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Google credits Gemini for better detection of fake business reviews and maps spam

Google is crediting its AI advancement, such as Gemini, to help detect and remove fake reviews and listings within Google Maps. “AI has been a pivotal tool in helping us stop scammers in their tracks, and we’re now using it to scale our protections even more,” Google wrote.

The metrics. Google shared these metrics for its battle over Google Maps spam:

  • Google blocked or removed more than 240 million policy-violating from 2024. Google added that “the vast majority of which were removed before they were seen.”
  • Google blocked or removed more than 70 million policy-violating edits to places on Google Maps.
  • Google removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles.
  • Google placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts that repeatedly violated our policies.

When you compare the metrics to last year’s report, Google removed about 40% more policy-violating reviews.

Disabling reviews. Google also spoke about its newish feature to disable the ability to post reviews on some business profiles. The notice says “Posting reviews is turned off for this place” and was actually launched in December 2023, from what I can tell. But Google seems to be mentioning it now.

Google said it “rolled out alerts in the U.S., U.K. and India to let you know if we’ve recently removed suspicious five-star reviews in certain circumstances. These warnings — which will expand globally starting next month — help you understand quickly if a place may be engaging in unfair review practices.”

Here is what it looks like:

Crediting Gemini. Google said:

“AI has been a pivotal tool in helping us stop scammers in their tracks, and we’re now using it to scale our protections even more. Last year, we removed over 10,000 listings managed by a group of bad actors who impersonated real locksmiths to take over unclaimed Business Profiles and overcharge unsuspecting customers. Beyond removing the fraudulent content, we filed a lawsuit against the bad actors and are actively applying what we learned to enhance our detection systems.”

“This new model has already helped us block thousands of suspicious Business Profile edits this year,” Google added.

Why we care. If you are in the local SEO space, none of this is probably new to you. You’ve all seen the swarm of complaints about business edits placing a business in a suspension, reviews not being able to be added to a business profile, listings confusion and so much more.

Much of this is likely associated with Google’s new methods to detect and fight spam on Google Maps. Some of these changes may be a bit overzealous but Google has a tough job with fighting spam on Google Maps.

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Using AI to generate great SEO titles and meta descriptions

You need compelling titles and meta descriptions to attract visitors from search results and encourage users to click. Manually writing these elements for every page can be quite challenging. Generative AI can streamline this process by automating it. However, you should check the AI-generated suggestions critically. This post will show various methods for generating effective titles and meta descriptions using generative AI for SEO.

AI titles and meta descriptions for SEO

Titles and meta descriptions act as your web page’s representatives in the SERPs. These snippets are often the first impression users get of your content, impacting their decision to click and explore further. Therefore, engaging titles and meta descriptions are key to capturing attention, showing relevance, and getting users to visit your site. Generative AI can help write effective ones. When done correctly, integrating generative AI with SEO can be very beneficial.

Improving click-through rates (CTR) and UX

Titles and meta descriptions that sell your content help improve click-through rates. Compelling titles and descriptions are relevant to the users’ search query, which helps them to click on your link.

A higher CTR signals to search engines that your content is valuable, which could lead to more traffic. Moreover, describing the essence of your content helps users find what they’re seeking. This could lead to more engagement, more time spent on your website, and, ultimately, SEO success.

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The (un)predictability of Google’s rewriting game

While you invest time and effort in writing titles and meta descriptions, it’s important to note that Google often rewrites them on the SERPs. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that your carefully written titles and meta descriptions will always appear as intended.

Google often thinks it knows how to present your site best. It tends to rewrite stuff to provide users with the most relevant and informative snippets that align with their search intent. Thus, it may rephrase or modify a title or meta description if it believes its version matches the user’s query or accurately represents the content.

Although Google’s rewriting will happen, optimizing your titles and meta descriptions remains useful. Generating good, relevant content increases the likelihood that Google will use your title and meta description.

Use the AI in Yoast SEO Premium to generate titles

Yoast SEO uses AI to generate titles and meta descriptions. Imagine not having to struggle with writing the perfect meta descriptions and titles. Our advanced AI does it for you! It’s designed to understand your content and create engaging titles and descriptions that boost your performance.

The AI feature of Yoast SEO helps you find awesome titles and meta descriptions quickly

Using generative AI to create powerful titles

For SEO, generative AI is a helpful tool for automating the writing of optimized titles. Using state-of-the-art generative AI models like GPT-based models, we can improve our work and generate tailor-made titles for our target audience.

Did you know?

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Learn about generative AI and SEO at Yoast SEO Academy

Want to learn how to adapt SEO content strategies for AI? Looking to gain a competitive advantage by integrating AI tools? Check out our training course on AI for SEO!

How to evaluate AI-generated titles

Getting models to spit out titles is not hard, but what comes next is more important. You should check for relevance, keywords, length, uniqueness, and branding when evaluating AI-generated titles. Your titles should be effective and appropriate for your content:

  • Clarity and relevance: The title should accurately convey the subject and main focus of the content. It should tell what the page or article is about so that users can see how relevant it is before clicking on it.
  • Keyword optimization: Incorporate relevant keywords that fit the content and help search engines understand it. However, keep the title natural and readable, avoiding keyword stuffing or over-optimization.
  • Length and readability: The title must be within a certain length to be fully displayed. It must also be easy to read, with proper grammar and punctuation, so users can quickly understand it.
  • Engaging and unique: Titles that stand out are more likely to attract clicks. Use AI-generated titles that evoke curiosity, offer a benefit, or create a sense of urgency. Always try to make your titles unique and different from those of your competitors.
  • Brand consistency: Check if the AI-generated title aligns with your brand voice and guidelines. Make sure it represents your brand’s personality and values while being consistent across your content.

Remember, there’s still no substitute for human experience. Please take the time to manually improve the work of the generative AI tool of your choice.

Using AI-generated meta descriptions

Titles are not the only things you need to look at, as meta descriptions also play an important role. These summaries get users to click on your link and explore your website. You can optimize your meta descriptions using generative AI to be engaging, informative, and aligned with search intent.

Check the AI-generated meta description

Here are a few aspects to consider when checking AI-generated meta descriptions. In general, look for relevance, length, clickability, and if it has the correct tone of voice.

Ensure that the generated meta description accurately reflects the page’s content for relevance. Verify that the description captures the main topic or purpose of the page and includes relevant keywords or phrases that users might search for.

Looking at length and readability, you should check the length of the generated meta description. Make sure it falls within the desired character limit (around 150-160 characters). Check the readability and clarity of the text so it flows smoothly and is easy to understand for users. See if the message comes across in this short piece of text.

Clickability is important. Consider whether the generated meta description is likely to attract user clicks. Does it address the user’s search intent, highlight the page’s proposition, or create a sense of curiosity or urgency? Aim for attractive descriptions that encourage users to click through to your website.

Another aspect is tone and brand voice. Review the tone and style of the generated meta description to ensure it aligns with your brand voice and messaging guidelines. Does it accurately represent your brand’s personality and values? Make any necessary adjustments to maintain consistency.

Checking generated content using human expertise

Once you have your AI-generated titles and meta descriptions, check these for quality, relevance, and alignment with your objectives. Manual review and refinement from an expert are vital in perfecting the generated content.

Reviewing for quality and coherence

Begin your evaluation by checking the generated titles and meta descriptions for quality and coherence. Assess the language, grammatical correctness, and overall readability. Identify inconsistencies or errors that make the content difficult to understand. By making necessary edits, you improve the quality of the generated content.

Check relevance to content and context

While reviewing the generated output, evaluate its alignment with its content. Consider the specific web page and its context to ensure the generated content accurately portrays the page’s main topic, theme, or purpose and adjust where necessary.

Check brand voice and message

Like any other content, aligning the generated titles and meta descriptions with your brand’s voice, messaging, and tone is critical. Assess how the generated content reflects your brand’s personality and if it resonates with your] audience. Make edits to add your brand’s unique identity to the content while preserving readability.

Optimize keyphrase integration

See if the generated titles and meta descriptions have your target keyword phrases. Keywords play a crucial role in optimizing your content for search engine rankings. Check if the generated content naturally integrates the keywords and their variations.

Analyzing user engagement metrics

In addition to manual review, you should also analyze user engagement metrics to assess the effectiveness of the generated titles and meta descriptions. Monitor impressions, click-through rates, bounce rates, and time spent on the page to understand their impact. Compare the AI-generated content’s performance against alternative variations to determine the best-performing options.

Incorporating human input and expertise

While generative AI can help generate titles and meta descriptions, you shouldn’t underestimate the value of human expertise. Generative AI models are trained on data but lack intuition and an understanding of contextual nuances. By implementing manual review and refinement, you can add your creative insights, industry-specific knowledge, and brand context to the content.

Balancing SEO optimization and user value

Using generative AI for generating titles and meta descriptions is balancing between search engine optimization and delivering value to users. This can help your content perform well in search results while providing your audience with an engaging and meaningful experience.

Understanding user intent

To strike the right balance, understand the intent behind user searches. Analyze the keywords and search queries relevant to your content and consider users’ motivations and expectations when they land on your page.

Providing clear and concise information

When writing, please make sure your titles and meta descriptions tell what users can expect from your page. Clearly outline your content’s main topic, purpose, or value proposition. Use concise language to capture users’ attention and encourage them to click through.

Showcasing unique selling points (USPs)

Titles and meta descriptions are excellent opportunities for your unique selling points. What sets your page or product apart from the competition? Does it offer a unique perspective, in-depth analysis, or insights? By using these selling points in the content, you entice users and demonstrate the value they stand to gain by visiting your page.

Engaging and connecting with users

Titles and meta descriptions help user engagement. Use compelling language, emotional triggers, and storytelling elements that resonate with your audience. Emphasize the benefits, solutions, or outcomes users can achieve by interacting with your content. Stir curiosity or create urgency that helps users to click through and explore further.

Prioritizing readability and usability

Prioritize the readability and usability of your titles and meta descriptions. Use clear and concise language, making information easily understandable. Structure the content in a scannable format, and use proper punctuation and well-defined sections. Make sure the generated output doesn’t compromise readability by focusing solely on optimization.

AI for titles and metas, with a human in the loop

Generative AI can simplify and optimize the creation of titles and meta descriptions. You can save time, improve click-through rates, and elevate user engagement using AI. Yoast SEO Premium has a helpful AI tool that lets you generate titles and meta descriptions with the click of a button.

However, it’s crucial to remember that AI should improve human expertise, not replace it. Combine the creativity of human writers with generative AI to create titles and meta descriptions that are optimized, captivating, and valuable to users.

The post Using AI to generate great SEO titles and meta descriptions appeared first on Yoast.

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Integrating SEO into omnichannel marketing for seamless engagement

Integrating SEO into omnichannel marketing for seamless engagement

With customers now discovering content across traditional search engines, LLMs, social media, and beyond, the need for an integrated, omnichannel strategy is more important than ever.

Relying on isolated channel strategies no longer works. 

Customers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints before making decisions, and they expect seamless, personalized experiences. 

An effective omnichannel approach aligns all marketing efforts – ensuring consistency, maximizing visibility, and driving meaningful interactions.

As omnichannel marketing continues to evolve, integrating SEO across all channels is essential for sustained growth.

This article explores why a unified strategy is critical and how SEO can work across channels to enhance the customer journey and drive results.

Why an omnichannel approach to SEO is critical in 2025

Here are seven trends that make an omnichannel approach vital to business success and growth.

Why an omnichannel approach to SEO is critical in 2025

1. The shift away from third-party cookies

The decline of third-party cookies has made it harder for brands to track users across the buyer journey. 

An omnichannel approach to data collection and centralization helps mitigate these challenges and lays the foundation for an effective strategy.

2. Growth of LLMs and AI-powered search

The growth of alternate avenues for audiences to find information adds to the complexity of the buyer’s journey. 

This presents additional attribution challenges. 

3. Zero-click searches and decreasing top-funnel traffic

Due to the rise in zero-click searches, traffic to websites from top-of-the-funnel information-seeking terms is declining. 

