SEO
15 Proven Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog
Struggling to gain traction on your blog? Consumed tons of “ultimate guides” and courses, but traffic didn’t budge?
A few years ago, we found ourselves in the same predicament. Traffic to our blog had plateaued despite us following “blogging best practices.”
But today, we get an estimated 250,000 visits per month—and that’s from Google alone.
How did we do it?
Here are 15 tried and tested tactics we used to increase our blog traffic:
- Write about topics people search for
- Make sure you match search intent
- Build an email list
- Reach out to people mentioned in your post
- Boost important posts with internal links
- Build links
- Promote content in communities
- Create shareable images
- Share your content on Reddit
- Refresh and republish your content
- Craft click-worthy headlines
- Repurpose content into a Twitter thread
- Get content included in niche newsletters
- Publish original research
- Run ads
It can be tempting to write about whatever excites you—the latest industry topic, breaking news, or even just a random rant. But these types of posts have short shelf lives.
You may see a spike in traffic shortly after publishing. But once interest in the news, trend, or fad fades, your blog traffic will dwindle to nothing.
The solution? Write about evergreen topics that people search for.
For as long as your article ranks on Google for relevant search queries, you’ll receive consistent and passive organic search traffic.
This is the foundation of our approach to the Ahrefs blog. Every post we publish targets a term with search traffic potential.
The question is, “How do you find these topics?”
The easiest way to start is to enter a relevant keyword into Ahrefs’ free keyword generator tool and switch the tab to Questions.
Look through the list of ideas and pick out those that are relevant to your blog.
Recommended reading: Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs
Search intent is the why behind a search query.
Why does this matter?
Google aims to provide users with the most relevant results for their queries. So if you want to rank high and get more search traffic, you need to be the most relevant result—and that means creating content that aligns with search intent.
How do you figure out what type of content to create? Do a search in Google for your target keyword, then analyze the top-ranking pages for the three Cs of search intent.
A. Content type
Content types usually fall into one of five buckets: blog post, product, category, landing page, or video.
For example, if we search for “how to invest,” you’ll notice that the top few results are mostly blog posts.
So if you want to rank for this keyword, you’ll likely have to create a blog post.
Another example: If you look at the SERPs for “how to ski,” you’ll see that the top few results are mostly videos.
If you want to rank for this topic, it is likely you’ll have to create a video.
B. Content format
Content format applies mostly to blog posts, as they’re usually either how-tos, listicles, news articles, opinion pieces, or reviews.
For example, the top-ranking results for “best wireless headphones” are mostly listicles:
Whereas the top results for “how to make a tiktok video” are mostly how-tos:
To stand the best chance of ranking, follow suit.
C. Content angle
Content angle refers to the main “selling point” of the content. For example, people searching for “how to do a squat” want to do it properly/correctly:
Recommended reading: What Is Search Intent? A Complete Guide for Beginners
Every week, we send a newsletter containing all the content we’ve published that week to ~160,000 subscribers.
We can do that because those people have subscribed to our weekly Ahrefs Digest via opt-ins like this:
Why do we still choose email as a communication channel?
The reason is simple: With email, you can communicate with your fans anytime. Other platforms, such as Facebook, can deliberately limit your reach or even remove you from their platforms.
Building a list isn’t complicated. As you can see, we simply offer to deliver a weekly update of all our content. If people enjoy what they read on our blog, they’ll want more of it.
If you want to be a little more aggressive, you can try offering a “carrot”: a free eBook, course, etc. All these can work well.
If you’ve written an in-depth article, chances are you’ve linked to useful resources from other bloggers. Why not reach out and let them know?
It’s the first thing I do when I publish something new.
If you’re lucky, they may share it on their social profiles and send some extra traffic your way.
That said, the primary goal here is to reach out and build a relationship, which may eventually end up as something bigger—links, mentions, business partnerships, and more.
Executing this is pretty simple. Fire up your blog post and look for mentions of bloggers in your space.
Then find their emails and reach out to let them know.
Internal links are links from one page to another within the same domain. And adding internal links from relevant, high-authority pages to those pages that need a boost can help improve their performance in the search engines.
Here’s how to do it:
- Enter your domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer (free for your own site in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools)
- Go to the Top pages report
- Filter for positions #2–5 (since these pages are near the top, a few good internal links may improve their rankings)
Note down these pages.
Next, you’ll need pages to add internal links from. The easiest way to find these is with the site: search operator. For example, if I want to add internal links to our guide on online advertising, I’ll search for this in Google:
Then I’ll go through each of these pages and add internal links to the target page with relevant anchor text.
We go through this process every time we publish a new post on the blog.
Backlinks are an important Google ranking factor. How do we know?
