As e-commerce booms across the globe, we could all use some tips and tricks to ensure a better user experience, a stronger ranking in SERPS, and a deeper understanding into the role SEO plays in the overall e-commerce landscape. NetElixir’s SEO Team is here to help you improve your e-commerce platform and retail marketing strategy with a new video series on SEO hacks.

How to Fix Duplicate Content in Shopify

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms out there. While Shopify is easy to use and allows for a lot of customized content to make your e-commerce store stand out, it is not entirely without some small issues that can negatively impact your SEO and SERP rankings. But don’t worry; NetElixir’s SEO experts are always here to help!

If you use Shopify as your e-commerce platform, you may run into the issue of duplicate content with multiple URLs appearing for the same product page. Learn a quick trick for fixing canonical tags in the backend of Shopify’s admin to always point users, crawlers, and rank authority to the correct product URL by watching this simple instructional video. Shopify’s default fix is to add a canonical tag directly from the product collection slug variation to the actual product page.

Some development glitches give you multiple URLs for the same product page, and every single product is categorized as a duplicate page. That is an issue, since the crawlers are distributed across these pages equally in an effort to index them. Or Google will use only one URL to rank, and how will you make sure that you link only to the URL that Google uses?

Shopify adds a canonical tag from the collected slug variation of the product to the actual product page. But is this effective? Is adding canonical to the actual product page the best solution?

The answer is no. Since canonical tags are only hints and not directives, Google often ignores the canonical tag. So, is there a better solution?

Yes. NetElixir is going to teach you a simple hack that solves this problem.

Please seek the help of a developer to implement this. Or, like any other coding change, test in a staging environment before you make it live.

You can fix this common issue by simply modifying a single line of code, and all you have to do is adjust your Shopify theme files. 

Steps to fix duplicate content in Shopify:

1. First, go to the ‘Themes’ listed under the ‘Online Store.’
2. Then, you should pick ‘Actions’ and proceed to ‘Edit Code.’ After this, locate the ‘Snippets’ folder and pick ‘product-grid-item.liquid’ from the list.
3. Next, you need to adjust the code.
   1. Change this: <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>
   2. To this: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

This way, all the product pages will link to the right URL path (the one that can be ranked by search engines). 

And that’s it! Now all your internal links and image links will point directly to the actual product page.

SEO Hacks from the Archives

• Mobile-Only Index & Active Authorship
• App Store Optimization Tips
• Solving for X: Maximize Your Google My Business Impact With Photos
• The Changing Landscape of SEO

Stay tuned for more SEO Hacks to optimize the reach of your e-commerce business. Like and subscribe to NetElixir’s YouTube channel to catch more helpful SEO Hacks for your e-commerce site in the future.

The post SEO Hacks: Fix Duplicate Content in Shopify appeared first on NetElixir.

Your content strategy (this includes blogs!) reinforces every aspect of your digital marketing strategy, from social media to SEO. Don’t neglect a critical component of your online efforts to engage with your audience and build authority.

Contact NetElixir to see how we can give your content the royal treatment it’s been missing and help ensure your blog optimization strategy is succeeding. Email us at info@netelixir.com and ask about our content and SEO services.

Further Reading to Strengthen Your SEO and Content Strategies

• SEO Content Creation Process
• Forget ‘Content is King’ – Content is Actually Queen
• Setting Up Google Analytics in WordPress

The post Blog Optimization Strategies appeared first on NetElixir.

Why is image optimization important?

On February 10th, 2021, Google’s John Mueller released a video sharing important pointers that explain various techniques for optimizing images. 

When a user searches for a product/service in Google, they read the title and description snippet before making a decision on whether or not to click that particular result for more information. In a similar way, relevant images have the potential to influence a user’s psyche and compel them to visit the site. This is imperative for product-based sites, especially e-commerce websites where the users evaluate a product based on the image before arriving at a purchase decision. 

Mobile-First Indexing:

Google’s initial plan was to introduce mobile-first indexing by July 1, 2019, but owing to Covid, it has been rescheduled to March 2021. 

This means that your mobile version of the site has to be consistent with the desktop version. It has to be responsive, user-friendly, and essentially be equipped with seamless navigation. 

