Latest updates are moving toward on-page, technical supremacy and the visitors’ experience.

The added E in E-E-A-T stands for experience, Core Web Vitals is known as user page experience. Google is clearly telling us that they are putting the visitor, and the user in the centre of their updates.

Writing for the benefit of the Google crawler, keyword stuffing, AI generated content… we are all guilty of some of the classic SEO crimes one way or another.

So, let’s decode the recently announced E-E-A-T!

The best way to do that would be to review E-A-T first.

E-A-T in SEO stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

It is very important to learn that Google confirmed E-A-T is rated for every query that is searched in 2022. And that is a massive change for what is shown in top positions in SERPs and how it should optimise our pages.

E-A-T is all about quality, factual writing on a high quality, recognised and safe website:

E as Expertise stands for the expertise on the subject of the writer, aka you should seek a specialist on the subject of the page, not just a random freelancer that might get the facts wrong. Imagine buying face cream online and you are giving wrong advice, an unqualified or incompetent writer simply does not mention (for example) potential allergic reactions and you could end up with ruined skin.

A as Authoritativeness goes beyond just the voice of authority and supremacy of the individual page but speaks about the power, quality and recognition of the website as whole. Is your website seen as a good source of information on the web? Are you linking to other sources and are you being quoted as a place of useful and forceful information?

And lastly, T for Trustworthiness – once again refers to the website, not just the page quality. Is the website safe for you to use your credit card? – is a first question you should ask yourself when trying to validate if the website can be trusted by others. Do you have good Trustpilot and Google reviews? Are you using an SSL certificate? Does your website have a strong brand awareness? Are you present on social media?

E-A-T changed the SERPs and the growing importance of this quality measurement keeps changing the landscape of the SERPs.

Google always tries to serve the most relevant, best and fastest answer, but with E-A-T they are simply making sure that the results provided are keeping the users safe. Absolutely the correct approach as we all tend to shop more online for everything – travel, clothes, cosmetics… you name it.

E-A-T is not a ranking signal like speed, meta title or backlinks. But it impacts the rank of your content which is a ranking signal.

E-A-T is a Google quality guideline that is used to determine if the content is high quality and should be ranked higher or not compared to your competitors.

As Google saw a positive change in SERPs with E-A-T, they are taking it one step further to provide an even better experience to the users by creating E-E-A-T.

This is a change to Google content quality guidelines. The new E stands for Experience!

What Does that Mean and How Do SEOs Need to Work with this Latest Change?

Experience, in this context, refers to the first hand experience of the author and the website with the topic in question.

For example, if you are on a medical blog, is the article written by a doctor, or a real expert on the topic?

If it is a financial blog, is the article full of useful info written by someone from the financial sector? Is the information true? Is it understandable, even if an expert has explained it?

Is the article published on a relevant website or is it just a one time article of a completely unrelated topic to the whole website?

Also, Google is giving us more explanations on some vital concepts such as:

• Is the website harmful or safe?
• Is the content harmful or safe ?
• What is the reputation of the website and its contributors?

This is why an author’s profile is important, credentials, links to their professional profiles such as LinkedIn, or other places that can verify the true identity and qualification of the writer.

The job of SEO’s is to prove to Google that you have got the most relevant and best, trustworthy solution for the query.

To provide a good additional E to E-A-T, watch out for and provide:

Content: Original, well researched content that demonstrates a direct, ‘first hand’ experience’ with the topic.

Author: Is an expert on the topic in question, has verifiable credentials.

Publisher: Has a history and it is a recognised authority on the topic. Aka an SEO post on a website that is on marketing and SEO.

On top of all that, Google has confirmed that the most important and central piece of the E-E-A-T is trust, and it was named the most important ‘member of the trust family’.

Naturally, Google and their Quality raters will apply the principles of E-E-A-T differently to different verticals and niches. As this is a quality update for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) websites – medical, financial, news, governmental information… naturally these will see the biggest impact of this change. Having said that, Google wants to provide the best and most relevant and correct answer to all queries, so in the end, there will be impact on most of the niches out there, maybe not as significant as on YMYL.

In conclusion, if your website was already optimised for E-A-T, this should be just a small change and adjustment for you.

If your website does not respect E-A-T guidelines, E-E-A-T will cost you places in the SERPs.

Make sure to re-optimise your website and content that Google is asking you to and make sure to work with verifiable experts in their field.

In the end, we all want to feel safe online.

The post E-E-A-T: How E-A-T Changed and What It Means for SEOs appeared first on SiteProNews.

Google made it abundantly clear that the focus is shifting toward on-page and technical more and more.

