Another week has passed in the fast-changing world of SEO, and it’s been a busy one for me! The run-up to Christmas can be a little bit crazy (across most industries, I’m sure) and so I’ve been busy rounding things off ready for a break over the festive season.
There’s always plenty to discuss, but I’ll try and provide some of this week’s thoughts in the clearest way I can.
Structured Data (Schema) Implementation
“What is structured data?” I hear you (hopefully) ask. Well, let me explain as simply as possible:
Structured data is basically a kind of language that search engines like Google use to read and understand your site’s content with more context. Most importantly, this understanding allows Google to display your content in a rich format, directly within the search engine results pages (SERPs) – making your content stand out from the rest.
This kind of markup doesn’t directly impact your rankings, but it has a range of other benefits like I mentioned above. These include:
- Schema allows search engines to understand your content and the context it has.
- Your pages may be shown in more relevant search results as a result.
- Rich (and relevant) content will be displayed to users directly within the SERPs, improving your click-through rate (CTR).
In actual fact, a lot of sites still aren’t implementing structured data as part of their SEO and content strategies. All of the points I mentioned can boost your SEO when working in tandem, so why not jump on the bandwagon of schema now?
Signing off for Christmas With Clients
Making sure all your clients and colleagues are happy ahead of the Christmas break is a must, right? Signing off like this is really important, not only to ensure that you start the New Year off on the right foot, (I’m all about New Year’s resolutions) but also to make sure that any outstanding tasks are complete and emails answered.
I’ve actively tried to speak to clients in-person, or within our Roam virtual office, to chat over this year’s successes and identify any points that we can run with in January. I think this has been a worthwhile undertaking – furthering our relationships with some key clients as we come up with new ideas to implement in the coming months.
You can never expect a client to come directly to you with their problems, (unless something’s gone really wrong) so it’s important to find any gremlins for yourself before they grow to become real issues.
Migrating Website Builders
Last on the list of topics for this week is a little boring, actually: WordPress. More specifically, Elementor, the tool that creates the building blocks of many websites.
Now, there are millions of websites out there that use a variety of different builders, but we find Elementor to be one of the best for SEO. There are certainly easier tools to use out there, (Squarespace and the like) but the modularity available through Elementor makes it pretty popular.
Why am I banging on about a website builder? Well, we’re actually in the process of migrating a client’s basic, default WordPress builder to Elementor. This way, we’ll be able to implement new on-page content and optimisations far faster than before, using Elementor’s visual building blocks that allow you to realise changes in real-time.
And, as most website builders worth their salt should, Elementor offers SEO-related benefits, too. Whether it’s being able to easily add alt-text to images or the built-in schema markup feature, (as discussed previously) Elementor helps us to quickly make necessary changes with ease. That’s why we’re so keen on it!
I hope this edition of my Week in SEO has provided some more context to this pretty complex world. Stay tuned to Eighteen for more (no-bullshit) insights!