4. Importance of SEO

Despite the growth in zero-click searches, SEO remains the primary source of traffic for most businesses and the channel with the highest long-term ROI. 

AI Overviews and AI-generated results mainly pull information from the top organic results.  

5. Search is multi-modal

This means written content is not the only content you need to optimize. 

To effectively saturate SERPs, you must optimize all your digital assets, including images, videos, and PDFs. 

6. Personalized experiences

Personalization is key to customer engagement. Up to 71% of consumers expect it, while 76% find generic content frustrating, per a McKinsey study. 

Businesses that prioritize personalized marketing can see up to a 40% increase in revenue. 

An omnichannel approach ensures marketers focus on customer intent rather than marketing channels.  

7. Unified customer experience with agent economy

The growth of artificial intelligence has resulted in the emergence of an agent economy, where AI agents are beginning to revolutionize marketing and digital experiences. 

They can easily connect dots across multiple channels to deliver a unified customer experience.

Tackling the visibility dilemma in customer journeys

With all the changes in the industry, consumer behavior, and technological advancements, we need to answer important questions that marketers are confused about. 

  • How can you learn about audience intent even when they do not visit the site after a search?
  • How do you gather data on your audience’s behavior after they leave your site if they do not convert during their first visit?
  • How can you develop effective SEO, paid, zero-click, and content strategies with limited visibility into the customer journey and insights into customer intent and personas?
  • How can you provide personalized experiences without third-party data, limited traffic, and visibility into your customers’ journeys?

This is where an omnichannel approach can help businesses enhance visibility, drive meaningful interactions, and create a seamless path to conversion.

Building blocks of an omnichannel strategy

A true omnichannel strategy is no longer limited to traditional marketing channels like SEO, paid, email, social media, etc. 

Today, it is about delivering a unified experience at every stage in the customer journey at every touchpoint. 

It includes effectively using channel-agnostic strategies and tactics, such as personalization, AI agents, conversion optimization, A-B testing, and co-optimization. 

Here are five building blocks for creating an omnichannel strategy that truly engages your audiences consistently across touchpoints in an AI-powered world.

 omnichannel-strategy-building-blocks

Reliable data

Ensure you have the necessary infrastructure to gather and segment customer data accurately. 

AI can then be layered to:

  • Build audience cohorts.
  • Predict user journeys.
  • Deliver real-time personalized experiences. 

Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data

Artificial intelligence

Having an organizational AI strategy is key to ensuring the effective use of AI, not just for content generation but also for improving:

  • Efficiency.
  • Process automation.
  • Customer data segmentation.
  • Forecasting.
  • Real-time personalization at scale.
  • And more.

Dig deeper: 4 pillars of an effective enterprise AI strategy

Digital assets

Having a digital asset manager that lets you centralize, optimize, and distribute all your digital assets across marketing channels is key to ensuring consistency and reducing duplication. 

Dig deeper: Visual optimization must-haves for AI-powered search

Infrastructure

Search-friendly infrastructure and content management system are crucial for effectively crawling and indexing your content, and delivering an engaging, personalized experience to your visitors. 

Dig deeper: How to select a CMS that powers SEO, personalization and growth

Structured data and entity optimization

All search engines, including LLMs, detect entities within your content to understand what your content is all about.

Structured data – or schema markup – helps search engines detect entities and all your digital assets. 

This helps maximize your content visibility and SERP saturation. 

Dig deeper: Future-proof your SERP presence: 6 areas to focus on

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9 steps to integrating SEO into an omnichannel customer journey

9 steps to integrating SEO into an omnichannel customer journey

You can start developing your omnichannel strategy while closing any gaps you have identified in the building blocks.

Step 1: Audience and intent mapping

Start with your audience and intent. Identifying target audience personas and their intent is the first step in audience mapping. It is important to review:

  • Content performance: Evaluate performance of page types or templates to understand gaps in content strategy (e.g., category pages vs. product details pages vs. location pages vs. blog content).
  • Search engagement insights: Search console data can help identify high-intent terms with low click-through rates. This information can inform zero-click and CTR optimization strategies. 
  • Channel overlaps: Identifying how visitors overlap across channels is key to crafting an integrated and unified experience. For example, paid and organic channels must work together to saturate the full funnel and maximize ROI from both channels.  
  • Conversion optimization: Content with high engagement can provide insights into visitor intent. This can help define A-B tests, UI/UX enhancements, and personalization strategies.

Step 2: Define clear strategic goals

The next step is to have clear and smart goals that you want your omnichannel strategy to achieve:

  • Set specific, measurable business objectives (revenue growth, customer retention, growing market share, etc.)
  • Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for channel-specific and overall performance. For example, if the goal is to improve visibility, the primary KPIs should be around impressions, clicks and rich results visibility. Traffic or conversions can be secondary KPIs but should not be the primary success criteria.
  • Create baseline metrics to measure improvement against current performance.
  • Develop a measurement framework that accounts for cross-channel attribution challenges.

Step 3: Map the customer journey across all touchpoints

Traditional funnel is changing rapidly. 

Brands should be ready to respond to customers across all touchpoints fast and with quality.  

 customer journey across all touchpoints

Develop a comprehensive understanding of how customers interact with your brand:

  • Create detailed personas representing your target audience segments.
  • Identify patterns in cross-channel journeys using path analysis in analytics and create common use cases.  
  • Aggregate and centralize data across customer touchpoints (website analytics, CRM, sales data, app usage, etc.)
  • Segment customers based on behavioral patterns rather than just demographics.
  • Quantify the value/attribution as a combination of different journey paths and touchpoints.
  • Measure channel preference and effectiveness across different customer segments.

Step 4: Omnichannel audit

Based on your goals and journey maps, evaluate your current channel gaps and capabilities:

  • SEO audit: Analyze search visibility metrics, technical health scores, and overall SEO performance.  
  • Content audit: Measure content performance data, topical and entity coverage, competitive gaps, engagement rates, conversion impact, and cross-channel content effectiveness.
  • Local presence assessment: Evaluate local search visibility metrics and location-specific engagement.
  • Experience audit: Analyze drop-off points and measure cross-channel friction.
  • Data and technology assessment: Evaluate data collection and measurement framework to optimize your data infrastructure.
  • Full-funnel audit: Learn from your visitors. Past visitor data can provide meaningful insights into audience segments, what visitors engage with, and where they drop off in the conversion funnel. This can help identify opportunities for co-optimization, A-B tests and delivering personalized experiences across channels.

Step 5: Develop your integrated channel strategy

Here, focus on aligning your channels to ensure they work together seamlessly and support your overall business goals.

  • Prioritize channels according to attribution data and customer value metrics.
  • Leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to forecast the impact of each channel.
  • Use predictive analytics to determine the optimal channel mix.
  • Set channel-specific targets that ladder up to overall business objectives.
  • Create frameworks for continuously testing and validating channel effectiveness.
  • Define how channels will complement and support each other across the customer journey. 

Step 6: Content orchestration strategy

While a content strategy focuses on what content is needed, a content orchestration strategy also encompasses distribution frameworks that enhance audience interaction with your content.

Friction analysis

Analyze how your audience engages with your content to identify friction points. This process helps you identify, rectify, and optimize:

  • Inconsistencies.
  • Intent misalignments.
  • Delivery mechanisms (text, images, video, etc.).

Content intelligence

Assess the performance of your existing content across various channels and identify competitive gaps and opportunities based on audience personas and business goals. 

Here are a few steps to evaluate content gaps and refine your strategy:

  • Identify underperforming content for optimization.
  • Spot gaps in content that need to be addressed across channels and stages of the customer journey.
  • Recognize cross-linking opportunities to create content hubs.
  • Prioritize new content to close competitive gaps and achieve business goals.

Cross-channel content strategy

After identifying friction points and content gaps, develop a tailored content strategy for each channel, prioritizing based on business goals:

  • Broader informational content to enhance awareness during the discovery stage of the customer journey (e.g., social media, blog content).
  • Comparison content for the consideration stage (e.g., product pages).
  • Landing pages focused on specific buying-intent terms during the conversion stage.

Content optimization

Optimizing content extends beyond targeting the right keywords. Your content optimization strategy should include:

  • Closing topical gaps in content that create friction.
  • Developing an entity optimization strategy to maximize content discoverability.
  • Implementing a click-through rate (CTR) strategy to enhance traffic from discovered content.
  • Optimizing visual content.
  • Establishing an engagement and conversion optimization strategy that includes personalization, calls to action optimization, A/B testing, messaging strategies, UI/UX optimization, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Dig deeper: The complete guide to optimizing content for SEO (with checklist)

Step 7: Infrastructure and technical SEO

To give your content the best chance of being crawled, indexed, understood, and featured in search results for the right terms, focus on the following:

  • Fix technical SEO issues related to crawling, indexing, and user experience.
  • Ensure mobile optimization across all digital properties.
  • Deploy nested schema markup to enhance search visibility.
  • Improve page speed for all web properties and optimize Core Web Vitals.
  • Test cross-device compatibility.
  • Implement proper canonicalization for multi-regional brands.
  • Prioritize web accessibility by following ADA and WCAG guidelines to enhance user experience and search visibility.

Step 8: Engagement and conversion optimization

Utilize unified customer data to enhance user engagement and drive conversions:

  • Deliver personalized content at scale for each audience segment in real time. Personalization strategies can be based on various factors such as marketing channel or campaign, visitor location, search intent, and past behavior. 
  • Identify and deploy AI agents that assist audiences in quickly finding information, engaging in meaningful interactions, and making real-time decisions.
  • Develop remarketing strategies informed by visitor behavior.
  • Implement A/B testing across channels, ensuring consistent test and control groups.
  • Measure performance across channels and optimize based on business goals and success KPIs. 

Step 9: Continuously test, measure, learn, and optimize

Refine your strategy through ongoing testing and data-driven adjustments to improve performance across all channels.

  • Monitor performance metrics across all channels. Establish BI dashboards that connect and integrate data across channels.  
  • Implement attribution models that effectively account for complex customer journeys.
  • Regularly test new channel integrations and enhancements to the customer journey.
  • Gather feedback from customers regarding their cross-channel experiences.
  • Refine your strategy based on evolving search engine algorithms and changing customer behavior.

SEO’s role in delivering a unified, cross-channel experience

Integrating SEO into the omnichannel customer journey isn’t simply for improving search presence. 

Ultimately, it’s about creating discoverable, unified, and personalized experiences that guide customers naturally toward conversion. 

By implementing this nine-step framework, you can:

  • Break down departmental silos.
  • Align cross-functional teams around customer needs.
  • Build truly seamless engagement models that drive sustainable growth.

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Ecommerce SEO checklist: 30 tips for a better online store

There is so much you can do to optimize your online store, whether for users or Google. To help you cover all your bases, we’ve written this ecommerce SEO checklist. It doesn’t cover absolutely everything, but if you at least start by optimizing all the aspects in this post, you will definitely be doing a great job!

Site-wide ecommerce checklist

The first part of our ecommerce checklist is all about changes you can make site-wide to make sure your online shop is up to scratch. Some of these tips will help with your ecommerce SEO, but — more importantly — they will give users a better experience when they visit your site.

1. Use consistent branding

The first thing you should be aware of is that you should always use consistent branding. Ensure your brand or logo is visible on your homepage and page title. This will build trust and help promote and build your business, helping trigger recognition offline and in search engine result pages.

2. Add social buttons and newsletter sign-up

Newsletters and social media are the easiest ways to get return visits from your customers. Be sure to draw attention to your social profiles and newsletter signups throughout your website. Add your social profiles to your footer at least (use icons, links, and social widgets), but if you have space left in your header, that would also be a great spot for them. Promote your newsletter in your sidebar and use scroll-triggered boxes to draw attention to it. A nice giveaway always helps motivate people to subscribe.

3. Take care of site navigation essentials

Make sure users can navigate to your most important pages from your site menu. It should always be easy to reach shopping pages and the shopping cart, as well as customer service information and FAQs covering essential information like shipping costs and payment options. If users can’t find these pages, they’ll find it difficult to shop on your site.

