seo

Posted by dudleycarr

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

At the end of last year, we launched Moz Local Insights, and then I read this comment on Phil Rozek’s blog:

“To be honest, we’ve been finding issues in the citation quality — it seems like their directory partners are changing up how they update information and not keeping stuff as consistent as we’d all like. I’d like Moz to focus on that and make that rock solid first — because right now, we really can’t rely on the results we’re getting from InsiderPages and SuperPages (for example). And listings that were “fixed” magically get unfixed weeks later — I don’t think this is Moz’s fault, but I do think they want to have a “red alert” feature when something gets broken that was previously resolved.”

Well, that wasn’t the comment I was looking for when we launched an important addition to Moz Local. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We took that blog comment and other feedback to heart, and we’ve spent our time since Insights launched on just this.

So how did we put out this fire? Well first, here’s a bit of backstory:

When Moz Local launched two years ago, the bubbles next to each listing in the dashboard was to let customers know that Moz Local was working for them. We provided simple transparency into how things were working with each of our partners.

The bubbles are popular, but they also raise two questions:

1. Why isn’t my listing accurate on X partner?
2. What goes into determining whether my listing is accurate for a given partner?

Better distribution

In February, we started the process of figuring out why our bubble gun wasn’t producing green bubbles. Hundreds of emails with partners, and countless (actually, probably countable) hours later, the process of submitting a listing to a partner and having that accepted has improved dramatically across the board.

The end result of all the hard work put into making listing distribution perfect: Listings submitted to Moz Local see an average accuracy score increase of 28% within 3 months. That’s a large lift across a large set of listings independent of size.

Step 1 was improving the underlying Moz Local distribution with partners. Step 2 was to make needed visual improvements for people to better understand their accuracy and what makes up that accuracy.

Better visualization

So, we’ve replaced the accuracy bubbles with an overall accuracy score and a bar graph that breaks the accuracy score down by its factors:

• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Website
• Categories

If you don’t have 100% accuracy, then you can find out which critical component of the listing is contributing to that issue.

Quick side note: “Listing score” is the same score you see on the Moz Local Check Listing service. It grades a listing based on accuracy, completeness of categories and photos, and whether or not a listing has duplicates. The “accuracy score” is just to measure NAP+WC consistency of distribution partners. So, listing score is a superset of accuracy score and includes other important sites like Google and Facebook.

We think the accuracy score is more representative of the progress that your listing has made since it has been distributed with Moz Local. The factors are there to help understand across the partners where the gaps are. However, we realized that being Local SEO experts arming you with data helps you diagnose problems better. So, we’ve also broken all of the data factors down by partner.

The expanded accuracy factors view allows you to see whether you’re having an issue with a particular attribute of your listing or if it’s a distribution partner that is having issues with your data. For example, if the company you manage does a name change, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the name across partners show as inaccurate. In this example, the fact that I haven’t associated a Foursquare account with the listing helps explain why there are accuracy issues.

We hope existing Moz Local customers are excited about these changes. There is more work to be done, and I’m looking forward to sharing those improvements soon.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by Angela_Petteys

[Estimated read time: 23 minutes]

Setting up and using Yoast SEO

When you’re working with a self-hosted WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most valuable tools you can have. Yoast SEO is one of the most widely popular WordPress plugins around and it’s easy to understand why. Whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re a SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search engine-friendly as possible.

Yoast SEO can be installed on any self-hosted Wordpress site. (Sorry, free Wordpress.com bloggers.) It’s easily the most comprehensive SEO-related Wordpress plugin you could ask for and best of all, it’s free! You do have the option to buy premium Yoast SEO extensions for some extra functionality, but its most important functions are part of the free plugin. Yoast makes it easy for you to do things like control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords and track how often you’re using them, manage sitemaps, and so much more.

Downloading and installing Yoast SEO

If you don’t already have the Yoast SEO plugin installed on your site, let’s take care of that. If Yoast SEO is already installed and set up and you just want to learn more about how to use it, feel free to scroll on down to the “Using Yoast SEO” section.

From your site’s admin dashboard, look along the left-hand side of the screen for the “Plugins” option. When you hover over it, you’ll see the “Add New” option.

Click on “Add New” and you’ll be brought to a page with a selection of featured, popular, recommended, and favorite plugins. If you don’t see Yoast SEO listed under any of these sections, there’s a search box you can use to find it.

Once you find the Yoast SEO plugin, click “Install Now” and Wordpress will download it, install it, and ask you to activate the plugin. Activate the plugin and if it’s been successfully installed and activated, you’ll see an option marked “SEO” on the left-hand sidebar menu of your admin dashboard and along the horizontal menu bar on the top of the screen.

Downloading and installing Yoast SEO was easy, but now that you’ve done that, you need to set up the plugin. If you’ve never used Yoast SEO before, this might seem a little overwhelming, but I promise it’s nothing you can’t handle. I can’t promise this process will be a non-stop, action-packed thrill ride, but it’s completely worth the time it takes to set it up properly. Since the ideal Yoast settings will vary from site to site, I’m not going to tell you any hard and fast settings to choose, but I will walk you through what each of the settings are.

Importing settings from other SEO plugins

Just a quick question before we go any further: do you have another SEO plugin you’ve been using? If so, you could save yourself some time by importing your settings from the other plugin. From the “SEO” option on the left-hand menu, click on “Tools,” then “Import and Export.” Select the “Import from other SEO plugins” tab.

Here, you can import settings from HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, and WooThemes SEO Framework. All you have to do is check the appropriate box and hit “Import.” If you’ve used older Yoast plugins like Robots Meta, RSS Footer, or Yoast Breadcrumbs, you can import settings from those under the “Import from other plugins” tab. If you’re not using any of those SEO plugins, you might want to check out the “SEO Data Transporter” plugin Yoast recommends.

If you already have settings you’ve exported from another plugin and you want to import them, all you have to do is go to the “Import” tab, select the file you want, and hit “Import settings.”

Setting up Yoast SEO

If you don’t have any settings to import, let’s start from square one. Even if you imported your settings from another plugin, there’s no harm in checking all these settings just to make sure everything is correct.

To get started, go to your site’s admin dashboard, find the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu (or the top menu, whichever you prefer) and click on “General.” This will bring you to a page where you’ll have the chance to set up some basic global SEO options for your site.

General settings

General

If you ever want to revert Yoast SEO to its default settings, the “General” tab is where you can do that. Unless you want to take the introductory tour, head on over to “Your Info.”

Your Info

Here, you’ll be able to tell Yoast what your site’s name is or if you have an alternate name you’d like to use. You can also tell it whether or not you are a company or a person, which will make it easier for Google to incorporate your site in Knowledge Graph results. If you’re setting up Yoast SEO for a company’s website, you’ll have a chance to add things like a company logo, which could also be included in Knowledge Graph results.

Webmaster Tools

Now, let’s head on over to the “Webmaster Tools” tab. If you plan to use tools like Google Search Console, Alexa, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Yandex Webmaster Tools, you can verify your site through here if your site isn’t already verified.

The basic process to do this is pretty similar no matter which of the tools you’re using, but I’ll use Google Search Console as an example:

1. Open your Search Console dashboard and select “Manage Property,” then “Verify this site” from the box next to the site you’re adding Yoast to. If you haven’t already added your site to Search Console, you’ll need to do that first. (Check out my guide on the basics of Google Search Console if you need help with that.)
2. Choose the “HTML Tag” verification option. Instead of pasting the code it gives you into the <Head> section of your site’s code, take that code and paste it into the Google Search Console box you see here and delete everything except what’s inside the quotation marks, including the quotation marks themselves.
3. Hit “Save Changes,” then go back to your Google Search Console dashboard and hit “Verify.” You’re all set!

