Valuable doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. Relevant long-tail keywords are often cheaper and lead to more conversions; here are five tools to help you find them.
from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1Q3kYGY via transformational marketing
Appearing differently than Google intended, dynamic structured snippets have started showing up in AdWords campaigns and possibly point towards a trend in greater automation.
from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1VhtgxL via transformational marketing
There are certain fundamental trust signals that play a key role in every user’s overall experience when entering your website. In this post, we will explore these trust signals, which every web developer should utilise in order to build a level of trust with their users, in turn undoubtedly improving consumers’ opinions about their specific brand, product or service.
Before we go any further, it’s important to establish what trust signals are.
“Trust is built when no one is looking” (Seth Godin)
Trust signals are subliminal cues from and qualities of your website that have the power to encourage or discourage users from making transactions and communicating with your company. The end goal for these signals is to inspire trust in the consumer.
While some trust signals are unquestionably more important than others, by failing to optimise your site for these relatively quick wins you are underselling your brand and ultimately risking opportunities for site conversions and revenue generation.
Social profiles should be displayed on every page of your website. The most efficient way of doing this is to embed the symbols within the header and footer, linking to each individual profile and in turn making it as easy as possible for the user to engage with your brand.
The actual profiles themselves must be active and relevant to your users, which will help the improvement of conversions and create a brand personality. Social profiles will also allow you to share blog posts to each platform and drive traffic back to your site.
As the digital age continues to escalate, more and more users are heading to social media to talk to friends and share content. If you can connect with your users in this environment, they are more likely to trust you, your brand and your messaging.
Another essential trust signal for your website is to include your email address, phone number, street address and operating hours. This should be in an easily navigable place, such as your site footer, as well as your contact page, as demonstrated below.
Site navigation is an important trust signal as there is a close link between this and user experience. Your site structure must be clear, easily navigable and designed with the user in mind. For example, you should ensure that prime services pages that have their own pages are in the main navigation rather than making site visitors filter through to find them.
By allowing your customers to leave you product or service reviews, you are showing them that their opinions matter. This level of trust is then heightened by adding reviewers’ identities, which confirms the legitimacy of each individual review.
Google may use these reviews to pull through your rich snippet on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google+ reviews in particular are a valuable tool as they impact both the SERPs and click-through rate, enticing potential customers, as reviews can appear within the knowledge graph. When users are logged into their Google+ account, Google will pull in people and companies who are part of their circles, illustrating a sign of trust for your snippet in the SERPs.
Google prefers certain review platforms, such as Feefo, Reevoo and TrustPilot. For more information on these reputable review sites that Google trusts, visit Google’s ‘Understanding Your Seller Ratings’.
You can read more about reviews in a previous Koozai blog post.
For e-commerce sites, Google’s Trusted Stores Merchant shows users that Google ‘identifies and stands behind stores that provide a consistently great shopping experience’. Not only will Google’s Trusted Stores Merchant allow review stars to be featured within text and Shopping adverts, setting you apart from similar businesses, this will also enhance your credibility in the eyes of potential users of your site.
It used to be more difficult to be considered by Google’s Trusted Stores Merchant as there was a higher criteria for companies to meet. You can apply to be part of Google’s Trusted Stores Merchant and discover eligibility, restrictions and all relevant information online on Google’s Trusted Stores Merchant Guidelines.
By including a blog within your website, you are sending a message to your users that you are an expert in the field you’re operating in. By continuously creating fresh content about your topic, you are not only connecting with users and potential customers, but also promoting your business and showing that you are a leader in your area of expertise.
At Koozai, each employee feeds into our blog at least once every six weeks.
When building your website and optimising it, it’s important to determine the trust factors that are relative to your audience. While there are a number of trust factors that can potentially suit a variety of websites, each will have their own specific signals that will resonate with your audience more accurately than others.
Key takeaways from this post are the following. Include signals that will make the user’s life easier when browsing through your website. Establish easy-to-find contact information and location details to instil in your customer a sense of faith in your abilities. These trust signals will carry your brand through and increase conversions and return on investment.
If you invest more time in your site’s trust signals, you will be sure to reap the rewards.
