  • Dissatisfaction with competitors is a huge opportunity. Some businesses are built solely to fix what other companies can’t fix. 

Here’s a sample from our analysis: 

 Slide 6 — likes and dislikes about Competitors. Slide 6 — likes and dislikes about Competitors.

And here’s how we collated the data using ChatGPT. Important: repeat the process for each competitor.

  • Open ChatGPT and enter the prompt from the template.
ChatGPT prompt for competitive analysis.ChatGPT prompt for competitive analysis.
  • Go to G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot and find a competitor’s reviews with ratings from 2 – 4 (i.e. one rating above the lowest and one below the highest possible). Reason:

businesses sometimes solicit five-star reviews, whereas dissatisfied customers tend to leave one-star reviews in a moment of frustration. The most actionable feedback usually comes in between.

  • Copy and paste the content of the reviews into ChatGPT (don’t hit enter yet). 
  • Once you’re done pasting all reviews, hit enter in ChatGPT to run the analysis.
Sample of ChatGPT output with charts.Sample of ChatGPT output with charts.
  • Paste the graphs into the deck. If you want the graphs to look different, don’t hesitate to ask the AI. 

There’s a faster alternative, but it’s a bit more advanced. 

Instead of copy-pasting, you can use a scraping tool like this one to get all reviews at once. The downside here is that not all review sources will a have scraping tool available. 

5. Compare purchasing convenience

Lastly, we’ll see how easy it is to actually buy your products, and compare the experience to your competitors. 

This is a chance to simplify your checkout process, and even learn from any good habits your competitors have adopted.

For example, we found that our sample company had probably nothing to worry about in this area — they ticked almost all of the boxes. 

Slide 7 — purchasing convenience.Slide 7 — purchasing convenience.

Here’s how to complete this step:

  • Place a “1” if you or any of your competitors offer convenience features listed in the template. 
  • Once done, copy the chart and paste it into the deck.

Step 6. Present conclusions

This is the part of the presentation where you sum up all of your findings and suggest a course of action. 

Here are two examples: 

  • Landingi had the lowest SOV in the niche, and that is never good. So the conclusion might be to go a level deeper and do an SEO competitive analysis, and to increase social media presence by creating more share-worthy content like industry surveys, design/CRO tips, or in-house data studies.
  • Although the brand had a very high purchasing convenience score, during the analysis we found that there was a $850 gap between the monthly full plan and the previous tier. The conclusion here might be to offer a custom plan (like competitors do) to fill that gap. 

We encourage you to take your time here and think about what would make the most sense for your business. 

Tip

It’s good to be specific in your conclusions, but don’t go too deep. Competitive analysis concerns many aspects of the business, so it’s best to give other departments a chance to chime in. Just because your competitors have a few unique features doesn’t necessarily mean you need to build them too.

Final thoughts 

A competitive analysis is one of the most fruitful exercises in marketing. It can show you areas for improvement, give ideas for new features, and help you discover gaps in your strategy. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it’s fundamental to running a successful business. 

Just don’t forget to balance “spying” on your competitors with innovation. After all, you probably don’t want to become an exact copy of someone else’s brand. 

In other words, use competitive analysis to keep up with your competitors, but don’t let that erase what’s unique about your brand or make you forget your big vision. 

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Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

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Critical WordPress Form Plugin Vulnerability Affects Up To +200,000 Installs

Security researchers at Wordfence detailed a critical security flaw in the MW WP Form plugin, affecting versions 5.0.1 and earlier. The vulnerability allows unauthenticated threat actors to exploit the plugin by uploading arbitrary files, including potentially malicious PHP backdoors, with the ability to execute these files on the server.

MW WP Form Plugin

The MW WP Form plugin helps to simplify form creation on WordPress websites using a shortcode builder.

It makes it easy for users to create and customize forms with various fields and options.

The plugin has many features, including one that allows file uploads using the [mwform_file name=”file”] shortcode for the purpose of data collection. It is this specific feature that is exploitable in this vulnerability.

Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability

An Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability is a security issue that allows hackers to upload potentially harmful files to a website. Unauthenticated means that the attacker does not need to be registered with the website or need any kind of permission level that comes with a user permission level.