This surely goes hand in hand with the image optimization strategies suggested by Mueller. In order to feature your images right in mobile platforms along with the usual desktop counterpart, one must follow these steps: 

Serving Relevant Images: 

When it comes to Google or any other search engine, the very word “relevance” is the key. Whatever image you upload in support of the content has to be relevant to it. And, it is imperative that your image is placed towards the beginning of the content rather than the end.

Most importantly, do not compromise on the image’s quality. It is the high-quality images that get the best attention from users and prompt them to visit the website.  

Tip! Always provide necessary alt tag information and add an image title when applicable.

 Search engines can’t read images. It is only through the alt tag that Google can identify what an image is about. Hence, it is absolutely important to be as descriptive as possible while composing alt tags for the images. The same idea applies to image titles. Do not leave your image unattended with the dimensions. 

Clean URL Structure: 

The clearer you are regarding the location of the images, the better your chances of getting them indexed. Make sure that your image path is clean and reflects the exact location of the file. 

For example, an image location like: http://www.example.com/images/confectionaries/cookies.png 

is better than something like: http://www.example.com/images.png/?session=1213_1232

In the above example, cookies.png is the file name of the image and the whole URL defines the path where the image is located. It is important to keep the filename relevant to the image and as descriptive as possible, that way it is easier for Google to comprehend it. 

Needless to say, a clear URL path is like a clearer way to the destination. 

And, a word of caution! 

Make sure that your important image files aren’t blocked in the Robots.txt file. Having your important images blocked inadvertently would permanently omit your chances to capitalize on image Search. 

Structured Data: 

We believe it is absolutely necessary to include structured data markup on the page. If it is a product, you can include a product structured data schema. Similarly, for recipes, articles, reviews, and FAQs, you can provide the relevant markup. 

We completely agree with the fact that adding relevant structured data markup adds the necessary momentum for your website. 

Tip!  Adding structured data to your site’s FAQ section accelerates its chances to get listed under featured snippets as well. 

Image License information: 

If you provide license information for images, the same would also be reflected in Google image search. Google would display a “licensable” tag, which would cater information to users on how they can use the image. 

Check out this article to know more details on image licensing and image structured data. 

Mobile responsiveness: 

With mobile-first indexing being a top priority item for Google, it is absolutely necessary that your website property is mobile optimized. All images should open seamlessly in mobile layout as they would on the desktop. Our experiences say that only by having a robust mobile appearance, a website is able to secure a long-standing position in search engines. 

Having a large preview image option is definitely an add-on from the user’s perspective. This is more so for online retail platforms as it provides better clarity for an image and assists users in the buying process.

Image Dimensions:

It is almost imperative to specify dimensions when it comes to optimizing images. By doing so we specify the same to the browser and it is able to load the image smoothly without any layout shift. To prevent cumulative layout shift from images, always include width and height size attributes on your image and video elements. 

If the image dimensions aren’t specified, the browser will build the whole page based on its text and then again build the whole page with images and this time by relocating the images in relevant places. This has an impact on the page experience. When using responsive images, the “srcset” attribute defines the image URL. You then allow the browser to select between what size each image is, you just have to make sure that each image uses the same aspect ratio.

This also goes hand in hand with core web vitals, which elaborates on cumulative layout shift as well as other essential aspects aligned to a site’s UI/UX.

Avoid Lazy Loading:

For essential images, it is advisable to avoid lazy loading of images. In many cases, the images that aren’t rendered upfront in mobile platforms are not indexed. This would deter the images from gaining enough brownie points in the eyes of Google.  

In a nutshell, images, as well as videos, are significant content assets that can definitely contribute to your site’s traffic contribution. It is important for website owners and search engine optimizers to leverage this opportunity to gear up your website for enhanced search engine visibility. 

The post Why is Image Optimization a Must-Do in 2021? appeared first on NetElixir.

CMS platforms allow you to create and manage your website quickly and efficiently with minimum technical knowledge and resources. You can customize your website’s design and functionality according to the requirements of your e-commerce store. Each platform has its own SEO advantages to help your store rank in the search engine results page (SERPs) when people are searching for products related to your business.