If you have a question for me or there’s something you want me to discuss in more detail, feel free to leave me a comment or contact me on Twitter at @koozai_sally.
The post 6 Essential Trust Signals For Your Website To Follow appeared first on Koozai.com
Structured data gives e-commerce platforms and their partners better insight to help close the gap between supply and demand.
from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1LwmFei via transformational marketing
This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would.
Hey, Kooz fans, I’m Graeme. I’m going to be talking to you today about how you can try and answer some questions about mobile search using Google Analytics. There’s no doubt about it. Mobile search is something that pretty much every business needs to be well aware of. The opportunity there is massive. We’re now seeing the data come out saying that mobile devices are now starting to take the lion’s share of all searches that are being performed, specifically with Google.
So, with that in mind, we should start to treat mobile and desktop not so much separately, but we shouldn’t just absorb everything within one overall kind of view of how the site performs. So what I wanted to do today was kind of think about how you can analyse the opportunity that mobile offers you. Also, look at what you can do within Google Analytics to help you uncover some of those insight, and then push you towards considering what solution it is that you decide to offer to your mobile viewers.
So, with this in mind, where I’ll start is really at the top, basically having a look at your site and what it gets as far as user sessions for mobile devices and for non-mobile devices. I’m quite a big fan of looking for trends as it can tend to help back up some of either preconceived notions or present completely new findings. Data tells a different story to gut feeling. Sometimes it’s worth backing up gut feeling with data or looking to see if the data can just basically destroy those kind of preconceived notions.
So I’m focusing on Google Analytics here. Where I’m going is into the technology report and looking at mobile, the mobile report within that. I think looking at the 3-month period, so looking at the current 3-month period you’re in, comparing that to the previous 3-month period, doing likewise for the current 6-month period, comparing that to the previous 6-month period and doing the same for a 12-month period as well, you’ll start to see a rate of not so much adoption, but it will show you the change in behaviour of the audience that comes to your site, how it’s behaving differently, so using the different mobile devices to access your site.
My gut feeling is that you will probably see an increase in mobile device usage and obviously a slight decrease in the desktop usage of the site. The rate of that will probably define how quickly you need to move to adapt your site structure and content to capitalise on that. And that’s where you then kind of look at what the user behaviour is telling you.
I think it’s well worth and there’s plenty that already kind of exist if you look at the Google Analytics gallery, the assets that are in there, you want to have an advanced segment that isolates just mobile user sessions, mobile and tablets together, another one that excludes mobile and tablet sessions as well so that you can compare and contrast the two different data sets throughout the Google Analytics reports that you can access.
So get yourself one of those. Get yourself on of those as well. I think if mobile is a big consideration to you, it will be well worth considering setting up a view within Analytics that’s just dedicated to mobile traffic. Effectively, you then get a version of Google Analytics that’s solely focused to mobile user data. You don’t run into the issues of data sampling that you do using an advanced segment.
The downside is obviously that you’ll only start collecting data from the moment that you set up the view. You can’t look back historically, which is what an advanced segment can give you. If you apply a segment, it will look at the whole data range that you are applying it to. So those two things are a great asset. They both have pros and cons that you need to be aware of as well.
Now, looking at user behaviour, Google Analytics has a wealth of information that drills down device types so you can start to see the popular devices that are accessing your site. This, I think, will help to inform your strategy moving forward when we’re kind of considering how we’re serving content to the mobile, the non-desktop users.
It might well be that you’ve got a broad range of devices that are commonly accessing the site. There might be stranger cases where there’s a very fixed small set of devices that are regularly driving traffic or using your site. That’s going to be quite interesting, because you have a lot of pros and cons with the three main ways of serving content to mobile users, being responsive design, dynamic serving, or using a parallel solution. So this type of analysis will help to kind of give you a leeway into what solution you want to be offering to your regular users.
The other types of things to look at is you’ll have your money pages. You’ll have the pages that you know are very popular on the site. Is that true with mobile devices? Is it true that there are no other pages that are randomly getting lots and lots of interaction? The rule of thumb really for this is not to assume anything, because until you’ve got the data to back it up, it’s just a gut feeling and you’re potentially going to be missing out on either extra user sessions or, even worse, conversions as well.