4. Use SSL and security seals

Here’s one vital thing about creating trust: If your site has an SSL certificate, it will have that nice green padlock in your visitors’ browser address bar, and you’ll let them know they are shopping in a safe environment. These things will help customers confidently insert their home address, credit card details, or other personal information you ask them to provide. You could also add security seals. Find more tips like this in our trust article.

5. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Don’t forget mobile users! Making purchases via mobile is a popular option for many shoppers. So be ready for them and don’t miss out on those transactions. Read our ultimate guide to mobile SEO to get started.

6. Get things up to speed

When we say speed, we mean the performance of your site. People have short attention spans, and we’ve all got used to faster internet everywhere. However, many places worldwide have to make do with less-than-perfect mobile connections and a small data allowance. Don’t take your situation as gospel. Also, Google tends to rank websites faster, which is another reason to make sure your website is as fast as possible.

7. Add an ‘About us’ page if you don’t have one

People like to know about the company they’re buying from. Who is behind it? What’s their story? What motivates them? If we share the same values and beliefs, people are likelier to return to that shop and buy more products. Adding an about us page, and perhaps a team photo will help build a connection between your company and your customers. If you want some inspiration, Patagonia and Dopper are nice examples.

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Homepage

While you don’t necessarily need to optimize the homepage of your ecommerce site for SEO, you shouldn’t just ignore it completely, either. There are a couple of things you can do to make sure any visitors landing there will continue to shop and make a purchase:

8. Show featured products

You also need to reserve a prominent spot on your homepage for featured products or something similar, usually your core products or the items you currently have on sale. This will provide an immediate trigger for visitors and a good way to let them know whether or not they have come to the right online shop.

9. Include a compelling call to action

Your homepage needs a compelling call to action. This may change if you want to promote particular products or run seasonal promotions like a Black Friday sale. But whatever your CTA is, you need to make sure it’s always easily visible and meets your visitors’ needs and expectations.

Product search and categories

Having a great site is one thing, but if visitors can’t find the products they want to buy, it won’t be much of use to anyone. That’s why the following section of our ecommerce checklist is all about making your products easy for customers to find when searching on your site.

10. Add a search option

Every online store with more than 20 products should have a search option. Make sure you put the search option in a visible spot, as this will probably be the navigation of choice for your visitors. Besides optimizing your search option, be sure to give the search result pages some TLC. More on that later.

11. Use product categories

How you set up your categories and make these accessible to visitors matters – a lot. Categories help visitors get to different groups of products as quickly as possible, especially those who aren’t sure which specific products to buy. Amazon has a large list of categories (or departments), but makes the kind of products a category contains as clear as possible. That has much to do with naming these categories and logically using subcategories. Put yourself in the place of your visitors and go over your shop’s categories. Do they make sense? Are these the terms a visitor would use? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track.

12. Add introductory content on category pages

Besides being clear about the name of your category, be sure to add a nice introduction to your category pages as well. This introduction is like the glue that holds the collection of products on that page together. This is really helpful in determining the subject of the page, especially for search engines. This also helps the category pages function in a similar way to cornerstone content.

13. Add thumbnail images for your products

In most cases, product images say more than a thousand words. This is especially true for those pages that simply don’t have space for a thousand words about a single product, such as your category or internal search result pages. Adding a stunning thumbnail image of that dress or painting will encourage more clicks to that page. Good thumbnail images make it easier for visitors to choose from a wide variety of products in category or search result pages.

14. Include calls to action in overviews

Besides having killer product thumbnails, your overview pages also need a call to action for each product, which means the visitor can add that product to their cart right from the category or search result page. Although it isn’t always possible for every product, you should do this wherever you can. There are online shops that allow you to choose the color and size of jeans, for example, without having to go to the product page. Choose the option you like, click add to cart, and proceed to checkout, all from the overview page.

Product pages

You’ve probably already put much effort into crafting your product pages. But are you sure nothing is missing, and nothing can be improved? This section of our ecommerce SEO checklist will help you ensure your product pages look the best they can.

15. Add great product images

Be sure to add great product images to your product pages. They should be zoomable and give multiple views of the product. Remember that even the filename and alt text of the product image matter for SEO. There’s a lot more on this in our detailed article on product images.

16. Write a fantastic product description

Optimizing your category pages is often much easier than optimizing all your product pages. If you’re selling bolts, screws and nails, adding an awesome and unique product description to each page is a lot of work. If you need your product page to rank as well, be sure to invest some time and effort in optimizing your product descriptions for the product name and/or SKU. Our Yoast SEO plugin will be useful if you have a WordPress site or a Shopify store.

17. Be clear about pricing

We can’t emphasize this enough: be clear about your prices. Adding surprise costs like shipping or taxes later in the checkout process will backfire, and shoppers may abandon their purchase. Be clear about these additional costs (if any) right from the start. You could even leverage this by offering free shipping on orders of more than a certain value, say $20 or $50. Surprise costs are a major turn-off, and they are illegal in the EU.

18. Show product reviews

Creating trust is a good thing for all online shops. Genuine product reviews help a great deal with this. One thing we would recommend for websites that include user reviews from third parties is to copy a couple of those reviews to your own website. Including third-party reviews in, for example, a widget, would be a great solution. Add these near your call to action for the best results.

19. Promote related products

When you’ve got their interest, leverage it. If someone buys an iPhone from your site, chances are they’ll need a cover and might even want a pair of those expensive wireless ear pods. But they might feel a bit less expensive when a customer has just paid full price for a new iPhone! Adding a related products section or an ‘other customers also bought’ section to your product page will trigger upsells, allow for bundles, and much more. We highly recommend adding these.

20. Add a call to action on your product page

Your visitor needs to click the Add to Cart button on your product page to start the purchase. Don’t hide that button! The number of shops that accidentally disguise the Add to Cart button is lower than it used to be, but we’d still like you to look at that button and make sure it stands out. This is especially true when you have a secondary call to action like ‘Add to wish list’. Making sure that the Add to Cart button stands out the most and is the largest and first major button on your product page is essential.

21. Show stock availability

These days, the availability of a product drives sales. With online shops everywhere, people want to buy things at a shop that will deliver the products they want tomorrow or even the same day. If you tell users a product is in stock, people are likelier to buy it. But this isn’t just about competition; it’s about managing expectations. If your website shows something isn’t in stock, people can still decide to buy at your shop and know they’ll have to wait a bit. If people buy at your shop and won’t get the product for three weeks because it’s out of stock, they’d likely have bought it elsewhere. Not making availability clear also badly affects your brand, by the way.

Shopping cart and checkout

It can be easy to overlook the details of your shopping cart and checkout process. However, these parts of your site are vital to the customer journey. In this section of our ecommerce checklist, we encourage you to take some time to ensure everything is working seamlessly.

22. Make the shopping cart easy to find

Regardless of how noble your intentions are, in most cases, your main goal is to make as much money as possible, and that money is made through your shopping cart. For this reason, your shopping cart should always be available and visible – don’t make people look for it. We recommend adding the number of products in the cart to the cart icon. It will help people remember if they have already added products to the cart.

A recognizable shopping cart icon that shows how many products are in the cart.

23. Show the payment options early on

Like in number 16 of this ecommerce SEO checklist, this one is about preventing surprises. It’s frustrating to get to the end of the checkout process only to find that your preferred payment option isn’t available. And again, if your ecommerce shop is in the EU, it is now a legal requirement to display your accepted payment methods to customers before they get to the checkout.

24. No account needed

Always allow customers to buy without forcing them to create an account. We think that making customers create an account is bad practice. It’s only valid if creating an account gives customers perks like easy license renewal, managing recurring payments, etc. These are tasks customers probably would want to do in a secure environment, so they wouldn’t mind setting up an account, but when they’re shopping for clothes, having an account only makes sense for convenience reasons (not having to fill in address details next time and so on), and therefore it should be optional.

25. Set longer cookie expiration times

Perhaps ‘cookie expiration times’ are too narrow for what we’re trying to say. Our article on shopping cart abandonment will tell you a lot about how people use your shopping cart. Read that entire article, and you’ll discover why using longer cookie expiration times for your cart is better.

26. Use discount codes wisely

Discount codes and vouchers can be a great way to increase sales. But before you put a field to add a discount code on your checkout pages, consider whether you want to do this carefully. Once users see the option to add a code, they will want a discount code. And often, that means they’ll stop mid-transaction and search for one! So, if you want to offer discount codes, it’s a good idea to make it easy for users to find a discount (even if it’s to remove the delivery costs from their order). If you’re not planning to offer discount codes soon, leaving the discount code field off your checkout pages is probably better. Otherwise, it might increase your cart abandonment rates.

Search and social appearance

All right, by now, your online shop should be ready to go. One thing left to do for our ecommerce SEO checklist: make sure your site looks its best wherever it appears. That could be in the Google search results or social media, so be ready to make a good impression!

27. Optimize your SEO titles and Meta descriptions

With ecommerce sites, more so than all other websites, SEO titles and meta descriptions serve a very important purpose. Where Google is probably able to come up with a proper and keyword-related invitation to your website for information pages, the chances are your product page doesn’t have enough product information, or it contains details about your customer service or warranty that Google might use instead. Add a product-focused meta description to your product pages to encourage Google not to show the wrong text in search results! Use Yoast SEO Premium’s AI tools to speed up the creation process.

28. Add structured data to your pages

We recommend adding structured data to your product pages for technical SEO reasons. Schema markup will help search engines and Google Shopping understand your page’s contents better, and it might even help your page stand out in the search results!

Add at least schema.org/Product and schema.org/Offer, and see if you can extend this to even more detailed schemas. Adding structured data markup is more technical than optimizing your product description, so if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, please ask your web developer for help. You can also use our WooCommerce SEO plugin or Shopify SEO app, making it much easier!

Read on: Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you »

29. Make sure you look great on social media

Besides structured data, be sure to add OpenGraph and X Cards. Again, Yoast SEO can help you add images to your page to be displayed on social media. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can even preview those! These ensure that when people share your content or products, they will be displayed as attractively as possible. This and more are explained in our article about product page SEO.

Keep on reading: Positioning your shop in the online market »

One last thing…

30. Make ecommerce easier with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO plugins and apps can help you to optimize loads of aspects of your site:

  • Making sure your texts are readable? Check.
  • Keyword research and optimization? Check.
  • Managing your SEO titles, meta descriptions and social outputs? Check.
  • Using AI to speed up the hard work? Check.
  • Adding structured data to your pages with minimal effort? Check.
  • Extra features for WooCommerce with our dedicated WooCommerce plugin? Check.
  • And for your Shopify store? Check.

Try Yoast SEO for WordPress (available in free and Premium versions) on your site today. If you’re using WooCommerce, add on our WooCommerce plugin for the ultimate ecommerce optimization. Alternatively, if you’re working with Shopify, try our Yoast SEO for Shopify app instead.

Lastly, boost your ecommerce SEO expertise with our ecommerce training at Yoast SEO Academy! You can follow a trial lesson for free or unlock the full course when you buy Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, or Yoast SEO for Shopify. Still want more? Check out our ultimate guide to ecommerce usability.

The post Ecommerce SEO checklist: 30 tips for a better online store appeared first on Yoast.

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Indexing and SEO: 9 steps to get your content indexed by Google and Bing

Indexing and SEO- 9 steps to get your content indexed by Google and Bing

Sick of seeing the error “Discovered – currently not indexed” in Google Search Console (GSC)?

So am I.

Too much SEO effort is focused on ranking.

But many sites would benefit from looking one level up – to indexing.

Why?

Because your content can’t compete until it’s indexed.

Whether the selection system is ranking or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), your content won’t matter unless it’s indexed.

The same goes for where it appears – traditional SERPs, AI-generated SERPs, Discover, Shopping, News, Gemini, ChatGPT, or whatever AI agents come next.

Without indexing, there’s no visibility, no clicks, and no impact.

And indexing issues are, unfortunately, very common. 

Based on my experience working with hundreds of enterprise-level sites, an average of 9% of valuable deep content pages (products, articles, listings, etc.) fail to get indexed by Google and Bing.