For a full overview of Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce, download our e-Book on How to Choose the Right CMS Platform. Keep reading for a quick overview to help you narrow down your search.

What is the Best CMS Platform for E-Commerce?

Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce are among the top three user favorite platforms, though there are plenty to choose from. MIVA offers a flexible and adaptable e-commerce platform. Shopify currently hosts over 1 million websites and holds a market share of 2.8%, while Magento holds a market share of 1.8%.

Each platform offers different SEO and e-commerce advantages, detailed briefly below.

Choosing Shopify As Your CMS Platform

Smaller and first-time enterprises typically favor Shopify. Shopify offers a hosted solution with limited customization available for themes and templates. It is an user-friendly CMS platform with a drag-and-drop interface and simple inventory management feature. Additionally, Shopify has a basic set of SEO options to start getting your website attention on SERPs.

Shopify Advantages and Disadvantages

Shopify has a host of advantages to make developing your e-commerce website easier, especially for startups and beginners. There are a few disadvantages in terms of additional features, themes, and plugins costing a decent amount of money and there being limited customization options.

While offering basic SEO features, there are still a few common SEO issues found in Shopify, such as:

• Forced URL structure
• Duplicate content in collections and product pages
• Inability to edit Robots.txt files
• Setting up 301 redirects

NetElixir’s SEO team created SEO Hacks to help you solve some of these SEO issues. Watch how to fix duplicate content in Shopify now.

To update your Robots.txt files on Shopify, create a text file named robotsnew.txt and upload it to the nearest root directory. Redirect the example.com/robots.txt to example.com/robotsnew.txt with a 301 redirect. Add no index tags for blocking search engines from crawling old robots.txt files.

Prioritize your redirects and make use of redirects import when setting up a new store to lessen the issue of setting up 301 redirects.

Overall, Shopify suits a wide range of customers, from e-commerce startup to enterprise-grade clients and is one of the most beginner-friendly options.

Choosing Magento

Medium and large enterprises usually prefer Magento, as it is a self-hosted, open-source platform with numerous customization possibilities. Because of the various advanced features and customization options, Magento has a more complicated interface than Shopify and is better suited for experienced e-commerce developers. Magento allows you to customize and update store design and SEO strategy for maximum output.

Magento Advantages and Disadvantages

Magento boasts of a wide range of solutions, from a cloud-based environment geared for a startup to dedicated hosting for an enterprise-grade site. Magento has a highly active community to offer guidance and support to your site. Your website is easy to customize through Magento’s multiple features and numerous extensions, including multi-language, multi-currency, and multi-storefront options. However, the extensive customization may be too complex for beginners. Migration from M1 to M2 is complicated and users need strong technical knowledge to operate the platform.

In terms of SEO, users of Magento often face issues with:

• Query string URLs from faceted navigation.
• Duplicate meta tags from product variations.
• Indexing search pages.
• Slow load speed on small or shared servers.

To address parameter URLs that are indexed from faceted navigation, block these filtered pages in robots.txt and add a no-index tag. Use canonical tags to point toward the actual product page and turn on the setting to use only top-level product URLs to fix duplicate meta tags.

Overall, Magento is advisable for those who have an existing website and/or those who are building a multi-channel web e-commerce store with complex functionalities to integrate with enterprise-grade applications. 

Choosing BigCommerce

Small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses typically prefer BigCommerce. It is a beginner-friendly CMS platform with hosted solutions, but no customization available. With BigCommerce, you have dedicated customer support and basic SEO features.

BigCommerce Advantages and Disadvantages

BigCommerce has a no frills store creation process with low pricing and no long term commitment, so it does not require much technical knowledge. BigCommerce fully hosts your site and offers limited themes and extensions to cater to your e-commerce needs. You can easily manage SEO activities and social links. However, through BigCommerce you have a limited email subscription list and certain design elements are not highly flexible. There are only a few free templates available and premium templates can get expensive.

Some common SEO issues for BigCommerce are:

• Complex implementation of canonical tags.
• Lack of testing environment.
• Default blog setup is on a sub-domain.
• Transaction limits are set on annual online sales.

