SEO

How To Write A Stand Out SEO Resume (With Examples)

Published

2 years ago

February 3, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

How To Write A Stand Out SEO Resume (With Examples)

The type of SEO work you’ll embark on depends on the type of industry you work in. You might find an opportunity:

In-house.
With an agency.
At an SEO SaaS company.
As an Independent or Freelance Consultant.

Whatever your aspirations, you need a professional and high-quality SEO resume to set you apart.

Our industry continues to see substantial growth year after year, and an increasing number of companies nationwide are recognizing the significance of SEO on their marketing initiatives.

This is evident by a rising reliance on in-house and external efforts to drive organic traffic.

And if you’re looking for a career in SEO, that’s great news for you.

In this article, you’ll learn about the current state of the U.S. SEO job market, different types of roles, what employers are looking for in winning candidates, and how to craft a resume that will stand out.

What Does The SEO Job Market Look Like Going Into 2022?

As companies’ SEO needs grow, so do the number of available SEO positions, the diversity of those positions, and the range of industries hiring SEO professionals.

Image from Conductor, January 2022

And as your experience grows, so too will your salary, making SEO an appealing career choice to invest in.

Image from Search Engine Journal, January 2022

To keep track of this evolving industry and guide you towards the right SEO job, we’ve created this SEO job market overview.

Let’s start with…

Who Hires SEO Professionals?

In-House SEO

One of the biggest benefits of being an in-house SEO expert is having access to its first-party research and data.

Plus, you are privy to the company’s marketing objectives and previous efforts, which puts you in a strong position to kick off your work.

Seek out companies with dedicated SEO teams or individuals. The number of SEOs in a company will give you a sense of its current investment in the field.

Joining an existing team may also aid your transition into the company and clarify opportunities for growth.

That being said, now’s a great time to advocate for a new SEO role or team.

Organic has proven itself the lifeblood of company web traffic and remains reliable even in uncertain times.

Consider pitching a new SEO role within your current company by proving the organic’s value to a CMO skeptical of bringing SEO in-house.

Or during an interview, suggest it as a role you could eventually step into given your SEO skill set.

Agency SEO

At agencies, SEO roles would all be client-facing.

You’d be supporting the SEO needs of other companies.

Difficulties include potentially not having access to first-party data, clarity into the client’s marketing objectives, or being able to directly implement the changes that will have the greatest impact.

However, the benefits include exposure to multiple clients across a variety of industries, platforms, data sources, and SEO challenges.

These will provide you with a wealth of experience that expands your skills and makes you a highly appealing job applicant.

SEO SaaS (Software As A Service) Company

You can’t get much more SEO than working for a company dedicated to the industry.

And there are many options.

Similar to at an agency, your role could be client-facing, using your mastery of your SaaS platform to support their needs.

This type of role could eventually lead you to oversee the strategic direction of client relationships.

Outside of SEO teams, there is a range of departments that include SEO-dedicated roles:

Sales: Promoting the benefits of SEO to prospective customers.
Account Management: Helping clients establish their SEO goals. and strategic needs through the productive use of your company’s platform or service.
Marketing: SEOing the company itself to promote its values, emphasize its SEO expertise, and organically promote its offerings.

Independent Or Freelance Consultant

Freelancing can provide you with more flexibility around title, salary, and hours.

It doesn’t commit you to any particular company but by developing strong relationships with in-house teams, you may be able to establish a roster of regular roles.

This type of position would allow you to be highly independent but it also leaves you at the whim of your temporary employer.

There may be limited guidance and access to first-party data, both of which you should determine in advance to set expectations.

What Types Of SEO Jobs Are Currently Available?

Once you’ve investigated the industries that hire SEOs, you can look for the following positions:

In-house Or Agency

SEO Analyst.
SEO Specialist.
SEO Senior Analyst.
SEO Manager.
SEO Senior Manager.
SEO Director.

You may also find that you’re qualified for roles with similar titles in marketing, analytics, content, or dev departments that have an SEO component.

But carefully read each job description to ensure that your expectations align with those of the company you’re applying to.

SEO SaaS Company

SEO Performance Analyst
SEO Success Manager
SEO Success Senior Manager
Customer Support Manager
SEO Customer Success director
VP SEO Customer Success.

You can also look for roles within Account Management, Sales, or Marketing.

Looking at the Career sections of these companies or at employee LinkedIn profiles will help you understand the job titles for each department.

Consultant/Freelancer

Freelancing or consulting as an SEO may give you the freedom to choose your own job adventure, including picking your own title.

But this isn’t always the case.

Freelancing at an agency, for example, may require you to accept an assigned title based on the way an SOW was written that included your position.

However, you can decide how you want to present yourself on your resume.

You could ignore specific titles and focus on a title related to your consultancy expertise.

