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If you want to improve Google page experience, you got to know what it is all about. In essence, Google is trying to tell you as a user or as a webmaster that you need to put the user first.  If you put the user first and strive hard to provide them with the best user experience, Google will rank you higher in the long run as it benefits a user which pleases Google. And if the users are happy while using Google’s search engine, what will they do? They will keep coming back and Google more, which helps Google generate more revenue.

Table of contents:

• • What is Google Page Experience and Why does it matter?
  • What are Web Vitals?
  • How do Core Web Vitals affect the Website?
  • Why Google Page Experience is Important?
  • Tips to Improve Google Page Experience

Google follows the trend. Remember that it doesn’t care about you or your website; today, it has become more user-centric. So, you need to focus on both – SEO (Search engine optimization) and UX (user experience) to give your readers the best possible experience and thereby increase your page ratings and site’s performance.

So, first off let us understand Google’s latest algorithm update – “Google Page Experience”.

 

What is Google Page Experience and Why does it matter? 

 

Google Page experience is Google’s latest attempt to improve search engines for users. Page experience update started rolling out on 15th June and it is Google’s new input for search ranking. It is a set of signals that calculate how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page on the computer and mobile devices. Google’s new algorithm update combines the core web vitals and previous user-experience-related search signals to measure the Google page experience. 

What goes into Page Experience?

There are a few core page experience signals, that Google has identified as a part of this new update:

1. Boolean checks

• • Mobile-friendliness
  • Using HTTPS
  • No intrusive interstitials
  • Safe browsing

 

2. Core web vitals

• • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

 

All of these factors allow you to identify the issues that hinder online readers from accessing a wealth of valuable information on the web. Google’s focus on these Google page experience metrics aligns with recent search marketing trends that have moved beyond traditional On-page SEO strategies such as keyword density, page metadata, etc.

The advance technical SEO strategy prioritizes the improvements of a website’s user experience through code-level enhancement. User experience plays a vital role in the ranking law of search, and the Google page experience update has provided you with a roadmap to follow.

 

What are Web Vitals?

 

Web vitals is an initiative taken by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to serve a better user experience.

Core web vitals are the subset of web vitals that apply to all pages. Core web vitals are the metrics that help webmasters, marketers, or site owners to keep track of their web pages and optimize the website to deliver a great user experience. These web core vitals measure the ability of a website to offer users a better browsing experience with optimal speed, visual stability, and responsiveness across computers and mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The metrics that makeup web vitals will evolve over time.

 

How do Core Web Vitals affect the website?

Here are a few factors that affect the core web vitals and thereby hurt your page experience:

• Page loading time: If your site takes a lot of time for loading a page, your users will likely leave that page right away. You need to increase your page speed to provide a better user experience.

 

• Broken links: Links that fail to land on a page, or return a 404-error message are called “broken links” or “link rots”. Having such dead links on your page may damage your website’s ranking.

 

• Intrusive interstitial guidelines: Intrusive popups block a user from having smooth access to your web page. Showing popups that cover the main content of the page makes the content less accessible to the users. And it is really annoying! 

 

• User interface: It is very important to have a mobile-friendly website as Google likes a mobile site. If your website is unresponsive, neglects security, and is not optimized for SEO then staying indifferent to the trends may earn you a rebel title as the “Bad website design”. You need to focus on web designing and web development to improve your site’s performance on computers as well as mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

 

• Security and safety: Google, promotes internet safety and security. Safe browsing is Google’s first priority. Having a website that is labeled as “not secure” by Google chrome will harm the trustworthiness of the website. That is why an SSL certificate is important. It helps to reduce the fraud rate and protect user privacy.

 

Core web vitals consist of three metrics that measure the overall page experience of a website.

1. Largest contentful paint (LCP)

LCP is the first metric of the web core vitals. It indicates how long it takes for the largest content of the page to load. The length of time taken by the largest content to load is called the “Largest contentful paint”. LCP that takes 2.5 to load the effective content is considered good. If your site takes more than 4 seconds then you are in trouble.

 

For example, suppose that you are browsing a new website and opened a new article to read, LCP for that page would occur when the main featured image of the article was loaded because images are heavier than texts. Lightweight page elements and the texts are typically loaded first.

 

2. First input delay (FID)

FID measures the time taken by the site to respond to the user’s input such as clicking, and tapping a button or a link.  Google wants every website to be interactive and responsive as fast as possible once they are opened by the users. For example, if you clicked an interactive element such as a Call-to-action button, the time taken by the computer to register your click and respond is FID.

 

Generally, the response time should be less than 100ms, that’s a tenth of a second. Just like a blink of an eye. Google wants – the moment a user is ready to act, the website needs to be ready to respond. A score under 100ms is considered good or passing. 

 

3. Cumulative layout shift (CLS)

CLS is the last metric in the web core vitals. It accesses the stability of a page. For example, if someone is trying to read content and the page moved, so you have to find your place in the article once again, or if you are trying to tap a button and the page moves unexpectedly and you are forced to click the wrong button, then you have been a victim of a bad CLS. That’s a page layout shift which is called a “cumulative layout shift”. CLS is the total change in the layout of a web page as it loads. A score under 0.1 is considered good or passing.

 

According to Google research, having a poor core web vital score and page experience:

• Reduces the conversion rate: There is a strong relationship between conversions and a good page experience. Pages that load in 2.4 seconds have a better conversion rate.
• Increases the bounce rate: Longer page loading time has a major impact on the bounce rate.
• Generate less revenue: Speedy rendering times generate more revenue than the average and vice-versa.

Websites that have a bad user experience find it difficult to rank higher on Google and drive traffic from SERPs. Optimizing a website with the latest update along with SEO has become one crucial part of marketing strategies.

 

Tips to Improve Google Page Experience 

If you want your website to be rewarded, rather than penalized, with the rollout of the latest Google update “page experience”, here are a few tips to improve your Google Page experience to provide the best possible UX.

1. Use a responsive web design

 If you are not using a responsive web design, then now is the time to upgrade your website. 

2. Upgrade to HTTPS

Google wants to provide its users with a secure and safe browsing environment. Getting an SSL certificate through your domain registrar is inexpensive and easy. HTTPS protocol has been added as a page experience signal by Google in its new rollout update, so if you want to achieve a “good page experience” status in Google search results then, a page must have an HTTPS encryption.

