Reading Time: 2 min I’ve come across two very different website visibility-related situations in the last few weeks, and I thought they were interesting cases on how Google is able to see your site. They’re both related to “the magic checkbox” being misused. The first is with a friend of mine. They’re building a new site with another company, […]
Websites
Precise attribution is nearly impossible, and that’s ok
Reading Time: 2 min When we’re helping a company with their marketing efforts, we have a variety of tools that we employ to help track data and understand how things are performing. Starting with tools like Google Analytics, we set up data scorecards, heatmaps, trackable phone numbers, and a variety of excellent tools to help with our efforts. At […]
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. […]
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 […]
Are your requests scaring customers away?
Reading Time: 2 min 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 […]
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 […]
The right way to forward URLs
Reading Time: < 1 min When it comes to forwarding addresses on your website, there are a few different scenarios to consider. First you have the “always forwarded” pieces like I shared a few years ago, to catch special URLs or typo domains. The other scenario is when you build a new website to replace your old one, and want […]
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 […]