Security

Lastly, there’s the “Security” tab. If you’re working with a single-author site, you don’t really have anything to worry about here and you can leave this box unchecked. But if you’re working with a site where multiple authors can access the site and add content, this section can be helpful. When this box is left unchecked, it will allow a section with advanced options like redirects and noindex settings to be visible in the Yoast toolbox that appears on each page’s page editor. Although you might be fine with your site’s contributors being able to add content on their own, you might not necessarily want them to change those sorts of settings. All you have to do is check this box and you won’t have to worry about it.

Titles & Metas

Next, let’s move on to the “Titles & Metas” section, which can be found under the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu. This section is hugely important for SEO purposes since it’s where you get to have some say in how your site appears in SERPs. When you click on this, the first thing you’ll see is the “General” tab.

General

Here, you’ll have the chance to change how your titles display, like “Your Site Name | Contact Us” or “Your Site Name – Contact Us.” Whichever title separator you choose to go with will be used on all pages of your site. As for the “Force rewrite titles” option, this corrects a problem some sites have where the site name appears twice within the title. Some sites use WordPress themes that have built-in SEO title displays, which can override the settings you choose in Yoast. If you’re having this problem, checking this box can help solve it. If you check this box and you’re still having the duplicate title problem, contact your web developer because there is a way to fix that by editing your site’s code.

Homepage

What you see under the “Homepage” tab will depend on how your site is set up. In this case, the site I’m working with is set to use one page for a homepage and a different page for the blog. If this is how your site is set up and you wanted to make changes to the titles and meta descriptions for either of those pages, all you’d have to do is click on the “editing the front page/blog itself” links seen here and make your changes. If you’re working with a site where the homepage just displays the latest posts, your “Homepage” tab will look differently from what you see here.

Post Types

Titles and meta descriptions

Next up is the “Post Types” section. Here, you can set up basic templates for the titles and meta descriptions for the main types of pages of your site. Blog posts could follow one format, while other pages on your site follow another. If you don’t specifically write an SEO-optimized title or meta description for each of your pages, your titles and meta descriptions will follow the basic template you establish here. You can fill these out using variables and the information you specify will automatically be inserted into your titles and meta descriptions. If you leave the meta description box blank, search engines will pull an excerpt of content from the page.

Meta Robots

With the “noindex, follow” option, check the box if there’s something you don’t want to be indexed by search engines. In most cases, you’ll probably want to leave this box unchecked. But if you have pages you want to keep out of search engines or pages that could lead to duplicate content penalties, such as archives of content, go ahead and check the box.

Date in Snippet Preview

As for the “Date in Snippet Preview” option, whether you should check this box or not all comes down to what kind of content you have on that type of page. If you’re making frequent blog updates or are posting content about lots newsworthy stories, you might want to enable this. But if you’re dealing with evergreen content that will be relevant for years to come, you might prefer to disable this so people won’t see your page in SERPs, notice the date, and assume your site is out of date.

Yoast SEO Meta Box

Then there’s the option to hide the Yoast SEO Meta Box. If you’re dealing with a site that has multiple contributors, you might want to use this option to prevent your contributors from being able to change those. If you check this box and later decide you want this option back, no big deal; you can always come back later and change this setting.

Taxonomies

Next is the “Taxonomies” tab. If your site is something like a blog that uses several different categories and tags to organize posts, you can use this section to set up title and meta description templates for those pages using variables just like you did in the “Post Types” tab. If you tend to use the exact same terms for tags and categories, that’s fine, but you might want to check the “noindex, follow” option to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.

Archives

When you run a blog, having pages of archived content based on date and/or author is a great way to make it easy for your readers to find past content. However, archive pages aren’t always so convenient for search engines, which might consider them duplicate content. The “Archive” tab lets you prevent that by telling them whether or not you want your archive pages indexed or not, or you can disable archive pages all together if you prefer.

You’ll also be able to set up titles to appear on special pages like 404 pages. So if you’ve got something special you’d like these to be, go ahead and enter them in the “Special Pages” section. You can even use some of those variables you used in the past couple of tabs if you want.

Other

Finally, we come to the “Other” section, where you can set a couple more things. Fortunately, Yoast does a nice job of explaining what each of these settings are, so this is a pretty straightforward section.

Congratulations — you’ve made it through the most time-consuming part of the settings! There are still more settings to take care of, but the good news is the rest of the settings from here on out are pretty simple. Let’s get to work on the “Social” section, found under the “SEO” option of the left-hand toolbar.

Social

The “Accounts” tab of the “Social” section is pretty self-explanatory. All you have to do is add the URLs to each of your social media profiles. Just remember that for the Twitter section, you only have to enter your username, not the URL for your profile. Filling this section out notifies search engines that they are associated with your site.

As you go through the tabs for individual social media platforms, you’ll be able to control how content shared from your site will appear on each platform. Under the “Facebook” tab, there’s the option to add Open Graph meta data to your site’s <Head> section, which will make it easier for Facebook to use an appropriate image, title, and description when something on your site is shared. You can also specify a default image for them to use if someone shares a post or page that doesn’t already have an image on it.

If you have a Facebook fan page for your site, you can specify an admin for your page so you’ll be able to access Facebook Insights for your site. Facebook Insights will give you information about how often things from your site are being shared, being “liked,” and how much traffic your site is getting from Facebook. To access Facebook Insights, click on the “Facebook Insights” link and look in the upper right hand corner for a button marked “Insights for your Website.” This will bring up a box for you to connect your site’s domain to Facebook Insights.

There are similar settings under the “Twitter,” “Pinterest,” and “Google+” tabs. Under the “Twitter” tab, you can set up Twitter card meta data, which is basically the Twitter equivalent of Facebook Open Graph. If your site has a Pinterest account, you’ll need to check the “Add Open Graph meta data” box under the “Facebook” tab first, then enter the verification code provided to you by Pinterest under the “Pinterest” tab.

Now that your social media settings are all set, go back to the “SEO” section of the left-hand side menu and choose “XML Sitemaps.”

XML Sitemaps

One of the best things about Yoast SEO is that it makes managing sitemaps very easy. When you enable XML sitemap functionality, Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap, updates it as you add new content, and pings search engines when it’s updated.

As you click through the various tabs in this section, you’ll have the chance to determine whether or not you want things such as specific types of posts or post categories included in your sitemap. Just look through the tabs and if you see something you don’t want in your sitemap, simply check the box next to it and you’re good to go. You can also exclude specific posts from sitemaps by entering the post ID numbers under the “Excluded Posts” tab.

Now, let’s move on to the “Advanced” option, found under the “SEO” section on the left-hand side menu. Don’t let the name mislead you; this section is actually pretty simple.

Advanced

Breadcrumbs

Under “Advanced,” the first tab you’ll see is “Breadcrumbs.” If you enable breadcrumbs on your site, your visitors will see links along the top of the page showing the path that leads to the current page. (Example: Site Name > Blog > Post Title). Breadcrumbs can also be visible in SERPs, like so:

If you want to have breadcrumbs on your site, unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as checking this box. Be sure to check out Yoast’s article on implementing breadcrumbs because you’ll also need to add some code into your theme. If you aren’t able to edit your site’s theme on your own, talk to your web developer about adding this code to your site.

Permalinks

Let’s move on to the “Permalinks” tab. Here, you can clean up your URL structure, permalinks, and <Head> section to make them a little more search engine-friendly. Yoast does a good job of explaining what each of these options are, so there’s no need for me to make this guide any longer than it already is.

RSS

Next is the “RSS” tab. If you’ve been blogging long enough, there’s a good chance that at some point, you’ve found out that a scraper has published some of your content word-for-word on another site without your permission and without attribution. It’s annoying, right? You might not be able to completely prevent your content from being scraped, but you can use this section to add content to your posts when they appear in RSS feeds, giving yourself credit and linking back to your site. That way, if a scraper steals content directly from your site’s RSS feed, you at least get credit and backlinks to your site.

Search Console

Now we’re down to one last big setting to take care of, but this one only applies if you use Google Search Console. From the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu, click on “Search Console.”