3. Increase the security of your website

Work hard to achieve better standards for user privacy, fraud reduction, and overall safety.

4. Remove popups

Remove annoying elements or intrusive interstitial guidelines that block the access of the users.

5. Cleanup backend code

Several improvements can be done to the backend code to improve page loading time and provide a better user experience. You can remove the unused JavaScript, utilize modern file formats, and minimize large JF libraries with local CSS and JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces.

6. Use a good caching plugin

A good caching plugin can help you store your website’s information so it loads much faster than before for repeat visitors.

 

Conclusion

Google page experience update is going to evolve significantly along the way. With this initial rollout, Google wants to reward the sites that offer a high-quality user experience while de-ranking sites that provide a poor user experience. So, optimizing your website for this latest Google update should be your highest priority. 

Do you need help in improving your website’s page experience?

We have the best search marketing experts who specialize in both web development and search engine optimization. 

Connect with us to set up a free consultation. 

Everybody loves “hacks.”

People keep finding hacks to make life easier. So, today I am going to share a legitimate SEO hack that you can start using right away. 

It is the “robot.txt file” that can help you to boost your SEO. This teeny-tiny text file is also called a robot’s exclusive protocol or standard. Robots.txt file is part of every website on the internet, but it gets rarely talked about. It’s a source of SEO that is designed to work with search engines.

Robot.txt file is one of the best methods to enhance your SEO strategy because:

• • It is easy to implement
  • Consumes less time 
  • Does not require any technical experience 
  • Increases your SEO

 

You need to find out the source code of your website, and then follow along with me to see how to create a robots.txt file that search engines would love.

 

What is a robots.txt file?

 

Robots.txt file is a simple text file that webmasters create to instruct web robots or web crawlers how to crawl pages on your website. Robots.txt file is a per of REP (robot’s exclusive protocol), a standard that regulates how robots crawl the website, access the index content, and serve that content to the users online. The REP also has meta robots or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat the links such as “follow” and “unfollow”.

Robots.txt file indicates web crawlers which part of the website they can crawl and which part is not allowed to access. These crawl instructions are specified by “allowing” or “disallowing” for all user agents. Robots.txt file allows you to keep specific web pages out of Google. It plays a big role in SEO.

Search engines regularly check a site’s robots.txt file to see if there are any instructions for web crawling. These instructions are called directives.

 

Why robots.txt file is important for SEO?

From the SEO point of view, the robots.txt file is very important for your website. Using these simple text files, you can prevent search engines from crawling certain web pages from your website, they guide search engines on how to crawl sites more efficiently. It also tells search engine crawlers which web pages not to crawl.

For example, 

Let’s say Google is about to visit a website. Before it visits the target page, it will check the robots.txt file for instructions.

There are different web components of the robots.txt file. Let’s analyze them:

• • Directive – it is the code of conduct that the user-agent follows.
  • User-agent – it is the name used to define specific search engine crawlers and other programs active online. This is the first line of any group.  An asterisk (*) matches all crawlers except the Adsbot. 

 

Let’s understand this with three examples:

1. How to block only Googlebot

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

2. How to block Googlebot and Adsbot

User-agent: Googlebot

User-agent: Adsbot

Disallow: /

3. How to block Adsbot

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

• • Disallow – it is used to tell different search engines not to crawl a particular URL, page, or file. It begins with a “/” character and if it refers to a directory then it ends with a “/”.
  • Allow – it is used to permit search engines to crawl a particular URL or website section. It is used to override the disallow directive rule to allow the crawling of a page in a disallowed directory.
  • Crawl-delay – this is an unofficial directive used to tell web crawlers to slow down web crawling.
  • Sitemap – it is used to define the location of your XML sitemaps to search engines. Sitemap URL is a fully qualified URL. A sitemap is a better way to indicate the crawlers which file Google can crawl.

 

Let’s understand this with the following example,

Say that Google finds this syntax:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

This is the basic format of a robots.txt file.

Let’s understand the anatomy of the robots.txt file – 

• • The user-agent indicates for which search engines the directives are meant.
  • “Disallow” directive in robots.txt file indicates that the content is not accessible to the user-agent.
  • The asterisk (*) after “user-agent” means that the robots.txt file applies to all the web crawlers that visit the website.
  • The slash (/) after “disallow” tells the crawlers not to visit any pages on the website.

 

But, why anyone would want to stop web robots from crawling their website?  After all, everyone wants search engines to crawl their website easily so they increase site ranking.

This is where you can use the SEO hack. 

If you have a lot of pages on your website, the Google search engine will crawl each of your website pages. But, the huge number of pages will take Googlebot’s a while to crawl. If the time delay is more it may hurt your website ranking. That’s because Google’s search engine bots have a crawl budget. 

 

What is a crawl budget?

The amount of time that Google spends crawling a website is called as “site’s crawl budget”. The general theory of web crawling says that the web has infinite space, exceeding Google’s ability to explore and index each URL available online. As a result, there are limits to how much time Google web crawlers can spend time crawling any single website. Web crawling gives your new website a chance to appear in the top SERPs. You don’t get unlimited crawling from Google search engines. Google has a website crawl budget that guides its crawlers in – how often to crawl, which page to scan, and how much server pressure to accept. Heavy activity from web crawlers and visitors can overload your website.

To keep your website running smoothly, you can adjust web crawling through the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

The crawl budget breaks down into two parts-

1. Crawl capacity limit/crawl rate limit

Crawl rate limit monitors fetching on websites so that the loading speed doesn’t suffer or result in a surge of an error. Google web crawlers want to crawl your site without overloading your server. The crawl capacity limit is calculated as the maximum number of concurrent connections that Google bots use to crawl a site, as well as the delay between fetches. 

The crawl capacity limit varies depending on 

• • Crawl health 

if your website responds quickly for some time, the crawl rate limit goes up, which means more connections can be used to crawl.  If the website slows down, the crawl rate limit goes down and Google bots crawl less.

• • Limit set by the website owner in the Google search console

A website owner can reduce the web crawling of their site.

• • Google’s crawling limit 

Google has so many machines, but they are still limited. Hence, we need to make choices with the resources we have. 

 

2. Crawl demand

It is the level of interest Google and its users have in your site. If do not have huge followings yet, then Google web crawlers won’t crawl your site as often as the highly popular ones. 