Percentage of page types not indexed by Google and Bing

So, how do you ensure your deep content gets indexed? 

Follow these nine proven steps to accelerate the process and maximize your site’s visibility.

Step 1: Audit your content for indexing issues

A sitemap for each deep content page type

In Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a separate sitemap for each page type:

  • One for products.
  • One for articles.
  • One for videos.
  • And so on.

After submitting a sitemap, it may take a few days to appear in the Pages interface. 

Use this interface to filter and analyze how much of your content has been excluded from indexing and, more importantly, the specific reasons why.

GSC - Why pages aren't indexed

All indexing issues fall into three main categories:

  • Poor SEO directives
  • Low content quality
    • If submitted pages are showing soft 404 or content quality issues, first ensure all SEO-relevant content is rendered server-side. 
    • Once confirmed, focus on improving the content’s value – enhance the depth, relevance, and uniqueness of the page.
  • Processing issues

While the first two categories can often be resolved relatively quickly, processing issues demand more time and attention. 

By using sitemap indexing data as benchmarks, you can track your progress in improving your site’s indexing performance.

Dig deeper: The 4 stages of search all SEOs need to know

Step 2: Submit a news sitemap for faster article indexing

News sitemap for articles

For article indexing in Google, be sure to submit a News sitemap. 

This specialized sitemap includes specific tags designed to speed up the indexing of articles published within the last 48 hours. 

Importantly, your content doesn’t need to be traditionally “newsy” to benefit from this submission method.

Step 3: Use Google Merchant Center feeds to improve product indexing

While this applies only to Google and specific categories, submitting your products to Google Merchant Center can significantly improve indexing. 

Ensure your entire active product catalog is added and kept up to date.

Dig deeper: How to optimize your ecommerce site for better indexing

Step 4: Submit an RSS feed to speed up crawling

Submit an RSS feed

Create an RSS feed that includes content published in the last 48 hours. 

Submit this feed in the Sitemaps section of both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

This works effectively because RSS feeds, by their nature, are crawled more frequently than traditional XML sitemaps. 

Plus, indexers still respond to WebSub pings for RSS feeds – a protocol no longer supported for XML sitemaps. 

To maximize benefits, ensure your development team integrates WebSub.

Step 5: Leverage indexing APIs for faster discovery

Integrate both IndexNow (unlimited) and the Google Indexing API (limited to 200 API calls per day unless you can secure a quota increase).

Officially, the Google Indexing API is only for pages with job posting or broadcast event markup.

(Note: The keyword “officially.” I’ll leave it to you to decide if you wish to test it.)

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Step 6: Strengthen internal linking to boost indexing signals

The primary way most indexers discover content is through links. 

URLs with stronger link signals are prioritized higher in the crawl queue and carry more indexing power.

While external links are valuable, internal linking is the real game-changer for indexing large sites with thousands of deep content pages.

Your related content blocks, pagination, breadcrumbs, and especially the links displayed on your homepage are prime optimization points for Googlebot and Bingbot.

When it comes to the homepage, you can’t link every deep content page – but you don’t need to. 

Focus on those that are not yet indexed. Here’s how:

  • When a new URL is published, check it against the log files.
  • As soon as you see Googlebot crawl the URL for the first time, ping the Google Search Console Inspection API.
  • If the response is “URL is unknown to Google,” “Crawled, not indexed,” or “Discovered, not indexed,” add the URL to a dedicated feed that populates a section on your homepage.
  • Re-check the URL periodically. Once indexed, remove it from the homepage feed to maintain relevance and focus on other non-indexed content.
Diagram - internal linking and indexin

This effectively creates a real-time RSS feed of non-indexed content linked from the homepage, leveraging its authority to accelerate indexing.

Step 7: Block non-SEO relevant URLs from crawlers

Block non-SEO relevant URLs from crawlers

Audit your log files regularly and block high-crawl, no-value URL paths using a robots.txt disallow.

Pages such as faceted navigation, search result pages, tracking parameters, and other irrelevant content can:

  • Distract crawlers.
  • Create duplicate content.
  • Split ranking signals.
  • Ultimately downgrade the indexer’s view of your site quality.

However, a robots.txt disallow alone is not enough. 

If these pages have internal links, traffic, or other ranking signals, indexers may still index them.

To prevent this:

  • In addition to disallowing the route in robots.txt, apply rel=”nofollow” to all possible links pointing to these pages.
  • Ensure this is done not only on-site but also in transactional emails and other communication channels to prevent indexers from ever discovering the URL.

Dig deeper: Crawl budget: What you need to know in 2025

Step 8: Use 304 responses to help crawlers prioritize new content

For most sites, the bulk of crawling is invested in refreshing already indexed content.

Use 304 responses to help crawlers prioritize new content

When a site returns a 200 response code, indexers redownload the content and compare it against their existing cache. 

While this is valuable when content has changed, it’s not necessary for most pages.

For content that hasn’t been updated, return a 304 HTTP response code (“Not Modified”). 

This tells crawlers the page hasn’t changed, allowing indexers to allocate resources to content discovery instead.

Step 9: Manually request indexing for hard-to-index pages

Manually request indexing for hard-to-index pages

For stubborn URLs that remain non-indexed, manually submit them in Google Search Console. 

However, keep in mind that there is a limit of 10 submissions per day, so use them wisely.

From my testing, manual submissions in Bing Webmaster Tools offer no significant advantage over submissions via the IndexNow API. 

Therefore, it’s more efficient to use the API.

Maximize your site’s visibility in Google and Bing

If your content isn’t indexed, it’s invisible. Don’t let valuable pages sit in limbo.

Prioritize the steps relevant to your content type, take a proactive approach to indexing, and unlock the full potential of your content.

Dig deeper: Why 100% indexing isn’t possible, and why that’s OK

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Your guide to Google Ads Smart Bidding

Your guide to Google Ads Smart Bidding

Are you controlling your paid search campaigns, or are they controlling you? 

If you can’t confidently articulate your smart bidding strategies, you lose conversions and credibility. 

True mastery isn’t just about setting up a campaign and picking a bid strategy; it’s about owning and communicating the process effectively. 

This guide is your roadmap to clarity and control, breaking down 2025’s Smart Bidding into actionable insights.

We’ll cover key concepts, common mistakes, and actionable tips for picking the right strategy. 

Smart Bidding in Google Ads: AI-powered bid optimization

Smart Bidding is Google Ads’ advanced form of automated bidding.

It leverages machine learning and real-time auction signals to optimize bids for conversions or conversion value. 

It dynamically adjusts bids to achieve specific goals, such as maximizing conversions at a target cost or achieving a desired return on ad spend.

Key Smart Bidding strategies include: 

Target CPA (cost per action)

  • Optimizes bids to achieve conversions at a target cost per action. 
  • Ideal for campaigns where you have a specific cost you’re willing to pay for each conversion (e.g., lead, sale).
  • Example: “We aim to acquire leads at a CPA of $50.”

Dig deeper: Everything you need to know about Target CPA bidding

Target ROAS (return on ad spend)

  • Focuses on achieving your desired revenue for every dollar spent. 
  • Best for ecommerce or campaigns with clear revenue goals.
  • Example: “We want to achieve a ROAS of 400%, meaning $4 in revenue for every $1 spent.”

Maximize Conversions

  • Automatically sets bids to achieve the most conversions within your budget.
  • Useful when you want to drive as many conversions as possible, regardless of cost.
  • Example: “Our goal is to maximize the number of sign-ups within our daily budget.”

Dig deeper: Mastering Maximize conversions bidding in Google Ads

Maximize Conversion Value

  • Prioritizes higher-value conversions for greater overall return. 
  • Effective when different conversions have varying values to your business.
  • Tends to favor selling more expensive products or services, as they contribute more to the total conversion value.
  • Example: “We value a ‘request for quote’ more than a ‘newsletter sign-up,’ so we want to maximize the total value of conversions.”

Dig deeper: Maximize Conversion Value: Google Ads bidding explained

Maximize Clicks

  • Automatically sets your bids to get as many clicks as possible within your budget.
  • Useful for top-of-funnel campaigns where the goal is to drive traffic to a site.
  • Example: “This campaign is designed to drive as much traffic to our new blog post as possible.”

Enhanced CPC (ECPC)

  • A semi-automated bidding strategy that adjusts your manual bids to try and get more conversions.
  • Google Ads adjusts your manual bid up or down based on the likelihood of a conversion.
  • Example: “We are using manual bidding but want to use Google’s signals to increase conversions where possible.”

Viewable CPM (YouTube)

  • Focuses on maximizing viewable impressions of your display or skippable in-stream video ads.
  • Ideal for brand awareness campaigns where the goal is to get your message seen by as many people as possible.
  • Example: “We want to ensure our brand message is visibly displayed to our target audience on YouTube.”

Cost Per View (YouTube)

  • Optimizes bids to get the most video views or interactions within your budget.
  • Best for campaigns focused on driving engagement with your video content.
  • Example: “We are running a video campaign on YouTube and want to maximize the number of views we receive.”

It’s crucial to understand that while setting a Target CPA or ROAS provides strategic direction, achieving those exact targets isn’t guaranteed.

I’ve had situations where a media planner pushed for an immediate switch to a specific CPA goal. 

They wanted the target set at four times and wouldn’t budge or try to understand why the campaign was set at two times.

A common misconception is that simply setting a desired metric will automatically yield the desired results. 

In practice, achieving optimal performance often requires a nuanced approach.

This may involve:

  • Gradual bid adjustments.
  • A willingness to accept temporary fluctuations in ROAS for broader account health.
  • A comprehensive evaluation of multiple factors, including budget, historical campaign performance, and keyword strategy.

It’s essential to understand that Smart Bidding strategies, while powerful, require strategic oversight and a holistic understanding of account dynamics. 

Success should be measured within the context of overarching account objectives, not solely focusing on individual campaign metrics.

Understanding manual, automated and smart bidding in Google Ads

Understanding manual, automated and smart bidding in Google Ads

Manual bidding allows you to control bid adjustments completely, making it ideal for certain industries, such as legal or home services, where fluctuating competition requires ongoing oversight. However, it requires more time and effort.

It’s like driving a car where you control every gear shift and pedal movement.

Automated bidding simplifies bid management by using algorithms to adjust bids. 

While automated bidding can save time, its generic approach doesn’t account for nuanced conversion goals.

Think of this as engaging cruise control. You tell the car (Google Ads) your general desired speed (goal), and it adjusts the engine (bids) to maintain that pace.

Smart Bidding, however, takes automated bidding further by using real-time signals and advanced machine learning to predict the likelihood of conversions and their value, tailoring bids to individual auctions. 

It’s especially effective for campaigns with clear conversion goals and sufficient historical data.

This is like having a self-driving car with an incredibly sophisticated navigation system.

It’s important to know that while all Smart Bidding is automated, not all automated bidding qualifies as Smart Bidding.

Automated bidding covers a wider range of strategies, some of which are more basic and don’t rely on real-time signals or advanced machine learning.

In essence:

  • Manual: You control every bid.
  • Automated: Google’s algorithms handle bid adjustments based on your chosen strategy.
  • Smart: Google’s machine learning optimizes bids in real-time for conversions and conversion value.

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Smart Bidding: Advantages and risks

There are significant advantages to using Smart Bidding.

  • Improved efficiency: Saves time by automating bid adjustments. 
  • Auction-time optimization: Factors in user intent, device, location, and other data points to optimize bids for each auction. 
  • Goal alignment: Customizes bids to match your campaign objectives, whether it’s maximizing volume or focusing on high-value actions.  

While Smart Bidding offers significant advantages, missteps in implementation can lead to underwhelming results. 

Here’s how to avoid common pitfalls and optimize your campaign performance.

Data dependency

Smart Bidding algorithms rely on robust historical data to make accurate predictions. 

Campaigns with fewer than 30 conversions in the last 30 days may struggle to optimize effectively.

