Reading Time: 2 minYour website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care. It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that […]
SEO
Be careful when measuring your targets
Reading Time: 2 minA few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“ To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress […]
You don’t need more website traffic
Reading Time: < 1 minA goal of almost every website owner in the world is more traffic. “If I’m making $100/day with 1,000 visitors, then if I double my traffic I’ll double my revenue!“ It’s not always that easy. Getting more traffic on your site isn’t a bad thing, but rather than getting more traffic you should work on […]
Don’t overthink SEO
Reading Time: 2 minThere is a tendency to think that ranking well in Google is a big, mysterious, complex thing. It’s really not. I said years ago that Google doesn’t change the rules for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that still holds true. Things change frequently, for sure, but most of those are just Google getting better at […]
Spot the imposter
Reading Time: 2 minWhen dealing with a professional of any kind, you expect that they know the lingo. For example, I’m not very knowledgeable about how a car works, but if I’m talking to a mechanic and I mention that I think I might have an issue with my transmission, and he responds with “what’s a transmission?”, I […]
Users don’t click on your blog page, and that’s ok
Reading Time: 2 minYou’ve probably heard that having a blog on your site is a great way to increase traffic and awareness, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, most users that visit your site won’t go over and visit your blog page. If that’s the case, then why blog at all? Because it’s intended for everyone else. […]
Page Experience is becoming more important to Google
Reading Time: 2 minFor the past few years, Google’s “page experience” update has essentially been used as a tie-breaker. If you have features such as HTTPS on your site (which you should), or your site loads quickly (as it should), those weren’t huge ranking boosts. In fact, Google confirmed back in 2015 that HTTPS was essentially just a […]
Why did that site show up in the search results?
Reading Time: 2 minGoogle has historically been pretty quiet about what causes site to rank well in the search results. They’ll give high-level ideas (fast loading, great content, etc), but no specifics, and you can read many of my ideas from over the years in the SEO category on this blog. They’re still not opening up a bunch, […]
Why did my website traffic drop?
Reading Time: 2 minI posted a few days ago about a simple change that some websites can make to cause a huge jump in traffic, and the resulting screenshots from Google Analytics show what that looks like. But what if the opposite happens? What if your traffic dips, and you need to figure out why? Google recently published […]
The magic checkbox
Reading Time: 2 minI wrote yesterday about how you should work hard not to confuse Google, and one of the things I mentioned in there was to “make sure your site isn’t doing something stupid“. While that could mean a variety of things, there is one thing that rises above pretty much all of the others, and it’s […]