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How To Identify And Reduce Render-Blocking Resources

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How To Identify And Reduce Render-Blocking Resources

Identifying and reducing resources responsible for blocking the rendering of your web page is a critical optimization point that can make or break your page speed.

It can be so critical that it can pay dividends to your site’s page experience metrics (and your user’s satisfaction) as a result.

In 2021, the average time it took to fully render a mobile web page was 22 seconds. In 2018, it was 15 seconds.

Clearly, this is a substantially higher number than Google’s recommended time of 2-3 seconds. It’s also substantially higher than it used to be.

What could be causing these issues with render-blocking resources?

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What is driving this increase in overall page render speed?

One interesting trend to note is that there has been an increasing reliance on third-party fonts compared to system fonts. Using third-party fonts as a resource tends to interfere with the processing and rendering of a page.

With system fonts, the browser does not have to load anything extra, so it doesn’t have that additional processing step as a result.

Screenshot from Web Almanac, January 2022

This reliance across industries is likely to impact this rendering time. Of course, this is not the only cause of this issue with render-blocking resources.

In addition, Google’s own services tend to have a significant impact on rendering time, such as Google Analytics or using a third-party Facebook pixel for tracking purposes.

The desire to rely on such technologies is not necessarily terrible from a marketing perspective.

But, from a render-blocking resources perspective, it can cause significant increases in page load time and how Google (and users) perceives your page.

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The ideal solution is to make sure that your page loads for user interaction as quickly as possible.

It’s also a possibility that poor web development practices in use by web developers today are to blame.

Either way, this is something in every website project that should be addressed as part of your Core Web Vitals audits.

Page experience, however, is not just about how fast the entire page loads.

Instead, it’s more about the overall experience of the page as measured by Google’s page experience framework, or Core Web Vitals.

This is why you want to work on improving and optimizing your page speed for the critical rendering path throughout the DOM, or document object model.

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What Is The Critical Rendering Path?

The critical rendering path refers to all of the steps that it takes in order to render the entire page, from when the browser first begins receiving data to when it finally compiles the page at the final render.

This is a process that can take only several milliseconds if you optimize it right.

Optimizing for the critical rendering path means making sure that you optimize for the performance of rendering on many different devices.

This is accomplished by optimizing the critical rendering path to get to your first paint as quickly as possible.

Basically, you’re reducing the amount of time users spend looking at a blank white screen to display visual content ASAP (see 0.0s below).

An example of optimized vs unoptimized rendering from Google.Screenshot from Google Web Fundamentals, January 2022

There’s a whole process on how to do this, outlined in Google’s developer guide documentation, but I will be focusing on one heavy hitter in particular: reducing render-blocking resources.

How Does The Critical Rendering Path Work?

The critical rendering path refers to the series of steps a browser takes on its journey to render a page, by converting the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to actual pixels on the screen.

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An example of Critical Rendering Path.Screenshot from Medium, January 2022

Essentially, the browser needs to request, receive, and parse all HTML and CSS files (plus some additional work) before it will start to render any visual content.

This process occurs within a fraction of a second (in most cases). Until the browser completes these steps, users will see a blank white page.

The following is an example of how users may experience how a page loads according to the different stages of the page load process:

How users perceive page rendering.Screenshot from web.dev, January 2022

Improving the critical rendering path can thus improve on the overall page experience, which can help contribute to improved performance on Core Web Vitals metrics.

How Do I Optimize The Critical Rendering Path?

In order to improve the critical rendering path, you have to analyze your render-blocking resources.

Any render-blocking resources may end up blocking in the initial rendering of the page, and negatively impact your Core Web Vitals scores as a result.

This involves an optimization process of:

  • Reducing the quantity of resources that are critical to the rendering path. This can be done by using a defer method for any possible render-blocking resources.
  • Prioritizing content that is above-the-fold, and downloading important media assets as early as you possibly can.
  • Compress the file size of any remaining critical resources.

By doing this, it’s possible to improve both Core Web Vitals and how your page physically renders to the user.

Why Should I Care?

Google’s user behavior data reports that most users abandon a slow site after about 3 seconds.

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In addition to studies that show that reducing page load time and improving the page experience leads to greater user satisfaction, there are also several major Google updates on the horizon that you will want to prepare for.

Identifying and optimizing render-blocking resources will be critical to stay on top of the game when these updates hit.

Google will be implementing page experience on the desktop in 2022, beginning their rollout of desktop page experience in February and finishing up in March.

According to Google, the same three Core Web Vitals metrics (LCP, FID, and CLS) along with their associated thresholds will now be linked to desktop ranking.