Similar to Shopify and Magento, to address tagging issues, block filtered pages in robots.txt and add a no-index tag. To fix your blog default settings, use a third party blog platform like WordPress to install a blog on sub-directory.

Overall, BigCommerce is suitable for small and mid-sized businesses.

Choose Your CMS Platform

Choosing the right platform for your business is an essential e-commerce decision. For a deeper dive into the pros and cons of Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, download our CMS Platform e-Book.

At NetElixir, we specialize in implementing high-quality web development solutions for your e-commerce store and website hosted on Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, MIVA, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and other platforms. With our vast experience of managing digital marketing solutions for more than 500 e-commerce clients, we understand the nuances of different e-commerce platforms. A strong e-commerce foundation is critical to supporting your other digital marketing efforts. Our e-commerce and web development experts can provide comparisons between solutions to help you make an informed decision. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to experts at NetElixir.

Read More:

• A Marketer’s Guide to AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning
• Google’s Match Type Update Explained
• How to Properly Invest in Digital Marketing in 2021

The post SEO Advantages to Your CMS Platform appeared first on NetElixir.

Starting Your Valentine’s Day SEO Strategy

As with any SEO strategy centered on a specific holiday, you want to start planning it about three to four weeks in advance to give the search engines time to crawl and index your landing pages. Create a landing page catered specifically to the holiday to make it easy for searches to find. Setting up this landing page early alerts loyal customers to forthcoming promotions, as well as captures potential customers who are looking for inspiration prior to committing to a purchase.

When running your promotions, be sure to include weekends in your campaigns. While the always-on consumer is searching throughout the workday, weekends are when people have the most time to search and shop for their loved ones.

On your website, notify consumers of the last purchase date for shipping and update them with any shipping delays. A countdown of your promotions on your homepage and Valentine’s Day specific landing pages is a great way to inspire urgency in consumers. As the actual day of the holiday nears, cater to last-minute shoppers by highlighting the ease of services and safety precautions at your brick-and-mortar store.

The Right Keywords to Say “I Love You”

Use Valentine’s Day specific keywords in your on-page content and in relevant blogs used to showcase your products. Optimize for keywords within the metadata text. Share your blog posts and landing pages across social media to generate awareness and engagement to help these pages rank higher in SERP. 

In February 2020, Google reported the following as the most-searched gifts in the United States:

1. Flowers
2. Ecards
3. Teddy bears
4. Rose bears
5. Chocolate covered strawberries

While these searches are, of course, subject to change in 2021, these are classically staples of Valentine’s Day. If your business sells these products, be sure to optimize all your content, including product descriptions and URL tags, to make it easier for people to find.

Use friendly and easy to read URLs. Simplify URLs to their most basic elements, such as http://www.yourbusiness.com/products/valentinesdayflowers. This improves your overall SEO performance, including better ranking, faster returned search results, and easier promotion. Most important, this drives a better user experience, as consumers are directly exactly where they want to go.

Target keywords people are more likely to search for, such as “gifts for my girlfriend,” “gifts for my husband,” “romantic gifts,” etc. While nearly half of the total estimated spending for Valentine’s Day will be on someone’s significant other or spouse, people shop for other family members, friends, classmates and teachers, pets, and co-workers. Including Valentine’s Day keywords related to a variety of loved ones will help diversify your content and reach. Create  blog posts or guides that showcase your range of products and target different audiences. Use titles such as “Valentine’s Day on a Budget Guide” or “Best Food for Valentine’s Day.” Soon, you’ll be everyone’s favorite Valentine.

How to Share Your Valentine’s Day Content

After you created all your great content and optimized your landing pages, how do you generate more awareness? 

Because Valentine’s Day is a special time for many people, a testimonial highlighting the attributes of a product or service can go a long way in ensuring other customers they are getting the right thing. Testimonials help improve conversion rates, as people are more likely to trust their peer’s reviews over ads and other promotional language. (Reviews also boost local searches, which can drive further business to your brick-and-mortar store.) Showcase positive reviews as much as you can without it being overbearing. Share on social in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day after your pages are optimized to help persuade undecided and last-minute shoppers. Add relevant testimonials to specific landing pages. Finally, include some of the best-written and glowing reviews on your homepage, linking the review to the specific product page to drive conversions.

