dmcanally

M Posted 5 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

One of the most important issues this year facing digital marketers is how to prepare for Google’s upcoming Page Experience Update.This May, Google will begin using three key metrics to help assess the user experience of a given webpage based on actual browser data. The three metrics that are critical for this update include:

Largest Contentful Paint: This is the time it takes to load the largest visible element of your page (images, videos etc). Google says load times of less than 2.5 seconds for this element are ideal. 

First Input Delay: This is the time it takes for the first interactive element on a page to respond to the user (hitting play on a video, clicking into a link or a drop down menu etc). Google has stated times less than 100 milliseconds is ideal. 

Cumulative Layout Shift: As pieces of a site load, elements of the page will move around as pieces render. This shift in layout can cause people to click on the wrong things and ultimatley provide a poor user experience. This is measured from a score to 0-1. While some layout shift is inevitable, Google has stated less than .1 is ideal. 

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What will this mean for websites? 

For large companies whose websites have lots of moving parts, it can be challenging to meet these benchmarks without making drastic changes to their entire infrastructure. Sitewide changes involves multiple stakeholders, conflicting business priorities and often lead to sizable projects. To be successful in preparing for this update, digital marketers need compelling data and very prescriptive prioritization in order to sell requirements into their organization. 

Here are five key strategies that can help you address the core web vitals of your website and justify the implementation work needed.

1. Assess how your segment is doing
2. Evaluate your infrastructure
3. Use Log File Analysis as a priority guide
4. Build a holistic fallover plan
5. Use a combination of micro and macro trends to forecast overall impact

1. Assess how your segment is doing

It’s critical you keep a pulse on this for your own web properties. But you also need to understand your landscape. It can be difficult to scale measuring multiple URLs if you’re only using things like Google’s Page Speed Insight Tool. Tools like Brightedge Instant enable users to look at batches of URLs and compare their performancees. If they measure URLs with the top share of voice in a keyword group and run the page speed test on them, they have an instant readout of what competitors are vulnerable and where they have opportunity. Some ways to use this approach include: 

• Brand Protection: Get a high level view of how sensitive your branded searches are to changes in May by assessing the core web vitals of the top brands. 
• Striking Distance Keywords: Build a keyword group by using Data Cube to see which keywords are on page 2. Use the Share of Voice report to aggregate the top URLs to help your company understand what could be gained or lost for terms you’re almost on the first page for. 
• Product level keywords: Build and measure URLs that dominate key product categories. Pinpointing which of these categories are going to be sensitive to the Page Experience Update in May will help you put the context of the update in business impact. This can help your organization understand what the visibility fluctuations could mean for customers looking for your products. 

2. Evaluate your infrastructure

There are a range of issues that could cause metrics like first input delay to be slow. You should be able to address many of these through common code optimization techniques. If pages are built on custom apps or content management systems that require multiple javascripts to render content, you may need to seek other ways to help your site meet performance benchmarks.  

How your site is hosted, and its total infrastructure can have an impact on how well it serves content. In addition to evaluating on-page factors and loading aspects specific to a page, consider how your site it hosted, what platforms it is built on and so forth. These may be big overhauls but if you’ve got data to show how significant it could impact the channel, it may be worth it. 

3. Use Log File Analysis as a priority guide

One of the most common challenges with enterprise websites, is they feature legacy code, and elements that are no longer in service. Log files can help marketers see what aspects of the site may be particularly prone to slowing down load times reducing the sites ability to react quickly to user input. SEO’s typically use log file analyzers to get a birds eye view into how crawlers are getting through the site. This same principle can help you address contentful paint and input delay issues at scale. While Google has stated this measurement is driven by browser data, the experiences crawlers have on the site can offer invaluable data points to prioritize how to optimize your site’s experience. Some examples of how log file analysis can help marketers prepare for the Core Vitals update:

• Identify which parts of your site are likely to be prone to core web vital issues and why
• Sense and help forecast what gains could be hindered by a poor page experience using log file analysis
• Pinpoint what files need compression help at scale
• Fuel automated optimization services

Once you are aware of these issues, there are scaled ways to address them. For example, Brightedge’s AutoPilot compresses images automatically, eliminating this as a task. 