So I think looking at the content that’s consumed by mobile users versus desktop, so having a mobile advanced segment and an exclude mobile segment, will show you the same data set but with the two audiences there, looking at the content that’s being consumed, pulling in conversion behaviour as well, which assets are converting better on mobile devices than desktops and conversely the same, because that will pinpoint the areas on the site or at page level that you can make incremental improvements to, which tend to translate to incremental gains.
I should stress as well this type of analysis should be done at page level, all the way through looking at page level so that you’re not having figures over-inflated based on using an average, because an average will dumb down the really bad performers, and it will also not show you the really high performers as well. So it’s worth keeping that in mind.
Things like bounce rate, average duration, the average number of pages that are consumed as well, how does mobile compare to desktop? Those insights will, again, start to tell you where you should be spending your time. For instance, if your mobile traffic converts way better than your desktop traffic, even though it gets, I don’t know, half as much of the amount of sessions, then there’s a real opportunity there to either learn from mobile users using the site or trying to apply the things that you’ve found out there across the board to increase conversions as well.
With that in mind, you’ll then start to look at moving out of Google Analytics and perhaps looking at the SERPs overall, the mobile one versus the desktop one, to understand if there’s any kind of change in what a user is kind of looking for. This can produce difficulties when you’re trying to decide what you’re going to target, identifying keywords, for instance. This will then kind of start to inform, again, how you’re going to serve up content to the people on different devices.
For instance, with responsive design, it’s a great way of obviously having one solution that adapts your pages’ content to the user’s device. However, with a dynamic serving, you can select for a particular device type or screen resolution exactly what content you want to serve up on there, which gives you a bit more flexibility in being able to target different things as well.
Then you’ve also got having a parallel solution, like using a mobile domain, m.domain.com, etc., which helps you have something completely different for your mobile users but throws up the potential issue of duplicating content.
So this is a whole video that’s worth doing all by itself. But it’s easy to see how this type of analysis will start to move people towards identifying what is the best solution for their site’s users.
So that’s been my view on how you can get started slicing and dicing the data that you’ve got in Google Analytics to find some answers about mobile search and where the opportunities are for you. Any questions, let me know in the comments at the end of the video. Also if you want to get in touch, our social profiles are there at the end of the video as well. Thanks very much.
The post Set Your Mobile SEO Strategy Using Google Analytics appeared first on Koozai.com
Learning from larger advertisers and monitoring threats in competitors’ landing pages are just two benefits of using PPC spying tools to monitor to competition’s sales funnels.
from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1NHONO1 via transformational marketing
Continuing from my last post (How Small Businesses Can Dominate Digital), it’s time to get ready for the impending doom of Black Friday, that pre-Christmas explosion of human greed that really makes you question your involvement in society. As a retailer, it’s your responsibility to improve the situation for customers as much as possible – and that means preparing right now. Read on to find out what you need to start doing now!
Will consumers choose to stay at home and shop online this year? We’ve all seen shocking scenes in the news of people crawling over each other to get their hands on a pair of jeans, or a cheap TV or some other life-enriching gizmo. At the time of writing, the Black Friday death toll stands at seven (with 98 injured). That’s an almost impressive level of commitment to shopping.
But nobody seems deterred. If anything, this Black Friday looks set to be the biggest in the UK yet, as last year’s crazy statistics made sure everyone was aware of it. And this year, even more consumers will be turning to their desktops, laptops and touchscreen thingies – possibly due to a fear of being trampled or punched to death by a mob of fellow shoppers.
If previous years are anything to go by, this one’s going to be big online.
Consumers are interesting creatures. We seldom know what we want until someone tells us what we want. People have often made their minds up about the product they intend to buy by the time they come to market due to previous experience, word of mouth or mass-exposure advertising, but where they will buy it from is still up for grabs.
At other times, they need more information, or some kind of reassurance that they’re making the right choice. Reviews, especially in prestigious publications, can really boost confidence in a product – or they can be a deal-breaker.