Visuals are crucial to highlighting your products. High-quality images build trust and credibility with your customers. With the growth of video SEO, adding videos to applicable products can help add a competitive advantage to your. User-generated content can play a significant role here, as you can ask customers for videos of significant others opening their gift. 

As always, label images and videos with optimized keywords and add alt text that users will likely search for when looking for that particular product.

With a strong Valentine’s Day SEO strategy, you are bound to be inundated with hearts from loving clients.

Additional Resources

If your SEO strategy needs a loving boost, contact a NetElixir expert today.

• Google’s Match Type Update Explained
• 9 Search, Social, and Amazon Trends for 2021
• What Are Core Web Vitals and How Do They Impact Your Organic Rankings?

The post Sharing the Love: Valentine’s Day SEO appeared first on NetElixir.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

In simple terms, Core Web Vitals is a report shared by Google Search Console where a group of URLs are analyzed based on core metrics. The three core metrics analyzed include LCP, FID, and CLS.

LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, signifies the amount of time it takes the largest content piece on the page to download. Only the largest image or block of content within the viewport is considered, and the part that extends beyond the screen is ignored. Typically, large images, videos, and background images are measured in this context. When considering images on your website, you should maintain the same intrinsic and visible size for the images. Note that LCP is different from FCP. FCP, or First Contentful Paint, refers to the amount of time it takes the browser to render the first piece of content on the screen.

FID, or First Input Delay, measures interactivity and responsiveness. It is the time spent from when a user first interacts with the content until the browser is able to process that request. An example of this is when a user clicks on a link — the FID measures the time from the moment the link is clicked to the moment the site processes and reacts to that click. A good FID score is 100ms or less.

CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift, measures the shifting of web page elements as the page downloads. This typically includes images, videos, and fonts. CLS is measured in terms of impact fraction and distance fraction. Impact fraction measures how much the elements moving have changed the viewport area between two frames; distance fraction measures how much the elements moved. The CLS score is a product of multiplying both the impact and the distance fraction. 

How To Improve Your Core Web Vital Scores

Decreasing Page Load Time For Your LCP Score

• Optimize and compress images: If you resize an image’s visible size, it still retains the same intrinsic size. For instance, if an image has a dimension of 1200×600 pixels, it is the intrinsic size of the image. If the same image is resized to 600×400, the intrinsic value still remains at 1200×600 pixels and the visible value is 600×400. Instead of resizing on screen, resize images before uploading and use lower quality file types.

Improving Responsiveness For Your FID Score

• Minify CSS: Minification of CSS files can help the browser render the layout of the page at a faster pace. 
• Minify Javascript: In many cases, the Javascript blocks the main thread of the browser for an extended time period, which hinders the processing of user’s inputs. In order to circumvent this, you can use strategies like deferring unused JS and minimizing unused polyfills. Most importantly, longer tasks block the main thread of the browser, not allowing it to process user inputs. Break longer tasks into smaller ones to facilitate the process more efficiently. 

Circumventing Issues Related To CLS

A higher amount of CLS creates a slower user experience. Some telltale CLS issues on web pages include unspecified image & video dimensions, iframes, and embed codes. Avoid issues relating to invisible and unstyled text by using prerendering where applicable. 

Using Tools To Monitor And Improve Your Core Web Vitals

What tools can be used to improve your scores?

• Google’s Search console’s Core Web Vitals report
• Google’s page speed insights
• Chrome user experience report

The Core Web Vitals report gives an in and out picture of all possible areas which can be improved to enhance the UI/UX parameters of a webpage, thus making your website more attuned to users as well as search engines. This report, and following its insights, gives your website and business an edge in offering users a superior experience, translating to better CVR and a more pleasant customer experience. 

Using additional tools like Lighthouse allow you to ascertain gaps and help you accelerate performance. You can also get exhaustive page speed insights report from LXRmarketplace — this tool will share valuable and specific information such as site load time.

From each of these suggested tools, we recommend downloading a report that specifies the resources which need to be worked to enhance the score and implement the provided recommendations.  