4. Build a holistic failover plan

If you’ve used share of voice reporting to identify which of your search results are prone to fluctuations in May during the Page Experience Update, you have a critical collaboration point for your media teams. If you anticipate having some vulnerabilities when the update rolls out, it may be wise to lean on paid search to help run air cover while you implement. 

• Create paid keyword campaigns designed to provide coverage where you anticipate ranking loss
• Build proactive conquesting campaigns for keyword groups where organic search results are particularly sensitive
• If you’re using BrightEdge Daily Pulse, it can serve as your virtual war room in the month of May to see what needs to be turned on/off

5. Use a combination of micro and macro trends to forecast overall impact

Measuring trends on both a macro and a daily level not only help you understand where those may be, but they can also help you anticipate what opportunities you could realize by meeting the Core Vitals Benchmarks. For example, Brightedge users that are using Market Insights can see at a high level what behavioral trends are fueling search behavior. This insight fuels things like content strategy, but when coupled with tools like Search console and page speed inisghts on the leaders in each space, it is now possible to forecast and predict what content is likely to be displaced at scale. For Brightedge customers, Daily Pulse makes it simple to visualize how positions are shifting leading up to the rollout, and even pinpoint when it occurs on results that matter to your business.  

We can expect Google’s Page Experience update in May to have significant impacts on the organic channel as a whole. It is important to be armed with the right data and the right tactics to pivot and adjust. Even if your website is meeting the benchmarks, you can use this as an opportunity to pinpoint where you need to focus to generate positive traction. If you’re interested to learn more about how Brightedge’s suite of enterprise technology could help your business navigate things like the May Page Experience Update, please reach out and we can set up a demo today.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Following market trends on a regular basis will help your business to understand customer search behaviors and customer search intent in order to maintain or pivot strategies for maximum sales opportunities. Market Insights is BrightEdge’s newest innovation that allows marketers to tap into search data, the world’s largest, most agile and honest focus group.

Creating Market Insights

Search behavior offers a unique perspective on what audiences care about and how they think about products, services and information. The challenge is that visualizing and capturing this data in a way that makes it scalable so a company can truly use it to sense what their market wants is difficult. BrightEdge saw an opportunity to leverage billions of data points collected via Data Cube to build a new way of understanding a market that has the depth of business intelligence at the speed of search.

For example, if you’re an apparel company, you may have seen an increase in interest of your loungewear products over the last year. Market Insights can show you the interest in near real-time using Google’s search volume and keyword rank data. It can provide the pages of your site that should be optimized, and the specific keywords consumers are searching for in order to capitalize on those opportunities. Since this insight is rooted in search, it refreshes and updates automatically so brands can sense and respond in real-time as consumer preferences for loungewear products change.

Often when companies are trying to understand their market, they might work with an agency or marketing firm to conduct surveys, consumer interviews, testing, etc. to better gauge audience interest. Market Insights harnesses search data and provides direct and actionable insights to guide these marketing and SEO decisions. Rather than waiting for an agency report that comes every six months, Market Insights pulls data monthly. This enables marketers to stay on top of trends, quickly identify or pivot strategies and provide data to report to the appropriate person.

In addition, Market Insights provides granular data underneath these macro perspectives to drill down to individual keyword performance. Here, you can solve the needs of the executive team looking for market trends, to the SEO analyst who needs to understand tactical opportunities to influence web page performance. Market Insights is not just a one-time deliverable, but an ongoing solution to making decisions.

Using Market Insights Dashboards

Market Insights offers dashboards that are updated monthly as new search volume is published. This provides fresh insights into market trends for businesses. The below dashboards are two of the main features of Market Insights and what they offer customers.