Here, you’ll be able to get a verification code so you can connect Yoast to Google Search Console. Doing this will let you see a list of site errors that your site’s visitors have encountered and give you a chance to fix them right from your site’s dashboard. If you need to set a redirect for a broken link, you can do that there, too.

If you want to do this, all you have to do is:

1. Click on “Get Google Authorization Code.” This will bring up a box asking you to give Yoast SEO access to your Search Console account.
2. Hit “Accept” to get a code to paste into the “Authenticate” box you see here.
3. Click on “Authenticate” and choose your site’s profile from the list provided.
4. Hit “Save Profile.”

That takes care of all the major settings. Finally! Before we move on, there’s one last thing I want to show you. Go back to the “SEO” option on your left-hand side menu and click on “Tools.”

Tools

The “Bulk Editor” tool is something you hopefully won’t have to use too often, but if you ever need it, you’re going to love having it. If you ever find yourself needing to make changes to several titles and/or descriptions at a time, you can use it to bring up a list of all your posts and pages so that you can simply go through and make all your changes at once, instead of going to each individual page and making your changes there.

There’s also the “File Editor” tool, where you can make changes to your robots.txt file and your .htaccess file. Last, but certainly not least, there’s “Import and Export.” Now that you’ve spent all that time getting all these settings just right, you might want to export your settings so you can have a backup copy. Or if you have other sites to install Yoast SEO on, you can always export your settings and import them to other sites if you like.

Using Yoast SEO

Now that you have Yoast SEO installed and set up, go to the left-hand side menu on your site’s admin dashboard and choose “All Posts” or “All Pages” to see a list of all your pages/posts. You should be seeing a column marked “SEO” on the right hand side of the screen.

This column shows a dot indicating how Yoast SEO has rated that page. Yoast SEO uses a pretty simple system for rating a page’s SEO friendliness.

• A gray dot means Yoast SEO doesn’t have any information available for that page,
• A green dot means the page is good,
• A red dot means there are some significant problems,
• And a yellow/orange dot means there’s room for improvement.

If you’re in the process of going through all the pages or posts on your site and optimizing them, this column can be very helpful because you can sort pages/posts based on that column, making it easy to identify which pages need attention.

Click on a page or post to open up your page/post editor and you should see the Yoast SEO toolbox underneath the area where you enter your page’s content. The Yoast SEO toolbox has a few different tabs, the first of which is “General.”

General

The “General” tab is where you can write that page’s title and meta description and specify which keyword you’re targeting. When you set your focus keyword, the plugin will take a look at the page’s content, title, URL, meta description, and heading and let you know how many times your targeted keyword is being used. That way, you’ll know if you’re using your targeted keyword enough or if you might be keyword stuffing.

When setting your focus keyword, remember to go with the main keyword you want to target, because you’re only able to set one focus keyword at a time on Yoast SEO.

The “Snippet Preview” area is an awesome tool. It lets you see what your title and meta description will look like in a SERP so you can make sure nothing important is being cut off.

Page Analysis

Once you’ve set your focus keyword in the “General” tab, save or update your draft and click on the “Page Analysis” tab. This will give you some specific feedback on just how search engine friendly your page is or isn’t.

Yoast will give you feedback based on factors like if you’re using your targeted keyword too much or not enough, whether or not you have images or outbound links, how long your content is, if you’ve used a keyword before on another page, and so much more.

A few things to watch out for

Obviously, ideally you want to get as many green dots as possible and fix as many red dots as you can, but having some yellow dots in there isn’t inherently a bad thing. Keep in mind that while Yoast can give some very helpful feedback, you don’t necessarily have to take all of its advice to heart.

For example, in the above screenshot, I have a red dot for not having an image. That post actually does have an image, but it wasn’t inserted in the body of the post with the text; it was added using the “Set Featured Image” section, which Yoast didn’t pick up on.

Yoast might also give you some feedback that would seem unnatural or illogical if you actually implemented those changes. It’s very important to remember that Yoast is taking an extremely objective look at your content and that you’re ultimately writing content to be read by humans, not search engines.

For example, one thing Yoast might tell you is that even though you have your targeted keyword in a title, you might want to consider rewriting the title to put the targeted keyword at the beginning. If there’s a way to do this in a way that seems natural, go for it. But don’t feel obligated to make that change if it would just make your title sound strange. It’s not like Yoast is going to prevent you from publishing a post or a page if you don’t take its advice, so use your best judgement about which recommendations you listen to.

Advanced

If the option for the “Advanced” tab in the Yoast meta box hasn’t been disabled, you should be seeing a tab marked “Advanced.” Here, you can change settings for meta robots and sitemaps or set a 301 redirect URL. If this is a page of content that has been published elsewhere on the Internet, you can establish a canonical URL here, too.

If you’re wondering what the options in the “Meta Robots Advanced” section are, here’s a quick rundown:

• NO ODP: Stops search engines from using alternative site descriptions from ODP/DMOZ.
• NO YDIR: Stops search engines from using site descriptions from Yahoo! Directories.
• No Archive: Stops search engines from having a cached version of your page.
• No Snippet: Stops search engines from using a snippet of content in SERPs.

Social

Now that your page looks good to search engines, let’s head over to the “Social” tab and make sure it will also look great when it’s shared on social media. Since social media feeds tend to move very quickly, it’s important to make sure your pages will be eye-catching enough to stand out amongst the crowd when someone shares your content.

If you don’t fill out anything in this section, social media sites will automatically use the page’s title, meta description or a snippet of content from your post, and select an image to use. But if you’ve ever tried sharing content on social media, you know that sometimes they don’t always choose the most ideal image. You can fix that here by uploading the image you want them to use. Ideally, your page’s title and meta description or the snippet of content from your page will be attention-grabbing enough to work well for social media, but you can always rewrite them here if you like.

Publish

When you’re all done optimizing your page, take a look at the box where you can schedule a post, change privacy settings, or simply hit the “Post” button.

You’ll see another dot here telling you how Yoast SEO has rated that post or page on the whole. If you’ve got a green light, you’re good to go!

For a free plugin, the amount of functionality you get from Yoast SEO is pretty incredible. Now that you’re familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll have no problem making your site as search engine-friendly as possible. If you’re interested in a little extra functionality, you might want to check out the premium Yoast SEO extensions.

Premium Yoast SEO extensions

Yoast SEO Premium

If you have to redirect a lot of URLs, the Yoast SEO Premium extension might be worthwhile. It has a great redirect manager that lets you import redirects from your .htaccess file, write redirects to your .htaccess file, and choose the type of redirect you want — plus more tools to help make creating redirects easier. You’ll also get access to 13 different tutorial videos in case you still have some questions about how to use Yoast SEO.

Video SEO

If your site has a lot of video content, the Video SEO plugin can help you provide search engines with the information they need to help index your video content so that you can potentially get a rich snippet SERP result. Rich snippet results are hard to come by and using the Video SEO plugin does not guarantee that your site will get rich snippet results, but if Google decides your content is worthy of them, this plugin can help you get one.

SEO News

Is your site focused on news content? If so, the SEO News extension will help you optimize your site in a way to help you get featured in Google News results. It doesn’t directly submit your site to Google News, but it will help you optimize your site in a way that will help you get there. It gives you the option for creating a “Standout Tag,” creating XML News sitemaps, and more.

Local SEO

Lastly, there’s the Local SEO extension. If it’s important for you to be featured in geographically specific search results, this is the extension for you. The Local SEO extension helps you give search engines important information about your business — such as your address, phone number, and hours of operation — so the search engine can give more accurate and detailed information to searchers.

Any questions or thoughts about setting up and using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Posted by Angela_Petteys

[Estimated read time: 23 minutes]

Setting up and using Yoast SEO

When you’re working with a self-hosted WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most valuable tools you can have. Yoast SEO is one of the most widely popular WordPress plugins around and it’s easy to understand why. Whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re a SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search engine-friendly as possible.