NetElixir’s SEO Team Is Here To Help

Core web vitals are key to the success of your e-commerce website. Our SEO team is available to provide expert suggestions and custom insights to help improve your website. Please email growth@netelixir.com with any questions.

The post What are Core Web Vitals and How Do They Impact Your Organic Rankings? appeared first on NetElixir.

Ensure your brand and products are there for them when they search by creating holiday-specific landing pages.

Packaging Holiday Landing Pages

To increase your chances for visibility on key shopping holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, create targeted landing pages with researched keywords well in advance of the days themselves. Consider creating a separate page for each broader category of product for which you plan to offer a discount rather than a general, blanketed page stuffed with too many deals.

Broaden your holiday SEO content strategy beyond simply the products you have. Package your products into easy-to-navigate landing pages that are catered to specific demographics, key areas rising on Google Trends, and strategic messaging from trending terms and keywords you found success with last year. While this year is unpredictable and uncertain, you did have a winning strategy from last year – expand upon your victories, big and small. 

How can you package your products effectively? Start with your customer personas and target audience. Based on this data, consider segmenting your products by:

• Gender, like “Best Gifts for Him”
• Profession, like “Best Gifts for Teachers”
• Price, like “Best Gifts Below $25”
• Interest, like “Best Gifts for Outdoor Enthusiasts”

See what’s trending and what products you already have that could easily fit into trending categories. Keep your buyer personas in mind, as well, so as not to optimize for customers who aren’t converting to your website.

Once you have your packages neatly tied in a bow, use your product categories to create gift guides and blogs that list out your top selling products remarketed, for example, as Best Gifts for Mom. (If you have customer reviews of these products, even better! Customers love peer reviews. Consider working these packages and testimonials into your social media strategy as well.)

Your Holiday SEO Strategy

Ideally, these promotional holiday landing pages should be made ahead of time. Create pages before the holiday season crunch and use 302 (rather than 301) redirects wherever applicable. This is useful for holiday- and promotional-specific versions of a homepage. This pre-planning is twofold: one, you have time to optimize the pages fully based on your trends and keyword research, and two, search engine crawlers have time to scan and redirect points only during the appropriate time. 

When creating landing pages, consider placing them prominently in top navigation in order to drive traffic from the homepage. 

Drive Urgency for Your Holiday Promotions

Pre-planning your sales serves a third purpose: whetting the appetite of your loyal customers and alerting new customers on what to expect. Early announcements will drive users to your site as they start planning out their purchases and researching ahead of time. Using regular announcements (think once a week starting a month in advance to each day the week of) in tandem with a live countdown on your website will drive urgency in shoppers. 

Your holiday promotional schedule could look like:

• 45 days in advance: Leverage your website calendar, social media, and any emails or newsletters to start driving traffic and garnering interest
• 7 Days in advance: Begin leveraging the above for daily posts
• 1 Day in advance: Make your onsite countdown prominent to focus on your upcoming deals

Download a 2020 Holiday ECommerce Sales Calendar to coincide your marketing strategy with the anticipated high volume sales days.

Promoting your landing pages increases its ranking in SERPS. Beyond sharing the link to social, try writing blog announcements that highlight your product packages and new features of your holiday landing pages. These social and organic posts boost backlinks and generate greater exposure to your existing audience. Furthermore, such blog content, just as the landing page, can be used year after year through simple updates, making it evergreen.

For example, take Royal Caribbean, who has a blog they just add to every year so you can see how their Black Friday deals evolved over the years. Their blog ranks number 2 for high volume term “Black Friday Caribbean cruise deals.”

Your Technical Holiday SEO Checklist

• Start sooner rather than later
• Check your site for any issues that could affect performance
• Study last year’s trends and take note of ones that could be useful for your business this year
• Identify relevant keywords for your niche
• Create landing pages specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals
• Coordinate SEO with your other marketing efforts
• Track and measure success frequently and adjust your strategy to focus on what’s working

Further Reading

• SEO Content Creation Process
• Amazon SEO
• Real-Time Data on Holiday ECommerce Trends

The post Effective Holiday Promotional SEO Strategy appeared first on NetElixir.