Big purchases, like laptops and flat-screen TVs, generally come on the back of some pretty hefty online research. Things like food and clothing tend to be somewhat more whimsical purchases, but fashion and cooking blogs do have a major influence on the final purchase. Food and fashion shoppers may seem to be a little less analytical as there’s usually no spec sheet to a potato or dress, whereas laptops and TVs may appear to be heavier on the numbers. This isn’t really the case, though, as branding, brand loyalty and the sense of ‘what this laptop/smartphone says about me’ is just as strong with those products as with any others.
End users want to think they’ve made a free choice, discovering things by chance based on their uniqueness and individual personality. We know, as marketers, that this is, in fact, all orchestrated and a huge amount of influence has been exerted by the time of purchase. Free will might be off limits to the man upstairs, then, but down on Earth we have plenty of techniques for manipulating the buyer’s mind.
The ‘buying cycle’ is often talked about, and often ignored. This is where content comes into play. User reviews, product demos, non-boilerplate product descriptions, [product A] vs [product B] comparisons, long-term product road tests, image galleries, news stories, offers, reminder emails… The list is longer still. Being the e-commerce retailer with all the answers at all stages gives you the upper hand in each situation, an element of trust on each view and a far better chance of getting the conversion you desire.
There’s an epic Koozai blog post covering the buying cycle. Read it – you’ll get some great ideas from a content marketing pro.
So, what are you waiting for? Here’s what you need to start preparing right now:
Build an online rapport with potential customers now, before pushing Black Friday weekend. How do you find these people? Easy. No, really, it is. I searched #decisions in Twitter and found this within five seconds:
Do you have content that can answer that question? Link to it. Can you beat the price on one of the products mentioned? Give them something that makes their choice easier. Offer a discount. Win the customer. You’re then in on the ground floor; keep it up and you’ve got a customer for life!
I could have done this with brands, products or anything else. Choose something you sell and try it with that too. Instant customer service points and no hard sell!
If you haven’t started to prepare, it’s not too late – but don’t leave it any longer. Clear the diary and get writing, planning and researching your new customers.
Put together a PPC campaign. Put together your content plan. Get some staff on Twitter and Facebook. Start drawing in the net.
This will give you so much more power come Christmas time, too – all that preparation is going to pay off big time. So what are you waiting for?!
The post Black Friday: Content for Consumer Research appeared first on Koozai.com
Every search marketer should do some keyword maintenance from time to time. Separating your superstars, and using Google’s Keyword Planner and Search Query Report are good places to start.
from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1NJzVMX via transformational marketing
Last quarter, Facebook surpassed Google in referral traffic to news sites, challenging the search giant’s dominance and becoming its most formidable competitor in yet another area.
from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1PBqMal via transformational marketing
Google Tag Manager first launched in 2012, although despite its powerful features, it’s still not widely utilised by websites. The second version of the interface, known as Google Tag Manager V2, or GTM V2, provides a more intuitive and easy-to-use tool whilst still providing the same powerful features. Here’s what you need to know to get started with GTM V2.
GTM is a powerful tool that gives marketers and webmasters more control and flexibility over a website’s code and tracking. It enables marketers without development experience to implement important functions or features such as event tracking, Schema and much more from within a simple, smart interface.
You can read more about the tool on the GTM FAQs page or check out Google’s introduction to the tool in this short video:
For anyone who already used or has used the original GTM, Version 2 is visually very different so it can take a minute to get used to.
The look and feel is now much closer to that of other Google properties, such as Analytics and Webmaster Tools, which makes it somewhat easier to navigate once you adjust to the new layout:
One change to be aware of is the renaming of Rules and Macros, which are now Triggers and Variables respectively. These work in very much the same way, but the names now make a little more sense. Setting these up though, like tags, is definitely a little different.
Version control is very much the same, but like the rest of the interface it’s set up a little differently:
If you’ve used the first GTM, I recommend browsing around the various tabs and navigation menus to familiarise yourself with what’s new and where to find everything. You should find it much clearer and more intuitive, so getting to grips with the new style shouldn’t be like learning to use a completely new tool.
If you have not already migrated your V1 GTM accounts into V2 manually, they will have been automatically transferred on 1st June 2015. As such, there is no action you need to take in order to migrate or upgrade your accounts, but it’s definitely worth testing everything thoroughly to ensure your information was transferred in the way you’d expect.