Also, Google is working on a brand-new possibly experimental Core Web Vitals metric, taking into account maximum event duration, and total event duration.

Their explanation of these factors they are considering are:

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Maximum event duration: the interaction latency is equal to the largest single event duration from any event in the interaction group.
Total event duration: the interaction latency is the sum of all event durations, ignoring any overlap.

With many studies linking reductions in page load times to improvements in valuable KPIs (conversions, bounce rate, time on site), improving site latency has become a top-of-mind business goal for many organizations.

SEO professionals are in a unique position to guide this effort, as our role is often to bridge the gap between business goals and web developers’ priorities.

Having the ability to audit a site, analyze results, and identify areas for improvement helps us to work with developers to improve performance and translate results to key stakeholders.

The Goals Of Optimizing Render-Blocking Resources

One of the primary goals of optimizing the critical rendering path is to make sure that the resources that are needed to render that important, above-the-fold content are loaded as quickly as is humanly possible.

Any render-blocking resources must be deprioritized, and any resources that are preventing the page from rendering quickly.

Each optimization point will contribute to the overall improvement of your page speed, page experience, and Core Web Vitals scores.

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Why Improve Render-Blocking CSS?

Google has said many times that coding is not necessarily important for ranking.

But, by the same token, gaining a ranking benefit from page speed optimization improvements can potentially help, depending on the query.

When it comes to CSS files, they are considered to be render-blocking resources.

Why is this?

Even though it happens in the midst of a millisecond or less (in most cases), the browser won’t start to render any page content until it is able to request, receive, and handle all CSS styles.

If a browser renders content that’s not styled properly, all you would get is a bunch of ordinary text and links that are not even styled.

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This means that your page will basically be “naked” for lack of a better term.

Removing the CSS styles will result in a page that is literally unusable.

The majority of content will need repainting in order to look the least bit palatable for a user.

Example of CSS enabled vs CSS disabled.

If we examine the page rendering process, the gray box below is a representation of the browser time needed to get all CSS resources. This way, it can begin constructing the DOM of CSS (or CCSOM tree).

This could take anywhere from a millisecond to several seconds, depending on what your server needs to do in order to load these resources.

It can also vary, which could depend on the size, along with the quantity, of these CSS files.

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The following render tree shows an example of a browser rendering all the files along with CSS within the DOM:

DOM CSSOM Render Tree.Screenshot from Medium, January 2022

In addition, the following shows an example of the rendering sequence of a page, in which all the files load in a process, from the construction of the DOM to the final painting and compositing of the page, which is known as the critical rendering path.

Because CSS is a render-blocking resource by default, it makes sense to improve CSS to the point where it doesn’t have any negative impact on the page rendering process at all.

The Official Google Recommendation States The Following:

“CSS is a render-blocking resource. Get it to the client as soon and as quickly as possible to optimize the time to first render.”

The HTML must be converted into something the browser can work with: the DOM. CSS files are the same way. This must be converted into the CSSOM.

By optimizing the CSS files within the DOM and CSSOM, you can help decrease the time it takes for a browser to render everything, which greatly contributes to an enhanced page experience.

Why Improve Render-Blocking JavaScript?

Did you know that loading JavaScript is not always required?

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With JavaScript, downloading and parsing all JavaScript resources is not a necessary step for fully rendering a page.

So, this isn’t really a technically required part of page render.

But, the caveat to this is: Most modern sites are coded in such a way that JavaScript (for example the Bootstrap JS framework) is required in order to render the above-the-fold experience.

But, if a browser finds JavaScript files before the first render of a page, the rendering process can be stopped until later and after JavaScript files are fully executed.

This can be specified otherwise by deferring JavaScript files for later use.

One example of this is if there are JS functions like an alert that’s built into the HTML. This could stop page rendering until after the execution of this JavaScript code.

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JavaScript has the sole power to modify both HTML and CSS styles, so this makes sense.

Parsing and execution of JavaScript could be delayed because of the fact that JavaScript can potentially change the entire page content. This delay is built into the browser by default – for just such a “just in case” scenario.

Official Google Recommendation:

“JavaScript can also block DOM construction and delay when the page is rendered. To deliver optimal performance … eliminate any unnecessary JavaScript from the critical rendering path.”

How To Identify Render-Blocking Resources

To identify the critical rendering path and analyze critical resources:

  • Run a test using webpagetest.org and click on the “waterfall” image.
  • Focus on all resources requested and downloaded before the green “Start Render” line.

Analyze your waterfall view; look for CSS or JavaScript files that are requested before the green “start render” line but are not critical for loading above-the-fold content.

Example of start render.Screenshot from WebPageTest, January 2022

After identifying a (potentially) render-blocking resource, test removing it to see if above-the-fold content is affected.