Yoast SEO can be installed on any self-hosted Wordpress site. (Sorry, free Wordpress.com bloggers.) It’s easily the most comprehensive SEO-related Wordpress plugin you could ask for and best of all, it’s free! You do have the option to buy premium Yoast SEO extensions for some extra functionality, but its most important functions are part of the free plugin. Yoast makes it easy for you to do things like control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords and track how often you’re using them, manage sitemaps, and so much more.

Downloading and installing Yoast SEO

If you don’t already have the Yoast SEO plugin installed on your site, let’s take care of that. If Yoast SEO is already installed and set up and you just want to learn more about how to use it, feel free to scroll on down to the “Using Yoast SEO” section.

From your site’s admin dashboard, look along the left-hand side of the screen for the “Plugins” option. When you hover over it, you’ll see the “Add New” option.

Click on “Add New” and you’ll be brought to a page with a selection of featured, popular, recommended, and favorite plugins. If you don’t see Yoast SEO listed under any of these sections, there’s a search box you can use to find it.

Once you find the Yoast SEO plugin, click “Install Now” and Wordpress will download it, install it, and ask you to activate the plugin. Activate the plugin and if it’s been successfully installed and activated, you’ll see an option marked “SEO” on the left-hand sidebar menu of your admin dashboard and along the horizontal menu bar on the top of the screen.

Downloading and installing Yoast SEO was easy, but now that you’ve done that, you need to set up the plugin. If you’ve never used Yoast SEO before, this might seem a little overwhelming, but I promise it’s nothing you can’t handle. I can’t promise this process will be a non-stop, action-packed thrill ride, but it’s completely worth the time it takes to set it up properly. Since the ideal Yoast settings will vary from site to site, I’m not going to tell you any hard and fast settings to choose, but I will walk you through what each of the settings are.

Importing settings from other SEO plugins

Just a quick question before we go any further: do you have another SEO plugin you’ve been using? If so, you could save yourself some time by importing your settings from the other plugin. From the “SEO” option on the left-hand menu, click on “Tools,” then “Import and Export.” Select the “Import from other SEO plugins” tab.

Here, you can import settings from HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, and WooThemes SEO Framework. All you have to do is check the appropriate box and hit “Import.” If you’ve used older Yoast plugins like Robots Meta, RSS Footer, or Yoast Breadcrumbs, you can import settings from those under the “Import from other plugins” tab. If you’re not using any of those SEO plugins, you might want to check out the “SEO Data Transporter” plugin Yoast recommends.

If you already have settings you’ve exported from another plugin and you want to import them, all you have to do is go to the “Import” tab, select the file you want, and hit “Import settings.”

Setting up Yoast SEO

If you don’t have any settings to import, let’s start from square one. Even if you imported your settings from another plugin, there’s no harm in checking all these settings just to make sure everything is correct.

To get started, go to your site’s admin dashboard, find the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu (or the top menu, whichever you prefer) and click on “General.” This will bring you to a page where you’ll have the chance to set up some basic global SEO options for your site.

General settings

General

If you ever want to revert Yoast SEO to its default settings, the “General” tab is where you can do that. Unless you want to take the introductory tour, head on over to “Your Info.”

Your Info

Here, you’ll be able to tell Yoast what your site’s name is or if you have an alternate name you’d like to use. You can also tell it whether or not you are a company or a person, which will make it easier for Google to incorporate your site in Knowledge Graph results. If you’re setting up Yoast SEO for a company’s website, you’ll have a chance to add things like a company logo, which could also be included in Knowledge Graph results.

Webmaster Tools

Now, let’s head on over to the “Webmaster Tools” tab. If you plan to use tools like Google Search Console, Alexa, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Yandex Webmaster Tools, you can verify your site through here if your site isn’t already verified.

The basic process to do this is pretty similar no matter which of the tools you’re using, but I’ll use Google Search Console as an example:

1. Open your Search Console dashboard and select “Manage Property,” then “Verify this site” from the box next to the site you’re adding Yoast to. If you haven’t already added your site to Search Console, you’ll need to do that first. (Check out my guide on the basics of Google Search Console if you need help with that.)
2. Choose the “HTML Tag” verification option. Instead of pasting the code it gives you into the <Head> section of your site’s code, take that code and paste it into the Google Search Console box you see here and delete everything except what’s inside the quotation marks, including the quotation marks themselves.
3. Hit “Save Changes,” then go back to your Google Search Console dashboard and hit “Verify.” You’re all set!

Security

Lastly, there’s the “Security” tab. If you’re working with a single-author site, you don’t really have anything to worry about here and you can leave this box unchecked. But if you’re working with a site where multiple authors can access the site and add content, this section can be helpful. When this box is left unchecked, it will allow a section with advanced options like redirects and noindex settings to be visible in the Yoast toolbox that appears on each page’s page editor. Although you might be fine with your site’s contributors being able to add content on their own, you might not necessarily want them to change those sorts of settings. All you have to do is check this box and you won’t have to worry about it.

Titles & Metas

Next, let’s move on to the “Titles & Metas” section, which can be found under the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu. This section is hugely important for SEO purposes since it’s where you get to have some say in how your site appears in SERPs. When you click on this, the first thing you’ll see is the “General” tab.

General

Here, you’ll have the chance to change how your titles display, like “Your Site Name | Contact Us” or “Your Site Name – Contact Us.” Whichever title separator you choose to go with will be used on all pages of your site. As for the “Force rewrite titles” option, this corrects a problem some sites have where the site name appears twice within the title. Some sites use WordPress themes that have built-in SEO title displays, which can override the settings you choose in Yoast. If you’re having this problem, checking this box can help solve it. If you check this box and you’re still having the duplicate title problem, contact your web developer because there is a way to fix that by editing your site’s code.

Homepage

What you see under the “Homepage” tab will depend on how your site is set up. In this case, the site I’m working with is set to use one page for a homepage and a different page for the blog. If this is how your site is set up and you wanted to make changes to the titles and meta descriptions for either of those pages, all you’d have to do is click on the “editing the front page/blog itself” links seen here and make your changes. If you’re working with a site where the homepage just displays the latest posts, your “Homepage” tab will look differently from what you see here.

Post Types

Titles and meta descriptions

Next up is the “Post Types” section. Here, you can set up basic templates for the titles and meta descriptions for the main types of pages of your site. Blog posts could follow one format, while other pages on your site follow another. If you don’t specifically write an SEO-optimized title or meta description for each of your pages, your titles and meta descriptions will follow the basic template you establish here. You can fill these out using variables and the information you specify will automatically be inserted into your titles and meta descriptions. If you leave the meta description box blank, search engines will pull an excerpt of content from the page.

Meta Robots

With the “noindex, follow” option, check the box if there’s something you don’t want to be indexed by search engines. In most cases, you’ll probably want to leave this box unchecked. But if you have pages you want to keep out of search engines or pages that could lead to duplicate content penalties, such as archives of content, go ahead and check the box.

Date in Snippet Preview

As for the “Date in Snippet Preview” option, whether you should check this box or not all comes down to what kind of content you have on that type of page. If you’re making frequent blog updates or are posting content about lots newsworthy stories, you might want to enable this. But if you’re dealing with evergreen content that will be relevant for years to come, you might prefer to disable this so people won’t see your page in SERPs, notice the date, and assume your site is out of date.

Yoast SEO Meta Box

Then there’s the option to hide the Yoast SEO Meta Box. If you’re dealing with a site that has multiple contributors, you might want to use this option to prevent your contributors from being able to change those. If you check this box and later decide you want this option back, no big deal; you can always come back later and change this setting.

Taxonomies

Next is the “Taxonomies” tab. If your site is something like a blog that uses several different categories and tags to organize posts, you can use this section to set up title and meta description templates for those pages using variables just like you did in the “Post Types” tab. If you tend to use the exact same terms for tags and categories, that’s fine, but you might want to check the “noindex, follow” option to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.