Use the Preview and Debug feature to run tests and make sure your tags are firing as they should:
Setting up GTM on your site if you haven’t used the previous version is a straight forward process with prompts that guide you through the process. In short, you simply need to create an account and install the container code on your site.
The GTM container code is provided after you enter some basic details (above) for your account and should be added immediately after the openingtag on every page of your site.
GTM is all about tags. Tags are the individual pieces of codes that are fired via the container you install when certain criteria, or Rules, are met.
There are many different types of tags, including both pre-set and custom tag options. Here is an example of just a few different tags you might need:
There are two main types of Google Analytics tag: Classic Google Analytics and Universal Analytics.
If you haven’t moved over to Universal Analytics yet, a move to GTM would be a good time to do so, as long as you test everything thoroughly at every step. Classic Google Analytics is being phased out and so the sooner you have accurate data tracking using Universal Analytics, the less work you’ll leave yourself in the future.
The main Google Analytics tag you’ll want to set up, even if you use no other tags at all, is a standard Page View tag to fire on all pages. This means that whenever a visitor views any of your pages, the Analytics tracking code fires and data about their visit is sent through to the Google Analytics interface:
To create this tag, simply choose “Google Analytics” as the Product in the first section and choose either Universal Analytics or Classic Google Analytics as required in the second step.
Section 3 then asks you for your Tracking ID, which you can either enter manually (it’s your Google ID beginning with “UA-“) or you can create a Variable for your tracking ID so you only have to enter it once. For more information on setting up your Tracking ID variable, please download our free GTM whitepaper.
You can either use the little brick icon to browse for your Custom Variable or you can enter it in manually, in the format of {{trackingid}} – where “trackingid” is the name of the Tracking ID variable you created.
The last step is to tell Google when to fire the tag, which for your Google Analytics main tracking code tag will be on All Pages. Once you select the All Pages default Trigger, you can hit save and you’re done!
For more information on Google Tag Manager or setting up Tags, Rules and Variables, please download our free GTM V2 whitepaper.
Alternatively, please feel free to Contact Koozai today and we’ll be happy to help you get started with this powerful tool.
The post Getting Started With Google Tag Manager V2 appeared first on Koozai.com
This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would.
Hi. Today we’re going to look at defining content penalties. There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to content in terms of what counts as an issue and what is acceptable. Firstly, we want to have a look at duplicate, and then we want to look at thin content and then we want to look at template and automated content. These three are the three main areas that can really harm your site when it comes to search rankings.
So what we’re going to start with is duplicate content. Duplicate is where you can find multiple versions, multiple URLs featuring the same content. This is a problem because Google wants its search results to be unique as possible. So what it would do is look for the page that it thinks is the most relevant and the strongest in terms of authority, and what it has claimed in the past that it would do is obviously only show one version of that particular piece of content. And what that can mean is that some of your pages won’t show up on the Web if they’re very similar or almost exactly duplicated of another page that already exists. The reason it’s a low penalty risk is because Google has actually said in the past that you wouldn’t get penalised for it, you would just maybe not have the search visibility that you would expect.
Then moving on to, sort of, thin content. Thin content is having a website with a reasonable large portion featuring very few pages of unique, detailed content. Generally speaking, we look at about under 200 words for this. The reason this is such an issue is because of past tactics. There has been a lot of websites in the, sort of, early 2000s featured pages that were purely designed to rank in Google, especially on strong websites. So there was hundreds of pages featuring very little content and serving very little purpose, and that disrupted Google search results as well as other search engines.
Google has introduced a penalty for this. It could be both site-wide and partial, which means site-wide it can have a huge impact on the whole website and actually can stop you ranking for your branded terms. Partial is just a section of the website that it decides or maybe even just a page, depending on what the penalty issue is. But essentially, thin content can be quite a risk. [Most state] it as medium risk there mainly because of the penalty you can receive. And generally, thin content pages don’t rank well on Google anymore anyway.