Demand Landscape Dashboards

• Quickly see how demand is fluctuating across different categories
• Drill into what fuels demand fluctuations down to the keyword level to aid in content and messaging strategies
• Inclusive of six (6) Dashboards providing insights at various topic levels, keyword detail analysis and content recommendations

Market Authority Dashboards

• Evaluate competition based on curated keyword collection and market taxonomy
• Determine how you fare to competitors at page and keyword ranking levels
• Influence keyword strategy using Dashboards providing authority keyword and page detail analysis at various topic levels

Over the past year, we have seen how volatile the market can be. Transforming real-world organic search data into insights provides a better way of viewing the consumer market and which areas of a business are showing an increased interest. Start making strategic and tactical decisions for SEO with Market Insights.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Website performance is an important aspect of maintaining high ranking in the SERPs. Regularly checking on your site’s performance, especially your page speed insights, is a must for any SEO. A great user experience is becoming more and more important to search engines particularly Google as it prepares for its Page Experience Update coming May 2021.

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Understanding Core Web Vitals related to page speed tests

Users expect to begin interacting with a website within seconds. They will very quickly click off of a site if content isn’t loading and they’re unable to interact with your site almost immediately. 

While there are a number of metrics Google measures to consider page speed, there are three Core Web Vitals that score how quickly your page content loads. Understanding these metrics and how to correct your web vitals will be beneficial to your page speed and SEO as Google prepares to severely impact sites with their May update. Below are the three metrics necessary for you to familiarize yourself with:

• LCP – Largest Contentful Paint refers to the point when main content is loaded on a page
• CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift is layout instability and refers to when content shifts up or down and you unexpectedly interact with part of a site you didn’t mean to
• FID – First Input Delay refers to the delay when your page is loading but you can’t immediately interact with it

You can learn more about evaluating and fixing Core Web Vitals in this post.

Resources to test website speed for your business 

There are a number of resources to dive deep into the health and performance of your website. You can use them to test the performance of your site as well as competitors. Understanding how your page speed compares to your competitors should be part of your competitive analysis. Sometimes, you might find that fixing the errors provided to you by one resource may not have improved scores the way they were predicted to. Because of this, it’s important to have several tools you can combine to gain different suggestions or recommendations into fixes. You can perform a page speed test using any of the below resources.

BrightEdge Instant. You can leverage BrightEdge Instant to assess page speed performance and gain insights into Core Web Vital metrics. Instant provides actionable and prescriptive recommendations to improving page speed across the most important pages of your site. You can run ten URLs to test website speed with Instant, speeding up the task compared to inputing one URL at a time using Lighthouse. 

From your analysis, you can export all of the granular information pointing to specific files that may be causing page speed issues. Below you can see what testing website speed in Instant looks like.

BrightEdge ContentIQ. Performing a website audit using ContentIQ will also give you an audit into page speed insights and how quickly your pages are loading. ContentIQ offers a response time which is tied to a metric called TTFB – or time to first byte. TTFB measures how long a browser has to wait to receive its first byte – or piece of data – from your site.

Google PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights is also referred to as Lighthouse. It analyzes and calculates your page to give you an overall performance score on both mobile and desktop. If you test your page multiple times, you might notice that the scores fluctuate. The reasons for this are many and can include testing on different devices, browser extensions, traffic routing and more. Google recommends you think of your site performance as an overall score that includes more than one score rather than a single number.

The weight of each performance metric Lighthouse 6 considers includes:

• First Contentful Paint – 15%
• Speed Index – 15%
• Largest Contentful Paint – 25%
• Time to Interactive – 15%
• Total Blocking Time 25%
• Cumulative Layout Shift – 5%

Below you can see the information Lighthouse provides you about your page speed insights.

Pingdom Speed Test. The most basic use of Pingdom is free and offers a different visualization into page speed insights and recommendations on improve page speed performance. With Pingdom, you can sort by what’s most important to you. You can determine strategies to fix errors by sorting by load order, load time, receive time, send time and more. Understanding which areas are costing your site a slow loading time and sorting them by most impactful can lead to efficiency when fixing. Below you can see an example of the information Pingdom offers when testing website speed.

Improving page speed performance

Once you test performance, it’s time to fix any errors that bog down your load times. If you have the time, strategize around which fixes are most impactful to the health of your website. 

