Does accessibility help your website rank higher?

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Online accessibility has become an important topic over the past few years. I’ve shared some tips on how you can improve accessibility on your site, and this short podcast offers a few more bits of advice.

The question is — does Google reward your site for being accessible? The short answer is “no”, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced.

Google’s John Mueller put it this way (via SE Journal):

“No, not really. So I think accessibility is something that is important for a website because, if you drive your users away with a website that they can’t use, then they’re not going to recommend it to other people.

But it’s not something that we would pick up and use as a direct ranking factor when it comes to search. Maybe that will change over time. ”

He’s not wrong. At this time, Google doesn’t measure and rank sites based on their level of accessibility. However, many of things that you need to work on to help with accessibility will also tend to help with your rankings in Google.

A site that loads quickly, doesn’t bury text in images, uses proper alt text, and makes good use of headings will accomplish both areas. Sites like that will be more accessible, but they’ll also tend to rank better.

Accessibility won’t be a bonus for your rankings in and of itself, but spending the time to do it right will have secondary benefits for you, and your users will absolutely appreciate it.

Are your requests scaring customers away?

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When we’re developing a website, we work hard to make sure that every single page has a goal. The call-to-action (CTA) might be to sign up for a newsletter, reach out with more questions, or to simply continue on to another article for more information, but you have to have something there. Too often I find web pages that get to the end of the content and then… nothing.

However, if you go in too aggressively with your CTA, you might just scare people away instead. Much like the idea of not proposing on a first date, easing people toward a commitment is usually the right way to go.

An easy place to start is by asking for less information. If you have an email sign-up form on your site, asking fewer questions will generally result in a much higher conversion rate. While I’d love to know the zip code and annual income of everyone on our list, reducing the questions and only asking for their email address is a much easier commitment for a user to take.

Why is someone here?

As you’re working to figure out the goal for each page, taking the time to understand why someone might be reading a particular page can help you understand how far into the journey they are.

  • If they’re browsing your “about” page, they’re likely pretty new.
  • If they’re looking at the details in your knowledgebase find out how your system handles on obscure scenario, it’s likely that they’re much further along. Treat them accordingly.

For most people, simply taking the time to have a goal in mind for every page would be a huge step forward, but if you can craft the CTA for each page based on the type of person you expect would be there, you’ll see much better results.

Keep It Tight

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I’ve shared before that I tend to use as few words as possible when writing or speaking. It was something that I tried for a while to “fix” before I realized that it was already a pretty good thing.

Fewer words doesn’t mean that something needs to be thin, just that you can remove the excess bloat. While most of my posts on here are under 300 words (this one is just 207 words), I have some that are much longer (Roam Research at 2,038 words and the Digital Efficiency Framework at 2,976 words).

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Handley puts it like this:

“Brevity doesn’t mean bare bones or stripped down. Take as long as you need to tell the story. (The length of content is dictated by the kind of content you’re creating.) The notion of brevity has more to do with cutting fat, bloat, and things that indulge the writer and don’t respect the reader’s time. Keep it tight.”

Mark Twain summarized in fewer words than that:

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

Take as long as you need to get your thoughts across, but the more junk you can trim out, the better.

Write first, fix later

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I’ve talked a good bit about the idea of writer’s block, and how a blank page can be a tough thing to get past. However, if you can just get a smidge of an idea started, that’s often all you’ll need to get the full concept written out.

When you get it all written it might be kind of a mess, but that’s ok. Having a draft that needs to be tightened up is far better than stressing about a blank page.

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Hadley shared a very simple quote from writing teacher Don Murray:

“The draft needs fixing, but first it needs writing.”

I do everything I can to help keep a fresh supply of loose ideas on hand. I read as much as I can, listen to podcasts, and just try to treat the world like a big “blog walk“. The more I have, the easier it is to write those first few sentences. Once I get just a little bit of a start, it all rolls from there.

