SEO
What It (Really) Is & How to Fix It
Many people believe that having multiple pages about the same thing confuses search engines and leads them to rank the “wrong” page.
In the words of Patrick Stox, this whole idea is “preposterous.”
He’s right. Having multiple pages about the same thing can lead to unexpected or undesirable rankings, but it doesn’t always mean that something’s wrong or needs fixing. However, it can occasionally signal an opportunity to consolidate content to improve rankings and organic performance.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on a website target the same or similar keywords and compete against each other to hurt the site’s organic performance.
For example, let’s say we have two pages about technical SEO. If we could get more organic traffic overall by combining the two pages into one, that’s a cannibalization issue. The existence of those two pages is eating away at our organic performance.
Keyword cannibalization is bad. But it’s crucial to remember that you only have a real cannibalization issue when multiple pages target the same keyword and hurt a site’s organic performance.
Given that pages tend to rank for many keywords, that’s not always the case.
For example, let’s say that we have two pages targeting the same keyword. One of them ranks #1, but the other page (that we’d prefer to rank) is nowhere to be seen. You could argue that this is textbook keyword cannibalization because one page is seemingly “cannibalizing” traffic to the other page.
But even if that’s true for traffic from this keyword, what if these pages each rank for hundreds of other keywords?
In that case, why worry about traffic from just one keyword?
The reality is that we don’t have a real cannibalization issue here because the existence of these two pages likely isn’t harming our site’s overall organic performance. If we were to merge or delete one of them, we’d likely lose some of our other keyword rankings and see a net drop in traffic.
The trick to finding real cannibalization issues is to look for pages that target the same keywords and fulfill the same or very similar intent.
The reason for this is that if the intent is the same, each page is unlikely to be ranking for lots of different long-tail keyword variations. So there’s usually more to gain than lose by consolidating the pages.
Let’s look at a few ways to identify these pages.
Option 1. Do a content audit
Unless your site is huge, cannibalization issues should be relatively easy to spot during a content audit.
Option 2. Look at historic rankings
This works best when you want to check for cannibalization issues for a specific keyword
Here’s how to it in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
- Filter for the keyword you want to investigate
- Click the ranking history dropdown
For example, if we look at Moz’s historical rankings for “keyword cannibalization,” we see three pages ranking in the last six months—none of which ranked higher than position #8:
Let’s take a closer look at two of those URLs:
/blog/identify-and-tackle-keyword-cannibalisation-in-2019
/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization
Here’s what they tell us about the pages:
- They’re both blog posts.
- They’re both about the same thing (i.e., tackling/solving keyword cannibalization).
- The first one is outdated (it has “2019” in the URL).
So this is almost certainly a cannibalization issue. The pages fulfill the same intent and compete against each other. Moz’s overall organic performance could likely be improved by consolidating them.
Option 3. Run a site: search
Head to Google and search for site:yourwebsite.com "topic". You’ll see all the pages on your site related to that topic.
If we do this for site:moz.com "keyword cannibalization", you can see that the first three results are the ones we previously discovered in Site Explorer:
TIP
Be careful with this tactic, as Google returns every vaguely matching result. For example, you can see above that there are 661 results for our search. Moz may very well have a keyword cannibalization issue here, but not all of these pages are problematic. Most are targeting completely different keywords.
Option 4. Run a Google search and remove host clustering
Running a site: search can help you to find potential cannibalization issues. The only issue is that the results lack a sense of place, making it hard to know how to tackle the issue.
If you look at the previous example, you’ll see that it probably makes sense for Moz to merge three of their pages. But how exactly should they merge them? Which pages should be redirected, and which should they keep? Is this even likely to improve things?
You can often find answers to these questions by running a regular Google search and removing host clustering—which is where Google excludes similar pages from the same host from the search results.
For example, if we search for “keyword cannibalization” in Google, we only see one result from Moz in the top 20:
But if we append &filter=0 to the Google search URL, it removes host clustering and reveals three results from Moz in the top 20:
This is useful because it gives each URL a sense of place.
In this example, we see Moz’s 2019 post ranking in position #6 and the other two posts ranking in positions #12 and #13, respectively.
So we know now Moz could rank higher than position #6 by combining some of these pages and redirecting. It’s also evident that Google currently considers the page in position #6 the most relevant result for this keyword. Thus, it probably makes sense to work primarily with that page and redirect the other pages there.
Option 5. Check for multiple ranking URLs
If Google ranks multiple URLs for a keyword, that can be a sign of a cannibalization issue.
Here’s how to find these keywords in Site Explorer:
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
- Toggle “Multiple URLs only”
You can see that when we do this for Moz, Site Explorer finds the same issue for the term “keyword cannibalization” as we found earlier using method #2.
Just be aware that this doesn’t always work, as Google tends not to rank multiple pages (in “regular” positions) from the same host, as discussed previously. But as it’s super quick to do in Site Explorer, it’s still worth a quick check.