Take a look at your scores and locate the elements of your site that take the longest to load and fix those first. For example, if Lighthouse is indicating it takes 4.16 seconds for render blocking resources to load, you can save up to 4.16 seconds of load time by eliminating render blocking resources.

Check out this post on fixing page speed after you test performance for more information on these insights.

Faster pages make users happy and provide an overall better user experience. If your pages take too long to load, you could be losing customers within seconds. The first step in maintaining good organic ranks and quality traffic to your site is by performing page speed tests to understand where you can improve page speed.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 5 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Google has announced that their interstitial penalty has gone live, and we want to make sure our community is up-to-date on what this penalty entails and what Google wants to accomplish by enacting it.

Google announced that there would be an impending interstitial penalty for intrusive ads on websites. Like the mobile-friendly update in 2015, the interstitial penalty ideally boosts the user experience while also providing website owners with enough time to make the adjustments before their sites lose traffic or rank. In a sense, the interstitial penalty is related to the mobile-first bias as they are even more disruptive on the small screen.

What are interstitials?

Interstitials are ads that appear when a person lands on a page on your site and a full screen ad appears before the user goes where they're intended to go. It will cover the original page of content, immediately drawing the attention of the visitor to the ad material. Typically, users have the option to skip the ad or else there is a countdown that will automatically redirect the person back to the original content after a few seconds.

Interstitial ads are unique to banner ads as they are sometimes interactive and perform better than banner ads. Because the ad takes up the entire screen, they're more difficult for users to click off of. Some brands will use an ad background that forces the "X" button to be slightly hidden, therefore paying more attention to the ad.

How do sites use these interstitial ads?

Interstitial ads are attractive to site owners because of their ability to focus the attention of users on the ad material and drive response. Since they dominate the screen while they are displayed, many brands see positive returns. Interstitial ads are absolutely only effective if implemented correctly. Check out Google's guide to properly integrating interstitial ads on an Android or integrating interstitial ads on iOS.

Globally, interstitial ads produce results. It was reported that several brands using them saw strong returns in the past, including a hotel chain that saw a 25x increase in video views and a game developer that saw a 7x increase in conversions. A study reported of BlackLight Studio games saw a 38 percent increase in revenue from interstitial ads. Airbnb and Pinterest saw a 100 percent and 300 percent increase in installations individually with interstitial ads.

An example of one of these interstitial ads can be seen on the website, Whosampled. When visiting the site, users are prompted to download their app, but the ad itself completely covers the screen and can thus make it difficult for people who just want to navigate to the original page of content.

Google's interstitial penalty

Google penalizes websites that use what they termed, ‘intrusive’ interstitial advertisements. Adding interstitial ads where they do not belong can result in a poor user experience. Because of this and the fact that Google penalizes for intrusive ads, you must place the interstitial page during a transition moment in the user's experience. An example of this would be after a round of a game is complete. Do not place interstitial ads in the middle of a blog post or article. Interrupting a user's reading is a big no-no.

Google explains that they wanted to lower the ranking of websites that had interstitial ads hindering the ability of the user to access the content they sought. Specifically, Google listed in their announcement the types of interstitial ads they will target:

• Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
• Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.
• In contrast, Google said that the interstitial penalty will not impact these types of ads when used correctly:
• Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
• Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content, such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.

Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Since the interstitial penalty went live on January 10, 2017, we have already begun to see the impact of this change on site users. For some sites, the interstitial penalty has been severe and resulted in noticeable drops in ranking with some marketers reporting that offenders have lost as many as ten or more spots in the mobile SERPs. It is believed by many in the community that the penalty has been rolling out slowly, which means that some sites might still be penalized in the coming days and weeks as it begins to hit all offenders.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when integrated interstitial ads:

1. Avoid interrupting readers
2. Pay attention to ad loading times to avoid a slow page speed
3. Use a 320x480 or 480x320 size for ads
4. Test your interstitial webpage before adding it to your app
5. Create an ad that's as engaging as possible to keep a user's attention
6. Allow user's to find the X to close out the ad but not too easily

What the Google interstitial penalty means for brands

It is important for all site owners to recognize the intentions of this update, even if they do not use this style of ads themselves. Google has been paying more attention to the mobile user experience. They want to make sure that users on mobile devices have a seamless experience. Interstitial ads can make it difficult or confusing for people trying to access the original content, thus the interstitial penalty. All brands, however, should be paying close attention to how they can improve the mobile experience for their users, as Google is only going to continue to push towards optimal mobile UX.