Here are three main factors that play important role in determining the crawl demand:

• • Popularity

Popular URLs on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in the index.

• • Staleness

Systems want to recrawl documents frequently to pick up any alterations.

• • Perceived inventory

Without any guidance, Google web crawlers will try to crawl almost every URL from your website. If the URLs are duplicates and you don’t want them to be crawled for some reason, this wastes a lot of time on your site. This is a factor that you can control easily.

 

Additionally, site-wide events like site moves may boost the crawl demand to re-index the content under new URLs.

Crawl rate capacity and crawl demand together define the “site’s crawl budget”.

In simple words, the crawl budget is the “number of URLs Google search engine bots can and wants to crawl.”

Now that you know all about the website’s crawl budget management, let’s come back to the robots.txt file.

If you ask Google search engine bots to only crawl certain useful contents of your website, Google bots will crawl and index your website based on that content alone.

“you might not want to waste your crawl budget on useless or similar content on your website.”

By using the robots.txt file the right way, you can prevent the wastage of your crawling budget. You can ask Google to use your website’s crawl budget wisely. That’s why the robots.txt file is so important for SEO.

 

How to find the robots.txt file on your website?

If you think finding the robots.txt file on your website is a tricky job. Then you are wrong. It is super easy.  

This method can be used for any website to find its robots.txt file. All you have to do is to type the URL of your website into the browser search bar and then add robots.txt at the end of your site’s URL. 

One of the three situations will happen:

1. If you have a robots.txt file, you will get the file just by typing www.example.com/robots.txt, where the example will be replaced by your domain name.

For instance, for www.ecsion.com/robots.txt  I got the robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://www.ecsion.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you find the robots.txt file you need to locate it in your website’s root directory. Once you find your robots.txt file you can open it for editing. Erase all the texts, but keep the file.

2. If you lack a robots.txt file, then you will get an empty file. In that case, you will have to create a new robots.txt file from scratch. For creating a robots.txt file you must only use a plain text editor such as a notepad for androids or a TextEdit for Mac. Utilizing Microsoft word might insert additional codes into the text file.

3. If you get a 404 error, then you might want to take a second and view your robots.txt file and fix the error. 

Note: if you are using WordPress and you don’t find any robots.txt file in the site’s root directory, then WordPress creates a virtual robots.txt file. If this happens to you, you must delete all the texts and re-create a robots.txt file.

 

How to create a robots.txt file?

You can control which content or files the web crawlers can access on your website with a robots.txt file. Robots.txt file lives in a website’s root directory. You can create a robots.txt file in a simple text editor like a notepad or TextEdit. If you already have a robots.txt file, ensure you have deleted the text, but not the file. So, for www.ecsion.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.ecsion.com/robots.txt. The Robots.txt file is a simple and plain text file that follows the REP (robots exclusive protocol). A robots.txt file has many rules. Each rule either blocks or allows access for a given web robot to a specified file path on that site. All files will be crawled unless you specify.

Following is a simple robots.txt file with 2 rules:

1. User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogooglebot/

2. User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://www.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

This is what a simple robots.txt file looks like. 

Let us see, what that robots.txt file means:

1. The user agent named Googlebot is not allowed to crawl any URL that starts with http://example.com/nogooglebot/
2. All the other agents are allowed to crawl the entire website.
3. The website’s sitemap is located at https://www.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

Creating a robots.txt file involves four steps:

1. Create a file named robots.txt 
2. Add instructions to the robots.txt file 
3. Upload the text file to your website
4. Test the robots.txt file 

Create a file named robots.txt

Using the robots.txt file you can control which files, or URLs the web crawlers can access. Robots.txt file lives in the site’s root directory. To create a robots.txt file, you need to use a simple plain text editor like notepad or TextEdit. Use of text editors like a word processor or Microsoft will be void, as it can add unexpected characters or codes which cause problems for web crawlers. Ensure that you save your file with UTF-8 coding if prompted during the save file dialog. 

Robots.txt rules and format:

• • Robots.txt file must be named robots.txt.
  • Every site can have a single robots.txt file.
  • Robots.txt file must be located in the website’s root directory.  For example, to control crawling on all the URLs of your website https://www.ecsion.com,  the robots.txt file must be located at https://www.ecison.com/robots.txt. It can’t live in the sub-directory. (for example, at https://www.ecsion.com/pages/robots.txt ). 
  • Robots.txt file can be applied to the sub-domains or on non-standard ports. 
  • Robots.txt file is a UTF-8 encoded text file that includes ASCII. Google may ignore characters that are not part of the UTF-8 encoding, rendering robots.txt rules invalid.

 

Add instructions to the robots.txt file

Instructions are the rules for web crawlers about which part of the site they can crawl and which part they can’t. when adding rules to your robots.txt file keep the following guidelines in mind:

• • Robots.txt file consists of one or many groups.
  • Each group has different rules and directives, one instruction per line. Each group begins with a user-agent line that defines the target of the group.
  • A group gives the following instructions to the user-agent:
  • Who the group applies to (the user-agent)
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent can crawl?
  • Which files, URLs, or directories the agent cannot crawl.
  • Web crawlers process the groups starting from the top to the bottom. A user agent can match only one instruction set, which is the first, most specific group that matches a given user agent. 
  • By default, a user agent can access any URL, or file on your website unless it is blocked by the “disallow” rule.
  • Rules are case-sensitive. For example, disallow: file.asp only applies to https://www.example.com/file.asp, but not https://www.example.com/FILE.asp. 
  • “#” marks the beginning of a comment. 

 

Upload the robots.txt file

After saving your robots.txt file to the computer, you might want to make it available for the search engine crawlers. How you upload the robots.txt file to your website completely depends on your server and the site’s architecture. You can search the documentation of your hosting company or directly get in touch with them.

Once you upload the robots.txt file, perform a test to check whether it is publicly accessible or not.

Test the robots.txt file 

For testing your robots.txt markup, open a private browsing window in your web browser and navigate to the location of your robots.txt file. 

For example, https://www.example.com/robots.txt 

if you find the contents of your robots.txt file, you can proceed to test the robots.txt markup.

There are two ways offered by Google to test the robots.txt markup:

1. Robots.txt tester in search console 

This tool can be used for robots.txt files which are already accessible on your website.