In that case, ensure that your accomplishments accurately reflect the level of effort, managerial responsibilities, and budgets as a means of expressing the scope of your experience.

What Are SEO Employers Looking For?

The most critical part of any resume is your experience.

But building a noteworthy and eye-catching record of your accomplishments that will help the reader envision you at their company is a challenging feat.

Not only does each job need to demonstrate the impact of your work but you want to show growth from one to the next.

Ensure that you layer SEO within as many line items as possible.

For a larger scale marketing effort or campaign, tie in SEO to highlight your individual contribution to the team.

When writing a description of professional achievements, keep these sentence structures in mind: [Active success verb] + [KPI improvement] due to [project/SEO initiative][Active action verb] + [project/SEO initiative] + which resulted in [KPI or output improvement]

For example:

Grew organic traffic by +25% after establishing monthly optimization plans to update content based on keyword analysis reflective of ever-changing user intent.
Improved site load speed after reducing site technical errors by 20%. Prioritized broken issues such as links, redirect, and images which lead to lag and hurt the user experience.
Created the team’s first SEO strategy that outlined all SEO plans and objectives for the year and established a cross-team collaborative workflow.

The goal is to prove how your actions, either independently or as part of a team, contributed to SEO business objectives.

Skills

Three key SEO skill areas that hiring managers are always looking for are Content Writing, Technical, and Data Analytics.

Content Writing

Writing and language are at the heart of SEO since the goal is to match user intent, via language used in searches, to the content you have on your site.

It’s a form of Q&A. Valuable applicants can show how they conduct keyword research, interpret it, and directly apply findings to writing content.

The same goes for knowing all of the written components that make content more likely to rank well on Google, such as Title Tag, Meta Description, and Alt Tags.

Preparing these yourself using keyword research prior to content publication, shows you can save your team’s time and energy by getting SEO-ed content live faster.

Technical

The majority of technical SEO expectations don’t require direct web design, web development, or programming experience, though you should highlight any related capabilities you have.

These can be highly beneficial to an SEO career and are skill sets you should invest in if you want to advance your technical capabilities.

Key technical SEO support includes understanding and optimizing the backend components of a site that help get it ranked and improve rank.

You’ll be expected to run site crawls to identify what helps your pages (ex: inclusion of meta tags) and what hurts it (ex: slow page speed, broken links).

You may be asked to launch a new site or support a site migration, which has many technical implications.

Depending on the company, you may be able to update the website yourself or request changes be made.

Asking for clarification about this in advance will help you determine your workload.

Data Analytics And Reporting

Knowing how to compile, organize, and analyze data is especially relevant for SEO roles.

What’s even more valuable is knowing how to derive insights from data and use it to tell a story. To do this, make Excel your best friend if you haven’t already.

Learn how to do vlookups, concatenates, IF statements, and pivot tables.

Once you do, you won’t know how you ever survived without them.

Using SEO data, you can tell the story of the full organic traffic funnel, from content appearing on Search Engine Results Page (SERP), to clicks through to the site based on specific queries, to site organic pageviews, and on to eventual conversions.

To do this, you’ll need to be familiar with site analytics platforms, Google’s Search Console, and whatever ways your company tracks conversions.

Mapping out this funnel will support optimization creation and aid you in obtaining buy-in for your efforts.

If you don’t have experience with these platforms, there are online courses and training available.

But also consider requesting access to these platforms at your current job, even if you don’t use them in your day-to-day, to practice with.

Proving expertise in at least one of these SEO-related skills and knowledge of the other two will help you stand out for SEO roles.

Outside of these, a hiring manager may look for the following items in your resume, especially for more experienced candidates:

Insights And Optimizations

Optimization is the literal name of the game.

Ensure that as you write out your professional accomplishments, you reference the insights you’ve uncovered, the optimizations that were implemented, and their impact.

Interpersonal Skills

Being able to present yourself well, communicate clearly, and concisely explain the critical thinking behind your SEO practices will make you appear not only confident but reliant and trustworthy.

Think about how to express these efficiently in the way you write your accomplishments and plan ahead for how you can let these qualities shine in an interview.

Diversity In Your Customer, Client, And Brand Base

Having a well-rounded background of industry knowledge will help showcase your value.

Especially when working with customers, experience and familiarity with different fields make you a very appealing job prospect.

It lets you jump right into various client worlds’ and make yourself invaluable to them.

SEO Tools

To emphasize your skills and range of day-to-day abilities, call out the tools you’ve used and mastered.

Start by creating a Skills section in your resume and listing out the SEO tools you’ve had experience with.

You don’t need to include specific tools under Experience.

Use that section to focus on taking credit for initiatives and results.

But if you incorporate language relevant to the processes and capabilities of the platforms and tools, those reading your resume who are familiar with the tools will understand their supportive role.