Start with manual bidding or Maximize Clicks to build a data foundation before switching to Smart Bidding. Boris Beceric, a Google Ads consultant and coach, said:

  • “I guess most try Smart Bidding too early – without enough conversion volume. What usually helps: consolidate campaigns so you get more data flowing through a single campaign. Portfolio bidding – kinda the same, but consolidation takes place at the bid strategy level.
  • “Micro conversions – try to add in the micro conversion that had the most volume and is closest to the ‘real’ conversion. Bonus: Reverse engineer CVR and conv value from micro to macro conversion and adjust tCPA accordingly.”

Goal misalignment

Using the wrong bidding strategy can hinder performance. 

For example, applying Target ROAS to a new campaign with limited data can set unrealistic expectations and reduce reach.

Align bidding strategies with your goals.

When prioritizing profitability, use Maximize Conversions for volume and Target ROAS or Target CPA. Harrison Hepp, owner of Industrious Marketing, said:

  • “I had a client who was hybrid ecommerce and lead gen (they sold products, but high-priced deals were lead gen), and they insisted on tracking purchases and leads in every campaign. We constantly battled major fluctuations in the campaigns as they’d swing back and forth between getting purchases or leads and trying to optimize to both.
  • “It also made bid strategy selection really hard, as conversion value bidding would deprioritize leads (no value was tracked), but CPA bidding wasn’t efficient for purchases because of differences in product prices. It really showed how aligning your goals and bid strategy is critical for steady performance. It also underlined how the right bidding strategy can prioritize success in campaigns.”

Monitoring is non-negotiable

Despite its automation, Smart Bidding is not a “set it and forget it” tool. 

Failing to monitor campaigns can lead to wasted ad spend and missed optimization opportunities.

Regularly review performance metrics, adjust campaign parameters, and stay proactive in managing Smart Bidding strategies.

  • “Custom columns/Segment views: We want to measure efficiency, so things like conv value/conv, search impression share, etc.” said Ameet Khabra, owner of Hop Skip Media.

Even with the most advanced AI behind Smart Bidding, performance optimization requires vigilance. 

Regularly review the following metrics to ensure your strategy is working as intended:

  • CPA: Is your Target CPA being met?
  • ROAS: Are the conversions driving sufficient revenue?
  • Conversion rates: Are conversions coming from the right audience segments? Or are you paying for competitors to download your white papers and marking that down as a lead?
  • Search term reports: Are irrelevant keywords consuming a significant portion of your budget? Unprofitable keywords can be why a campaign is not meeting goals.
  • Conversion tracking accuracy: If conversion tracking is improperly implemented, Smart Bidding will optimize based on inaccurate data, reducing effectiveness.

Double-check your conversion tracking setup. Assign accurate values to conversions to reflect their true business impact. Khabra said:

  • “My favorite saying lately is ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ and that is definitely a large component of conversion tracking. Ensuring that we’ve identified the correct conversions that move the needle is half the battle. Implementing the tracking and double-checking that it is correct – collecting conversions – is the second half.”

Budgetary awareness

Strategies like Maximize Conversions and Maximize Clicks will attempt to spend your entire daily budget. 

If your budget is set too high, this can lead to overspending.

Start with smaller daily budgets and gradually increase them while monitoring performance.

Realistic targets

Setting overly aggressive Target CPA or Target ROAS goals can limit your campaign’s reach, as the algorithm will avoid auctions it deems unprofitable.

Begin with realistic targets slightly higher or lower than your current average. Allow time for the algorithm to learn before refining the target.

Best practices for Smart Bidding in Google Ads

To ensure optimal performance, follow these best practices for implementing Smart Bidding in your Google Ads campaigns.

1. Feed accurate data 

Ensure your conversion tracking is set up correctly. 

Assign meaningful values to conversions – whether it’s a purchase, lead form submission, or newsletter signup. 

2. Leverage seasonality adjustments 

Use seasonality adjustments in Google Ads to guide Smart Bidding algorithms for short-term changes (e.g., holiday sales or promotions). 

This prevents excessive or insufficient bids during periods of fluctuating demand. 

Google Ads seasonality adjustments

3. Start with conservative budgets 

Begin with smaller budgets and avoid aggressive bid caps that may limit auction participation. Allow the algorithm to learn and adapt gradually. 

4. Prioritize business value over conversion volume 

Align your bidding tactics with broader business goals. Instead of focusing solely on conversion volume, consider how each conversion contributes to revenue or lifetime customer value. 

5. Test and adapt 

Use Google Ads experiments to test different strategies. 

For example, compare Target CPA with Target ROAS to identify which delivers better results for your campaigns. 

Google Ads Experiments let you directly compare bid strategies in real-world scenarios.

Duplicate your campaign, allocate a split percentage to a new strategy (like comparing Target CPA vs. Target ROAS), and see concrete results with statistical significance.

Final thoughts

Smart Bidding isn’t just about knowing which technical settings to adjust. 

It’s about understanding how to make Google’s automated tools align with your business goals.

The digital landscape evolves quickly, so it’s essential to stay adaptable, continuously monitor performance, and make adjustments as needed. 

Nail the strategy, stay proactive, and you’ll set yourself up for long-term success.

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The next wave of search: AI Mode, deep research and beyond

The next wave of search: AI Mode, deep research and beyond

With the rise of AI-powered features, search engines are not just directing users to information but delivering answers directly. 

This shift is redefining how people interact with the web, raising questions about the future of SEO, content discovery, and digital marketing. 

Here’s what’s coming next.

From ChatGPT to Grok 3: The breakneck pace of AI advancements

The world has seen rapid and significant advances in AI technology and large language models (LLMs) within two years. 

Looking back just three years ago, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s LLAMA did not exist, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT was later released in late November 2022. 

  • Fast-forward to January 2025, the public was introduced to DeepSeek R1. This open-source large language reasoning model astounded the AI community with its speed, efficiency, and affordability, especially compared to OpenAI’s o1 GPT model. 
  • A few weeks later, Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grok 3, which impressed users by topping a key AI leaderboard with its complexity and fewer guardrails (see: unhinged mode).
  • More recently, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code, an LLM that excels at code creation and debugging to a degree that has made many software engineers a bit uneasy.

These LLMs are just the beginning of AI’s rapid progress, with more breakthroughs on the way. 

Google’s AI Mode: A glimpse of the future 

AI isn’t just bringing new products – it’s transforming existing ones, too.

On March 5, Google announced they were expanding AI Overviews with a new experimental feature called AI Mode. 

This interactive feature allows users to:

  • Engage with web search in a chat-like manner through multimodal understanding.
  • Refine long-tail queries in a back-and-forth manner. 

AI Mode, powered by Gemini 2.0, enhances research using a “query fan-out” technique to gather real-time data from multiple sources and generate detailed, in-depth summaries.

This may make SEOs uncomfortable, as it potentially reduces clicks to publisher sites and further promotes a zero-click ecosystem. 

With Google integrating Gemini 2.0 into its suite of products and its dominance of 89% of the search industry, its AI innovations demand close attention. 

These technologies will likely be added to search, and AI Mode offers a preview of what’s ahead.

Two terms for the future of search: Agentic and deep research 

We’ll likely hear two terms used more often in the AI and search space: 

Deep research models can browse the web and focus on conducting intensive, in-depth research to provide users with informative summaries on complex topics. 

Unlike previous LLMs, which use a single-step information retrieval system through RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), deep research and agentic models can:

  • Conduct multi-step research through a series of actions, pulling information from multiple sources to provide comprehensive summaries to the user. 
  • Take proactive actions, such as executing tasks and complex instructions. 

Google’s Project Mariner and OpenAI’s Operator already showcase these capabilities by allowing users to perform tasks within their browsers while understanding multi-modal elements such as text, images, and forms.

Dig deeper: How to use OpenAI’s Deep Research for smarter SEO strategies

How these models could change search

Suppose you want to plan a trip to Tokyo and know the best season to go, the weather, and where to stay. 

Typically, this type of research takes a few days or weeks, and you gather information from various sources, such as travel websites or YouTube videos.

A deep research model can do the heavy lifting by searching the web, gathering information, and summarizing relevant content, which saves you time. 

It can also “read, listen, and watch” various sources to provide a thorough answer. 

An agentic model could also book your hotels and flights, navigating checkout flows to complete the purchase.

AI is moving in this direction as companies like Google work toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) – machines that can reason across diverse tasks like humans.

Deep research and agentic models are key milestones in building practical AI solutions for everyday use.

AI Overviews have already impacted click behavior and organic traffic. 

Now, we must consider these AI features’ long-term effects on the content ecosystem.

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What could the future search landscape look like?

Google’s AI Overviews and agentic advancements are here to stay. 

If AI Mode succeeds, it will be the first deep research feature in Google Search. 

So, what’s next for the search landscape? 

Here are some possibilities.

Continual rise of zero-click searches

Since launching in May 2024, AI Overviews have significantly reduced clicks to informational queries.

As AI search capabilities advance, users will likely rely even more on AI tools for quick answers rather than clicking through to websites or articles. 

AI Mode and future search innovations could accelerate this shift by prioritizing fast, AI-generated summaries over traditional browsing.

As zero-click searches become the norm, you must rethink how you measure value and engagement. 

Traditional KPIs may no longer accurately reflect user behavior, so focusing on brand visibility and awareness will be more critical than ever.

Increased personalization

LLMs and AI systems are revolutionizing search by personalizing responses with unmatched speed and scale, surpassing traditional algorithms. 

Leveraging Google’s vast user data, AI can train on existing information and refine queries in real-time to deliver more tailored results. 

As these systems continuously learn, they will become even better at recognizing, remembering, and adapting to individual user preferences.

As AI-driven search becomes more personalized, it’s worth considering whether hyper-niche content is the key to reaching your audience.

Multimodal search

Google’s AI-powered multimodal capabilities are already embedded in many of its products, including Project Astra, an AI assistant unveiled at Google I/O 2024.

During a live demonstration, Astra used multiple tools – such as Google Lens – to identify objects in real time and respond to voice queries.

In my own experience at Google I/O, the AI assistant:

  • Accurately classified animal figurines.
  • Distinguished between similar names (“Bob” vs. “Rob”).
  • Even created a story about the figures.

While some of these advanced features haven’t been integrated into Google Search yet, multimodal search through Google Lens and voice search is already shaping how users submit queries. 

As Google develops these capabilities, you should anticipate what’s next, look beyond text-based queries, and optimize for image, video, and audio search.

Dig deeper: From search to AI agents: The future of digital experiences

Commercial queries can still draw users to websites

AI-generated results have reduced clicks for informational queries, but commercial and transactional searches still offer opportunities for website traffic.

During the decision-making process, potential buyers research extensively – comparing products, reading reviews, and exploring multiple channels before making a purchase.

While it’s unclear how AI-generated search will impact this journey, think about how AI can streamline multi-touchpoint decision-making while still driving users to your website.

When users move closer to making a purchase, user-generated content – like reviews – will still play a crucial role in conversions.

Content quality still rules

Despite AI’s growing role in search, one thing remains constant: high-quality content is essential. 

Whether users rely on traditional search engines or LLMs, visibility will still depend on the strength of the content itself.

Since both Google Search and LLMs use RAG to pull from vast datasets, ensuring these systems have access to accurate, high-quality information is critical. 

Content demonstrating E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) will continue to rank higher in AI-driven search results.

Your brand will also play a bigger role in search visibility, making it essential to create valuable, well-optimized content across multiple formats.

Dig deeper: Decoding Google’s E-E-A-T: A comprehensive guide to quality assessment signals

Read more at Read More

How to Use ChatGPT to Get 10X Better Answers

This guide will show you how to use ChatGPT the right way.

Brand new to using it?

I’ll help you skip the rookie mistakes that leave most beginners frustrated.

Tried it before and had an average experience?

No problem. You’ll learn how to refine your approach to get useful, high-quality responses (finally).

Because here’s the thing:

ChatGPT IS a powerful tool. But only if you know how to use it effectively.

Let’s make that happen.

What is ChatGPT (And What Can It Do)?

ChatGPT is an AI assistant that answers your questions like a human would.

It can also generate ideas and assist with writing, problem-solving, and research tasks.