2. Google’s open-source robots.txt library 

It is also used in Google search to test the robots.txt file locally on your computer.

Submit the robots.txt file

After uploading and testing your robots.txt file, Google’s search engine crawlers will automatically start utilizing your robots.txt file. There’s nothing much you need to do. 

 

Conclusion

We hope this blog has given you an insight into why robots.txt files are so important for SEO. So, if you seriously want to improve your SEO, you must implement this teeny tiny robots.txt file on your website. Without it, you will be lagging behind your competitors in the market.

 

 

A search engine provides easy access to information online, but Google web crawler/web spiders play a vital role in rounding up online content. Search engines organize the online content based on the web pages and the websites visible to them. Moreover, they are very essential for your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Google’s web crawlers scour online data and feed results to the machine so that they can be indexed for relevance on SERPs. If you want your site to appear on search engine rank pages, you must give Google bots something to crawl.

In this article, we talk about 

1. What is a Google web crawler? 
2. How does Google search work?
3. How do Google robots crawl your website?
4. Why Google web crawlers are important for SEO?
5. What are the roadblocks for Google web crawlers?
6. How to improve web crawling?

 

What is a Google Web Crawler?

Google web crawlers also referred to as Google bots, Google robots, or Google spiders are digital bots that crawl across the world wide web (www) to discover and index web pages for search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. Google doesn’t know what sites exist on the internet. Google search engine bots have to crawl websites and index them before they deliver the right pages for the right keywords, and phrases people use to search a page.

Let’s say, for instance, you go to a new store for grocery shopping. You might walk down the aisle and look at the products before you pick out what you need.

Likewise, search engines also use Google web crawlers as their helpers to browse the internet for web pages before storing that page data to use for future searches.

 

How does Google search work?

To better understand the Google web crawlers, firstly you must know how Google search generates web page search results.

Google follows three main steps to generate these search results:

1. Crawling

Google web crawling means the search engine using Google robots to find out new content through a network of hyperlinks. The networking starts from an unknown page or through a sitemap.

2. Indexing 

Once a page is found, Google tries to understand what it is about and stores that information into a gigantic database known as Google index. This process is called indexing.

3. Ranking 

When a query is entered into the Google search box, Google finds the highest quality answers and then ranks them by the order of relevance, and finally serves them as a list called Search engine rank pages. The pages that appear on this list are highly ranked based on whether they offer the best answers while considering other ranking factors such as language, location, and devices.

 

How do Google robots crawl your website? 

When you launch a new website, Google web crawlers will discover it eventually. The bots crawl through the texts, images, videos, and more. If you want Google web crawlers to find and index your site quickly, you must follow these three easy steps:

• • Create a sitemap is a map that provides directions to the web crawlers for crawling. A Sitemap is uploaded to your root directory.
  • Use Google webmaster tools to submit your website.
  • Ask Google to index your website  Search engines try to crawl every URL which comes in its way, so if a URL is a non-text file such as a video, or an image, it will not read that file if it doesn’t have any relevant filename & metadata. 

 

Google search engines crawl the websites by passing between the links on the web pages. If your newly launched website doesn’t have links connecting your pages to others, you can ask Google search engines to crawl a website by submitting your URL on Google Search Console. Web crawlers act as an explorer in the new land. They are always hunting for discoverable links on pages and index them once they understand their features. 

Remember, Google website crawlers only sift through public pages on sites, they can’t crawl through private pages. Private web pages where the search bots can’t reach are labeled as “dark web”. Google robots or crawlers, while they are on the page, gather useful information about the page, and then the web crawlers store these pages in their index. Google search algorithm helps to rank your website high for the users. 

 

Why Google Web Crawlers are important for SEO?

 

SEO helps to improve your website for better ranking. SEO efforts are designed to help a site gain online visibility. For ranking your website higher on SERPs, it is important for your pages to be searchable and readable for Google web crawlers, Google bots, Google robots, or say Google spiders. Crawling is the first way Google search engines look for your pages, but frequent and regular crawling helps them display changes made on your website. Since crawling goes beyond the beginning of your search engine optimization campaign, you can consider web crawler behavior as a proactive measure for helping you appear first on the SERPs and improve your UX.

Without web crawlers to scour online data and verify that the content exists, all SEO efforts will be unproductive.

Crawl budget management 

The amount of time that Google spends crawling a website is called as “site’s crawl budget”. The general theory of web crawling says that the web has infinite space, exceeding Google’s ability to explore and index each URL available online. As a result, there are limits to how much time Google web crawlers can spend time crawling any single website. Web crawling gives your new website a chance to appear in the top SERPs. You don’t get unlimited crawling from Google search engines. Google has a website crawl budget that guides its crawlers in – how often to crawl, which page to scan, and how much server pressure to accept. Heavy activity from web crawlers and visitors can overload your website.

To keep your website running smoothly, you can adjust web crawling through the crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.

The crawl budget is determined by-

1. Crawl capacity limit/crawl rate limit 

Crawl rate limit monitors fetching on websites so that the loading speed doesn’t suffer or result in a surge of an error. Google web crawlers want to crawl your site without overloading your server. The crawl capacity limit is calculated as the maximum number of concurrent connections that Google bots use to crawl a site, as well as the delay between fetches.

The crawl capacity limit varies depending on :

• • Crawl health

    If your website responds quickly for some time, the crawl rate limit goes up, which means more connections can be used to crawl.  If the website slows down, the crawl rate limit goes down and Google bots crawl less.

  • Limit set by the website owner in the Google search console

    A website owner can reduce the web crawling of their site.

  • Google’s crawling limit

    Google has so many machines, but they are still limited. Hence, we need to make choices with the resources we have. 

2. Crawl demand

It is the level of interest Google and its users have in your site. If do not have huge followings yet, then Google web crawlers won’t crawl your site as often as the highly popular ones. 

Here are three main factors that play important role in determining the crawl demand:

• • Popularity

Popular URLs on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in the index.

• • Staleness

Systems want to recrawl documents frequently to pick up any alterations.

• • Perceived inventory

Without any guidance, Google web crawlers will try to crawl almost every URL from your website. If the URLs are duplicates and you don’t want them to be crawled for some reason, this wastes a lot of time on your site. This is a factor that you can control easily.