Google’s Andrey Lipattsev said so in 2016. Our own study of over a billion webpages also confirms the relationship between backlinks and organic traffic:
So how do you get more links to your site? You have to build them. There are tons of link building strategies around, but one we’ve used in the past was guest blogging.
Guest blogging is when you write a post for another blog. When that happens, there are usually plenty of opportunities for you to link back to your own blog posts.
How do you find these opportunities? Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Set it to an In title search
- Enter a term related to your niche
- Toggle Filter explicit results
- Check One page per domain (we don’t need to contact a site more than once)
- Check Exclude homepages (we’re looking for content)
- Check Exclude subdomains
- Set the Language filter to English (or the language you write in)
- Set the Live/broken filter to Only live
You can also use the Domain Rating (DR) filter to narrow the list down to those sites you’re comfortable writing for.
To learn more about guest blogging at scale, watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQK1Vbgb-RY
Recommended reading: The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building
Online communities like Facebook groups, Slack channels, or Discord servers are great places for promoting content. After all, people who are interested in your niche are all gathered in one place, so all you need to do is to persuade them to check out your blog.
But promoting in online communities doesn’t mean joining a couple of groups and spamming the heck out of them. That’s a big no-no unless you want to get booted and banned.
There is an art to doing this properly, and the key is preparation.
Before you even think about promoting anything in a group, you should first join it and study its “culture.” Figure out what people typically discuss, what kinds of posts get high engagement, and what posts aren’t allowed.
You should also study the group rules:
Along the way, you should become an active member. Leave comments, participate in discussions, ask questions, and so on.
If you’re active, the admin/moderator will notice. Build a relationship with them. Message them and ask how else you can be helpful.
This strategy should get you in good standing with most communities. From there, you’ll be able to share your content without worrying about any backlash.
At Ahrefs, we enjoy creating unique images to illustrate our concepts or showcase data. Here’s an example:
And even in a “boring” niche like SEO, our images still get tons of engagement on Twitter:
Looking for a complete SEO checklist for 2021?
Here’s one you can follow. pic.twitter.com/65brjXPBcg
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) August 15, 2021
We have in-house illustrators who create all our images. But you don’t have to go all fancy like us.
With tools like Canva, creating shareable images isn’t as difficult as it was before. And if you have the budget, you can find good designers on marketplaces like 99Designs.
If you’re in a visual-heavy niche like cooking, you don’t even need illustrations. Grab your smartphone, take a few photos, and your social shares may go through the roof—especially on networks like Pinterest.
If you have absolutely no talent for drawing or designing like me, don’t forget that “ugly” artwork can still stand out. Just take a look at Tim Urban’s illustrations from WaitButWhy:
Will these be on display at the British Museum any time soon? Probably not.
Are they unique, distinct, and memorable? Definitely.
Don’t let your individual design skills (or lack thereof) stop you from creating highly shareable images.
Unlike most communities, Reddit can be a tough nut to crack. Redditors are notoriously allergic to self-promotion, which results in many bloggers getting called out and even banned.
All that caution aside, it is possible to do well on Reddit.
First, you should follow tip #7. If you don’t study the culture and understand what Redditors are looking for in different subreddits, you won’t be able to submit a post successfully. If you do not study the rules diligently, you’ll be banned. Simple as that.
Next, check if the subreddit you’re posting in allows link submissions. If it does, then you can simply submit a link to one of your articles. In fact, that was how I kickstarted my now-defunct breakdance blog.
If the subreddit doesn’t allow link submissions, then you’ll have to create a text post. Do this by taking content from the blog post, stripping away all links in it, and formatting it appropriately in markdown.
Only at the end do you leave a link back to your original blog post.
The beauty of blogging is that you can try again.
If your blog post isn’t ranking, or it’s not matching search intent, or it has outdated content, just rewrite and republish it.
We do this all the time at Ahrefs. In fact, it’s a core part of our content marketing strategy.
For example, I rewrote this post about the buyer’s journey recently. Look at the search traffic growth after we republished it:
How do you know which posts to republish? The easiest way is to use our free WordPress SEO plugin to identify underperforming posts.
Then follow the guide below to learn the best way to republish your content.
Recommended reading: Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
The difference between someone clicking through and reading your post versus them simply skipping it is your headline.
Your headline must capture their attention and compel them to click.
How do you create such a headline?
If you’re matching search intent, then the foundation of your headline is somewhat set. For example, if you’re targeting the topic “best workout apps,” then it is likely your headline will include things like a particular number and the year.
But that in itself is still not compelling. After all, you can see from the SERPs that every site uses nearly the same headline. So you still need to stand out. Otherwise, you can’t get the click.
Use these tips to make your headline more click-worthy:
- Add concreteness – Make your headline specific. Instead of “Protein Powders for Weight Gain,” try “15 Tasty Protein Powders to Help You Gain 1lb per Week in Muscle.”