How does it do this?

It analyzes lots of books, web pages, and conversations — this is its training data.

Then, it predicts the most relevant response.

Think of it as a brilliant researcher who’s read millions of books and the entire internet.

It can recall any facts and instantly connect ideas to generate the most relevant answer.

How ChatGPT Works 

(We talk more about how generative AI works in this article.)

So, what can ChatGPT do?

A surprising number of things.

It can help you:

  • Brainstorm blog post topics
  • Plan your content strategy
  • Debug code snippets
  • Translate marketing copy into multiple languages
  • Explain blood test results in simple terms

Plus, depending on the model you’re using (more on that below), it can also:

Generate images using DALL·E:

ChatGPT – Flamenco dancer prompt

And handle voice interactions.

ChatGPT – Choose a voice

ChatGPT Models

OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) regularly updates ChatGPT with new training data.

That’s why there are different ChatGPT models.

Each one is optimized for different tasks.

Model Best For
GPT-4.5 Advanced model for reasoning and creativity. Better pattern recognition.
GPT-4o General and professional use. Also good for coding & deep analysis. Multimodal.
GPT-4o mini Everyday tasks. Gives responses faster but lacks advanced tools.
o3-mini Coding and advanced reasoning, great for problem-solving & logic tasks
o1 & o1-mini Complex problem-solving but lacks memory and search
GPT-4o with Scheduled Tasks (BETA) AI automation

ChatGPT Limitations

It’s no secret.

ChatGPT makes things up sometimes (aka a “hallucination).

It’s not really thinking for itself.

Instead, it predicts words based on patterns in its training data.

And sometimes, those predictions are completely wrong.

For example, Łukasz Białozor, an AI consultant, asked:

Who was the sole survivor of the Titanic?


Instead of correcting the prompt, ChatGPT named one person—even though 706 people survived.

ChatGPT – Titanic survivor prompt

Bias is another issue.

AI models like ChatGPT reflect societal biases that exist in their training data. Here’s a simple way to see this in action:

Ask it to draw a nurse. You’ll likely get a woman.

Now, ask it to draw a CEO. You’ll probably see a man.

Here’s what I got:

ChatGPT – Generated images: Nurse & CEO

This gender bias isn’t just limited to images. ChatGPT can perpetuate stereotypes and biases around:

  • Gender roles and professions
  • Cultural perspectives
  • Socioeconomic assumptions
  • Historical narratives
  • Geographic representation

For example, when asked about “traditional family values” or “successful business practices,” ChatGPT might default to Western, male-dominated perspectives without acknowledging other viewpoints.

What does this mean for you?

  • Always cross-reference important facts from multiple sources
  • Be aware that ChatGPT’s responses may reflect societal biases
  • Ask follow-up questions to get different perspectives
  • Use ChatGPT as a starting point, not the final authority
  • Consider whose viewpoints might be missing from its responses

Remember: ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s trained on human-created data—which means it inherits human biases. So, use it wisely by staying critical and conscious of these limitations.


How to Use ChatGPT: Step-by-Step Beginners Guide

If you’re new to ChatGPT, getting started is easy.

You’ll be using it like a pro in just a few steps.

Step 1: Choose the Right ChatGPT Account Type

There are three ways to access ChatGPT, depending on what you need.

Guest Access

You can try ChatGPT right away with “Guest Access.” No need to sign up.

Just go to chatgpt.com, and start chatting.

ChatGPT – Start page

It lets you ask questions and even search the web.

But your conversations won’t be saved.

Once you close the page, everything disappears.

If you’re testing it out, “Guest Access” is fine.

But if you want ChatGPT to act like a real assistant, you’ll need an account.

Free Account

A free account gives you more features and better answers.

For example, the “Reason” feature helps it think before answering, so you get sharper, more accurate responses.

ChatGPT – Hoover over Reason

You can also upload files like PDFs and spreadsheets, making it easy to work with large documents.

ChatGPT – Attachment feature

Another benefit?

Your chat history saves.

You can return to past conversations and pick up where you left off.

ChatGPT – Chat history

Another big benefit is that you can customize ChatGPT responses.

(More on that below.)

So, every time it responds to your questions, it answers in a way that matches your style.

How to Sign Up for Free

Go to chatgpt.com. Click “Sign up.”

ChatGPT – Sign up

Enter a valid email address or sign in using Google, Microsoft, or Apple.

ChatGPT – Create an account

Create a password.

ChatGPT – Create a password

Then, add your name and birthday (both are required).

ChatGPT – Tell us about you

And finally, choose if you want ChatGPT to remember your conversations (you can change this later).

ChatGPT now has memory

That’s it. You’re set.

ChatGPT – After sign-up

Paid Subscription

If you use ChatGPT a lot, consider upgrading to ChatGPT Plus for $20/month.

This gives you access to all ChatGPT models, including the latest and most advanced versions.

ChatGPT – Models

You even get 10 “Deep Research” searches per month.

ChatGPT – Deep research

This allows ChatGPT to search multiple web sources in one query.

You give it one prompt, and it’ll independently search websites, read research papers, compare products, and more.

It’s great when you need to research and visit many websites, such as when you’re comparing products before you buy.

Or when you need to go through scientific journals for research.

Oh, and another benefit?

Faster responses, even during peak hours (7 AM to 5 PM ET).

While free users wait, you keep chatting without interruptions.

Step 2: Tweak the Default Settings

ChatGPT works great out of the box, but a few tweaks can make it even better.

ChatGPT Memory: On or Off?

When you first sign up, you’ll be asked if you want to turn memory on.

But you’re not locked into that choice.

You can change this anytime at:

“Profile” (top right) > “Settings” > “Personalization.”

ChatGPT – Profile settings – Personalization

Turn memory on, and ChatGPT will learn from your past conversations.

You won’t have to repeat yourself every time you start a new chat.

Over time, it’ll remember details and give you more relevant responses.

Turn memory off and every session starts fresh.

This is great if you prefer more privacy.

Or don’t want past conversations influencing future replies.

You can also erase stored memories.

Click “Manage memories” in the “Personalization” window.

And you’ll see a new window where you can erase all memories or delete specific ones.

ChatGPT – Settings – Manage Memory

Personalizing ChatGPT: Make It Work Your Way

ChatGPT doesn’t have to sound the same for everyone.

You can easily customize it.

Just go to “Profile” (at the top right) > “Customize ChatGPT.”

ChatGPT – Profile – Customize ChatGPT

Then, enter basic details like your name and profession.

ChatGPT – Customize basic details

Next, customize ChatGPT’s personality.

ChatGPT – Customize personality

You can specify:

  • Tone: Friendly, casual, professional?
  • Response length: Brief and direct or in-depth?
  • Persona: Strategist, a teacher, or something else?

For example, if you want it to write in Backlinko style, you could type:

Write in the Backlinko writing style. Be direct and cut the fluff. Every sentence should be actionable. Do not use long complicated words when a simpler, shorter word exists.


ChatGPT – Write in Backlinko style

If you’re not sure what to write, you can ask ChatGPT.

Here’s one way you can do that using your brand’s messaging document.

Upload the brand guide to ChatGPT and write:

Attached is [YOUR BRAND’S] content guideline. In under 1,500 characters, summarize [YOUR BRAND’S] voice, tone, and personality.


ChatGPT – Uploaded brand guide

Advanced tip: I’ve noticed that ChatGPT doesn’t always stick to the personality I want. If you see that, too, do this:

First, give it this instruction.

“You have different personas. When I write [keyword], use that persona.”

Then, define the persona:

For example, for Backlinko, I write:

“[backlinko]: Be direct. Write clearly. Use short, punchy sentences with a confident tone. Make it easy to skim and focus on real, tested advice. Skip the jargon and write using the active voice. Keep the language simple (6th-grade level).”

Now, whenever I want ChatGPT to respond in Backlinko’s style, I start the chat with [backlinko].

The great thing about this?

You can add multiple personas for different tasks. And then you just add [keyword] to call that persona into the chat.

Some of my favorites include:

[80/20]: Focus only on the 20% of knowledge or actions that drive 80% of results. Prioritize key takeaways.

[teacher]: Break concepts into step-by-step explanations with real-world examples, analogies, and case studies.


The final section in customization is “What should ChatGPT know about you?”

What should ChatGPT know about you

Here, you personalize ChatGPT to your life and work.

What should you add?

Think about how you’ll be using it, then add relevant instructions.

For example, if you’re vegetarian with some dietary restrictions and you often use it for meal planning, you can write:

My family is vegetarian. One of our children has a peanut allergy, and the other doesn’t eat onions. Always make sure that the meals you create follow these restrictions.


Here’s another example if you use ChatGPT for work.

Say you have an ecommerce store.

You could add:

I sell handcrafted plant baskets made from sustainable materials. I have customers all over the world who are eco-conscious. I write in a warm but expert tone. I’m knowledgeable but never preachy. I have a small marketing budget. I do mostly organic content and paid ads.


Control Your Privacy

By default, OpenAI may use your conversations to improve the model.

If you’d rather keep chats private, you can turn this off.

Go to “Profile” > “Settings” > “Data Controls” and toggle “Improve the model for everyone.”

ChatGPT – Improve the model for everyone

Once you do this, it won’t use your conversations for training.

And that’s it.

Your AI is now customized for you.

Go test ChatGPT with a few questions.

And see how well it adjusts based on your customizations.

Still not customized the way you want it?

Go back to settings and keep refining.

Step 3: Learn to Write Better Prompts

If you want high-quality answers from ChatGPT, you need to write better prompts.

Bland or generic answers usually mean a prompting problem.

Why?

Because when you give ChatGPT a vague question, it has to fill in the gaps.

And from what I’ve seen, it plays it safe by giving you the most generic explanations.

You don’t want that.

So how do you fix it?

Let’s get Google to help.

In its prompting guide, Google states that a good, detailed prompt includes four elements:

  • Task: What you want ChatGPT to do (explain, analyze, compare)
  • Context: Relevant background info (who, what, where, why)
  • Persona: The role ChatGPT should take (expert, teacher, consultant)
  • Format: How the response should be structured (step-by-step, bullet points, examples)

Elements of a Good Prompt

Adding just task + context makes a big difference.

Use all four, and you get much better answers.

Let me show you the difference in answer quality between a basic and an optimized prompt.

A basic prompt:

Give me unique marketing tips for a tour guide.


What do you get?

A generic list that can work for any tour guide anywhere in the world:

ChatGPT – Prompt – Tour guide

Now, add task + specific context:

ChatGPT – Prompt – Unique marketing strategies

Since ChatGPT has specific details to work with, the answer is more relevant.

We’re not done yet.

How about using all four elements using this prompt?

Act as a tourism marketing expert with 20 years of experience. I’ve just started a tour company in Málaga, Spain. The competition is fierce, so I need to stand out. Your task: identify three unique viral marketing strategies. The output should be a numbered list with one real-world example for each.


That level of detail gives you a more hyper-specific answer:

ChatGPT – Prompt – Marketing expert strategies

Step 4: Get Better Results With Frameworks

Frameworks help ChatGPT focus its thinking so its response becomes clearer and more organized.

So, instead of saying, “Give me an SEO strategy,” or “Give me content ideas,” specify a framework.

For example, in the Málaga tour guide prompt above, try using the STP framework (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning).

You might say:

Act as a tourism marketing expert with 20 years of experience. Use the STP framework (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) to develop a unique marketing strategy for a tour guide in Málaga, Spain. Identify a specific segment of travelers, explain the best way to target them, and position the tour guide’s services for maximum appeal.


Much. Better. Answer.

ChatGPT – Prompt – Marketing expert + STP framework strategies

But what if you don’t know any frameworks?

No problem.

Just ask ChatGPT.

All you have to do is choose the best one.

ChatGPT – Prompt – LinkedIn post

Step 5: Refine ChatGPT’s Responses with Follow-Ups

ChatGPT’s first answer isn’t always the best, especially for complex topics.

How do you improve it?

Keep asking questions.

Here’s what I mean.

