How I Will Use SEO to Get You More Sales at Lower Cost

Google Page Experience Ranking now applies to desktop as well as mobile
That means: You must have passing scores on Core Web Vitals, HTTPS not HTTP, no intrusive interstitials.

Google MUM has the potential to be a game-changer in search and SEO
MUM is multilingual (75 languages) and multi-modal (both text and images) and has 1000X the question-answering power of BERT.

To assess content quality, Google doesn't just look at text [VIDEO]
John Mueller: "[I]t's not the case that we would look at just purely the text...we really want to look at the website overall."

New research finds a one-second reduction in page load time lifts conversion 5.7% on mobile, 3.3% on desktop
58% of bounces are from pages that take longer than 4 seconds to load.

Google introduces Search Console Insights (BETA)
New tool is intended to help content creators and publishers understand what resonates with their audiences.

More comprehensive Schema.org markup validator to replace Google Structured Data Testing Tool
The new Schema.org validator is intended to be a ‘general-purpose’ tool you can use to debug many more structured data types than those supported by Google.

Google wants to see at least some content ‘above the fold’
“A part of your page should be visible when a user goes there - not just images, and without scrolling.”

How to use the Google Search Console Performance Report
If you're managing a website, you need to be using Google Search Console reports.

Q: Is Google still the only Search Engine that matters when it comes to SEO?

A: Yes. With 90+% share of all searches in both North America and Europe, and with its ranking algorithm changing on a daily basis, Google is the only search engine worth spending time optimizing for. And as a by-product, any optimization done for Google also works well for any other general search engine.

Q: Can Google ban a website from ever showing on their search engine?

A: Yes. Most famously, in 2006 Google banned BMW Deutschland for cloaking. The site showed Google a keyword-stuffed page of text, while showing users photo car ads.

Q: Is Google search engine still upgrading?

A: Yes, on a daily, hourly or minute-by-minute basis.

Q: Does Google penalize sites that use more than one H1 tag per page for SEO?

A: No - but if you have multiple H1's the fix is easy, why take chances?

Q: How does Google determine a website has new content and thereby update search results?

A: You can influence this by referring in your robots.txt file to an XML sitemap in which you have specified an update frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) telling Google how often your site changes. Absent that, google will by trial and error establish a re-crawl frequency for your site. What Google finds on the latest crawl replaces earlier data. Search results will reflect the most recent crawl, but not necessarily instantaneously.

Q: What do you do if your content doesn't get crawled regularly by Google?

A: Start with the basics: create an XML sitemap that specifies your change frequency, link to the sitemap from your robots.txt file, take ownership of your site in Search Console and submit your sitemap for crawling.

Q: Does Google index mobile versions of a website in addition to standard format websites?

A: Short answer is “yes” but there's more to it than that. Currently, Google's primary crawler for indexing is the smartphone version of the Googlebot user agent. Since 1 July 2019, NEW sites are crawled ONLY with the smartphone user agent. Older sites that don't index easily using the smartphone version of Googlebot may continue to be crawled for some period of time with the desktop Googlebot. But the handwriting is on the wall: your site needs to be smartphone-Googlebot-friendly - right now.

Q: To effectively track my website with Google analytics, do I have to add their script on every pages that I create or can I just leave it on the index page only?

A: GA code must be on every page on which you want GA data. A relatively easy way to accomplish that is to find some piece of HTML code that appears consistently in the HEAD section of every page and use an HTML editor with search/replace function to replace globally that existing line of code with [the same line of code] + [your GA code].

Q: Would submitting my websites to directories help Google ranking?

A: Being listed in high-quality directories should help get you valuable traffic. Best bets are usually directories of local businesses, and industry-specific directories. Worst bets are directories that will list anyone in the world for money, or for reciprocal links. Example: A company calling itself “The Ultimate Directory Submission Service” (search for it on Google) will list you on “the top 491 free directories” for $0.20 a pop. Don't waste you time and money on deals like that.

Q: If I'm someone who wants to rank his blogs at will, will it be possible for me to achieve that if I know all 250 or more factors that Google search codes are about?

A: Along with knowing what all the ranking factors are, you'd have to be able to CONTROL them unilaterally from your end in order to rank your blogs “at will” - and that's going to be difficult because of (1) off-page factors that you can't control (like the actions of competitors) and (2) Google's ongoing (secret) tweaks to their ranking algorithm.

Q: How do you make your Google mobile search results more clickable?

A: Run Google's Mobile Friendliness Test on your home page. Google will tell you what needs fixing and how to do it. Implement all the recommendations and when Google is happy with your home page, repeat for your other important pages. Repeat until you get all the clicks you want.

Q: How do I get more visitors from Google for free to my local business website?

A: Create the best possible Google Business Profile, and keep it updated. Google is constantly adding features to its products, and GBP is no exception. Post photos. Encourage customers to leave reviews. Make sure your map pin is located correctly. Monitor GBP insights and improve your listing accordingly. On your website, cover all the SEO basics: TITLE and Description tags, no broken links, mobile friendliness, fast page loading. Doing all those things will, over time, attract high-quality links, which Google likes. Don't buy or exchange links, which Google DOESN'T like.

