SEO
Steal Our SEO Report Template (Inspired by SEO Experts)
How do you instantly tell the difference between a good SEO and a bad one?
Look at their SEO reports.
- Bad SEO reports – Clients get lost in pointless data, don’t know what work was done, and get no insightful comments.
- Good SEO reports – Clients see key data summaries and easy-to-understand insights and overview of the work done.
I’ve seen many SEO reports from consultants, in-house teams, and agencies. I discussed them with experts from our Ahrefs Insider community. The conclusion? You can’t create an SEO report template that covers everything necessary without knowing a client, their business, and your responsibilities in the project.
But what I have for you here will get you as close as possible to a perfect SEO report. That is the main reason why I started discussing SEO reporting with experts in the first place.
Before you steal our SEO report template, let’s first learn the following:
Let’s get into it.
An SEO report is an overview of important SEO metrics reflecting business growth, performance in search engines, backlink portfolio strength, and website health.
It’s the main resource for your clients, managers, or bosses that tracks the progress of your work and its impact. After all, these stakeholders want to see that their money is well spent on you.
And while you can’t win with SEO every month, an effective SEO report should still convey that your work is likely to have positive ROI in the long term.
This leads us nicely to…
What and how you report on your SEO efforts depend on how you set up expectations with your client. While SEO reports are dependant on a client’s business type, this is what everyone generally wants to see:
- SEO KPIs – Evaluate SEO metrics that are closely tied to revenue growth.
- Ranking progress – See how rankings of the most important keywords have changed.
- Organic traffic progress – Check how the previous two aspects translate into absolute traffic numbers.
- Backlink growth – See new, valuable referring pages that drive traffic and/or pass link equity.
- SEO health – Know that the website is doing well from the technical SEO perspective.
Your work doesn’t end with just dumping a bunch of metrics into a document, though. You need to interpret them. Your SEO reports should convey the impact of your work in the most succinct and coherent way possible. That’s how we made the template as well.
Now let’s get back to the expectations between you and your client. The report should primarily contain what you’ve previously discussed. If you sent an SEO report without educating the client beforehand, you’d get a lot of questions and demands to show more data. This is even if the SEO report is perfect. That’s because you’re the SEO expert, not the client.
I’ll explain all the used metrics and data as we go through the slides later on. But I also highly recommend you to check out our articles on SEO KPIs and SEO metrics that actually matter. These will help you and your clients be on the same page.
Based on what I’ve heard, SEOs can spend anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours per month on each SEO report. This depends on several factors:
- Your responsibilities in the project
- Complexity of the project
- Your SEO experience and knowledge
- Your data analytics experience and knowledge
- Reporting format you and your clients prefer
Let me expand on the last point. It seems most SEOs prefer using the good old PDFs and decks for reporting purposes:
SEO Reporting Polls for upcoming article/presentation (Please RT) 👇
1) What format do you use for your recurrent SEO reports to non-technical clients/boss/decision makers?
…
— Aleyda Solis 👩🏻💻 (@aleyda) November 12, 2021
Our SEO report template is also in a deck format because it’s the easiest to use and read for everyone. The downside is you have to go through new data every month and put it together manually.
Some seasoned marketers prefer to use automated data dashboards like Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Power BI. These may take you a lot of time to set up initially. But they can update all the data automatically, saving you time in the long run. If you’re wondering about this option, we’ll be releasing Ahrefs’ GDS connector soon to help you with that.
But back to the actual template…
As explained previously, our SEO report template (or any other) isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s simply a great starting point to create an SEO report your clients will appreciate.
To get this done from start to finish, you’ll need the following tools:
Ready?
Click here to make a copy of the SEO report template.
You can change the color scheme to the brand colors of your client, give it a bit of your own branding, make it look fancier, whatever you like.
Before we get into explaining the rationale behind each slide, let me emphasize a few things.
First of all, feel free to tailor the slides to suit your client’s needs, as well as your service offerings. We’ve made this report to cover all SEO areas for monthly reporting.