- Surprise and delight – This tip is more for articles not designed to match search intent (e.g., designed for spread on social media). Say something interesting and unusual so that people will be intrigued. For example, a few years back, we used the headline “I Asked 235 People to Tweet My Article and All I Got Is This Cheerless Case Study.”
- Create curiosity gaps – Don’t give everything away—leave something to be desired in the headline so people want to click. For example, this headline “How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag” is curiosity-inducing. A perfect title tag? Does that exist? Let me check it out.
Recommended reading: How to Write an Irresistible Headline in 3 Easy Steps
Joshua Hardwick, our head of content, wrote an article about keyword cannibalization. Later on, he turned it into a Twitter thread:
If you’re trying to solve keyword cannibalization, you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. 🔪👃😱
Here’s why.
//THREAD//
— Joshua Hardwick (@JoshuaCHardwick) December 8, 2021
Compared to our brand account’s tweet about the article, it got way more attention.
At Ahrefs, we encourage our authors to turn their posts into Twitter threads so they can get more exposure to their content. Here are a few more examples of threads from my colleagues:
17 (free!) online marketing courses for marketers of all experience levels—each researched and vetted by me. 🧵
Psst: Full post on the @ahrefs blog!
— Rebecca’s the name (@RebLiew) December 6, 2021
Google claims that it uses title tags ~87% of the time after the most recent updates.
Well, we analyzed 953,276 pages and got a much lower 66.6% match rate 😈
A few more highlights from our latest @ahrefs data study 👇 pic.twitter.com/JHn1PkevTm
— Michal Pecánek (@michalpecanek) November 16, 2021
As you can see, they get a lot of traction.
How do you write a great Twitter thread? I’ll go meta and share a Twitter thread from one of Twitter’s top creators:
Twitter threads are the new blogs.
Over the last 5 weeks, I’ve 32x my Twitter following posting a thread a day.
These 15 learnings will help your threads go viral 🧵
— Alex Garcia 🔍 (@alexgarcia_atx) May 6, 2021
Like communities, there are plenty of niche-specific newsletters dedicated to sharing the best articles of the week. For example, my colleague, Michal Pecanek, wrote an article about hiring SEO consultants that was featured on the #SEOForLunch newsletter:
In this case, Michal’s article was included organically. But you don’t have to stand by and wait for such a situation to happen. You can reach out and try to get the newsletter editor to include your article too.
Don’t reach out every single time you publish something, though. That can be annoying. Reach out only with your best articles so you stand the highest chance of getting included.
I recommend following the principles in this article on outreach for maximum success.
Even if the editor doesn’t add your article this time around, don’t worry. Use this chance to build a relationship with the editor.
Newsletters are sent on a frequent basis anyway, so there’s always another chance to be included. But this can only happen if you have a good relationship with the editor.
Bloggers and journalists are constantly looking for statistics to back up claims in their articles. When they find the right statistic from a credible source, they’ll usually link back to the page.
So by publishing original research, you’re creating opportunities for top-tier publications to link to you. In fact, this is how we acquired links from authoritative sites like Inc., TechCrunch, and Search Engine Journal. They all linked to one of our studies on featured snippets:
That said, you can’t just create any random data study and expect journalists to flock to you. It must be something interesting—or at least something that journalists want answers to.
If you’re in the industry, you already know what those questions are. For example, in the SEO industry, plenty of people ask the question, “How long does it take to rank on Google?” So we created a study to try and answer the question objectively.
The result? We acquired ~2,700 backlinks from ~1,600 unique websites:
Alternatively, you can simply try to recreate popular but outdated studies. Here’s how to find them:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Enter a search term like [industry] + “study,” [industry] + “survey,” [industry] + “research,” or [industry] + “data”
- Set the filter to an In title search
- Set the Published filter to an older date range (e.g., 2010–2015)
- Sort the results by referring domains
Voila! A list of popular and outdated studies you can recreate.
When you’re done with your study, follow our complete guide to blogger outreach. There, you’ll learn the art of promoting your content to people who are interested.
The most direct way to get more traffic to your blog is simply to run ads. Pay a platform, and you’ll get traffic almost instantly.
At Ahrefs, we run ads to every new article we publish:
Facebook isn’t the only platform you can run ads on. Quora, Twitter, or even display advertising can work too.
Find a platform where your audience is, keep your clicks affordable, and you’re ready to get rolling.
Final thoughts
Do these tactics work individually? Definitely.
But think about it this way:
When you rank on Google for your target keywords, you get search traffic. If you can then get those people to subscribe to your email list, you can get even more traffic to future posts. And if some of those people then link to your posts, you may rank even higher on Google faster.
Bottom line: If you want to grow traffic to your blog quickly, combine the tactics.
Did I miss anything? Let me know 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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