Over the last few years, we are told speed is becoming important, mobile first has happened, we saw quality guidelines like top-heavy, E-A-T, BERT and many others happening. Each and everyone changed the game in a certain way.

Lately, Google gave us new indications of the significance of on-page and user importance. Let’s talk about Core Web Vitals – Google’s page experience update – speed/loading, interactivity and stability of pages – new ranking factor since 2021.

Once Google throws at us SEOs something big and game-changing like CWV, it gives us time to get ready and helps us test our websites’ performance.

If you are not familiar with this update, here are the main points:

Once again, this update is about speed of the website, but it goes deeper than before, Google is now measuring 3 main areas:

LCP – Largest contentful paint – how long does it take to load

FID – First input delay – how long does it take for the website’s elements to be interactive

CLS – ‎Cumulative Layout Shift – how stable are the website’s elements

With this, Google gave a massive importance to the technical qualities of the websites. In 2023, CWV will be more important than ever, so make sure you are ready for it.

If the technical side of your website is in a perfect shape, pay attention to the content you are serving to your visitors.

You know you should write for the customer, not for Google, your content should be original, interesting, trustworthy and educational.

Google product reviews started to roll in December 2021 – and keep rolling throughout 2022, we are just at the end of it. Naturally, this has created a colossal volatility in the SERPs. Websites with poor and unnatural content have been removed, good content has been rewarded.

What was punished:

– thin content

– unoriginal/plagiarised content

– unnatural content (poor AI creations)

– content lacking expertise on the topic

E-A-T has been modified into E-E-A-T, what does that mean?

First, what was E-A-T updated: this was one of the YMYL (your money, your life) quality updates. E – expertise, A – authoritativeness – T – trustworthiness – is a concept of Google’s search quality evaluators used to determine the quality and effectiveness of search results.

Now understanding that, where does the other ‘E’ come from? EXPERIENCE!

Experience as a way of evaluating the quality of the content for the reader, for the final consumer. Is it original, is it well written and does it have a value, is it easy to understand by the audience it is aiming at?

After all of these hints and breadcrumbs, Google gave us yet another set of indications that the importance is moving to on-page rather than off-page.

In November 2022 it was announced that links are becoming less important. If you did not take this warning seriously, month later Google made it clear with the links spam update.

Usually, Google updates on links, such as Penguin or Penguin 4.0 were impacting the site links were pointing to. This new update is different and a very clever one. This time, Google is looking into the websites linking to you and discarding them and their importance if it looks like these are some sort of ‘link farms’ or are openly selling links.

We know that a lot of industries, that are struggling with getting links via natural outreach, are buying links and their results would be for sure impacted by this update.

This is how 2022 looked for SEOs when it comes to updates, core updates and smaller or bigger Google changes:

I counted so far 91 confirmed and non-confirmed SEO Google updates in 2022.

From experience, 2023 is not going to be any different.

But based on recent years and Google activities, we can be prepared.

It is obvious that Google wants us to create technically superior products with good content.

So in 2023:

• Make sure your technical SEO is a priority
• Pay attention to Core Web Vitals
• Run a deep content audit, look for improvements on your existing content
• Check for content gaps
• Make sure you are E-E-A-T ready
• Create a good and logical internal linking structure to help your users to navigate easily
• Do not discard links, just because they might be less important, they are still a big ranking signal
• Align your strategy with other channels within the acquisitions funnel – work on brand awareness, keep in mind that traffic is a massive ranking signal
• Work closely with PPC, anything that PPC does can help or ruin SEO results, these two channels should be friends not foes
• Do not forget that SEO, even though it is being perceived as an acquisition channel, is as well a great retention tool
• Keep an eye on Google’s activity

Be ready and good luck navigating the choppy 2023 SEO waters!

The post SEO Trends for 2023 appeared first on SiteProNews.

First of All, What is a CMS?

CMS stands for content management system – it allows the users to update and work with any website without necessarily understanding the code of the website. It is a user-friendly solution for non-developers to work with websites that are using some type of CMS.

What Types of CMS Exist?

We will discuss 2 types of CMS, when to use them, what the advantages, pains and limitations of each system are: Decoupled CMS and Headless CMS.

What is Decoupled CMS and When is It a Good Solution to Use?

WordPress or Drupal are examples of so-called decoupled CMS. They are called ‘decoupled’ as they provide extensions and plugins that decouple them from their front-ends. Naturally, there are advantages to using and working with such a CMS. These are ‘off the shelf’ solutions, and easy to use.

