Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve been doing something on Google quite a lot lately, and I’ve come to find out it’s part of a larger trend. When I search for something, say “best electric lawnmower”, I’ll stick the word “reddit” at the end of it and search for “best electric lawnmower reddit” instead. The results are tremendously better. You […]
SEO
Google extracts “near me” from search phrases
Reading Time: < 1 min I mentioned a few months ago that using the words “near me” on your website (or even in the name of your business) was unlikely to help improve your search rankings, and now there is some more data to support that. To be clear, people search for things “near me” all the time, myself included. […]
Anchor and twist
Reading Time: < 1 min This term has been around for a long time, but I hadn’t noticed it until very recently. It has to do with sharing new ideas, and “anchoring” them to something people are familiar with and then “twisting” into how the new product is different. It’s similar to Seth Godin’s concept of putting your new product […]
Does accessibility help your website rank higher?
Reading Time: < 1 min 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 […]
User engagement doesn’t impact your search rankings
Reading Time: 2 min 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 […]
Internal linking is crucial for your website
Reading Time: 2 min 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 […]
More content doesn’t mean more traffic, except when it does
Reading Time: 2 min If you’re striving to get your site to rank higher in Google, you often hear two big things: Google loves more content and Google loves fresh content. Neither are necessarily true, though they’re not necessarily false either. For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider “more content” and “fresh content” to be the same thing. If […]
15% of all searches on Google are still brand new
Reading Time: < 1 min Over the years, Google has frequently shared that a large percentage of the searches on their site are for phrases they’ve never seen before. This is heavily related to search queries getting longer, which I first talked about 13 years ago and continues to progress to this day. As of right now, 15% of all […]
Google being less transparent can be a good thing
Reading Time: < 1 min For decades, there have been calls for Google to be more transparent about how their search algorithm works. While it’d be essentially impossible to share because it’s so wildly complex, even if sharing was possible it might still be a bad idea. In a recent Twitter poll, search engine experts were asked about the impact […]
Does “near me” help your website rank better?
Reading Time: 2 min Many people include the words “near me” when performing local searches on Google, such as searching for something like “car dealer near me”. Google understands this, and essentially extracts “near me” and just runs it as a local search, which makes sense. However, if Google treats it that way, does it make sense to include […]