All BrightEdge clients can easily track their mobile rankings and traffic with the BrightEdge SEO platform. We encourage you to play close attention as this update goes live. Even if you do not use these types of ads, it can be helpful to see if you might even receive a bump in traffic as your competitors receive the interstitial penalty.

Now that Google has officially gone live with their interstitial penalty, it is important for brands to remain in compliance with the latest recommendations. We will continue to look for ways to help our clients optimize their marketing strategies while also keeping you updated on the latest changes that Google proposes.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

In October 2019, Google released its newest and largest algorithm update since RankBrain – BERT. So, what exactly is BERT and does it matter to your SEO?

BERT – Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing and has the ability to better understand the full context of your query by looking at all of the words in your search. Google built new software and hardware to make this update happen to better serve your search results and delve deeper into the relevant information you’re seeking.

Google said, “With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

The search giant understood that through the billions of searches they received every day, people were searching for queries they wouldn’t normally ask for; say – in a day-to-day conversation. Rather, people were gearing their questions to what they thought Google would understand best. With BERT, you now have the ability to search in a way that feels natural to you instead of searching in a way you think Google, or a robot, will understand best.

For conversational queries and long-tail keywords, where prepositions like “for” and “to” are influential words, Google – or rather, BERT – will be able to understand the context of the words in your search. BERT models have the ability to perceive that a word as simple as “to” matters a great deal.

Google systems were previously matching search terms with keywords found on a page but BERT models understand words in different use cases. For example, Google tested and tested before releasing BERT and discovered searching “do estheticians stand a lot at work” matched to a page with “stand-alone” in the copy, simply because the word “stand” was present. The SERP wasn’t relevant to the query. BERT now recognizes “stand” was being used in a different context.

So, does the Google BERT update impact your SEO? You shouldn’t have seen too much of a shift in SEO changes while BERT rolled out like you would have in previous Google algorithm updates. Danny Sullivan of Google has said not to optimize for BERT. Continue creating content and optimizing for people and their natural queries.

BERT models are applied to rank and will impact featured snippets Google says, “BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over times.”

The aftermath of BERT

After BERT was released, B2C companies, including AT&T, noticed that high volume head terms helped their rankings. Though, they weren’t ranking for solutions pages anymore but rather, for informational pages. Because of this, BERT altered content strategy for digital marketers. Instead of creating content around selling a consumer, digital marketers must first and foremost define the searched topic.

BERT is designed to determine what exactly the user is asking for so that Google can serve a searcher with the most relevant results pages. Below you can see different search use cases for the keyword “rose.” “What is a rose” turned up results pages for what a rose flower is. Here, Google used natural language processing and assumed that this search was requesting general information on what a rose is.

Then, you can see “what is rose” resulted in information on the pink wine Rosé. Here, Google assumed a search for the wine and offered insights through the entirety of page one about the pink colored wine, how it’s made, where it originated from, why it recently became so popular and more.

Below you can see “define rose” resulted in several different results pages. Rose is not only a flower, a type of wine and a name, but it’s also a verb. The “define rose” search wasn’t as certain as the ones above and offers multiple definitions for “rose" to answer a range of possibilities for the search.

Tracking BERT changes

It’s difficult to track whether or not BERT impacted your site ranks, but it’s possible to see how it continues to change your ranking content over time.

Data Cube offers monthly documentation to report on shifts in keyword rankings. You can track keywords in Keyword Reporting week-over-week to determine which keywords rank for your pages. There, you can see the content performing and what type of content your site is ranking for. Is it what is, who is, how is content? If you’re ranking for glossary and FAQ pages, strategize a content plan around even more informational content for your site.