IMPORTANT
Not all of the keywords that show up here will reflect “cannibalization” issues. You should always check the SERP and ranking history to ensure you have a real cannibalization issue on your hands.
If you’re confident that you have a cannibalization issue on your hands, you can often improve organic performance by consolidating the pages. That may mean redirecting an old, outdated page to something more relevant that you already have or combining multiple pages into something new.
Either option will usually have a positive impact because they consolidate known ranking signals like backlinks and internal links into one page rather than diluting them across multiple pages.
We saw success by doing this in 2018 for two guides about broken link building.
Here’s what we did:
- We wrote a new guide consolidating the knowledge from both guides.
- We published the new guide at one of the existing URLs.
- We deleted the old guide and redirected it to the new guide.
You can probably tell when we did this in the graph below, which shows our historical rankings for “broken link building”:
Our historical estimated organic traffic to these two pages also shows the positive change (the arrow marks the consolidation date):
Until the redirect in 2018, both pages were getting a bit of traffic. After consolidating and redirecting, only one gets traffic… but it gets way more traffic than both pages (combined) did beforehand.
TIP
Remember that it’s always a best practice to swap out any internal links after implementing redirects. You can use the Link Explorer tool in Ahrefs’ Site Audit to do this:
- Crawl your site with Site Audit
- Go to the Link Explorer tool
- Click Advanced filter
- Click +Rule
- Change the new rule from “Is source internal” to “Target URL”
- Enter the old redirected URL
You’ll then see a list of pages internally linking to this URL, along with the anchor text of the link and other details.
Learn more: Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide
Is the solution really this simple?
Most of the time, yes. But as our more experienced readers will know, there’s a lot of “it depends” in SEO, so there are times when things are a bit more nuanced.
For example, we have two very similar guides:
How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines
How to Submit Your Website to Google
Both of these pages fulfill very similar intent, despite targeting slightly different keywords. And if we look at their estimated organic traffic, we see that one page’s traffic pales in comparison to the other:
So this looks like a cannibalization issue, and we should probably merge the pages. Right?
Perhaps. But then again, our guide to submitting websites to search engines couldn’t be performing any better in organic search right now.
It ranks #1 for its primary target keyword…
… and seems to have pretty much maxed out its “traffic potential” (it’s getting more traffic than every other similar guide):
So is this really a cannibalization issue? Is there really anything to be gained by merging these pages? Probably not. And consolidating the posts into one would probably cause us to lose the small amount of organic traffic that the other guide currently gets. So why bother?
Another example of a nuanced scenario is targeting the same keyword on multiple pages that fulfill different intents. This is fine if the keyword has mixed intent, and this usually isn’t a real cannibalization issue. Sure, you may see some keyword overlap or periodic rank swaps. But each page will usually get traffic from its own bucket of long-tail keywords.
(Again, this is why it doesn’t usually make much sense to focus on “fixing” cannibalization at the keyword level. You risk losing traffic from long-tails.)
But what if your analytics tell you that one of these pages has little or no value?
For example, perhaps one is a super ToFu blog post, and the other is a BoFu landing page.
In this case, as long as you’re 100% certain that the low-value blog post has no value to your business, you can delete the page and redirect it to the landing page to consolidate “authority.”
This will likely cause you to lose some organic traffic overall. But it shouldn’t matter, as you identified that traffic as having no value to your business.
People often try to solve cannibalization at the keyword level with seemingly logical solutions that are fundamentally flawed in practice. Let’s take a closer look at these, so you know what not to do.
Delete the page
This is rarely a good solution unless the page has no value for your business (discussed previously) or ranks for only the “cannibalizing” keyword. Both of these scenarios are pretty unlikely, so this is a rare thing to do in the face of cannibalization.
Noindex the page
Noindexing causes search engines to drop the page from their index, meaning it won’t rank for anything. This is a terrible way to fix cannibalization and, again, highlights the reason why tackling cannibalization at the keyword level is almost always a bad idea.
Recommended reading: Robots Meta Tag & X‑Robots-Tag: Everything You Need to Know
Canonicalize the page
This is only a viable solution when dealing with multiple pages that are near or exact duplicates, otherwise known as duplicate content. Canonicalization is not a way to fix keyword cannibalization.
Recommended reading: Canonical Tags: A Simple Guide for Beginners
De-optimize the page
This one kind of makes sense in theory but is fundamentally flawed because you can’t de-optimize a page for just one keyword. Things don’t work that way. For example, removing all internal links with the cannibalizing keyword as the anchor is likely to affect the page’s rankings for other keywords too. The same is true for removing mentions of the cannibalizing keyword from the page.
Final thoughts
Keyword cannibalization isn’t really a thing—at least not in the way most people understand it. Google doesn’t get “confused” by multiple pages about similar things or pages targeting the same keywords. It knows what’s on those pages and ranks them accordingly.
Does that mean Google will always rank the page you want it to rank? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that it’s “ranking the wrong page” or that drastic action is required to “fix” the problem. Many common “solutions” to keyword cannibalization do more harm than good.
Got questions? Disagree with me? 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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