Additionally, events like site moves may increase the crawl demand to re-index the content under new URLs.

Crawl rate capacity and crawl demand together define the “site’s crawl budget”.

 

What are the roadblocks for Google web crawlers?

There are a few ways to block Google web crawlers from crawling your pages purposely. Not every page from your website should rank in search engine rank pages, these crawler roadblocks help to protect sensitive, redundant, irrelevant, or useless pages from appearing for keywords.

There are two types of roadblocks for crawlers:

• • Noindex meta tag 

It stops the Google search engine from indexing and ranking a particular web page. You should apply the noindex to the admin pages, internal search results, and thank you pages.

• • Robot.txt file

It is a simple text file placed on your server which tells Google web crawlers whether they should access the page or not.

 

How to improve web crawling?

How long does it take for the Google search engine to crawl a website? It depends on the number of pages your website has and the quality of hyperlinks. To improve the site crawling you have to:

1. Verify that your website is crawlable

Google accesses the web anonymously and will be able to spot all the elements of your web page only if everything is in order. The first thing you should do to improve your web crawling is by verifying that search engines like Google can reach your website’s pages.

2. Create a solid homepage

If you ask Google to crawl your page, start from your homepage, as it is the most important part of your website. To encourage Google web crawlers to crawl your website thoroughly, make sure that your home page contains a solid navigation system that links to all key sections of your site.

3. Beware of links that violate the guidelines

You can improve your site crawling by linking your web page with another page that Google web crawlers are aware of.

 

 

Every complex website must have a sitemap if you look from an SEO standpoint. Sitemaps are a vital part of your technical SEO plan. It helps Google crawlers to better scan your website. Search engines utilize sitemaps to index your website. Having search engines crawl your website more intelligently, you can improve your website rankings and drive more potential traffic. 

In today’s article, we will learn all about Sitemap

Table of contents

• • What is a Sitemap in SEO?
  • Why do we need a Sitemap for SEO?
  • What are the types of Sitemaps in SEO?
  • Why Sitemaps are important in SEO?
  • How to create a Sitemap for SEO?

 

What is a Sitemap in SEO?

A sitemap is a file placed on your site which provides you with information about the pages, texts, videos, URLs, and other files. Search engines like Google use sitemaps to understand your website and its structure in a better way, while web users can use them to find specific pages on your site. It can help you in SEO if your site’s content is well-prepared and attractive to web users.

 

Why do we need to Optimize Website Sitemap for SEO?

A large and complex website must have a sitemap as it is a list of web pages created for crawlers to find your web content as fast as possible. Your website will benefit from having a sitemap, and you will never be punished for having one. It can help crawlers to scan larger and more complex sites. A sitemap is important for SEO as it provides faster indexation, better indexation of deep pages, and monitoring of index pages.

You need a sitemap if –

• • Your website is too large web crawlers might overlook some of your newly updated web content.
  • Your website content is changed frequently.
  • You need to index your new content fast.
  • Your website has a lot of heavy media content such as videos, and images. Google takes additional information from sitemaps into account for web search.
  • Your website is recently launched and has a few external links. Google crawlers scan the web by following the external links from one page to another. If your site is new Google might not discover your content pages if no other site is linked to them. A Sitemap helps Google to find out the newest web pages or all web pages together on a website.
  • Your website has a large archive of content pages that are not properly linked to each other. If your pages do not naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to make sure that Google discovers them.

 

Let me tell you something loud and clear –

“A sitemap does not help to boost your rankings.”

A sitemap is not for you if –

• • Your website is “small”.
  • Your website is a portfolio website.
  • Your website is widely linked internally.
  • Your website doesn’t have heavy or fresh media files.
  • Your website is a one-page presentation. 
  • Your website is a SaaS application or website for an organization.

 

What are the Types of Sitemaps in SEO?

There are 2 kinds of sitemaps often used by SEO professionals for their SEO strategy to target search engine crawlers and users.

Let us know about the 2 main types of sitemaps.

1. HTML sitemaps (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language)

HTML sitemaps are written for the users to browse, not search engine bots. It is visible to the website user. Search engine bots crawl through the HTML sitemaps and send strong user experience signals to Google.

HTML sitemaps are often placed at the footer of your website to help you navigate from one page to another. Your HTML sitemap should have links that help users navigate from your site. You can organize your HTML site map such that – it is the directory of your website.

2. XML sitemaps (eXtensible Mark-up Language)

XML sitemaps are written for search engine bots to crawl, not the users. XML sitemaps are used to share technical details of your site, like how many pages you have and how often they’re uploaded. These are digital maps that help Google discover important web pages of your site and how frequently they are updated. You might want to communicate with your search engines when things change on your website. 

XML sitemaps are important but mostly underrated. An XML sitemap is for websites that are new, large, utilize lots of images, and videos, and have lots of orphaned pages. They allow search engines to discover fresh pages even if they are not linked to the main website. Search engine crawlers prioritize XML sitemaps for faster crawling.

An XML sitemap is further divided into –

• Image sitemap: Image sitemap is used for images to get featured on Google Image Search.
• Video sitemap: Video sitemap is used for videos to get featured in Google Video Search. It helps search bots to better understand the video content.
• News sitemap: News sitemap is used for news to get featured in the “news section” Google SERPs. It is mandatory for a news website. It can not contain news articles that are published 2 days prior. A news sitemap can not have more than 1000 URLs. You can break 1000 URLs into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file. 
• Mobile sitemap: Mobile sitemap is used only for the specially formatted version designed for mobiles. As per reports, there is no need for a mobile sitemap in SEO for a mobile-friendly website.

 

HTML Sitemap vs XML Sitemap

HTML and XML both are coding languages used to create web pages. When it comes to sitemaps, the only difference between them is that XML is written only for search engine crawlers, while HTML focuses on making a user-friendly website for humans.

 

Why Sitemaps are Important in SEO?

Well-executed SEO means making your site crawlable and accessible.  A sitemap in SEO is important as it keeps your website organized.  

Here are a few benefits of using Sitemaps for SEO –

• • Makes your website user-friendly
  • Make it easy for search engines to classify your content
  • Helps you to find internal linking opportunities
  • Organize large sites
  • Determine areas to improve website navigation
  • Provides faster indexing
  • Automatically index your updated content
  • Increases visibility of your website in SERPs

 

How to Create a Sitemap for SEO?