Three Benefits Of Using PWAs vs. Native Apps

There are many advantages of using PWAs over native apps including:

• Ease of Development: Unlike native apps, PWAs are built on a single codebase (Javascript, HTML) that is completely web-based. This means there is only one version to write code for and resolve bugs on, as opposed to developing and solving for both mobile and desktop. You can also save time and money from less time coding and not having to pay app store hosting fees.
• Better User Experience: PWAs run smoothly and are extremely fast. It’s also simple to launch them with the click of a link and re-engage users with push notifications. Fast page loading times are a major factor in keeping visitors on the site. According to NetElixir tests, lightweight PWA pages load 1 to 2 seconds faster than non-PWA pages, while heavy PWA pages load 2-3 seconds faster than heavy native apps. 
• SEO Friendly: Because it’s a website at the core, search engines can crawl progressive web apps. This makes it important to focus on optimization efforts. Since PWAs cannot be found in popular application stores, good search result rankings are crucial. There’s also progress in creating a place for these apps like Appscope, but it still is not as well-trafficked as Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Quick Tips For Optimizing PWAs

If you decide to go with a PWA over a native app, there are some steps you can take to make sure it follows SEO best practices. Check out some tips below:

• Make Your Content Crawlable: Be sure to use real URLs and not hash fragments. Follow SEO URL best practices by including related keywords in the URL and keeping them short.
• Be Secure: Make visitors feel safe by securing your PWA. In fact, 80% of the web uses HTTPS today. If your site doesn’t support HTTPS yet, it’s a good idea to migrate.
• Measure Page Speed: Page speed is a direct ranking factor in Google. It also indirectly affects SEO by impacting bounce rates and dwell time. Use WebPageTest and Lighthouse to determine your First CPU Idle, originally called the Time to First Interactive, the key page speed metric Google measures.
• Provide a Sitemap: Add a sitemap to your site and make sure you register it in the Google Search Console. This is the first thing Google uses to know what pages are on your site.

PWAs continue to be a great web solution for those who want an app-like feel for less effort and cost. Plus, there’s the benefit of high engagement if done right. If you’re interested in the magic of highly optimized PWAs or having one created from scratch, please reach out to us to learn more!

The post Get Results With Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) appeared first on NetElixir.

The A9 considered direct and indirect factors. Direct included some traditional SEO content factors like product copy, title, and description, as well as availability of the item and the price of the item as compared to competitors. Out of stock items would not rank high, if they ranked at all. If the price of an item is drastically higher than a competitor’s, the algorithm would give precedence to the cheaper product.

Indirect factors include sales history, customer feedback, image quality, product reviews and more. Amazon’s new A10 update adds even more weight to these indirect factors. 

Amazon A10 Algorithm Updates

The A10 update adds more significance to the intent of the buyer. One of the main purposes of the update was to remove fake and fraudulent sellers from the platform to protect users and provide them with a better shopping experience. While Amazon PPC campaigns are still considered by the algorithm, customer behavior factors have more importance.

Relevancy in Customer Behavior

Amazon prioritizes product relevancy to match user intent, which the A10 algorithm update reinforces.

The update looks at seller authority, which charts how long the seller has been active on Amazon Marketplace, their overall rating and performance metrics, and the amount of products in their feed. Older sellers with a trusted background will get precedence over newer sellers. Amazon also looks at off-site sales to track how well a product linked to an Amazon account sells from a branded website. If a product performs well separate from Amazon itself, then Amazon will rank the product higher. 

The selling history of a product is also considered – if a product consistently and historically sells well and customers highly review it, then the product will rank higher. Focus on organic sales, as that means customers are searching for and exactly finding your product, making it relevant and desirable.

Ensure your Amazon product listing is complete. A complete product description – from bullet points to titles to manufacturing dimensions to images – will help increase your conversion rate, user impressions, and relevancy to user’s searches. All these factors are considered by the A10 update. Including images in your product listing is a must because it impacts your click-through-rate and helps confirm user intent.

Customer feedback is critical. Slow order processing speed and a high order defect rate will make Amazon drop your product’s rankings. Respond to reviews and answer questions, as sellers answering questions about their own products offer more accurate and more relevant information to searchers, increasing their likelihood of converting.