And then that takes us on to the third, template and automated content. Template and automated content is what I’d class as the highest risk. This includes doorway pages as well, and what these pages are, the content is very similar on them and the only thing that changes, perhaps, is a key head, title, h1 header or meta description, and the rest of it generally stays the same. So for instance, if a company doesn’t have multiple locations, but it features multiple pages, for instance, including a London version or a Manchester version, and the page basically says something similar to SEO Agency London, SEO Agency Manchester, without changing the main content on the site. This is where it can really have a big, big sort of impact on your search rankings, and Google is looking out for these pages nowadays and introduced the specific algorithm penalty for doorway pages. It’s always sort of had a manual penalty for template and automated pages for the last 5 or 10 years. This can have a real impact on your search rankings and can really damage the reputation of your site with search engines.
So, essentially, there are the three key content issues to look out for. And if you can avoid those, your site will generally be in quite a good position, and then you clearly just need to focus on improving the content you already have and look into developed pages that perhaps aren’t performing as well as they should do in search.
Thanks for your time and thanks for listening. But if you want to discuss any more, my Twitter handle is @koozai_jamesc. Thank you very much.
The post Understanding Google Content Penalties appeared first on Koozai.com
In April 2015, Google started rolling out their mobile update which saw mobile friendliness become an especially strong ranking factor that would have significant ranking effects in the mobile search results.
During the rollout of the update hailed as ‘Mobilegeddon’ which started on April 21st, Next had only an app in place that catered for their mobile audience. Since then, they have launched a mobile website.
Although Next now have a mobile website in place, are they effectively serving their mobile website from a user and mobile SEO best practice perspective? This is what we will answer today.
Next’s mobile website is built using a separate URL configuration; this is a relatively common setup and essentially involves having a mobile site that is completely separate to their desktop site.
Commonly, a website built using separate URLs detects user-agents; a redirection takes place, sending a user to the appropriate URL equivalent that displays optimised content for the detected device. However, Next’s mobile website doesn’t operate in this way; if a mobile user visits Next’s desktop website they remain there and vice versa.
So how does Next’s mobile website fare from a user experience perspective? We’ve conducted checks to identify their current standing with regards to usability.
Interstitials can create a negative experience for users on a mobile website as they are forced to scroll to see the full page they had originally intended to view, and in some cases are required to interact with an interstitial to begin viewing a page.
When visiting Next’s mobile website, you’ll notice that no interstitials are used, which is best practice according to a recent Google study.
Some users may prefer pinching to zoom as opposed to having to scroll or navigate through pages to find what they’re looking for, as is often the case on a mobile website. It is best practice to allow users to overwrite the page being served to them and return to the desktop equivalent if they wish.
As you can see in the picture above, the Next mobile website does provide users with the option to view the full desktop version of their website.
As well as allowing users to navigate to the desktop equivalent of their website, Next also allow users to actively navigate to their mobile website. This is less commonly seen across websites and was likely added because mobile users are not automatically redirected to the mobile website when they land on Next’s desktop website.
When serving a user a mobile version of a website – be it dynamically, separately or responsively – you want to ensure that the design is consistent with the desktop equivalent where possible.
Next are consistent with their website design across mobile and desktop. By sticking to a similar design, users are able to navigate through their mobile website in a similar way to how they would do this on the desktop website.
Although used across most mobile websites, the Hamburger Icon (as highlighted below) can cause confusion amongst users. To help your users identify what the graphic means, it is best practice to clearly label the icon, as has been done by Next on their mobile website.
Using unsupported content on your website can result in certain types of content being unplayable on mobile, which causes problems for mobile users and affects their experience on the website.
Next do not feature content on their mobile website that cannot be viewed across mobile devices on platforms such as Flash or Quicktime, which is good practice.
It’s important to allow a sufficient tap target for each link and button on your mobile website, otherwise it will not be considered mobile-friendly – and more importantly, it will greatly affect a user’s ability to navigate around your mobile website.
Next have an almost-perfect user experience score according to Google’s PageSpeed Insight, with only one tap target bringing their user experience score down slightly.
So how does Next fare with regards to factors that affect the visibility of their website in the mobile search results?
Sitemaps help search engines find the pages of your website and improve search engine rankings. Next’s mobile website does not currently contain a sitemap (neither HTML nor XML) which means search engines and users have limited information about the site structure or pages.