Archives

When you run a blog, having pages of archived content based on date and/or author is a great way to make it easy for your readers to find past content. However, archive pages aren’t always so convenient for search engines, which might consider them duplicate content. The “Archive” tab lets you prevent that by telling them whether or not you want your archive pages indexed or not, or you can disable archive pages all together if you prefer.

You’ll also be able to set up titles to appear on special pages like 404 pages. So if you’ve got something special you’d like these to be, go ahead and enter them in the “Special Pages” section. You can even use some of those variables you used in the past couple of tabs if you want.

Other

Finally, we come to the “Other” section, where you can set a couple more things. Fortunately, Yoast does a nice job of explaining what each of these settings are, so this is a pretty straightforward section.

Congratulations — you’ve made it through the most time-consuming part of the settings! There are still more settings to take care of, but the good news is the rest of the settings from here on out are pretty simple. Let’s get to work on the “Social” section, found under the “SEO” option of the left-hand toolbar.

Social

The “Accounts” tab of the “Social” section is pretty self-explanatory. All you have to do is add the URLs to each of your social media profiles. Just remember that for the Twitter section, you only have to enter your username, not the URL for your profile. Filling this section out notifies search engines that they are associated with your site.

As you go through the tabs for individual social media platforms, you’ll be able to control how content shared from your site will appear on each platform. Under the “Facebook” tab, there’s the option to add Open Graph meta data to your site’s <Head> section, which will make it easier for Facebook to use an appropriate image, title, and description when something on your site is shared. You can also specify a default image for them to use if someone shares a post or page that doesn’t already have an image on it.

If you have a Facebook fan page for your site, you can specify an admin for your page so you’ll be able to access Facebook Insights for your site. Facebook Insights will give you information about how often things from your site are being shared, being “liked,” and how much traffic your site is getting from Facebook. To access Facebook Insights, click on the “Facebook Insights” link and look in the upper right hand corner for a button marked “Insights for your Website.” This will bring up a box for you to connect your site’s domain to Facebook Insights.

There are similar settings under the “Twitter,” “Pinterest,” and “Google+” tabs. Under the “Twitter” tab, you can set up Twitter card meta data, which is basically the Twitter equivalent of Facebook Open Graph. If your site has a Pinterest account, you’ll need to check the “Add Open Graph meta data” box under the “Facebook” tab first, then enter the verification code provided to you by Pinterest under the “Pinterest” tab.

Now that your social media settings are all set, go back to the “SEO” section of the left-hand side menu and choose “XML Sitemaps.”

XML Sitemaps

One of the best things about Yoast SEO is that it makes managing sitemaps very easy. When you enable XML sitemap functionality, Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap, updates it as you add new content, and pings search engines when it’s updated.

As you click through the various tabs in this section, you’ll have the chance to determine whether or not you want things such as specific types of posts or post categories included in your sitemap. Just look through the tabs and if you see something you don’t want in your sitemap, simply check the box next to it and you’re good to go. You can also exclude specific posts from sitemaps by entering the post ID numbers under the “Excluded Posts” tab.

Now, let’s move on to the “Advanced” option, found under the “SEO” section on the left-hand side menu. Don’t let the name mislead you; this section is actually pretty simple.

Advanced

Breadcrumbs

Under “Advanced,” the first tab you’ll see is “Breadcrumbs.” If you enable breadcrumbs on your site, your visitors will see links along the top of the page showing the path that leads to the current page. (Example: Site Name > Blog > Post Title). Breadcrumbs can also be visible in SERPs, like so:

If you want to have breadcrumbs on your site, unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as checking this box. Be sure to check out Yoast’s article on implementing breadcrumbs because you’ll also need to add some code into your theme. If you aren’t able to edit your site’s theme on your own, talk to your web developer about adding this code to your site.

Permalinks

Let’s move on to the “Permalinks” tab. Here, you can clean up your URL structure, permalinks, and <Head> section to make them a little more search engine-friendly. Yoast does a good job of explaining what each of these options are, so there’s no need for me to make this guide any longer than it already is.

RSS

Next is the “RSS” tab. If you’ve been blogging long enough, there’s a good chance that at some point, you’ve found out that a scraper has published some of your content word-for-word on another site without your permission and without attribution. It’s annoying, right? You might not be able to completely prevent your content from being scraped, but you can use this section to add content to your posts when they appear in RSS feeds, giving yourself credit and linking back to your site. That way, if a scraper steals content directly from your site’s RSS feed, you at least get credit and backlinks to your site.

Search Console

Now we’re down to one last big setting to take care of, but this one only applies if you use Google Search Console. From the “SEO” option on the left-hand side menu, click on “Search Console.”

Here, you’ll be able to get a verification code so you can connect Yoast to Google Search Console. Doing this will let you see a list of site errors that your site’s visitors have encountered and give you a chance to fix them right from your site’s dashboard. If you need to set a redirect for a broken link, you can do that there, too.

If you want to do this, all you have to do is:

1. Click on “Get Google Authorization Code.” This will bring up a box asking you to give Yoast SEO access to your Search Console account.
2. Hit “Accept” to get a code to paste into the “Authenticate” box you see here.
3. Click on “Authenticate” and choose your site’s profile from the list provided.
4. Hit “Save Profile.”

That takes care of all the major settings. Finally! Before we move on, there’s one last thing I want to show you. Go back to the “SEO” option on your left-hand side menu and click on “Tools.”

Tools

The “Bulk Editor” tool is something you hopefully won’t have to use too often, but if you ever need it, you’re going to love having it. If you ever find yourself needing to make changes to several titles and/or descriptions at a time, you can use it to bring up a list of all your posts and pages so that you can simply go through and make all your changes at once, instead of going to each individual page and making your changes there.

There’s also the “File Editor” tool, where you can make changes to your robots.txt file and your .htaccess file. Last, but certainly not least, there’s “Import and Export.” Now that you’ve spent all that time getting all these settings just right, you might want to export your settings so you can have a backup copy. Or if you have other sites to install Yoast SEO on, you can always export your settings and import them to other sites if you like.

Using Yoast SEO

Now that you have Yoast SEO installed and set up, go to the left-hand side menu on your site’s admin dashboard and choose “All Posts” or “All Pages” to see a list of all your pages/posts. You should be seeing a column marked “SEO” on the right hand side of the screen.

This column shows a dot indicating how Yoast SEO has rated that page. Yoast SEO uses a pretty simple system for rating a page’s SEO friendliness.

• A gray dot means Yoast SEO doesn’t have any information available for that page,
• A green dot means the page is good,
• A red dot means there are some significant problems,
• And a yellow/orange dot means there’s room for improvement.

If you’re in the process of going through all the pages or posts on your site and optimizing them, this column can be very helpful because you can sort pages/posts based on that column, making it easy to identify which pages need attention.

Click on a page or post to open up your page/post editor and you should see the Yoast SEO toolbox underneath the area where you enter your page’s content. The Yoast SEO toolbox has a few different tabs, the first of which is “General.”

General

The “General” tab is where you can write that page’s title and meta description and specify which keyword you’re targeting. When you set your focus keyword, the plugin will take a look at the page’s content, title, URL, meta description, and heading and let you know how many times your targeted keyword is being used. That way, you’ll know if you’re using your targeted keyword enough or if you might be keyword stuffing.

When setting your focus keyword, remember to go with the main keyword you want to target, because you’re only able to set one focus keyword at a time on Yoast SEO.

The “Snippet Preview” area is an awesome tool. It lets you see what your title and meta description will look like in a SERP so you can make sure nothing important is being cut off.

Page Analysis

Once you’ve set your focus keyword in the “General” tab, save or update your draft and click on the “Page Analysis” tab. This will give you some specific feedback on just how search engine friendly your page is or isn’t.

Yoast will give you feedback based on factors like if you’re using your targeted keyword too much or not enough, whether or not you have images or outbound links, how long your content is, if you’ve used a keyword before on another page, and so much more.

