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Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed

February 4, 2021 by Peter Mahoney

Right, this is an interesting one. It’s technical, but has a very simple main recommendation (in large text, below).

Google has started to include something they’re calling CLS in their ranking metrics.

Essentially it means ‘how long before elements loading on the site stop moving around’, and their target is just 0.25 seconds.

If things move around as your page loads for longer than that it’ll get a warning in their system. (This isn’t general loading time, just a very specific part of how a site loads.)

Think about when a website loads, the first thing it does is load the layout – where the menu is, where images will go, text, etc. That’s the elements they’re talking about.

It’s fine for a image to take longer to load, as long as the space it will take is already reserved for it when it DOES load. To be honest most of this happens so quickly you can’t even see it.

But there is one very common thing lots of sites have turned on that means layout changes happen long after a page is loaded – and that’s “lazy load” for images.

Lazy Load was a great technique when it became popular a decade ago. It meant images didn’t load on a page until the browser needed to se them. If an image was at the bottom of a page, and the user wouldn’t see it in the browser until they scrolled down, it waited until it needed to load it to do so.

But when that happens, it moves elements on the page around accordingly to make space for the image – and therefore will always fail the CLS test Google does for all sites and pages.

So ironically something that used to be recommended to help a page load faster is now a problem for passing loading time tests!

Personally I’ve not used Lazy load for years (in most cases it was unclear if the speed enhancement it brought was actually better than the extra Javascript it needed to work) – but now my recommendation to all website owners is clear:

If you use Lazy Load, turn it off.

Filed Under: Featured, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Website Speed, Wordpress

Large Google Algorithm Update

December 30, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

We’ve seen another core update from Google to their algorithm. They usually make updates of this size a few times a year – not usually over the New Year period but this hasn’t exactly been a normal year by any measure.

Bulk analysis of tens of thousands of sites has revealed which industries were affected for the better, and which for the worse.

This is how Google tends to treat these larger core updates – rather than just looking for smaller changes to SEO settings, punctuation, word use, etc. – they’re actively trying to impact entire industries and sectors.

Industries that saw a strong, positive effect:

  • Accounting & Taxes
  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Business Services
  • Finance
  • Food & Drink
  • Health
  • Health Conditions
  • Insurance
  • Law & Government
  • Nutrition & Fitness
  • Religion
  • Relocation & Moving
  • Science & Education

While industries they’ve slightly downgraded include:

  • Addictions
  • Dating
  • Natural & Alternative Medicine
  • News & Media
  • Performing Arts
  • Senior Care
  • Sports

Of course, downgrading an entire industry doesn’t always have the effect you’d initially expect. So yes, addiction services might have been downgraded, but that impacts everyone in that sector. So anyone searching for ‘addiction recovery hotline’ for example will still be competing with other sites in the same situation.

The main takeaways for SEO professionals here is that there are more industries in the positive list, and that this is the widest reaching change they’ve made for some time.

One industry to watch in particular is Natural & Alternative Medicine, which Google has been after for a while. The last few large-scale algorithm updates from Google have really targeted this sector. And fair enough, scientific information has never been more important than it is in the Covid-19 pandemic.

But having said that I personally have had a lot of success with the couple of clients I have who fall into this sector, over the past six months their organic SEO stats have more than doubled. 🙂

Filed Under: Featured, Google, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Case Study: Turning SEO work off

May 11, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

Filed Under: Featured, Google Search Console, Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Wordpress Tagged With: google, ranking, search engine optimisation, seo

Reminder, JPGs are for photos

April 11, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

Please remember when saving images to upload to the web – photos should be saved as JPGs.

PNG is another popular format for the web but it works best on images like logos, with large blocks of the same colour.

Anything like a photograph that is made up of 1000s of different colours will always be best as a JPG – and usually about one 10th the filesize.

Of the clients that ask me to speed up their WordPress websites (in addition to their SEO work) perhaps the most improvement comes from simply converting their photos they’ve saved as PNGs into JPGs. If a site has several photos that are saved as the wrong file type it’s easy to shave several megabytes off the page size, and therefore speed up the site’s loading time.

Part of the problem is a lot of software for editing images will default to PNG when you use their “Save for web” function. Which is fine for icons and logos, charts and even text saved as an image.

So many websites these days focus on really high quality imagery (understandably – people love photographs!) but don’t know that not all file types are created equally, they all have different purposes and use cases and those wonderful product shots should always be saved as JPGs.

It’s good to get in the habit of doing this right away – after an image is uploaded into WordPress there’s no simply way to convert it to JPG and change all the references in the code to use the different filename. So try to get it right from the outset!

Filed Under: Content, Hints & Tips, Website Speed, Wordpress Tagged With: images, jpeg, jpg, photos, png, speed

BERT is Google’s latest update

November 7, 2019 by Peter Mahoney

There’s been a number of news stories about the BERT update from Google.