User engagement doesn’t impact your search rankings

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Keeping users engaged on your website is vitally important, but Google says it doesn’t affect your rankings. I suspect they want it to, but they don’t have a good way to tie your site engagement to the rankings.

The problem for Google is two-fold:

  • If you have Google Analytics on your website, which captures many of those engagement metrics, it doesn’t feed that back to Google for search rankings. Google has stated repeatedly that your data from Analytics doesn’t impact rankings.
  • While Google Analytics is used on a lot of sites, there are millions that don’t use it. Google wants the rankings to be the best they can be, so if they gave more of a boost to sites with Analytics on them, that could make for a worse user experience.

Secondary benefits

While Google doesn’t use engagement metrics directly, you can still gain in the rankings if users are highly engaged. Those highly engaged users are more likely to search for brand-related queries in the future, and they’re also more likely to link to your site and reference it from other places on the internet, which can have a big impact on your rankings.

Really, though?

There are some people that don’t believe this, and think that Google must be using Analytics data at least a little bit. While I’m convinced that they don’t, I certainly don’t have any hard proof so there’s always a chance.

Similar to my “Facebook still isn’t listening to you” post, I’ve done my research and I’m happy with my conclusion, but there is a chance I’m wrong and I’m willing to listen. If you find info that shows how Google might be using engagement to directly impact rankings, please let me know.

Until then, keep working on your website engagement, but consider it mostly a separate task from any search engine optimization work that you might be doing.

I write and therefore I know

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In a recent episode of the “Focus on This” podcast, host Blake Stratton shared something that I found very interesting.

The topic was about journaling, and how it can lead to clarity. Blake took the idea of externalization and put it like this:

Usually you think, “Oh, I know and therefore therefore I write,” it’s not always the case. A lot of times it’s, “I write and therefore I know.” We don’t just learn by consuming, we learn by then trying to articulate what we’ve consumed and put it into our own voice and into our own words.

As I’ve said on here before, that’s my basic idea for publishing this blog. It’s not that I know all of this great stuff that I want to share, but it’s that I come across ideas that might be great and then I use this blog as a way to process and externalize them to help me learn more.

Interestingly enough, in researching a few other thoughts on this post, I dug back into my old Blogging Beats Journaling post — which it turns out was also inspired by a journaling-focused episode of the “Focus on This” podcast.

I still maintain that blogging is better than journaling in many cases, since it forces you to better summarize your thoughts before sharing them, but this latest episode of their podcast has helped me to see the benefits of pure journaling a bit better. Check it out when you have a chance.

Taking an idea from a car thought to a blog post

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Seth Godin has said repeatedly that “writer’s block is a myth”. He said it’s really more like “I have a fear of bad writing”, as he explains in this short video:

However, I tend to disagree. When I sit down to write, I’m not afraid of bad writing, but I often just don’t know where to start. For me, the key is having some ideas ready go to, and I usually do. For most of my posts, they go through three phases.

Capture

Many of my ideas pop up while I’m driving. Perhaps it’s from a podcast that I’m listening to, or maybe my mind is wandering and idea shows up. Either way, I want to capture it for later. In my case, I just use Google Keep for that. I tell my car “Hey Google, take a note” and then leave the note with my voice. Case in point, the idea for this post came in the car, and here is the Keep note that was waiting for me when I got home.

The other big source of my post ideas is from reading, which I unpacked quite a bit here.

Processing

The next step is to move it from Google Keep, or Kindle highlights, or wherever the idea is and get it into Roam Research. You could do the same into Evernote or almost any kind of note-taking app. For this post, it looked like this:

Every idea for a blog post that I have goes into Roam like that, so I always have a steady supply of small nuggets of ideas that I can build out. For this post, that’s all I had to work with, but it was enough.

Writing

Finally, I write the post. I simply head into WordPress, use the title from Roam, and start putting it together. Sometimes I have a lot of notes to work from, sometimes it’s just a few bullets (like this one). Either way, I work it all out in WordPress, and when it’s ready I figure out where it fits into the upcoming schedule via the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin.