A few things to watch out for

Obviously, ideally you want to get as many green dots as possible and fix as many red dots as you can, but having some yellow dots in there isn’t inherently a bad thing. Keep in mind that while Yoast can give some very helpful feedback, you don’t necessarily have to take all of its advice to heart.

For example, in the above screenshot, I have a red dot for not having an image. That post actually does have an image, but it wasn’t inserted in the body of the post with the text; it was added using the “Set Featured Image” section, which Yoast didn’t pick up on.

Yoast might also give you some feedback that would seem unnatural or illogical if you actually implemented those changes. It’s very important to remember that Yoast is taking an extremely objective look at your content and that you’re ultimately writing content to be read by humans, not search engines.

For example, one thing Yoast might tell you is that even though you have your targeted keyword in a title, you might want to consider rewriting the title to put the targeted keyword at the beginning. If there’s a way to do this in a way that seems natural, go for it. But don’t feel obligated to make that change if it would just make your title sound strange. It’s not like Yoast is going to prevent you from publishing a post or a page if you don’t take its advice, so use your best judgement about which recommendations you listen to.

Advanced

If the option for the “Advanced” tab in the Yoast meta box hasn’t been disabled, you should be seeing a tab marked “Advanced.” Here, you can change settings for meta robots and sitemaps or set a 301 redirect URL. If this is a page of content that has been published elsewhere on the Internet, you can establish a canonical URL here, too.

If you’re wondering what the options in the “Meta Robots Advanced” section are, here’s a quick rundown:

• NO ODP: Stops search engines from using alternative site descriptions from ODP/DMOZ.
• NO YDIR: Stops search engines from using site descriptions from Yahoo! Directories.
• No Archive: Stops search engines from having a cached version of your page.
• No Snippet: Stops search engines from using a snippet of content in SERPs.

Social

Now that your page looks good to search engines, let’s head over to the “Social” tab and make sure it will also look great when it’s shared on social media. Since social media feeds tend to move very quickly, it’s important to make sure your pages will be eye-catching enough to stand out amongst the crowd when someone shares your content.

If you don’t fill out anything in this section, social media sites will automatically use the page’s title, meta description or a snippet of content from your post, and select an image to use. But if you’ve ever tried sharing content on social media, you know that sometimes they don’t always choose the most ideal image. You can fix that here by uploading the image you want them to use. Ideally, your page’s title and meta description or the snippet of content from your page will be attention-grabbing enough to work well for social media, but you can always rewrite them here if you like.

Publish

When you’re all done optimizing your page, take a look at the box where you can schedule a post, change privacy settings, or simply hit the “Post” button.

You’ll see another dot here telling you how Yoast SEO has rated that post or page on the whole. If you’ve got a green light, you’re good to go!

For a free plugin, the amount of functionality you get from Yoast SEO is pretty incredible. Now that you’re familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll have no problem making your site as search engine-friendly as possible. If you’re interested in a little extra functionality, you might want to check out the premium Yoast SEO extensions.

Premium Yoast SEO extensions

Yoast SEO Premium

If you have to redirect a lot of URLs, the Yoast SEO Premium extension might be worthwhile. It has a great redirect manager that lets you import redirects from your .htaccess file, write redirects to your .htaccess file, and choose the type of redirect you want — plus more tools to help make creating redirects easier. You’ll also get access to 13 different tutorial videos in case you still have some questions about how to use Yoast SEO.

Video SEO

If your site has a lot of video content, the Video SEO plugin can help you provide search engines with the information they need to help index your video content so that you can potentially get a rich snippet SERP result. Rich snippet results are hard to come by and using the Video SEO plugin does not guarantee that your site will get rich snippet results, but if Google decides your content is worthy of them, this plugin can help you get one.

SEO News

Is your site focused on news content? If so, the SEO News extension will help you optimize your site in a way to help you get featured in Google News results. It doesn’t directly submit your site to Google News, but it will help you optimize your site in a way that will help you get there. It gives you the option for creating a “Standout Tag,” creating XML News sitemaps, and more.

Local SEO

Lastly, there’s the Local SEO extension. If it’s important for you to be featured in geographically specific search results, this is the extension for you. The Local SEO extension helps you give search engines important information about your business — such as your address, phone number, and hours of operation — so the search engine can give more accurate and detailed information to searchers.

Any questions or thoughts about setting up and using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

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Posted by Dr-Pete

When we do keyword research, we tend to focus on discovery. We take a short list of keywords we think matter, brainstorm wildly, paste the resulting list into a dozen tools, paste the results back into Excel, and measure our success by how often our spreadsheet crashes. Then, we throw it all away when our tax attorney client tells us he only cares about ranking #1 for “taylor swift downloads,” because he heard that gets a lot of traffic.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Keyword discovery is a critical process, but what we’re left with at the end is a long and often rambling list to prioritize, and typically we prioritize either by our own gut feelings or by the black box of AdWords global volume. What if there were a better way?

When we were building Keyword Explorer, we wanted to solve the deeper problem — how do we pick the best keywords to start with, given the complexity of Google SERPs and our competition in modern SEO? Which keywords really balance potential traffic with ROI?

Over the course of many months, we created four metrics:

1. Keyword Difficulty (V2)
2. Keyword Opportunity
3. Importance (user-defined)
4. Keyword Potential

Today, I want to explain the philosophy of these metrics, some of the math behind them, and how you can use these ideas to reinvent your approach to keyword research. Stepping outside of our product, I’m going to try and translate these metrics into questions that are relevant to anyone, regardless of which tools you use.

1. How difficult is the keyword to rank for?

All else being equal, we’d rather rank #1 on a keyword that gets a ton of traffic. In the real world, though, all else is rarely equal. High-volume keywords are often highly competitive, which translates directly into more ranking difficulty. More difficulty means more time and/or more money.

A few years ago, we developed a Keyword Difficulty metric based on our authority metrics (Domain Authority and Page Authority). Page Authority (PA) is a constantly evolving metric that is designed to correlate with a page’s ability to rank on Google, based in large part on the page’s link profile. Keyword Difficulty (V1) used Page Authority in the middle-top of SERPs (the median PA, more or less) for a given keyword to approximate how hard that keyword would be to rank on.

Our updated Keyword Difficulty (V2) score uses a more complex, click-through rate (CTR) weighted model of Page Authority across the first page of a SERP, reflecting more of the competitive landscape, and adapts to today’s irregular organic result counts. V2 also does a better job of filling in gaps when PA metrics are missing for one or more results. Finally, V2 scales scores to fill more of the 0–100 range and provide better granularity.

If you want to cheat and build your own proxy for Keyword Difficulty, I’m going to risk a few sales and let you in on a secret. Install the MozBar SEO toolbar (it’s free), run your Google search, and grab the PA from result #4:

Why #4? That’s a rough approximation of the median difficulty of the page, slightly adjusted for the prevalence of SERPs with less than 10 results. You can pull similar data (although in a couple more steps) from Open Site Explorer (also free). Again, it’s a rough approximation, and Keyword Difficulty V2 adds quite a bit, but it’s a start. You’ve got one more column in your spreadsheet.

2. How much organic opportunity is there?

The days of 10 blue links are gone, and today’s SERPs are a complicated mix of paid results, organic results, vertical results, and Knowledge Graph features. Traditional keyword research assumes a mythical page of nothing but blue links and 100% click-through potential.

Let’s look at a modern SERP, a result for the brand “Forever 21” in Portland, Oregon:

While there are many potential opportunities on this page, the only traditional SEO opportunities that a company other than Forever 21 can realistically compete on are the three in green. The first position is naturally dominated by the brand, the two rows of site-links beneath it each occupy one row of organic results, there are two verticals (Twitter and News), a local pack, and the three results at the bottom are a pack of In-depth Articles and not subject to the same algorithm as core organic results. Plus, there’s a Knowledge Panel on the right that has the potential to draw away clicks.