Tools fall into two different sets, both of which are important to include.

First, there are the paid tools and those that connect directly to a website that companies and clients give you access to.

For example:

Usage and application of at least one of each of these will be looked for by potential employers.

This isn’t just to check off requirements but to understand the ways you’ve been exposed to SEO and get a sense of how you work.

Experience with tools will almost certainly be asked about in an interview so be prepared to address platform use cases and outcomes from your resume.

For team efforts, focus on your individual role with the tool and collaboration with other team members.

Second, there are a plethora of free SEO resources that a skilled SEO professional should have at their fingertips.

These not only help you with your craft but also look great on a resume. A few include:

These aren’t required but a knowledgeable SEO hiring manager will look for these tools to indicate that you’re leveraging SEO skills and applying SEO capabilities on a regular basis.

SEO Resume Tips For Those New To The Field

Early in your career and especially for your first job, it’s fine to only have experience with one of the three key SEO skills.

For example, if you wrote for a college publication, had a marketing or analytics internship, or worked on a personal dev project, lean into it and focus on the tactical capabilities you’ve learned.

Mention the range of projects, skills, tools, research, and clients you were exposed to.

As you try to join the field of SEO or are entry-level looking to move up, leverage the range of online resources for getting started with SEO.

This thorough guide consolidates 37 basic SEO tips into one hub.

If you’re not sure where to start, focus on the top SEO skills recommended by those in the industry, especially the tips for beginners.

Most will tell you to learn and reinforce knowledge of the skills and tools listed above.

In addition, work on the following SEO project journey to understand its individual components and how they connect together.

Leverage data to uncover searches driving current trends, whether those searches show your page, and if what shows up encourages people to click through.

Use that data to find content gaps with high enough search volume to warrant the creation of new content or edits to existing content.

Look to understand the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, particularly, what are the components that can be read by Google and help the site get ranked.

Based on what Google can read, it then decides whether that content is relevant to a specific keyword.

So know when to apply your writing skills or when to collaborate with writers to incorporate the best language that answers users’ searches in the on-page and coded site components.

Those Applying To More Experienced SEO Roles

If you’re already got a few years of experience, focus on further strengthening your SEO resume in the following ways:

Highlight how your experience and tactical capabilities in the three key SEO skills have evolved, especially in your more recent roles.

Demonstrate development for each and take credit for your role in project conception, execution, and results.

Apply a similar process to strategic growth.

Go beyond a one-off project.

Present your role in influencing a shift in a business practice via large-scale impact and long-lasting value.

For example: Explain how you trained and obtained buy-in from a team of content writers, who were previously unfamiliar with SEO and keyword research.

Then show how your efforts both halted unnecessary errors and set content up for success from the moment it’s published.

Include any managerial experience, the number of direct reports and trainings hosted to show impact and recognition.

What Helps An SEO Resume Stand Out

Whether you’re applying for your first SEO job or looking to improve or refresh your SEO resume, the list below covers all the essential, optional, and red-flag components that will set you up for success on your job hunt.

Image created by author, January 2022

Necessary Structural Components

Name.
Contact information.
Professional experience.
Professional skills and platform knowledge.
Academic education.

While these may seem like obvious inclusions, there are a few things to note.

Contact Information

A full address used to be commonplace on resumes but it’s no longer required since email is the primary method of communication.

If it’s needed by employers, they’ll request it in the application process.

Professional Experience And Skills

While details about these sections are included above, it’s critical that the information you include is accurate to you and your experience and relevant to the job description.

Determine if it’s worthwhile sending out different versions of your resume to different companies based on the job descriptions.

The time that will take should be well worth the effort.

Education

The placement of this section should depend on the level of professional experience you’ve had.

Keep it at the top of your resume, under contact information, if you’re a recent grad or haven’t yet had a job with skills relevant to SEO.

Once your professional experience becomes relevant to the work you’re applying to, move Education below it.

Direct experience is what recruiters and hiring managers will want to see first.

For each institution attended, including the school’s name, major/area of study, years attended, and degree/s awarded.

If no degree was awarded, summarize what was studied but do not include the degree name or level.

Include any non-degree SEO, writing, marketing, design, UX, dev/tech, or analytics courses that trained and tested you in platform usage and/or awarded marketing certifications.

Add them to Skills or Experience if you took a course while employed to distinguish them from degree-based education.

Optional Components Include

Volunteer experience.
Awards won.
Languages known and level of proficiency.
URL for a LinkedIn profile.

Overall: Including these should come down to relevancy.

If awards represent the quality of work, if volunteer experience represents the quality of character, and if languages show skill of value, include them.

But if they take up too much space or seem frivolous, limit or remove them.

LinkedIn Profile Link

This isn’t required as your resume should be the full depiction of your work.