Q: Is there any public information available on how Google's algorithms work?

A: Speculation yes, “information” no - at least none that I would trust.

Q: How does Google generate the short descriptions below searches?

A: Usually from the META Description tag in the code at the head of the page.
Example:  If a site has a META Description tag like ‘Expert digital tourism advertising and marketing | Boston and Maine - customized research based campaigns’
Google will likely use part or all of ‘Expert digital tourism advertising and marketing | Boston and Maine - customized research based campaigns’ in the SERP. If the page has no META Description tag (bad idea) or one that Google doesn't think is descriptive of the content, Google will pick/choose from available content - maybe the H1 tag or something in B tags.

Q: How many times does Google Spider need to visit a new page before it decides to rank it in the results?

A: Remember there's a distinction between indexing and ranking. The Googlebot is a dumb creature, just finds what's there and reports back. Ranking happens on a search-by-search basis. An unindexed page won't ever appear in a Google SERP, but the fact of indexing doesn't guarantee anything in the way of ranking.

Q: In the Google Search Console, what is the difference between an error and valid with warnings for schema markup? Also, does a warning prevent the content from being indexed?

A: Basic difference is that a structured-data warning should affect neither indexing nor ranking - not necessarily true of errors.

Q: Does Google consider no-follow links for search rankings?

A: Google has stopped ignoring nofollow links altogether, and now considers “nofollow” to be a clue as to the value of the link. Also Google now encourages the addition of “sponsored” or “ugc” attributes to nofollow links to make it easier for AI to understand the reason for the nofollow. Short answer: sometimes (maybe).

Q: Can you trust someone who claims the ability to predict Google ranking algorithms?

A: No, absolutely not. Anyone with the ability to do that would have too much money to be spending time trying to sell you SEO or whatever.

Q: Have the recent Google updates put sites that sell links out of business or are there still naive people who purchase them?

A: Unfortunately, Google has been slack in penalizing the use of paid backlinks. By doing a Google search on “buy links” you can see that the link-selling industry continues to be alive and well. Right now from that search, on Page 1 I'm seeing 7 paid Google Ads selling links along with a full slate of organic listings.

Q: What is Google optimization?

A: If your question is of a general nature - like “how do I optimize for Google search”: you begin by studying Google's policies and recommendations - all fully laid out in great detail at Google - then learn to use the various Google tools like Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Create and test your website using those tools, follow all Google's recommendations for improvement. Repeat until you have the customers, leads and sales you want. Or, alternatively, hire a Google search pro to do the optimizing - faster immediately, and cheaper in the long run.

Q: Which backlinks do more harm than good to a website's search engine rankings?

A: Backlinks you pay for. Backlinks with reciprocal linking. Links from sites with content unrelated to yours.

Q: There are some pages that I have deleted from my website, but are still showing up in Google search. What will be better for seo, remove the page or redirect the page?

A: A 301 (permanent) redirect will be instant-on and will prevent links from Google and whoever else may be linking to that page from going to 404 "File Not Found" page (always a bad user experience). Then at your leisure you can find any existing links from external sites and ask webmasters to switch to a relevant existing URL.

Q: What is the least expensive Google keyword?

A: The least expensive keywords are those that never match a search query.

Q: Do SEO companies really help? Is it worth it?

A: SEO done well helps most businesses that are selling something for which people search online (and there are few exceptions to that today). But not all SEO companies are created equal. Avoid any that promise specific results like “page 1 of Google in 30 days” etc. - if you get an offer like that, ask ’page 1 on what keywords?” and be prepared for waffling. Extensive experience and specialization in your industry or a related group of industries are both useful qualifications for a company doing SEO. Also, to do SEO well requires a certain minimum threshold of up-front spend that's pretty much independent of the size of the client's business. So the minimum investment in effective SEO for a 3-room B&B might be about the same as that for a 100-room hotel, so may be out of reach for the smaller business. Google Ads is a useful alternative in that situation.

Q: What can SEO services do that WordPress plugins like Yoast can't?

A: Yoast is OK for basic on-page optimization but it doesn't know what's going on in your competitive space. And anyone doing SEO professionally will find that out, track, and adjust optimization accordingly.

Q: What do we need to set up Google Analytics on our site?

A: You need a Google account from which to create a Google Analytics tag, FTP (or otherwise) access to the website so you can download/upload HTML files, an HTML editor or other means to put the GA tags onto the pages.

Q: Should we look beyond Google for our SEO strategy and optimize for other search engines?

A: I once for several months tried optimizing for Bing alongside optimizations for Google, and found (1) it was a distraction, Google was enough to deal with without Bing, and (2) pages optimized for Google performed, on average, as well or better than those optimized for Bing. So once again, I optimize for Google only - which after all has 90%+ search share across the Western world vs. around 3% for Bing.