From a traditional SEO standpoint, there is very little organic opportunity available on this page. Our Keyword Opportunity metric attempts to measure this phenomenon. It starts with the assumption of 100% CTR (that’s idealized, of course, but it makes the scale go from 0–100), and then begins subtracting clicks based on non-organic features, including ads. Ads and Knowledge Graph features take away clicks and re-shift the CTR curve. Verticals occupy an organic position and remove the CTR of that position, etc. If the #1 position has site-links, we assume that position has “dominant intent” (to use Google’s vernacular) and probably isn’t in play.

The Keyword Opportunity model gets complicated and it necessarily makes many assumptions, but the goal is to subtract out all of the non-organic elements and try to figure out what’s left. We hope to enhance and evolve this model as time goes by and we gather more data about how features impact CTR.

You don’t have to use Keyword Explorer or build your own, equally complicated model, but I think it’s very important to look at SERPs in a browser as a real searcher and understand the available opportunity. Even if you do keyword research by hand, give that opportunity a score (1–5 is a good start). Some of the most attractive, highest-volume keywords also have the least available opportunity.

3. How important is the keyword to you?

We’ve all got stories about clueless clients, but their experience does matter and some keywords have more business relevance than others. The trick is not to let it become too subjective. Put a number against it. Make your client, boss, or team prioritize. Everything can’t be a 10, so create a column and force them to pick a value. Quantify your intuition and put it to work.

In Keyword Explorer, we wanted to allow customers to adjust keywords up and down to reflect insights and intuitions our models may not have. Importance is essentially a multiplier, and it ranges from 1–10. We default Importance to a value of 3. That may seem like an unusual choice, but it allows you to easily shift a keyword by roughly a factor of 3 in either direction (1 = 1/3X, 9 = 3X). It also gives you a bit more granularity for upward adjustments than downward. Our assumption is that most people will tend to focus importance adjustments on critical keywords that are essential to their business.

4. Which keywords have the most potential?

So now you’ve got a mountain of data, which is great in theory but a bit overwhelming for many of us in reality. We thought it was important that people have the raw metrics — many of you are advanced SEOs and want to slice-and-dice the data into your own models. However, we also thought it was important to provide guidance and help make sense of it all. Perhaps the toughest question at the end of the keyword research process is “Where do I start?”

Counting keyword Volume, we have the following metrics (or variables):

• Volume (V)
• Keyword Difficulty (KD)
• Keyword Opportunity (KO)
• Importance (I)

Keyword Potential (KP) combines all of these metrics, creating a weighted score (also 0–100). Volume is a real number that carries meaning by itself. You can think of both Keyword Difficulty and Keyword Opportunity as multipliers. Higher Difficulty reduces Potential, while higher Opportunity increases Potential. Likewise, Importance is a direct multiplier. Our formula for Keyword Potential looks something like this:

KP = sqrt(V) * (1 – KD / 100) * (KO / 100) * I

We use the square root of Volume so that high-volume keywords don’t automatically overwhelm all of the other metrics, but very high-volume keywords still naturally carry a lot of potential. The resulting value is re-scaled in Keyword Explorer to a 0–100 score, but that math gets a bit tricky and is somewhat unique to our own internal metrics and the ranges of data we historically encounter.

Even if you do keyword research by hand or in a semi-automated fashion, there are many ways to adapt this basic concept and create a useful meta-metric. Obviously, one metric can never convey all of the complexity of rich data, but it’s important to remember that this is not an either/or situation. You can use a meta-metric for sorting and prioritization, while still keeping all of its original components for deeper insights.

Richer metrics for a richer world

No metrics are perfect, but the Google landscape is richer and more complex than ever, and it’s important that our metrics and tactics evolve as SERPs evolve. Whether or not you use Keyword Explorer, keyword research is still a fundamental building block of a strong SEO campaign, and that research has to reflect modern SEO realities. Understanding the interplay of volume, difficulty, opportunity, and your own intuition of importance is an important next step, and those concepts extend far beyond any single product. If you end up adapting any of these ideas, I’d love to hear about it. Extra credit for Excel spreadsheets, especially ones that crash my computer.

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Posted by MoosaHemani

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

An effective e-commerce product page captures the audience’s attention and compels them to convert to paying customers.

Many e-commerce businesses believe a product page is all about high-resolution images with detailed descriptions for each product.

Although these are important areas that need to be considered, thinking that they are the only elements needed to win the game for you is overly simplistic.

In this post, I’ll discuss the elements that make a product page captivating for visitors. I’ll discuss in detail the things you should consider doing on your product pages so that they stand out from the competition.

Product URLs must be a priority

Let me start out with something that’s critical to get right, yet is often neglected: optimizing product URLs. Unfortunately, I know dozens of e-commerce stores that don’t consider the URL to be part of a product page at all, much less one of the most important parts.

Well, guys, they’re wrong. Ignoring this vital fact can seriously impede your click-through-rate (CTR), especially in terms of organic searches.

Remember, there are literally thousands of choices for a visitor once she decides to buy a product online. She will go for options that she’s satisfied with. Let’s suppose a user runs a Google search and sees this in the results:

Note: I’ve purposely hidden the titles and descriptions so you can focus on the URLs.

Now, try and understand the psychology of a potential customer who has multiple available choices online. Look closely at the two URLs given above. Which one would you click if you were looking to buy men’s shirts?

Naturally, the first one — it’s clear that upon clicking the link, you will directly land on the men’s clothing section of an e-commerce site. The second URL, on the other hand, look like it will take you to a brand page — which may or may not offer the shirts you’re looking for. (The second URL doesn’t make it clear whether they’re selling shirts for men or women.)

Takeaway: SEO-friendly URLs aren’t simply important because they’ll give you better rankings in search engines; they also answer basic questions pertaining to the buyer’s awareness stage.

A URL must give a clear indication of where the user will land once he clicks it; therefore, it must be relevant to the search query.

Think carefully about product titles

Your titles should be SEO-friendly, but there’s a very fine line between SEO-friendly titles and overly optimized title tags.

Catchy and attractive titles can significantly increase the number of clicks.

Let’s suppose you’re searching for “business plan consultant” and all you see is a title loaded with different keywords that basically mean the same thing. Now compare this to another page that has the correct keywords to please potential buyers and search engines. Which page title would you click?

The reason why I’d choose the first one is that its message is clear, and it’s completely relevant to what I’m searching for.

So, if the product page is stuffed with all the possible keywords that the audience could possibly search for, you’re actually decreasing your chances of being clicked.

Takeaway: Titles are important for search engines, but they’re equally important for your target audience. Make sure the title for your product page is well thought out, relevant, and delivers the complete message in 65 characters or less.

Always use high-resolution images

A website’s image section is one of the most important sections of a product page, as it’s sure to capture the attention of visitors (provided that it is well-constructed).

The clearer your product image, the more interest you can arouse in your visitors. A visitor is bound to look for the image of a product in order to make sure that it is, indeed, what he wants to spend his money on.

When it comes to images on product pages, you should consider the following few things:

Image size

When I say high-resolution, I don’t just mean the image quality, but also the image size. The image should be of a size that lets users easily see the product details and understand what it would look like when they receive it at their doorstep.

Images that are either too small or too large (in a way that doesn’t fit the screen) can negatively impact user experience, thereby leading them to leave the page.

The best thing to do is to use images of the same size and allow website visitors to zoom in to take a closer look at the details.

I like how Sophie & Trey present the images on their product page. They display two images of the same product side-by-side, and a visitor can get a closer look at the product by hovering the cursor over a specific area of the page.

Multiple angles

If you want users to buy your products, then you have to encourage them to make a purchasing decision by giving them all the product details they need to do that. Normal images are two-dimensional. If you take photos of your products from multiple angles, however, you can give your potential customers a more realistic of how your products look in person by presenting them virtually as three-dimensional images.