Imagine you’re a social media manager launching a smart water bottle that reminds users to drink.

Your first prompt might be:

Give me a list of interactive social media campaign ideas. Context: We’re launching a new product: a smart water bottle that reminds users to drink. You’re a social media strategist with 10 years of experience.


ChatGPT gives you a list:

ChatGPT – Prompt – Interactive social media campaign ideas

It’s a good start.

But it’s not enough to have a clear launch strategy.

So, you dig deeper.

  • If the reply is too generic, ask for more details.
  • If the answer is too theoretical, ask for clear, actionable steps.

Or you can focus on one thing in the list.

ChatGPT – Prompt – TikTok challenge

Keep refining your questions until you have everything you need.

By doing this, ChatGPT becomes more of a collaborative partner.

And you get a final output that’s a blend of AI and your knowledge and topical expertise.

Why not add everything in one big prompt?

You could.

But it’s not always the best approach.

Yes, some prompts are simple enough that they don’t need iterative refining.

ChatGPT – Prompt – Unicorn

But for complex ideas, refining step by step gives you more control over the output.

Personal insight: When conversations with ChatGPT get longer, it can go into a rabbit hole and lose track of the original task. When this happens, I bring it back with a prompt like:

“Go back to the original task. Do you remember it?”

If the response shows that it has forgotten some details from the original prompt, remind it explicitly:

“We were working on [ORIGINAL TASK]. Pick up from where we left off.”

This helps bring the conversation back to the task you set out to do.


Fun Ways to Use ChatGPT for Life and Work

One of the most powerful things about ChatGPT?

It can take on different roles.

It can be your personal assistant, researcher, strategist, problem-solver, and more.

ChatGPT as 24-7 Personal Assistant

ChatGPT can be your assistant for work and daily life.

Need help with life planning, SEO, or optimizing your habits?

Done.

For example, you can use it to review legal documents.

Upload a PDF, like a client agreement, and ask it to explain the legal jargon. Or point out unfair clauses.

ChatGPT – Personal assistant – Document review

It’s great for mundane tasks, too. Like cleaning up video transcripts.

Paste (or upload) the transcript.

And ask ChatGPT to organize it better.

ChatGPT – Prompt – Transcript clean up request

Saves you so much time.

ChatGPT – Transcript edited

Personal insight: I recently used ChatGPT to help me organize my Obsidian vault (Obsidian is a personal knowledge management tool.)

I wanted a clean, scalable folder structure that matched my use case.


So, off to ChatGPT I went and wrote this prompt:

Create a folder structure for Obsidian that helps organize personal insights, research, and notes. The folder structure should make finding and linking notes easy while keeping things simple and scalable. Strictly limit to five main folders. Make sure it’s organized so it’s easy to expand over time. Your output should be in a clear, hierarchical bullet format.


ChatGPT – Prompt – Creating folder structure

This response gave me a solid starting point to structure my folders.

It also saved me time by giving me a clear framework to customize instead of figuring it all out from scratch.

ChatGPT as Your Analyst

ChatGPT is also great for processing and analyzing data.

A few things it can do:

  • Clean up raw data
  • Identify patterns
  • Extract insights

Side note: Data analysis works best with the paid plan. The free version may not always deliver the same level of detail.


Here’s a great example of how you can use its data analysis capabilities for digital marketing.

Let’s say you run an online store.

You want to analyze your competitor’s Google Shopping Ads using the Product Listing Ads (PLAs) data you got from Semrush.

Do this:

Upload the data to ChatGPT and use this prompt:

Analyze this Product Listing Ad (PLA) data for BestBuy.com from Semrush. Give me the top five takeaways that will help me. Show your work.


Just like that, ChatGPT will identify patterns and trends from the Semrush data:

ChatGPT – Prompt plus Semrush PLA data

Expert tip: Want to double-check the analysis? Add “Show your work” to your prompt. This tells ChatGPT to explain its thought process so you can verify and refine the answer.


ChatGPT as a Thought Partner

ChatGPT is great for learning and skill development.

For example, you can use it as a conversation partner when learning a new language.

ChatGPT – Speaks Esperanto

You can also use ChatGPT to stress-test your thinking.

It can challenge your assumptions and poke holes in your reasoning.

I even use it to analyze my content outlines for writing projects.

ChatGPT – Content analyze prompt

Fun fact: Being nice to ChatGPT can lead to better responses. Research shows that using polite, supportive prompts leads to better answers.


Don’t Stop at ChatGPT. Build Your AI Toolkit.

You’re speaking ChatGPT like a native now.

You’ve gone from curious to confident.

Keep using it, the better you’ll get.

But here’s the thing:

ChatGPT isn’t the only AI tool you should master.

Other generative AI platforms excel at different tasks.

Some crush internet research and exploration. And others are great for chatting with real-life characters.

Check which AI tool matches your exact needs in our no-fluff guide to ChatGPT alternatives.


The post How to Use ChatGPT to Get 10X Better Answers appeared first on Backlinko.

Read more at Read More

7 tips to write good, high-quality content

Writing quality content should be a key aspect of every SEO strategy. But when is your content considered good or high-quality? And does quality mean the same for your users as for Google? In this article, we’ll discuss creating content and how you can make sure it hits the mark. It will require some creative writing skills. But don’t worry, you don’t have to become the next big author! By focusing on the right things, you can create high-ranking quality content that your users will happily read.

What is quality content?

That is the million-dollar question. Knowing how to write good content helps you get more visitors, higher conversions, and lower bounce rates. But who determines the quality of your content? The easy answer: your users. However, this also makes creating the right content more difficult. Because every user is different and has a different search intent. They have, however, one thing in common: every user knows what they want.

Although your users eventually determine the quality of your content, you can take a few steps to ensure you end up with well-thought-out, readable, and attractive content. In other words, content that’s eligible to be considered high-quality by your users and search engines. Luckily, a lot of the aspects that users will appreciate about your content are the same as the aspects search engines look for in quality content.

How search engines determine quality content

Search engines want to present their users with the exact content they seek. Content that is helpful, reliable and people-first and aligns with their current search intent. To help you create good content, Google has an acronym that you can consult: E-E-A-T. 


Search engines decide on what is content quality by assessing a number of things – relevance, clarity and helpfulness, credibility and uniqueness. This all ties into the importance of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in any strategy around brand or topical authority.

Alex Moss – Principal SEO at Yoast


The acronym E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In their ongoing search for the best content, Google has added this acronym to their search quality raters guidelines. They use this to assess and judge the quality of online content. Although it’s especially important for so-called YMYL websites (“Your Money Your Life” – sites that are related to well-being, health, finances or safety), these guidelines apply to all content out there.

Why is quality content important?

 Quality content is the foundation of a strong brand, helping you establish authority and expertise in your industry. Well-crafted content speaks directly to the needs of your audience, providing valuable insights that position your brand as a reliable source. Whether it’s through blog posts, social media, or in-depth guides, delivering high-quality content builds long-term relationships with customers, fosters engagement, and strengthens brand credibility.

Beyond its impact on branding, quality content plays a crucial role in SEO. As mentioned above, search engines prioritize helpful, well-structured, and informative content that truly benefits users. By focusing on producing valuable content that answers queries effectively, you can achieve higher rankings in the search results. This leads to increased visibility, organic traffic, and better engagement, which will help you grow your website sustainably. To scale content creation effectively, check out this guide on scaling content. Additionally, if you mainly write content for your clients’ website, make sure to check out our article on writing valuable content that your clients will love.

7 steps to start creating high-quality content

To ensure the quality of your content, there are 7 steps that you can follow. Let’s go into them in more detail.

1. Write for your readers, not yourself

If you have an ecommerce site, you want readers to know about the products or services you offer. If you’re a blogger, you want readers to get to know you and the topics that interest you. However, it’s also important to consider what your users want to read about. What interests do they have? What events or news do they follow that you can relate to your business?  And what ‘problems’ are they trying to fix that have led them to your site?

The first step in creating high-quality content is ensuring it contains the information your audience is looking for. To find out what your users are looking for, you have to conduct proper keyword research. This will help you determine what subjects to write about and what words your audience uses. Keyword research also helps your rankings, as more visitors and lower bounce rates tell Google that your page is a good result to show in their search results.

2. Think about search intent and your goal

Search intent is the reason why someone conducts a specific search. It’s the term used to describe their purpose. For example, do they have a question they need answered? Or do they want to buy something online? Someone’s search intent makes a difference in how they consider the quality of your content. If it fits their need at that moment, then they will stay on your page longer. But if they need an answer to a question and the page they land on only tries to sell them products, they’ll be gone before you know it.

Match goals to different search intents

It’s important to consider search intent while creating content for a specific page. That’s why we advise you to match your goals to users’ different search intents. Is one of your goals to increase newsletter subscriptions? Then, you should add that subscription button to pages where users with an informational intent land. Does a visitor have a transactional intent (meaning: they want to buy something)? Make sure they land on a product or category page dedicated to the product they are looking for. 

Of course, experience tells us it’s not always that black and white. Still, it’s good to consider your users’ search intent. It helps you determine the focus of your content and what call-to-actions you want to add. A great way to get started is by adopting a content design mindset. This mindset helps you produce user-centered content based on real needs. Also, we recommend looking at the search results for some input to create great content.

3. Make your content readable and engaging

Do you want to get your message across? And do you want people to read your entire blog post or page? Then, make your content easy to read. This means that you should:

  • Think about the structure of your text and the words you use. Too much text without any headings or paragraphs, also known as a wall of text,  tends to scare people off. Use headings and whitespace to give your readers some air while reading.
  • Try to limit the use of difficult words and be cautious of the length of your sentences. Both can make your content harder to understand, which will slow down and frustrate your reader.
  • Variation in your text will make it engaging. Use synonyms and alternate longer sentences with shorter ones to mix it up.

Another important thing to focus on: Have fun! And be conversational in your writing. This helps you write high-quality content that is different from your competitors’ and helps users get to know you and your brand.

Read more: 5 tips for writing readable blog posts »

4. Write with E-E-A-T in mind

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness can all be used to improve your content. So how can you make sure to include these in your writing? We’ll go through them one by one and give you some pointers.

Share your experience

Although the acronym started as E-A-T, they added another E shortly after. This newly added E stands for experience. They prefer content that showcases knowledge or skills gained through first-hand experience. This can be gained through personal involvement or observations related to the topic at hand. To give an example, someone who has worked as an optician for many years will be experienced in the topic of eyesight. Or someone who has a prescription themselves will also have experience on the topic.

Keep reading: The new E in E-E-A-T, or the importance of Experience »

Be the expert in your field

The second E in E-E-A-T stands for expertise. Although it makes sense that this would be an important factor in determining the quality of content, it is trickier to evaluate. So what Google does is find out what it can about the author itself. What is their reputation when it comes to the topic at hand? What is their background? And what other (reliable) sources are they referring to? When it comes to this criterion, it will pay off to be clear about your expertise and where it comes from online.

Read on: The E in E-A-T: What is expertise? And how to show it? »

Show your authority

Related to expertise, the next letter stands for authoritativeness. An authority can be defined as a person or organization having power or control in a particular area. When you’re an authority on a topic, you often have the proper knowledge on it. That’s why official websites often have a higher chance of being perceived as the authority on a topic. But also aspects like qualifications and being associated with well-known organizations count towards this. If this one is tricky for you, don’t worry. It’s just one of the aspects Google looks for when determining quality. If this one doesn’t fit your blog or business, just focus more on the other letters in the acronym.

Keep on reading: The A in E-A-T: What is authoritativeness? »

Be trustworthy

The last one probably doesn’t come as a surprise, as this is something we all look for when browsing online. The trustworthiness of the content before you. Whether it’s for a product you want to buy or information that you’re looking for, trust plays a big role in how serious you take online content. If it doesn’t feel right, a user will hesitate in the best case and leave your website in the worst. Google’s guidelines are quite clear on how they determine the trustworthiness of a website: “An unsatisfying amount of any of the following is a reason to give a page a low-quality rating: customer service information, contact information, information about who is responsible for the website or information about who created the content.” So make sure to be clear on these and look for other opportunities to show your trustworthiness.