In my example, I noticed some JavaScript requests that may be critical.

Even though they are critical, it’s sometimes a good idea to test removing these scripts to test how shifting elements on the site affect the experience.

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Example of web page test results showing render-blocking resources.Screenshot from WebPageTest, January 2022

There are also other ways to improve such resources.

For non-critical JavaScript files, you may want to look into combining the files and deferring them by including these files at the bottom of your page.

For non-critical CSS files, you can also reduce how many CSS files you have by combining them into one file and compressing them.

Improving your coding techniques can also result in a file that’s faster to download and causes less impact on the rendering speed of your page.

Ways To Reduce Render-Blocking Elements On The Page

Once you determine that a render-blocking resource is not critical for rendering content above-the-fold, you will want to explore a myriad of methods that are available in order to improve the rendering of your page and defer non-critical resources.

There are many solutions to this problem, from deferring JavaScript and CSS files to reducing the impact that CSS can have.

One possible solution is to not add CSS using the @import rule.

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Make Sure Not To Add CSS Using The @Import Rule

From a performance perspective, even though @import appears to keep your HTML file cleaner, it can actually create issues with performance.

The @import declaration will actually cause the browser to process a CSS file more slowly. Why? Because it is also downloading all of the imported files.

Rendering will be entirely blocked until the process completes.

Indeed, the best solution is to use the standard method of including a CSS stylesheet using the <link rel=”stylesheet”> declaration in the HTML.

Minify Your CSS And JavaScript Files

If you are on WordPress, using a plugin to minify your CSS and JavaScript files can have a tremendous impact.

The process of minification takes all of the unnecessary spaces within a file and compresses it even further, so you can end up with a nice performance boost.

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Also, even if you are not on WordPress, you can use the services of a well-qualified developer in order to complete the process manually.

This will take more time but can be well worth it.

Minified files are usually much lighter than their former counterparts, and this means that initial rendering will complete much faster.

In addition to this, after the minification process, you can also expect the download process to be faster, because less time is necessary to download non-render blocking resources.

Use System Fonts Instead Of Third-Party Fonts

While third-party fonts may appear to make a site “prettier,” this is not exactly the case.

While it may look amazing on the surface, these third-party font files often take a longer time to load and can contribute to your render-blocking resources problem.

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Because of the external files, the browser has to make external requests in order to download these files to render your page, which may result in significantly higher download times.

If you’re on a team that has less than ideal development best practices, then it could stand to reason that you have many third-party font files that are not necessary for rendering your site.

In which case, removing all these unnecessary files can improve your render-blocking resources significantly and contribute to your overall improvement in Core Web Vitals.

Using system fonts, on the other hand, only keeps the processing within the browser, without external requests.

Also, there are likely system fonts that may be very similar to the third-party fonts you are using.

Improve Your Coding Techniques And Combining Files

If you’re working with code yourself, you may (or may not … no one is judging here) find that techniques are less than optimal.

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One example: you are using inline CSS everywhere, and this is causing processing and rendering glitches within the browser.

The easy solution is to make sure that you take all of the inline CSS and code them properly within the CSS stylesheet file.

If another developer’s code is not up to par, this can create major issues with page rendering.

For example: Say that you have a page that’s coded using older techniques rather than modern and leaner ones.

Older techniques could include significant code bloat and result in slower rendering of the page as a result.

To eliminate this, you can improve your coding techniques by creating leaner and less bloated code, resulting in a much better page rendering experience.

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Combining files can also improve the situation.

For example: If you have eight or 10 JavaScript files that all contribute to the same task, you can hire the services of a developer who can then combine all of these files for you.

And, if they are less critical JavaScript files, then to further decrease the page rendering problems, these files can also be deferred by adding them to the end of the HTML code on the page.

By combining files and improving your coding techniques, you can contribute significantly to better page rendering experiences.

Key Takeaways

Finding solutions to reduce render-blocking resources have been an SEO audit staple for a while now. It’s important for several reasons:

By reducing render-blocking resources, you make your site faster. You can also reverse engineer your site to take advantage of elements that will play into Google’s overall page experience update.

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You also put yourself in a position to take advantage of a boost you will get from Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics.

Core Web Vitals are not going away. They have become a critical optimization point in order to facilitate the fastest potential rendering times possible within your current framework.

With new Core Web Vitals metrics being introduced in the future, making sure that you’re up-to-date on existing metrics is always a great idea.

Finding and repairing render-blocking resources also ensures that you continue keeping your website visitors happy and that it’s always in top shape for prime time.

More resources:


Featured Image: Naumova Marina/Shutterstock

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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