Having a good sitemap for your website greatly increases the chances of your website’s content showing up in relevant searches. If your business makes money from your website, then have a look at the following steps to create a sitemap.

1. Review your website structure 

The first thing you need to check is to see how your website structure is built. See how the existing content is structured on your site. Start from the homepage and see where your homepage links to. You might figure this out easily with the help of menu options on your website. But, when it comes to SEO, all pages are not created equally.  Keep the depth of your website in mind while reviewing your site. Pages away from your website’s homepage will be difficult to rank.

As per the search engine guide, you should aim to create a sitemap having shallow depth, which means it takes only 3 clicks to navigate to any of your website pages. That’s much better for SEO.

You must create a hierarchy of pages based on how you want them to be indexed and their importance. Follow a logical hierarchy while prioritizing your content. 

 

2. Code your URLs

Now that you have gone through all of your web pages and determined the importance of each page and matched that importance in your website structure; it’s time for coding the URLs.

The best possible way to do this is by formatting each URL with XML tags. It will be very easy for you if you have experience in HTML coding. The “ML” in the term XML stands for mark-up language which is the same in HTML. Start by getting a text editor to create an XML file. The text editor must be a plain text editor like windows, notepad, or TextEdit for Mac users. 

Then add the code for each URL.

• • Location
  • Changed frequency
  • Last updated
  • Priority of the page

 

Here is an example of how coding will look for each one

• • https://www.ecsion.com/page1
  • weekly
  • 2022-1-2
  • 3

This method is best for small size websites as you have to manually enter the text on each page. Text editor makes it easier when it comes to adding code for each URL, but you need to be sharp as it is a manual job. Take your time and ensure that you go through each step properly.

 

3. Validate the code

While coding manually, human error is natural. But, for your sitemap to run properly, you can’t make any mistakes in your code.

Luckily, there are software tools available online to validate your code to make sure your syntax is error-free. You can find multiple tools on Google search for sitemap validation.

The sitemap validator tool helps to check whether your sitemap is formatted correctly or not. It will inform you straight away in case of any syntax error. You can check what is the problem in your sitemap and fix that issue before submitting it to Google.

For example, if you miss out on adding an end tag in your syntax or something similar, it can be quickly identified and fixed.

 

4. Add your sitemap to the root and robots.txt

Find the location of your root folder and add your sitemap file to this folder. It will add the page to your website as well. This is not an issue, lots of websites have this. Just type in the website address and add “/sitemap/” to the URL and see what pops up.

Here’s an example for the Apple website https://www.ecsion.com/sitemap/

Now, this can be taken 1 step further by looking at the code on different websites by adding “/sitemap.xml” to the URL.

For example, https://www.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

By adding a sitemap to your root folder, you might want to add it to the robots.txt file which you will find in the roots folder as well. 

But, what is the robot.txt file?  why it is important to add your sitemap file link to the robots.txt file?

Well, the robots.txt file is just a simple text file that is placed in your website’s root folder. It has different uses. It gives direction to the unknown crawlers by using a set of instructions to tell search engine bots which page on your site they can crawl and which page they should ignore. On the robots.txt page, if you add “disallow” on your site, crawlers ignore it.  This file allows you to block specific robots from crawling your website. 

For example, if a site is under development, it makes sense to block the robots from having the access to crawl the website until it’s ready to be launched.

Robots.txt file is the first place that the spiders or crawlers visit when accessing a website.

If you have multiple sitemaps, you can add all sitemap files locations in a sitemap index file. The XML format of the sitemap index file is the same as the sitemap file, making it a sitemap of sitemaps.

When you have multiple sitemaps, you can either specify your sitemap index file URL in your robots.txt or you can specify individual URLs for each of your sitemap files.

 

5. Submit your sitemap

Now, that you know how to create and add a sitemap to your website files, it’s time to submit it to the search engines. For the next step, go to the Google search console. On the Google search console dashboard, Navigate to Crawl and select Sitemaps from the drop-down menu. Next, click on Add/ Test sitemap on the right-hand side of the screen. You can test your sitemap for any errors before you continue. In case of any mistake, you can quickly fix it and then submit it.

Google handles everything else ahead of this. This helps search engine spiders to index your website with ease, which will increase your SEO ranking.

 

Conclusion

If you wish to take your SEO strategy to the next level, you must create a sitemap of your site. If you don’t want to change the code manually, the internet is full of resources that can help you create a sitemap for SEO without needing to manually edit the code.

Mobile phone is the way of the future. It is more versatile and provides more value to the end-user than a computer. Nowadays, mobile phones are used more than desktops, laptops, and tablets. More and more web users are shifting from desktop computers to smartphones. Since people started using mobile devices on the go, mobile search has overtaken desktops. The usage of apps, voice assistants, and IoT devices for online searches has increased exponentially. It has become so important to optimize your website to work well on mobile devices. 

Wondering why mobile is so much important for small businesses?

Well, the answer is:

• • Mobile-friendly websites work faster and show up higher in search engine results.
  • Mobile searches make up most of the searches on Google.com.
  • Majority of the traffic comes from mobile devices.
  • If your website is not mobile-friendly, visitors will leave in no time.

 

In order to grow your small-scale business, it is crucial to invest some time to optimize your website and provide a mobile-friendly user experience. 

 

What is a Mobile-Friendly Website?

 

Responsive web design means no matter how big or small the screen is, it will fill the screen and the information in a clear way. A mobile-friendly web design allows your website’s information to be easily readable and accessible to all platforms including a much smaller screen of smartphones, tablets, and even watches. At a complex level, a mobile-friendly website means utilizing all the capabilities of mobile devices to deliver a satisfying experience to the users on the go. If your website isn’t optimized, then you are missing out.

 

Why Mobile-Friendly Website is Important for Your Business?

The use of technology is increasing rapidly, which is why it is today’s business necessity to discover an efficient and cost-effective solution to optimize your website.

Irrefutable truth: “To succeed your website better employ mobile-optimized web design”

Potential customers expect speedy answers and faster access. Their experience on your website is most likely to influence their impression of your business.

To design an effective mobile-friendly website you need to look at the following elements:

• • Does your website load quickly?
  • Is it easy to navigate?
  • Is it easy to perform actions?