Read more: The T in E-E-A-T: What is Trustworthiness? How can you achieve it? »

5. Keep your content up to date

Another key element of writing high-quality content is ensuring it’s up-to-date and relevant. This means you have to update your content occasionally to ensure people can find the right information. But why is this so important? It shows your users that you’re on top of recent developments and can always provide them with accurate information. In other words, it builds trust and keeps your audience returning to your site.

Keeping your website and blog posts updated is also important for SEO, as this shows Google that your site is ‘alive’ and relevant. So, make sure you schedule a time to update your content regularly.

Keep reading: 10 tips to improve the quality of your page »

6. Invest time in site structure

The five steps we’ve discussed so far will help you write content that is easy to read and user-centered. Now, we’d like to highlight an equally important step: working on your site structure. It’s important because it will help users and search engines find your content.

Site structure refers to the way you organize your site’s content. When you structure your site well, search engines can index your URLs better. It helps Google determine the importance of your pages and which ones are related to each other. A good site structure allows users to find their way around your site more easily. It will help them find quality content in the search results and on your website. That’s why there’s much to gain from perfecting your site structure.

7. Use Yoast SEO to perfect your content

The last tip I want to share is the content analysis in our very own Yoast SEO plugin. This feature gives you real-time feedback on your content while you’re editing your page in the backend. It monitors whether you use your chosen keyword often enough and in the right places, it looks at text length and gives you feedback on readability. For example, it tells you when you use the passive voice too much, whether you’re using enough subheadings, gives you feedback on word complexity and the use of transition words. All of this and more is available in the free version to help you improve the readability and quality of your content. 

The content analysis in Yoast SEO Premium goes a bit further and also does the following:

  • Allows you to optimize your text for related keyphrases and synonyms
  • Recognizes different forms of your keyphrase, so you can focus on writing naturally
  • Recognizes singular and plural, and also tenses of verbs
  • Gives access to our AI features, like Yoast AI Optimize, suggesting changes in your content
  • Gives you access to all the Yoast SEO academy courses, including our SEO copywriting training!

Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!

Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Get Yoast SEO Premium Only $99 / year (ex VAT)

A quick recap on high-quality content

Good, high-quality content will positively affect your SEO in the long run. So, before publishing post after post (or page after page), make sure to keep the following in mind. Make sure to write for your readers, make your content readable, match search intent with your goals, be trustworthy, keep your content up to date, and work on your site structure. 

The result? Good content that your readers will appreciate. This will positively affect your number of visitors, conversions and eventual revenue. If you want to learn more tips and tricks, make sure to read our guide to SEO copywriting!

Read on: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post 7 tips to write good, high-quality content appeared first on Yoast.

Read more at Read More

Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide

Shopify has become the leading online shopping platform in just a few years. It has become an anti-Amazon, helping small and large retailers worldwide run successful online stores with minimal effort. Although the ecommerce platform makes everything easy, there’s a lot you can do to improve the SEO of your online shop. In this ultimate guide, we’ll help you get on the right track by giving you many tips and tricks. In addition, we’ll tell you the best SEO app, and we have a Shopify SEO checklist for you!

Table of contents

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to consider when considering SEO. As with all content management systems, you must optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in.

The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.


Yoast SEO for Shopify

Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Does Shopify have good SEO?

Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly and that customers and search engines can reach it. It already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for many of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be suboptimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to cover and how Shopify and Yoast SEO can help you.

Read on: How to become a Shopify expert »

12 SEO basics for Shopify to get you started

It’s an excellent platform to host your online shop, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive to potential customers. In this guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful.

1. Define who you are and what you stand for

To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of explaining what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for your online store’s SEO and marketing strategy. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

shopify online store death wish coffee has a a good mission. "Rebellious by nature: live with a death wish"
Branding and storytelling are essential — so is having a mission!

2. Conduct keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research for online stores produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found. It will also give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. If you do it well, you can instantly fill in your SEO strategy for your site.

Various tools out there can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush — Yoast SEO for Shopify even integrates with Semrush. You can even use generative AI tools like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini to inspire you.

Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Remember that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

It would help if you also looked at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey has a number of steps, and you need to provide content for those steps.

3. Look at what the competition is doing

When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that?

Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or a strategy you might use. Or, you can find something that inspires you to work from. Please look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on?


Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your store!

4. Write unique and high-quality product descriptions

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means: the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and tips to help you improve both readability and SEO.

Taylor Stitch gives you everything you need to know about a product on one screen

Keep on reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO »

5. Write great titles and meta descriptions

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. Title and meta descriptions are essential aspects that you can focus on to improve Shopify’s SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click.

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings.

Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular titles and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages.

Quickly edit the information that will show up on the search results pages

You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO makes this process much more manageable. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables — and generative AI. Using variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself, but this allows you to automate some parts, which can be helpful when you have many products. The same goes for AI in Yoast SEO!

6. Create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify

SEO-friendly URLs are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, the CMS is inflexible, and there is little wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters

The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest.

7. Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation

One of the most impactful tips to improve your Shopify SEO is fine-tuning your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal links are essential

Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site.

For your navigation, keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations; your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base, right?

Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them.

8. Make products findable with an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are like maps detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also applies to your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. Your XML sitemap will include product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages.

You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps.

To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can add a noindex to determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results. You can also decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can.

the advanced settings help Yoast SEO for Shopify set up what goes into the XML sitemap
Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you determine what does and doesn’t appear on Google

9. Streamline the number of Shopify apps you use

While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest.

10. Optimize images for SEO

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can only get a good feel for the product with great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as they are one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Optimize the file sizes

One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

Lazy loading images

Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should always load all your images, as you want the images at the top of your browser window to always be visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice.

Preventing CLS

While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign that your user experience is lacking for Google. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site.

<img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200">

<img
  alt="{{ image.alt }}"
  src="{{ image.src }}"
  width="{{ image.width }}"
  height="{{ image.height }}"
>
Many sites still have visual elements that can use a proper width and height specification to prevent CLS

Add alt text and good file names

Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number.

an example of an alt text added within Shopify images
You can add an alt text in Shopify’s media editor

File names also help Google understand your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. For example, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 15, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_15_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

11. Add a blog to your Shopify store

You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, it has a basic blogging engine that functions appropriately, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way to enhance your SEO strategy as you try to reach an audience via search engines. It’s a beautiful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company.

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, the blog is called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your store. Check it out!

If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post you choose to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data.

Optimizing your store with Yoast SEO for Shopify it get noticed by Google

Is blogging good for my Shopify store?

Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog allows you to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize.

First, you have to determine the goal of your blog. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.


Yoast SEO for Shopify

Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now!

12. Finally, pick a good Shopify theme

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store.

Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

  • Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
  • Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
  • Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these into several collections, such as catalog size or the type of industry, such as clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on a shop’s homepage. Now, almost 200 themes are available in the Theme Store.
  • Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it.
  • Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
  • Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
  • You can try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you’ll need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run them through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
  • Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme.
  • Test the user experience: The theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, how the animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
  • Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Are there other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.
An example of a Shopify theme in the Theme Store
An example of a Shopify theme in the Theme Store

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

Having your own theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. It would help if you planned to ensure you avoid issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to help you learn more about building and adapting store themes.

8 technical SEO optimizations for Shopify

Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights.

1. Optimize for speed

As a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide users with a speedy experience. Shopify focuses heavily on speed to help customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts!

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, the CMS prioritizes performance. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has a performance report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance.

While it provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps you hardly use.

an example of a Lighthouse test run in Chrome from Shopify store
Regularly running a Lighthouse test gives you great insights into the performance of your Shopify store

2. Prevent duplicate content

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might need clarification about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your search performance.

Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs:

https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

and:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. Recent themes, like the Dawn Shopify theme, have improved and now automatically output the correct URL.

3. Working with product variants

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get them to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

Of course, you must provide sufficiently different product descriptions for each to appear individually in Google.

4. Faceted navigation or product filters

Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store—no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways to add more filters to your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage them.

The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. They also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically.

Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

Here’s an example of a faceted URL :

https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool

5. Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines

The e-commerce platform hired top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve its capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do in your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues SEOs have with Shopify.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

You can find your robots.txt file at https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this well; most users don’t have to touch this file. However, adding rules to ensure that more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results for more complex or expansive sites might make sense.

You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click Create Template, and you can start editing.

6. Structured data for your products

Structured data is essential in this day and age. This data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org — that search engines read to better understand your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products.

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings rich results in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

an example of a rich result in google for a product powered by structured data
An example of a rich snippet for a product in Google

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details.

You must follow some steps to get Yoast SEO to output Schema. A lot of structured data is added automatically, like Product information on product pages, but we need your input on other details. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo, and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock.

Schema structured data for your articles and pages

Yoast SEO does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google about your business — the name, logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. You can now describe the pages in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

This also goes for articles. Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article by default, but you can easily change this. There are news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and more options. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less.

7. Manage your redirects

Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. This is useful when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links.

Shopify has a redirect feature built in. For one, it automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. If you need to do large-scale work on your site, you can upload CSV files with your redirects. You can also use the URL redirect feature in the admin settings navigation section. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want the old one to point to.

Shopify has a simple redirect manager in the backend
You can manage redirects via a simple URL redirect feature

8. Add your store to Google Search Console

With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into your store’s performance in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must.

A quick rundown

Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated:

  • Open Search Console and log in,
  • Add a new property
  • Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party
  • Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works)
  • Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed)
  • Enter your domain name (including https://)
  • Copy the HTML file
  • Open your site theme settings
  • Click Actions > Edit code
  • Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag
  • Save and wait for Google to verify your site

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes adding the verification code to your ecommerce store easy. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings, and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste the verification code you received into it. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with some finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store.

Most SEO issues arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Products on the ecommerce platform can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, the CMS adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is canonical. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about this, but be aware of the limitations.

Another area people could improve is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, making for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. Some apps help ship your products, design your store, and offer customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re biased, but we think Yoast SEO stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your SEO expert

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress SEO app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify helps store owners improve their site technically and comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will suggest improvements to your product page descriptions, helping you create the best ones.

These analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO app helps you write high-quality, readable content that resonates with potential customers.

Yoast SEO for Shopify listing in the app store
Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you write awesome product descriptions that serve both customers and search engines
The best structured data for your Shopify store

To enhance your Shopify store’s organic traffic, it’s crucial to capitalize on the benefits of rich results, which increase search visibility and edge out competitors. Yoast SEO provides rich structured data/Schema.org output in JSON-LD format, supporting various types such as Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Yoast SEO also ties all its structured data together in a single graph, which helps search engines understand your store.

Additionally, Yoast SEO has integrated with the popular review apps Judge.me, Loox, Ali review, and Opinew, to generate the necessary AggregateRating schema to show your reviews in Google. Furthermore, the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block can conveniently be added to Shopify themes v2.0 to increase your store’s structured data and help boost its organic traffic.

Product variant schema

Product variant schema allows you to organize items like size, color, or material under one parent product to improve how Google displays them in search. Using properties like brand for the manufacturer, color, material size, and unique identifiers like sku, you can define each variant clearly. Adding this structured data helps search engines understand and showcase your product variations more effectively. Our Shopify SEO app makes it easy to implement this schema, ensuring your variants are optimized and compliant with Google’s guidelines.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs  structured data for product variants shown here with an example of t-shirt product data
Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs a lot of structured data for product variants

Of course, that’s only part of what the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your SEO.

The Yoast SEO for Shopify training improves your skills!

In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your store. Of course, there’s more to the CMS — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. Our SEO solutions come with training courses, and Shopify is no different. You’ll find an ecommerce SEO online course and training explicitly showing how to properly set up Yoast SEO for Shopify. Be sure to check out Yoast SEO Academy. Please try the ecommerce and Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.

Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Shopify is a popular platform for hosting your online store. Rightly so, because it is easy to use and performs well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. This ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gives you an excellent place to start.

Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and sign up for Yoast SEO for Shopify!

Read more: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »

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