Enough in the queue?

With the daily streak I have going, I’m always a bit nervous that I might run out of ideas and break the streak. That concern isn’t when I have very few posts in WordPress ready to go (though I’m not a fan of that situation…), but it’s when I have too few ideas in Roam that I can build out.

If I can keep Roam topped up with ideas, this streak will be easy to maintain. The more easily I can get an idea out of my head and into Roam, the better I’ll be, and things like Google Keep really help make that easy to do.

Collective sharing versus collective building

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The internet is at an interesting place right now, where sharing is becoming easier than ever, but building is becoming more elusive. As people continue to run to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other platforms, they’re finding it increasingly easy to share content.

That’s a not a bad thing, for sure. While I work to obtain a lot of content directly from the source that created it (using tools such as Feedly), most great content still comes my way because someone shared it with me, either via social media or by contacting me directly.

However, while sharing can be a great thing, the slow fade of true content creation on the internet is troubling. Thomas Friedman said it well in his book “Thank You For Being Late“:

“Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.”

Collective building can be amazing, but it’s rare. Wikipedia is likely the best example of that, but so are most news organizations. Anything where people can come together and create is a great place to be, and I hope we find a way to develop more of those in the coming years.

500 days of blogging

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When I started on this back in October of 2020, I was pretty confident I’d make it through the end of that year, and even 100 in a row didn’t seem too bad. However, 500 is a different animal and I’m pleased I’ve been able to keep it up this long.

Because I don’t write fresh posts every day (I write in batches and simply publish every day), my queue ebbs and flows. I’ll have as many as 10-12 posts ready to go sometimes, and other times it gets down to just 1 or 2. When I get down that low, the root cause is usually that I haven’t been reading enough recently. Writing posts is relatively easy, and I enjoy what I learn as I write them, but I sometimes struggle coming up with new ideas to write about.

1000?

Now that I’ve made it this far, 1000 seems possible. I’m not sure if I’ll make it not, but things are going strong now and I plan to keep on running.

I’ve said it a few times now, but the longer I do this the more I’m convinced that most people should be doing the same. Folks like Seth Godin and Chris Lema continue to produce amazing content, I’m seeing other folks like Cory Miller blog more, and people such as Tim Villegas and Evan Chasteen posting very consistently on LinkedIn as well. It’s a big ask, but I strongly encourage you to give it shot and see what it does for your clarity of thought.

If you do, let me know so I can check it out and follow your work!

Internal linking is crucial for your website

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When Google reveals a bit of information about how their search algorithm works, the words they use are very important.

For example, last year Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned that website speed is a “teeny tiny factor” in ranking, which came as a surprise to many people. It’s very important for user experience, but isn’t a major factor to Google.

However, in a recent post about the importance of internal linking on your website, Google’s John Mueller said that it was “super critical” and “one of the biggest things you can do” to help Google. Those are bold words!

Internal Links

I try to be very intentional about links on this site. Sometimes I’ll link out to other sources (such as the link a few paragraphs up), and many times I’ll link to old posts of mine that are relevant for the discussion at hand. For example, while John made it clear that internal links are important, I can point you to a post of mine from last year where he said that you can certainly have too many internal links and perhaps create problems.

Internal links are a huge, easy win, because they benefit both the user and Google. Really, most things that are good for users (unique content, mobile friendliness, etc) are good for Google as well. In most cases, you can think “Would this be good for my visitors?” and be pretty confident that it would also be good in Google’s eyes.

Back to John’s thoughts on internal links, though, here is an extended quote of what he said, and you can read even more over on this great post at Search Engine Journal.

It’s something where internal linking is super critical for SEO.

I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.

And what you think is important is totally up to you.

You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor or maybe you’re the weakest competitor.

With internal linking you can really kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site.