These kinds of vulnerabilities can lead to remote code execution, where the uploaded files are executed on the server, with the potential to allow the attackers to exploit the website and site visitors.

The Wordfence advisory noted that the plugin has a check for unexpected filetypes but that it doesn’t function as it should.

According to the security researchers:

“Unfortunately, although the file type check function works perfectly and returns false for dangerous file types, it throws a runtime exception in the try block if a disallowed file type is uploaded, which will be caught and handled by the catch block.

…even if the dangerous file type is checked and detected, it is only logged, while the function continues to run and the file is uploaded.

This means that attackers could upload arbitrary PHP files and then access those files to trigger their execution on the server, achieving remote code execution.”

There Are Conditions For A Successful Attack

The severity of this threat depends on the requirement that the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings is required to be enabled in order for this security gap to be exploited.

The security advisory notes that the vulnerability is rated critical with a score of 9.8 out of 10.

Actions To Take

Wordfence strongly advises users of the MW WP Form plugin to update their versions of the plugin.

The vulnerability is patched in the lutes version of the plugin, version 5.0.2.

The severity of the threat is particularly critical for users who have enabled the “Saving inquiry data in database” option in the form settings and that is compounded by the fact that no permission levels are needed to execute this attack.

Read the Wordfence advisory:

Update ASAP! Critical Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload in MW WP Form Allows Malicious Code Execution

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Alexander_P

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How SEOs Make the Web Better

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How SEOs Make the Web Better

SEOs catch flak for ruining the web, but they play a crucial role in the search ecosystem, and actually make the internet better for everyone.

Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people who seek to extract money from the internet regardless of the cost to others. There are still scams and snake oil, posers and plagiarists. Many parts of the web have become extremely commercialized, with paid advertising and big brands displacing organic and user-generated content.

But while there are situations where SEOs have made things worse, to fixate on them is to ignore the colossal elephant in the room: in the ways that really matter, the web is the best it’s ever been:

  • It’s the easiest it has ever been to find information on the internet. Searchers have a staggering array of tutorials, teardowns, and tips at their fingertips, containing information that is generally accurate and helpful—and this was not always the case.
  • Bad actors have a smaller influence over search. Search is less of a Wild West than it used to be. Once-scam-ridden topics are subject to significant scrutiny, and the problems and loopholes in search that need fixing today—like big brands and generic content receiving undue prominence—are smaller and less painful than the problems of the past.
  • More people use search to their benefit. Online content is the most accessible it has ever been, and it’s easier than ever to grow a local business or expand into international markets on the back of search.

SEOs have played a crucial role in these improvements, poking and prodding, building and—sometimes—breaking. They are Google power users: the people who push the system to extremes, but in doing so, catalyze the change needed to make search better for everyone.

Let’s explore how.

SEOs help regular people benefit from search

SEOs are much-needed intermediaries between Google and the rest of the world, helping non-technical people acquire and benefit from search engine traffic.

There is a huge amount of valuable information locked up in the heads of people who have no idea how to build a website or index a blog post. A carpet fitter with a bricks-and-mortar business might have decades of experience solving costly problems with uneven subfloors or poor moisture management, but no understanding of how to share that information online.

SEOs provide little nudges towards topics that people care about and writing that’s accessible to people and robots. They help solve technical problems that would hinder or completely block a site from appearing in search results. They identify opportunities for companies to be rewarded for creating great content.

It’s a win-win: businesses are rewarded with traffic, searchers have their intent satisfied, and the world is made a little richer for the newfound knowledge it contains.

SEOs turn helpful standards into real websites

SEOs do many things to actively make the web a better place, tending to their own plot of the Google garden to make sure it flourishes.

Take, for example, the myriad standards and guidelines designed to make the web a more accessible place for users. The implementation of these standards—turning theoretical guidelines into real, concrete parts of the web—often happens because of the SEO team.

Technical SEOs play a big part in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of principles designed to ensure online content is “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust” for every user. Every SEO’s fixation with Core Web Vitals fuels a faster, more efficient web. Content teams translate Google’s helpful content guidelines into useful words and images on a page.

(Case in point: check out Aleyda Solis’ Content Helpfulness Analyzer.)