But sharing it might have other benefits.

You may have overlapping connections with company employees or their connections.

Or you may have posted SEO or marketing content that shows you’ve got a finger of the pulse of the industry.

If you include it, personalize your profile’s URL so that it’s short and clearly contains your name.

For example:

www.linkedin.com/in/firstnamelastname
www.linkedin.com/in/firstnamemiddleinitiallastname

Optional, But Not Recommended

Photo.
Summary statement.
Hobbies.
Use of more than one page (no more than two).
URLs for social media profiles.

Overall: Don’t include fluff or irrelevant content that will needlessly elongate your resume and take focus from your experience.

Expect resume readers will only look at the first page so keep your relevant experience there.

Remove any of the above if they push experience off the first page.

If you absolutely must have two pages, put skills, education, volunteerism, and/or awards on page two.

Use a summary statement if you have something to add that isn’t obvious elsewhere in your resume.

But most people applying for the same job would likely want to call out similar qualities and qualifications so a statement may do little to differentiate you from other candidates.

Components That Will Negatively Impact Your Resume

Spelling mistakes or grammatical inconsistencies.
Unoriginal or untruthful content.
Poor formatting in digital or printed versions.
Professional experience entirely irrelevant to the job.
Lack of continuity and short tenure in previous roles (for full-time positions).

Common red flags include:

Mistakes And Unoriginal Content

Assume that any company you apply to has resume-reading software that may call out mistakes or scan for plagiarism and remove you from the running.

Formatting

Using fonts that are too small and margins that are too narrow may look visually unappealing and suggest that you have trouble editing down your work.

Tiny margins may also prevent your resume from printing out properly.

Irrelevant Job Experience

Don’t waste the reader’s time by going into irrelevant detail about past roles.

If you must include a role to indicate a gap in time, then limit it to your title, employer, and dates.

Oldest Job Experience

If you’ve been in the industry for more than two or three jobs, scaling back on details from your first job/s or internships.

Lack Of Continuity And Short Tenure

While two years is no longer the job tenure standard, staying for less than a year across multiple jobs may make you seem unworthy of the investment a company plans to make in its new hires.

While there are good reasons for a short job tenure (bad fit, layoffs, better opportunities, etc…), you become less appealing if this is a clear trend in your work history.

SEO Resume Examples

Here are two examples of SEO resumes to use for inspiration. They incorporate titles, experience, achievements, skills, and styles that help SEO resumes get noticed.

You can also see how the formatting guidelines and correct balance of components mentioned above are represented on paper.

If you choose to emulate them, be sure to change and personalize them as much as possible.

Conclusion

There’s no question – writing a great resume takes serious work.

It’s incredibly challenging to condense your entire professional and educational life into such a limited space.

Then needing to refine and condense even further with each new position you attain.

For SEO experts, this can be even more of a feat since the SEO industry has only recently been recognized as a full-time job and not just a skill.

But by following these recommendations, connecting with others in the field, practicing explaining your role and accomplishments with non-SEOs, and pushing yourself to expand your SEO knowledge, you’ll find that writing and talking about SEO becomes more natural.

And most importantly, just be your organic self.

More Resources:

Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock

Related Topics:Examples Resume seo Stand Write

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SEO

2024 WordPress Vulnerability Report Shows Errors Sites Keep Making

Published

6 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Max

2024 Annual WordPress security report by WPScan

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

Published

1 day ago

April 18, 2024

Max

Mobile SEO: An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices

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.

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.

Screenshot from GA4, March 2024

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.

A screen capture from Looker Studio showing a pie chart with a breakdown of mobile, desktop, tablet, and Smart TV users for a site

Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024

You 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.

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.

An image showing the Lighthouse Scores for a website.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

You 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.

An image showing how to get to Lighthouse within Google Chrome Developer Tools.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

Another 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.

An image showing the PageSpeed Insights scores for a website.

Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024

Other 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.

An image showing how to change the device emulation for a site within Google Chrome Developer Tools

Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024

Lastly, 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?

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.

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.

An image showing the difference between Web.dev in a full desktop display vs. a mobile display using responsive design.

Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024

This 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).

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 Geos

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.

Examples of intrusive interstitial pop-ups on a mobile site according to Google.

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.

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.

An image of a search result for Japanese rice cookers that shows rich results for Zojirushi and Amazon.

Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024

Adding 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.

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.

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.

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

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Every SEO’s favorite ~~link-building~~ collaboration tool, HARO, was officially killed off for good last week by Cision. It’s now been wrapped into a new product: Connectively.

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:

Example of an AI-generated pitch in HARO

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:

Example HARO pitch that caught my attention

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:

Example of links build with HARO, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

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. 😉

Finding people to request insights from in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

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.

Me, indirectly sourcing insights on social media

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 😉