Decoupled solutions are ideal for:

• Single page or smaller websites
• Affiliate websites
• Websites without too much javascript
• If you have limited access to developers, or small dev teams
• Websites that are not for eCommerce

There are many SEO advantages to using this kind of CMS (the most well-known is WordPress):

• Complex SEO issues are taken care of
• Automated sitemap XML
• Automated robots.txt file
• Yoast SEO plugin, which makes many standard SEO tasks easy

What is Headless CMS and How is It Different from Decoupled CMS Solutions?

Headless CMS is a back-end only content management system built from the ground up. Headless CMS makes content available via API (RESTful API or GraphQL API) on any device without a built-in, front-end or presentation layer.

The name ‘headless’ comes from disconnecting the ‘head’ (front-end) from the ‘body’ (backend).

Why is Headless Good?

For a Headless CMS it does not matter where the content gets displayed – website, mobile app or smartwatch, the only focus is on storing and delivering the content and allowing editors to easily cooperate on existing or new content. It allows for the scalability of any project.

Headless solutions are ideal for:

• Big eCommerce websites
• JavaScript heavy websites
• Native mobile apps
• Creating personalised and interactive digital content
• When you need scalability and streamlining business processes

Top benefits of headless CMS for SEO:

• Stronger SEO readiness for multiple devices
• SEO-ready for omni-channel queries across desktop, mobile, wearables, smart devices
• Headless CMS that supports SSR (server-side rendering) which is best for SEO
• Better optimisation options for speed and CWV (core web vitals)

A few words on Client Side Rendering (CSR) vs Server Side Rendering (SSR):

Google can either crawl client-side rendering or server-side rendering.

CSR – client-side rendering (it is called ​client-side rendering​ because it uses the computing power of the client device)- is a cheaper option as it reduces load time on the server. But keep in mind the main issues for CSR. One being slower and poorer user experience as rendering JavaScript can add seconds to the loading time. Secondly, CSR affects Google bots because Google has so called ‘second wave indexing. That means that bots will first crawl the HTML of the page and come back to recrawl the JavaScript once available – this may result in missing important data or content served by JavaScript. Naturally, this will impact your search results.

Pros of CRS:

• Faster rendering after initial loading
• Javascript frameworks/libraries to support CSR

Cons of CRS:

• Slow initial loading time
• Bad for CWV optimisation
• Bad for SEO

SSR – website’s JavaScript will be rendered directly on the server of the website. The benefits are that bots and humans will be served the results faster! As the pages are rendered on the server, there is no risk of missing vital content like during CSR. For these reasons, Server Side Rendering is better and more beneficial for SEO performance.

However SSR is a more expensive option and it is intensive on server resources.

Pros of SSR:

• Very good for SEO – better crawling for bots
• Faster initial rendering

Cons of SSR:

• Expensive
• Lots of server requests

A few words on Core Web Vitals (CWV):

In 2021 Google announced the importance of Core Web Vitals. Google has made it known that speed is important and it is no longer all about the loading time (but loading time still remains important).

Google places importance on stability and interactivity of the pages as well. There are 3 vital measures to pass: CLS – cumulative layout shift, FID – first input delay and LCP – largest contentful paint. There have been many good guides written on CWV – please read more here.

What are the Technical Best SEO Practices for Headless CMS?

Now to take a full advantage of what headless CMS can offer, there are some best technical SEO practices to follow. WordPress helps you with most of these, but when buildings headless CMS from the ground up you need to tsake care of this yourself.

Absolute basics:

• Canonical tag
• Hreflangs tag
• Pagination tag
• SSL certificate
• Meta title and description
• SEO content box
• SEO friendly URL structure
• Headings – H1, H2s…
• Image titles and Alts
• XML sitemap
• Robots.txt file

Nice to have for the best SEO practices:

• Breadcrumbs
• Implementations for Structured data
• 404 page
• CDN
• Speed optimisation
• CWV
• Be Mobile SEO-ready and consider omnichannel
• Be voice search ready

Main Takeaways of the Headless vs. Decoupled Debate

Both headless and decoupled CMS have their advantages and disadvantages and there are good places to use either solution – it depends on your needs.

Consider your website’s purpose before choosing the correct CMS.

If you are building:

• an eCommerce, casino, or sportsbook website,
• a website that will need scalability in the near or far future,
• if you need to publish content across several different platforms (website, native mobile apps, etc.),
• or JavaScript heavy websites…

Go for Headless CMS.

If your website is:

• a small affiliate website,
• a website where CSR is sufficient,
• if your dev team is small or
• if you need out of the box SEO solutions,

Then WP or another decoupled CMS is the best solution for you.

The post Headless and Decoupled CMS and Their Varying Impacts on SEO Performance appeared first on SiteProNews.