 

Nearly half of the visitors will leave their mobile if your website fails to load within 3 seconds. Visitors will leave if you do not optimize your website to provide a great user experience. A bad mobile experience may hurt your user base. 

Better play nice!

Your users, customers, or your business partners just want their information served fast, fresh, and convenient. So, you better focus on the ways to optimize your website design that encourage visitors to perform desired actions depending upon your small business marketing objectives. Emphasis on winning friends with a responsive web design.

Now that you know, what is mobile-friendliness and why it is crucial to have a mobile-optimized website; let us dig in more to learn the process of mobile optimization.

 

10 tactics to optimize your site for mobile search

Mobile search now dominates a significant portion of the online space. To be an effective marketer you need to create a strong user experience regardless of the device. The context of mobile search is different than that of desktop devices.

To get you started, here are the 10 best ways to make sure your website shows up on mobile SERPs:

1. AMP is your savior

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are lightweight web pages used to create a fast mobile experience. The technology used behind AMP enables web pages to load more quickly for mobile devices. AMP utilizes a stripped-down version of Hyper-text markup language. It is a web component framework that allows web pages to load smoothly, and fast and prioritize user experience.

It helps businesses to provide a consistent and fast experience across all devices, which means better speed can improve user experience. To employ AMP, you don’t require any super-savvy computer skills. You can reduce the need for a vast developer since it is easy to build.

AMPs were included in Google’s mobile search algorithm in 2016.

Technically, AMP requires 3 main components:

• • AMP HTML
  • AMP JavaScript
  • AMP Cache

 

2. Use schema markup

As Google remains the king, it always works on providing the answers to user queries. When you search “how to optimize a website” for example, Google presents you with an info-box that contains the answer to your related queries.  This is possible only by implementing schema markup. It doesn’t require a technically savvy person to get started. There’s a plugin for WordPress called schema app structured data that offers a responsive web design. You just need to activate the plugin, add your logo and business name, and BAM, your content is optimized to be fully understood by search engines resulting in higher traffic and increased click-through rates.

3. Speed is the deciding factor

Speed up anything and everything. Slow loading time translates to a high-bounce rate. High-ranking results have faster page load times. Web page loading speed is quite an inevitable thing for your website when it comes to desktops, but if you think that your website loading speed remains the same for mobile phones as well, then you are wrong. As mentioned earlier, web pages load differently on mobile devices. It is important to optimize your website to improve your web page’s loading speed and generate high-quality leads for your business.

4. Make your site responsive enough

A responsive web design is mandatory to maintain a higher ranking on Google. Google has made it very clear that it is going to prioritize websites that are responsive and fits the screen of all devices. The responsive HTML framework adapts according to the screen size and orientation of the device viewing the content. It means HTML allows your website to fit well enough on-screen that is 5 inches to the screen that is 10 inches. If you succeed in crafting a responsive design for your website then you can rank high, drive a good amount of traffic to your website, and eventually, gain a good amount of revenue for your business.

5. Squeeze the image size

Images are necessary for dynamic web content and visual content is the topmost priority for digital marketers. By compressing an image, you enable web pages to load faster. Compressed image frees up space and decreases page load time.  It’s a win-win situation!

For example, imagine that you are a blogger who uses tons of graphs, screenshots, videos, and other types of visual content within the blog to attract followers. In order to optimize your website, you can compress image files up to 95% to reduce the file size using photoshop without hampering the quality. While visual contents are important, there’s one type of visual content that needs to be removed quickly from your website. 

Any guesses?

6. Remove flash

Flash is banned from Google’s AMP project. Vulnerabilities in flash make it less attractive in web designs. Cheesy animation might appear good on pen and paper, but in the real world, they look less operative. The trend of simple designs is ruling the internet. So, we suggest you exclude flash from your site.

7. Check if your site layout is mobile-friendly 

While crafting a website you should not just look at the technical side but also the non-technical aspects of your website such as fonts and colors.  You need to check whether your website‘s content design is good enough on focusing the key points of your site.

8. Use open-source tools to improve your website’s experience

If you want to enhance your website ranking on Google, then you should run a mobile-friendly test which you will get in the Google search console. This test is conducted by open-source tools so you get the results faster than expected. If you pass this test then you are most likely to gain more traffic and enhance the end-user experience. If you fail the test, fix the problems and repeat the test until you get the best results.

9. Identify how people look for things from their mobiles

Look at your mobile website. If you think that people search in the same way on both desktops and mobile devices, then I am afraid you’re wrong.  While searching from a desktop, people have enough time to type longer phrases. But, while surfing on their mobile phones they tend to type smaller texts to get the exact same results. For mobile users, Google lets you use up to 78 characters to craft titles and for desktop, it is just 70. To optimize your mobile devices, you get more space to elaborate the titles so that your visitors find you effortlessly.

10. Say no to Pop-ups

Keep away from pop-ups while optimizing your website for mobile search.

Pop-ups are a Big NO! 

Google penalizes websites if they fail to provide easily accessible content for users. If pop-ups of your web design irritate your visitors, then it will surely hamper your website ranking. You better get rid of such pop-ups to provide a great customer browsing experience.

 

Conclusion

Mobile phones are the future of online search. Every person has a mobile device than desktop computers. So, it is important to optimize your website to resolve mobile queries and thereby increase search rankings and build a strong digital foundation.

 

 

If you are going to publish content on your website, you might as well take time to ensure Google takes notice of your efforts. But, how to do that?

Most of you guys might have heard about the three-letter term “SEO” thrown around about Digital marketing, internet circles, and online businesses. But, do you understand what they mean?

Remember, instead of just creating what you think people are searching for, an SEO strategy makes sure that you are creating content that people are looking for. That is why to build winning SEO strategy is important to stay on track when creating content.

Today, we are going to learn everything about Search Engine Optimization to carry out a strong, and effective SEO strategy. We are going to cover:

• • What is SEO?
  • Importance of SEO Strategy
  • 8 Expert Ways to Build Winning SEO Strategy

 

What Is SEO?

Nowadays, people turn to Google to find out answers to pretty much all doubts or queries.  Business owners everywhere do whatever they can to make their site, and information findable on Google search. This is exactly what SEO is – the practice of optimizing your content to appear first on SERPs.