The robots.txt file is one of the first places a search engine looks when it visits a site. Next currently have a robots.txt in place. However, it is blocking anything from crawling its mobile website, which is a crucial issue that needs to be resolved.
As Next have a mobile website that’s configured using separate URLs, they’re able to serve metadata on their mobile website that’s different to what’s served on their desktop website.
Next are currently not optimising their metadata for their mobile website, despite this being a basic SEO practice; this may be intentional as their site is currently not being indexed and ranked due to their crawler blocking robots.txt.
The Vary HTTP header tells a webserver that there is different content to serve to different users, and that when receiving a request for a URL, the webserver should consider the user-agent requesting before serving content.
From an SEO perspective, search engines such as Google may use the Vary HTTP header to aid their discovery, indexation and caching of mobile-optimised content so it’s important this is in place correctly to maximise mobile visibility.
Next currently do not use the Vary HTTP header and therefore they are not correctly informing search engines of mobile page alternatives. Given that they’re using a separate URL configuration, it’s very important to have this in place.
So how compliant is Next’s mobile website when referring to mobile SEO best practice? Not greatly.
When serving a mobile page on a separate URL to the desktop equivalent, to help Google and search engines alike understand the relationship between both pages, the alternate and canonical annotations need to be added to pages on Next’s mobile and desktop websites.
This tag tells search engines that there is an alternative version to the desktop page; this helps the discovery of your mobile content.
Next do not use this tag and so are missing an opportunity to inform crawlers of mobile page equivalents.
This tag tells search engines that the mobile page is a copy of the specified desktop page, avoiding any duplicate content issues whilst allowing link juice to flow back through to the desktop page. This has been implemented on the Next mobile website.
A meta viewport element is typically used when serving a mobile website that’s responsively designed; without a meta viewport implemented, a page is rendered at a desktop screen width. From a user’s perspective, this can create an unpleasant experience on your website as they’re required to manually zoom and scroll horizontally on your pages to view and interact with content.
As can be seen, Next have a viewport in place on their desktop website, which makes their website scale to fit the screen size of the device it is viewed on. This doesn’t provide a positive user experience if their desktop website is viewed on a mobile device as text size is very small and it’s difficult to navigate through pages due to closely spaced links.
This element is mainly useful for tablet users that are viewing Next’s desktop website.
Most people are aware that site speed is now a ranking factor for Google (and other search engines) and users don’t like a slow website, so it’s important that your mobile website performs at optimal speed.
The Next mobile website is very slow. Having used multiple page speed tools, it’s clear the main issues with their mobile website are caused by resources being blocked by robots.txt. This affects how the page is rendered, how browsers are instructed to cache their website and their server response time.
By blocking certain resources, you can affect how crawlers render and index your content, which can have a direct impact on your mobile search performance. As Next are currently blocking any crawlers from accessing their website through their robots.txt, they’re creating a big problem with how their mobile website performs.
When a mobile user enters your site on a desktop URL, it’s common and best practice to automatically redirect them to the mobile URL equivalent. By ensuring that desktop to mobile redirects are consistent with the URL detailed in the desktop page’s link rel=”alternate” tag (if correctly in place), it makes it easier to manage redirects and individual pages.
Next currently do not have redirects in place between their mobile and desktop pages and so users are required to manually navigate to the relevant website configuration. By not automatically serving mobile users with mobile optimised content, Next are creating a negative user experience.
When reviewed from a user’s perspective, the Next mobile website performs well; users are able to easily navigate around the website and can find what they’re looking for with a prominent search feature.
From an SEO and technical perspective, there is a lot that needs to be done to ensure the Next mobile website is optimised for search and correctly being understood and crawled by search engines. There are a number of serious issues with the Next mobile website, from crawler blocking robots.txt to missing sitemaps; there are substantial issues that need to be resolved to ensure their mobile website performs as best it can.
Do you have any questions regarding what I’ve discussed in this post? I’d love to hear from you – leave a comment below or contact me via Twitter @Koozai_Luke.
For more information on Mobile SEO or information on how you can effectively optimise your website for mobile, contact us today.
The post A Mobile SEO Case Study: Next appeared first on Koozai.com
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