Screenshot: Aleyda Solis' helpful content GPTScreenshot: Aleyda Solis' helpful content GPT

There is a lot of overlap between “things that help users” and “things that improve search performance.” Even if the motive behind these changes is as simple as generating more traffic, a well-optimized website is, generally speaking, one that is also great for real human beings trying to engage with it.

SEOs pressure-test Google’s systems

The biggest criticism leveled at SEOs is that they break things. And they do! But that breakage acts as a type of pressure testing that strengthens the system as a whole.

Abuse of spintax and keyword stuffing forced Google to develop a better understanding of on-page content. Today, that loophole is closed, but more importantly, Google is much better at understanding the contents of a page and its relationship to a website as a whole.

Hacks like hiding keywords with white text on a white background (or moving them beyond the visible bounds of the screen) forced Google to expand its understanding of page styling and CSS, and how on-page information interacts with the environment that contains it.

Even today’s deluge of borderline-plagiarised AI content is not without benefit: it creates a very clear incentive for Google to get better at rewarding information gain and prioritizing publishers with solid EEAT credentials. These improvements will make tomorrow’s version of search much better.

This isn’t just Google fixing what SEOs broke: these changes usually leave lasting benefits that extend beyond any single spam tactic and make search better for all of its users.

Illustration: how fixing problems leads to smaller future problems and improved search experienceIllustration: how fixing problems leads to smaller future problems and improved search experience

This is not to argue that blackhat SEO is desirable. It would be better to make these improvements without incurring pain along the way. But Search is huge and complicated, and Google has little incentive to spend money proactively fixing problems and loopholes.

If we can’t solve every issue before it causes pain, we should be grateful for a correction mechanism that prevents it—and more extreme abuse—from happening in the future. SEOs break the system, and in doing so, make future breakages a lot less severe.

SEOs are the internet’s quality assurance team

Some SEOs take advantage of the loopholes they discover—but many don’t. They choose to raise these issues in public spaces, encourage discussion, and seek out a fix, acting like a proxy quality assurance team.

At the small end of the spectrum, SEOs often flag bugs with Google systems, like a recent error in Search Console reporting flagged independently by three separate people, or Tom Anthony famously catching an oversight in Google’s Manual Actions database. While these types of problems don’t always impact the average user’s experience using Google, they help keep search systems working as intended.

At the other end of the scale, this feedback can extend as far as the overarching quality of the search experience, like AJ Kohn writing about Google’s propensity to reward big brands over small brands, or Lily Ray calling out an uptick in spam content in Google Discover.

SEOs are Google’s most passionate users. They interact with it at a scale far beyond the average user, and they can identify trends and changes at a macroscopic level. As a result, they are usually the first to discover problems—but also the people who hold Google to the highest standard. They are a crucial part of the feedback loop that fuels improvements.

SEOs act as a check-and-balance

Lastly, SEOs act as a check-and-balance, gathering firsthand evidence of how search systems operate, letting us differentiate between useful advice, snake oil, and Google’s PR bluster. 

Google shares lots of useful guidance, but it’s important to recognize the limits of their advice. They are a profit-seeking company, and Search requires opacity to work—if everyone understood how it worked, everyone would game it, and it would stop working. Mixed in with the good advice is a healthy portion of omission and misdirection.

Google Search plays a vital role in controlling the flow of the web’s information—it is simply too important for us to leave its mechanics, biases, and imperfections unexplored. We need people who can interrogate the systems just enough to separate fact from fiction and understand how the pieces fit together.

We need people like Mic King, and his insanely detailed write-up of SGE and RAG; Britney Muller and her demystification of LLMs; the late Bill Slawki’s unfaltering patent analysis; or our own Patrick Stox’s efforts in piecing together how search works.

Screenshot from Patrick Stox's presentation, How Search WorksScreenshot from Patrick Stox's presentation, How Search Works

Final thoughts

The web has problems. We can and should expect more from Google Search. But the problems we need to solve today are far less severe and painful than the problems that needed solving in the past; and the people who have the highest expectations, and will be most vocal in shaping that positive future, are—you guessed it—SEOs.

To SEOs: the cause of (and solution to) all of the web’s problems.



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