Second, the type of business you’re doing SEO for should also be reflected in the report adjustments.
If you’re doing local SEO, you’ll probably include an overview of local rankings and local SERP features. E‑commerce client? You may want to include Average Order Value from the organic traffic and dive deeper into the technical side of things.
And lastly, keep in mind the template contains mostly made-up data, insights, and scenarios. Don’t try to analyze the content of it. Rather, use its structure as a guide.
Let’s get started.
1. Title card
The first slide is the easiest part to create.
Add in the date/month of the report, your own logo, as well as your client’s website URL. Once those are completed, you are good to go.
It’s time to move on to the actual SEO reporting.
2. Highlights
A highlights page that summarizes the most important information of that month is a good intro.
This can be basically the first and also the last slide that a CMO or CEO looks at. Thirty seconds later, they’ll say, “Cool, good job,” and won’t bother with the rest.
What type of things can you include here?
- Brief summary of your SEO KPIs
- Stuff worth bragging about
- Most important tasks completed during that reporting period
- Tasks that require further attention
3. SEO KPIs overview
Next, you should dive into the SEO KPIs more. While the previous slide won’t cut it for most clients, some will already be pretty satisfied. This is as we’ve covered what matters the most on the first two slides:
As said earlier, you may want to include different or more KPIs, depending on the client and their business type. The rule of thumb is to choose metrics as closely tied to the business’s revenue as possible.
You can see the most universal SEO KPIs above: search visibility and organic traffic conversions.
Search visibility is the SEO version of one of the most important marketing KPIs: share of voice (SOV). It’s basically keyword rankings on steroids.
To get the search visibility metric, create a project in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. In there, paste the main keywords that encompass what your audience is searching for (you need to finish keyword research first), tag it to enable filtering later, and you’re good to go:
You’ll then find the search visibility metric in the Competitors overview tab:
Regarding organic conversions, the screenshot in the report is taken from a custom Google Analytics (GA) report that only shows the source/medium dimension and selected conversions to avoid all the clutter in the default reports. The conversions are then compared month over month (MoM).
If the client’s customers go through a complex buying process, you’ll also want to report assisted organic traffic conversions. You can find this in GA under Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions. These will complete the picture of the overall impact of SEO on the business.
4. Ranking progress
The overall search visibility KPI isn’t the only visibility metric that clients are interested in. They have certain product categories or topics on the blog that usually differ in relevancy and value to the business. That’s where measuring search visibility for keyword segments comes into play.
You can get this data by creating more tags in your Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker project. Scroll down to your keywords in the overview, check those that you want to tag, and assign the tag to them or create a new one:
5. Money keywords ranking overview
While search visibility metrics are the best proxies to your organic growth, most clients also want to see position changes of their most important keywords.
It’ll get pretty messy to present position changes of possibly hundreds of keywords in a deck. We should, therefore, satisfy the client by only reporting on the most important keywords for the business, aka “money keywords.” You can then include the rest by linking to the exported spreadsheet if the client wants to see it.
Again, tag these keywords in the Rank Tracker. You can decide whether a keyword should be tagged like this based on its business relevancy and CPC. Or you can just go through the keyword list with the client.
6. Non-branded organic traffic progress
It took us a few slides before we got to the metrics a lot of SEOs and clients focus on first: organic traffic. The reason for showing this later is simple: Growing organic traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into business growth. The website can start ranking for keywords that drive traffic but not revenue.
The overall traffic number isn’t really a great SEO proxy for anything. To make it more relevant, let’s segment it into non-branded organic traffic only:
The reason for showing non-branded traffic here is to avoid attributing organic traffic changes to marketing activities unrelated to SEO. For example, if the marketing team launched a great PR campaign or started airing mass marketing campaigns, your organic traffic would naturally go up just from people looking up your brand more.
