Today I was asked to look at boosting the performance of two specific keywords that are quite important to a customer. Firstly, I started by looking at the SERP for these terms in incognito mode. This gave me a good idea of what the pages that are performing well are doing.

Putting the keyword first in meta data

I noticed that the main pages for each of these terms didn’t contain a phrase match for the specific keywords in the meta data, so that’s an easy win updating the Title tag and putting the keyword at the start.

Keyword anchor text

There were also no internal links on these pages using the keyword as anchor text. This helps imply more importance to a word or phrase to Google. I also looked for these terms used throughout the site to add more internal links pointing back to the main pages.

I recommended some supplementary content be created based on “People also ask” questions on the SERPs to help support the site’s overall importance on this topic, increasing the internal authority of the term with more internal links.

You can also use tools like SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool to get ideas on what questions people are asking.

Simple updates that we’ll monitor over the coming weeks and report back to the client on any improvements using our Google Data Studio report.

Today’s daily SEO Tip is all about keeping your URLs simple. I was working on a large UK fashion retailer, optimising their Google My Business and Bing Places listings. I choose to bulk upload these updates as they have hundreds of locations.

I was updating UTM tracking in Bing Places and noticed that some of the URLs had “%20” in them, this indicates that they’ve been published with a space in between words. Best practise is to use a dash (-) in between words in a URL.

URLs with spaces were causing issues in Bing Places as they were failing validation and not being approved.

Further investigating the URLs, there were versions indexed with a dash however Google seemed to favour the URLs with spaces in. We made further recommendations to canonicalise the URLs with spaces to the URLs with dashes, only indexing one and not cannibalising SERPs.

To sum it all up, keep it simple when it comes to URLs, use dashes, don’t use spaces, keep it short.

Chrome extensions

SEO Meta in 1 Click

My favourite all in one SEO tool, SEO Meta in 1 Click simply displays a site’s metadata and main SEO information including title, description, headers, and information on images and links on the page. A very handy, lightweight chrome extension!

SEO Minion

SEO Minion helps you in your daily SEO tasks such as On-Page SEO analysis, Broken Link Checking, SERP Preview and more. I like it because it’s really simple to use, easy to navigate and tells you what you need to know, quickly. Well deserving of a space on your chrome extensions tool bar.

Tag Assistant

Tag Assistant chrome extension helps to troubleshoot the installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and more. Using the favourites option, by ticking the star in the top right corner makes it easier to check on the sites you manage quicker.

SEO Review Tools for Chrome

SEO Review Tools for Chrome is an extension which allows you to quickly check the URL your visiting with one of their 30 free SEO Tools, or in addition, they’ve included quick links to 6 free Google Tools;

• PageSpeed Insights
• Structured Data Testing Tool
• Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
• Google Search Console
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a cross-platform utility that uncovers the technologies used on websites. It detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and many more. It’s great for quickly identifying client CMS pre-sale. They also offer a Firefox extension too.

Lighthouse

Page speed, the speed at which your web pages load and can be interacted with are a massive topic of conversations within the SEO community. Lighthouse is Google’s in-depth developer tool that tells you what you need to do to improve your scores. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps.

Web developer

The Web Developer extension adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools. It is also available for Firefox & Opera browsers.

SEO Word Count & Keyword Density

add to chrome

SEO Word Count & Keyword Density helps visualise how Google perceives the value of certain keywords on your page. It can mean the difference between a top 3 position to a second-page ranking! Getting the right balance of your keyword and variants is key to a successful page.

Websites & Tools

Metatags.io

You can put any live URL in the search box and metatags.io will help you visualize, edit and optimize the meta tags code so you can update them. You can also add this to your WordPress site.

Wayback Machine

A Library of Internet sites and other cultural artefacts in digital form. A must use for all SEO experts. It’s free to use and there’s also a Chrome extension available which enables you to submit snapshots of your pages.

This is a test to see whether the Lazy Loading improves the site speed, using Google Page Speed Insights, which now uses their Lighthouse tool, to measure.

Level of expertise

I am attempting this with little to no knowledge on how to implement Lazy loading in an efficient way by adding scripts and/or functions to my site. My initial thought was to use a super small script I found called [be]Lazy.js. My technical knowledge meant that I resorted to using a WordPress plugin instead.

The top plugin by rating on Word Press is a3 Lazy Load. It took me 5 minutes to install, change some settings and test. The image below should now load as you scroll down the page!

The laziest loading pugs

Before adding the script

The following screenshots are from Google Page Speed Insights before adding the Lazy loading plugin to the site. As you can see there’s some work to be done.

The second opportunity recommendation in the list is to “Defer offscreen images”, basically try lazy loading.

After adding Lazy loading plugin

There was only a small increase in the overall speed and the plugin script is now showing as a render-blocking resource, a web developer could probably fix this by implementing lazy loading in a far superior and efficient way.

My speed score increased to 71 and a noticeable increase in FCP & FMP.

Passed audits

But the aim of this task was to tackle the opportunities concerning the images and whether adding Lazy loading would help my site pass those audits. The answer is, it does! (I choose not to lazy load my gravatar) All audits concerning images, for this page, passed!

In conclusion, adding lazy loading to your site can save you some valuable seconds which can help improve your page ranking.