For electronic products like cell phones, laptops or tablets, it’s important to show visitors multiple angles so they can understand how long or wide a product is, how it looks up close, and how it will look and feel in their hand.

If you have a fashion brand, then try showing the same dress of models with different looks. This will make it easier for the visitor to imagine how she will look in the dress she is looking at if you purchased it from your site.

Takeaway: When you optimize your product pages, make sure the product images are high-quality and available in different angles. This will allow visitors to not only see what your products look like, but virtually get a sense for how they feel as well, thereby increasing the likelihood that they’ll convert into paying customers.

Product videos

This one is simple, and becoming increasingly important in the world of e-commerce. Like it or not, videos can work wonders for fast sales.

You don’t have to trust my words. Listen to the head of search at ao.com, who has tried it on her website and reaped the rewards of success:

“Video gives us the opportunity to wow our customers and this, in turn, delivers results. We have tested and proven that when someone watches our video reviews they’re 120.5% more likely to buy, spend 157.2% longer on the site, and spend 9.1% more per order. So my focus this quarter is to increase customers watching video. Simple.”

There are some common questions about video that come to mind, especially if you’re looking at e-commerce from a technical point of view. For example, what’s the best method to add videos? Should we use a CDN, upload videos on YouTube and embed the links on our website, or something else?

This guide will help you answer those questions and more.

Takeaway: Including product videos on your product pages is a trump card that leads to better conversions. If you’re skeptical, invest in videos for a bit and see if your conversions improve. If so, create a budget for making high-quality product videos on an ongoing basis.

Get creative with product descriptions

The product page description is important from two aspects. First, it helps you with SEO. With unique, quality, and keyword-centric product descriptions, your chances of ranking for product-related keywords via search engines will be higher. Second, well-written product descriptions can engage visitors and encourage them to convert into paying customers.

If you have a website with thousands of products, the common challenge is to write unique and high-quality product descriptions. While overcoming this challenge can be frustrating, you need to do it or you’ll risk losing out on considerable amounts of potential traffic (and paying customers).

Even if your target audience can read hundreds of words in the description section, my advice is to show only 60 to 80 words, and hide the rest under “more.”

Takeaway: Following are a few of the things you need to keep in mind when creating product descriptions for your e-commerce website:

• You have to create unique and engaging product descriptions that allow users to convert into paying customers.
• Do not copy product descriptions from manufacturers’ websites, as doing this will kill your conversion rates.
• Either invest time on creating product descriptions for each of the products, or hire talented people on a freelance project basis to help you with it. Make sure to keep the quality in check.

These are the few ideas to keep in mind while creating product descriptions that are not only SEO-friendly but also enhance user experience.

Provide quantity and color selection options

From personal experience, I can tell you that I bounce from product pages if options for color selection or purchasable product quantities are either unavailable or difficult to find. I know people who actually pay higher prices to other manufacturers/retailers that have this option available.

The whole idea is to make it easy for the user to find and buy multiple products at the same time, instead of forcing him to come back and buy again.

Also, if you have a product that is available in different colors, it’s better to create it as one product with the option to choose three different colors instead of three different products.

Takeaway: The ideal product page means little to no frustration for the visitors.

User reviews can work wonders for your business

There are two different mindsets in the e-commerce industry as it regards reviews.

One view is that there shouldn’t be a review section on the product page, as most people don’t really leave reviews, and an empty review page is unappealing.

On the other hand, some believe there should be a user review page, as it will provide some extra unique content to the page.

I don’t think either of the above is the correct method of implementing user reviews.

I’m a strong advocate of using a strategy like the following for reviews:

• Send an email to all your happy customers and offer them a 10–20% discount if they’re willing to leave a genuine comment on your product page about their purchase.
• Another idea is to gamify reviews in a way that would encourage buyers to leave reviews on the different product pages on your website in a way that benefits them.

Takeaway: User reviews are very important as they strongly impact visitors’ buying decisions, but implementing them with yet another plugin could be a mistake. The idea is to deploy a smart strategy and adjust it as needed.

Don’t forget your social sharing buttons

Having prominent and easy-to-use social sharing buttons on your product pages encourages users to share products with their social circles. This will not only increase your numbers, but the returning social traffic from this activity can bring in more conversions for your website.

Takeaway: Encourage visitors to share your products within their social circles by rewarding them with freebies every now and then.

Be smart with the “add to cart” button

This is the most important element of the page from the perspective of conversion optimization. The “add to cart” button must be easy to find; otherwise, you’ll risk losing potential customers.

The fashion brand Lulu’s websites provides us with another excellent example of how the “add to bag” button can be effectively used to drive sales on product pages. The main color theme of the website is black, but if you focus on the add to bag button, you’ll notice it stands out because it’s pink.

Takeaway: The “add to cart” button needs to stand out from the overall color scheme of the page so the user can easily identify it and proceed towards the checkout.

Cross sell and upsell

You can always add elements on your product page that will help you cross-sell and upsell stuff to get the most out of a customer.

This is a great example of cross-selling by Nordstrom. I don’t think their placement is outstanding at the moment, but when you’re implementing this on your product page you can do some testing to see what works best for your audience.

Takeaway: Consider showing related products together with the product that the user intends to buy (cross-selling) or selling related products as a package (upselling).

An e-commerce website is incomplete without live chat

The numbers speak for themselves.

If you’re a business that supplies products to several countries, try using live chat software that supports multiple languages to help you build better relations with overseas clients.

Takeaway: Do I really need live chat software on my website? An e-commerce business should quit pondering this question and start investing in live chat.

Pricing

This one is a personal favorite. There’s no serious e-commerce website on earth that won’t add the price on the product page or will make it hard to find. So, why are we even talking about this in the first place?

That’s because as a business you should remain mindful of a few things when including pricing on product pages:

• Make prices clear and easy to read.
• There are different pricing strategies you can try. I wrote a detailed article on the subject a while ago and you can read it here: 4 Pricing Strategies for SaaS Startups to Increase Conversion Rate (applicable to e-commerce, as well).
• Experiment with adjusting pricing according to the scarcity principle and you’ll see an overall improvement in conversion rates.

In the above example, the company is using the “magic of the number nine” technique on their website.

Takeaways: Keep the prices on your product page simple, clear, and readable. Try different pricing tactics that work within your industry, such as the “number nine technique”, the “discount on bulk order” offer, and the “scarcity principle.”

Be trustworthy

The buying cycle starts with a single question and moves forward when it gets answered.

While the potential customer is on the product page deciding whether or not they should buy the product, the most important question running through their mind is “Why should I trust this company?”

At Workplace Depot, we use this trust signal throughout the website (including the product pages) which is why our conversions over the months have only grown.

Having a trust signal on the product page is important, but where to put it is tricky and can only be assessed via A/B testing.

Try placing the trust signals on different parts of the page and test it against the data to see which place works well with your target audience.

Takeaway: Quality trust signals are important and need to be included throughout your e-commerce website in order to increase overall business conversions.

Page load time

I always advise my e-commerce clients to go with a minimalistic design because less clutter allows websites to load quickly. Slow page loads will kill your SEO and dramatically decrease your conversions.

This infographic by Kissmetrics nails it perfectly:

Takeaway: In e-commerce, every second counts. Make your product pages clean and light. Visitors don’t have patience for slow websites.

Mobile

If your product pages are not mobile-friendly, you’re likely losing fifty percent of your prospective customers.

The same factors above apply for mobile, but remember: folks are even more distracted on mobile devices, so using concise, clear messaging with large, easy-to-read fonts is your best bet.

Conclusion

Product pages are often neglected as businesses focus on optimizing their e-commerce sites for long-tail keywords at the expense of the user.

Don’t make this mistake.

Focus instead on optimizing your product pages by keeping user experience at the forefront of all your actions, and you’ll very likely be rewarded with higher conversions.

If you think I’ve missed something, please let me know by adding it in the comments section.

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