To show a more accurate overview of organic traffic progress, simply apply a query filter in Google Search Console (GSC):
Again, you want to compare the current month’s performance with the previous month’s and, ideally, even with the year-over-year (YoY) performance. Most businesses tend to have seasonal swings, so some MoM comparisons may look bad just because the high season has already ended.
Be careful here. GSC only provides 28-day views and comparisons by default. Thus, you need to select custom dates to compare whole months. Remember to compare the same number of days. Let’s look at a scenario where a month has 31 days (e.g., in such a case, start the comparison on the last day of August to account for only 30 days in September).
Your client may also get a significant amount of traffic from Google Discover or Google News. If that’s the case, it’s probably worth dedicating a separate slide to it.
7. New referring domains highlights
Next up is the backlink profile—showing the client what new, interesting coverage they got in the past month.
However, you should only report on backlink profile changes if your activities in the project influence the acquiring of new links. That can range from creating link bait content to planning and executing outreach campaigns. I mention this because link building is quite often a separate activity from many SEO projects.
If you are responsible for backlink profile growth, go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, check the Referring domains report, and filter for new referring domains in the past 30 days (as you can see in the slide).
We show the highlights of the newly acquired referring domains sorted by Domain Rating (DR) score because it’s a solid and easy-to-understand proxy for improving backlink profile growth.
If you engage in outreach activities and see a new referring domain gained from that, you can highlight it in the screenshot so that the client can differentiate earned and acquired links.
8. Link building progress
This slide is designed to let you go into further detail about your link building work done during the month.
It can include:
- The pages you built links to.
- Any standout, new referring pages.
- The number of links those pages got.
- Your link building statistics, e.g., prospects contacted and success rate.
- Any insights you deem relevant, e.g., exceptionally good or bad link bait content.
Ahrefs’ Best by links growth report in Site Explorer is good to include here because it shows you pages that received the most backlinks in the past 30 days.
Truth to be told, there’s much more to evaluating link building than the number of links and DRs of referring domains. But that’s relevant for link prospecting before launching outreach campaigns, not for SEO reporting. Your clients don’t need to dive into all the nuances.
9. Technical SEO health overview
This is where you’ll give a snapshot of the website’s health that takes into account all technical SEO errors and issues.
To get this data:
Go to Ahrefs’ Site Audit, set up a project for the client’s website if you haven’t done so already, and let the tool crawl the website. Depending on your crawl settings, Site Audit can recrawl the website periodically, providing you with all the current and historical technical SEO data.
You get the Health Score on the overview page after each crawl is done:
If this is your first time crawling the website, use this Health Score as a starting point. You can start referencing monthly comparisons in your second report.
Now, you may be thinking that one metric isn’t enough to reflect the whole state of technical SEO. And you’re right. But you’re usually not sending SEO reports to developers or other SEOs who can easily understand more in-depth information. For this reason, the Health Score is the best proxy for a client-friendly, technical SEO metric.
Again, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t report on more technical SEO metrics, etc. Some projects involve huge websites and complex, technical SEO tasks. In such situations, it’s likely the client will welcome crawling and indexing statistics, details about the most important issues, etc.
10. Next month
After showing your client all the data and reports, you should give them a plan of the most important SEO tasks you’ll be working on next month.
A quick to-do list that summarizes your main focus for the following month will suffice. It will also serve as an anchor for your next SEO report.
Final thoughts
So there you have it. A fully customizable SEO reporting template to give to your clients. In case you skimmed through the article first, here’s the link again:
Click here to make a copy of the SEO report template.
Reporting will probably never be anyone’s favorite activity. But it’s crucial that you nail this to have satisfied and well-paying clients.
To wrap up, I want to thank everyone who shared their reporting insights with me over the years. I’m also grateful for Ahrefs Insider members, who proactively reached out with their knowledge and reports before I even started creating the template. And special thanks to Gyorgy Bolla, the search performance lead at Westpac, who introduced me to enterprise SEO reporting—the only area I wasn’t familiar with.
Think there are more metrics or slides this SEO report template should have? Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.
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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