These were followed by a slew of other stories about how the previous ones were misleading.

Let’s explain.

If we go back several years to what was a very big announcement from Google – they turned on something they called RankBrain. At the time it was a new system and approach to search engine optimisation. They were using artificial intelligence to try to read webpages more like a human (actual visitors) would.

It was such a big deal because context suddenly became very important. The days of simply matching how many times you used certain keywords in your content against searches were over – it was crucial to write informative, useful content.

(That seems like a non-brainer anyway – content should always be useful and informative.)

But it was the beginning of the end for the concept of ‘how many keywords you can rank for’, or ‘just say this three times and you’ll rank really highly’.

In the years following Google has made all kinds of similar small updates to improve that system. They’re committed to returning useful well-written, informative results; and they’ve regularly made changes to their algorithm to further that aim.

The BERT SEO update

The BERT update really just pushes that to the next level. ‘Pattern matching’ for specific phrases isn’t enough anymore, not by a long shot.

Fortunately this is all in line with what I’ve been saying for years – don’t just write to specific words (whether they’re ‘long tail’ or something else, the concept of expecting a certain amount of repetition to rock your SEO isn’t valid) – rather write well thought out content that explains what you’re trying to say.

(This is why some of the recent news stories about BERT backtracked about how important it was – because while it is important – it’s just a continuation of the same direction Google’s been going for a long time.)

To give you an example. You’d think the key with my own site is to mention SEO a lot. That’s easy to do – but harder to do in a way that makes it clear to the reader that I’m an authority on the subject, and even harder to impart useful information that might entice people back to my blog.

Simply repeating keywords is essentially keyword stuffing and Google knows it.

My recommendation for writing content hasn’t changed. Write to your audience, not to search engines. If you’re writing an about page then write about what you do and how you help people. Useful, natural words and phrases will come out of that anyway.

Your visitors – and increasingly your search engine ranking – will thank you for it.

Why context matters so much for SEO

As search engines continue to prepare for voice search being used more often (voice searches are usually quite conversational in their wording) context becomes more important.

To give a really basically example, let’s think about a site that may have been a review for a florist. Even if the content said something negative, for example “What a rubbish florist”, previously it would have helped rank for the search query ‘florist’. Increasingly Google can understand the negativity there and is less likely to present that site to someone who clearly wants to find a reputable local florist.

That really is a very basic example, but context is so important.

What needs changing for your WordPress SEO

As a WordPress SEO expert every change and update to SEO algorithms always comes back to the same question, “How does this impact WordPress SEO?” The answer in this case is very little. Unlike structured data or other updates that necessitate coding changes to your site, this really is all about content.

Fortunately WordPress itself is all about content and the ease of editing or creating it – so that’s a real boon. It’s easy to edit your site’s content to make it as contextual, human readable and useful as possible.

But there is no immediate need to jump in add or remove any plugins or systems.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Wordpress

Crawled – currently not indexed

October 31, 2019 by Peter Mahoney

This is a creative use of Google Search Console I’ve come up with for some easy SEO wins

And it’s been working really well on all my testing sites.

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s official stats system for organic search, and has the most useful data about your site’s ranking, visits, clicks, etc.

They changed the interface for it some time ago and keep adding more data in it. One new page will show you all the pages in your site they’ve crawled, but chosen not to include in search results.

So they know about these pages, but don’t think they’re worth including in their results pages. The effect of that is these pages are not actually helping with your SEO at all. From an SEO viewpoint they may as well not be there.

There are two main reasons I’ve found why otherwise useful content is being ignored by Google:

  • It’s just too short
  • It’s not on-topic enough

Your content might just be too short

This is fairly self-explanatory. Unless you’ve got 300+ words of text on a page it will often be ignored.

Your content might not be on-topic enough

The best way to explain this is with an example, let’s think about a digital marketing firm. Perhaps when they started they offered a variety of services from social media content to web development and SEO.

Well now they just focus on the latter. Their homepage is about it, all their services pages are too – but they have old blog posts about their older services.

Google knows what a site’s core service offering is. And things that might fall outside that – either because they’re just off topic or simply old and reflect what a business *used* to be about – they’re likely to get ignored as well.

Re-purpose old content to get it indexed and working for your SEO!

Here’s my recommendation. Have a look through the list of crawled but not indexed pages and see if there are any you can fix.

Doing this myself I found any short pages I fleshed out, or outdated ones I re-tooled to reflect what I’m doing now – every single one got picked up again by Google.

In some cases it was just a matter of adding an extra paragraph to an existing post. That’s not nearly as cumbersome as writing an entirely new one but essentially gets a whole extra page indexed.

Filed Under: Content, Google, Google Search Console, Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social networking

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