All these factors work together to create your Amazon ranking. While there is no single factor to magically and instantly boost your ranking, you should focus on providing the relevant product for your searchers. When customers can reliably find what they are looking for, Amazon’s A10 algorithm will take notice.

Further Reading

• Using Amazon to Fuel Further Growth
• Amazon A10 Algorithm Update: Weightage Shifts in Ranking Factors

The post Amazon SEO appeared first on NetElixir.

The goal of ranking is to try to achieve the maximum level of visibility in SERPs—right?

Yes, but this is only the surface, what gets people to click to a page.

Once someone is on your page, then what? Does the content, format, and goal of your page (now in essence a landing page) match the UI behind the ranking search term that just got a user to click? If not, that user will bounce, meaning that high ranking was a complete waste. Eventually, this high bounce will add up and you’ll lose that ranking you worked so hard to achieve.

Essentially, high-volume or not, we want terms to rank on pages where they make sense. Otherwise, high volume will not mean high converting.

Luckily, Google Search Console and other tools allow us to see what terms pages are ranking and getting traffic for. And one red flag that tells us if this traffic is converting or not is if a page has high impressions and clicks in GSC yet isn’t converting. Or, if a top landing page ranks for several high-volume terms but isn’t converting. Other tip-offs are if the page is also a high exit percentage page.

Sometimes it can be more subtle, though. For example:

You can rank well for a category of related terms on, say, your homepage. Is this bad? Maybe not that bad, but it may be an area for improvement. For instance, let’s say that the category of terms you’re ranking for on your homepage are directly related to specific products you carry. Wouldn’t it be better to rank for that category of terms on the relevant product page?

Ranking for the Right Keyword on the Right Page

Direct product terms are pretty specific, so we can assume they’re being searched by a user ready to buy or at least doing research. It benefits us to place that user as far along the buying funnel as fast as we can. This way we eliminate the number of clicks needed to get to the ideal UI-match page. This is especially the case for mobile where users have such a short attention span and are so fast to click back off-site if they don’t see the product they want. 

If the wrong page is appearing in SERPs for your target category of terms, look at how that incorrect page appears in SERPs compared to the desired page’s SERP result.

Stacking them one atop the other—which would more likely get you to click and eventually convert as a user if you saw it in SERPs after typing your target category of terms in search engines? If you’re more likely to click the SERP for the wrong page (the one that’s ranking and you don’t want to have rank) that’s a red flag.

How Do We Approach Content Strategy for Better Ranking? 

Adjust the Meta Content

There are several steps. An initial point is to adjust the meta content for each page to better reflect the terms you want that page to rank for, as well as match the user intent. Another is to evaluate the on-page content. 

In this case, we know the more ideal page isn’t ranking and needs content optimized for the related terms. But part of a strategy like this also often involves de-optimizing the page we don’t want to rank for the terms.

Evaluate All On-Page Content

Look at all “content” — anything front-end and user-facing. Are there several images on the wrong page grabbing the undesired term? Rewrite the alt tags or swap your images as needed.  

In addition to images, re-evaluate all ranking factors (content) on both pages (page you want to rank for the target terms and page that currently ranks which you don’t want to rank) — what is the keyword focus for:

• H1’s
• H2’s
• CTA’s
• Above-the-fold body copy
• Images
• Metas

In addition to adjusting content for the desired page to be more inclusive of the target term, you should consider adjusting content for the undesired page to exclude the target term. This may lose ranking on that term for a little while, but it’s better to rank a little lower for a high-volume term on the right page (where you get conversions) than it is to rank a little higher on the wrong page where you don’t see conversions for that term.

Evaluate Backlink Relevancy

More than just on-page content can make up the context of a page. The backlink profile (and the content within the pages making up those backlinks) also contribute to the context. So it’s important to ensure the pages making up the backlink profile also target the relevant and desired terms for that page and should be monitored accordingly.

Addressing all of the above should be part of optimizing the content for the page you want to rank for a term — and getting the terms off the page you don’t want to rank.

This is an example of some of the deeper analysis that should go into SEO content strategy and execution in order to best match your content and pages to UI and maximize conversions for rankings.

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