 

Search engine optimization is a process of optimizing websites to rank higher on Google search engine result pages through organic searches. SEO strategy is one of the fundamental strategies for any business to maximize the opportunity to gain organic traffic from search engines. It helps you discover opportunities to answer queries people have about their responsive business industry.

There are 3 types of Search engine optimizers:

• On-page SEO

It focuses on content that’s actually on your website, and how to optimize it to increase the website ranking for specified keywords.

In simple words, on-page SEO is the strategy that you implement on your website.

For example, 

• • The design
  • The text
  • Metadata
  • Alt text

 

• Off-page SEO

It focuses on links directed to your site from elsewhere on the internet. 

Incoming links or backlinks coming from reputable sources help your site to build trust with search algorithms.

For example,

• • Social posts
  • External links
  • Other promotional methods

 

• Technical SEO

 It focuses on the website’s backend architecture. Every business has different goals depending on its business size.

SEO’s job is to examine their industry and identify what their audiences are looking for and establish a solid strategy to give them what they are searching for.

 

Importance Of SEO

• • SEO is a budget-friendly marketing strategy than paid advertising
  • It is more effective and longer-lasting
  • It provides increases higher quality organic traffic and drives sales 
  • It improves visibility, credibility, and trust
  • It provides higher ROI than other marketing channels
  • Provides customer insight and sustainability
  • Improves usability and user experience (UX)
  • Builds a positive online reputation and increases domain authority of your website

 

8 Tips To Build Winning SEO Strategy 

Every business should invest time in building a strong website strategy. It helps in increasing organic traffic to your site which is a crucial part of a digital marketing plan if you are looking for longevity and cost-effectiveness. Organic search driven by SEO strategies is unbeatable. Initially, SEO can feel like a slow burn, but the effects are long-lasting. A website is the anchor of your marketing efforts. 

So, you cannot understate the importance of having an effective website for your business.

Now let us learn how to build a winning SEO strategy in 8 steps:

• Write for people first and Google second

Google algorithm is getting smarter every day and uses constant human inputs to better align with your thought process. Being said that, there is no special mix to outwit a search engine, so it’s better to write for humans first than search engines. 

Ultimately, your objective is to provide naturalistic content to your audience. Discover the right keywords to find the right audience to find you and elevate your already informative and valuable content. 

 

• Establish your top 3-5 goals 

Identify your business goals and order them in priority. It is important to find out why you are creating a website. Having a site that has clearly defined goals is the key to setting yourself up for a successful business journey. Take some time to think about whether you are trying to increase sales of your products, you are trying to increase your SEO or you are trying to convert visitors to leads before developing your website. 

 

• Create a list of keywords 

Keyword research is a legit SEO strategy for building a killer website. One of the best ways to find the right keyword is that which your users search. Google suggest – start typing a keyword into Google search and you will get a drop-down list of suggestions. This list can make great keywords for SEO strategy as it is directly populated by Google, and Google provides this list based on what people are searching for.

Long-tailed keywords are less competitive than short-tailed keywords, but they have low search volumes, and they are much easier to rank for. You can use different keyword search tools to discover the search volumes and competition of those terms to rank first on SERPs. 

 

• Focus on customer experience 

Improved customer experience and usability have a direct correlation with their perception of your business. There is nothing worse than customers not using your website. A bad user experience will deeply harm your organic traffic. In fact, after more than a few seconds of frustration customers leave your website. To avoid such situations, you must immediately remove dead links, and error pages, and modify the messy website structure.

Google crawlers scan your content and determine your search engine ranking. Easy navigation and good customer experience allow Google to rank your website higher in SERPs.

Key focal points to remember for providing a seamless UX:

• • Utilize heading and short
  • Utilize easy-to-read paragraphs
  • Tidy up your sub-folders
  • Reduce page loading time
  • Optimize your website for mobile devices

All these points will help you to reduce the bounce rate, improve your rankings, and generate a better conversion rate.  Loading, Interactivity, and visual stability are the 3 core web vitals that have become a ranking factor through page experience updates. So, you should be optimizing page speed more than ever before. A positive user experience has a direct impact on how successful your business will be. Businesses that actively work on UX can control their brand reputation online to some degree.

 

• Focus on relevant links 

One of the key aspects of building the domain reputation or domain authority of your website is link-building. External links are important as it enhances the information that you are providing and also receive reciprocal incoming links through outreach. Google crawlers scan and discover content by following these links through subsequent pages and judge how related they are to a search query. You can also link useful pages to your website wherever and whenever required. Link-building attracts inbound links from other sources online.

You can approach different blogs for guest blogging opportunities through which can link back to your site. Websites with high domain authority that link back to your content have a more significant impact on your SEO strategies. Many marketers noticed an impact after a few months of implementing a link-building plan. 

 

• Remove anything that slows down your site

While writing informative blogs, selling your services, or pointing someone in the right direction, your site needs to be quick, accessible, and easy to use. Nowadays users expect instant access and instant results.  If your website’s page load time is more, your customers will simply move.

Some of the ways to improve your site speed and the overall smoothness of your customer experience:

• • Delete old or defunct plugins
  • Clean up your code
  • Compress your images
  • Ensure that your sub-folders flow and make sense
  • Use tools to monitor your website performance metric (GTmetrix or Google page speed insights)

 

• Compress media files before uploading 

As your website grows, you will have more content more images, videos, texts, and other relevant media to support your content. These visual files can be appealing to your visitors, but they can be very large in size.  Since page loading time is an important factor in SEO strategy, it’s important to monitor the size of the media files before uploading them to your website. 

Bigger file sizes may lead to reduced page speed. It’s harder for mobile browsers to load these heavy files as the bandwidth on mobile devices is significantly smaller. So, the smaller the file size, the faster your website will load.

 

• Track your content’s success

Search engine optimization strategies require patience and a lot of hard work to achieve your goals. It’s very important to monitor your metrics to understand the success and overall progress to build winning SEO strategy. It helps you to identify the areas of improvement.  Organic traffic can be monitored by using various web analytics tools or by creating your own dashboard using Google sheets or excel. 

Tracking the overall process including conversion rate, ROI, and your ranking on search engine result pages can help you recognize your success as well as determine the areas of opportunity.

The search engine landscape is ever-evolving. Staying up-to-date about the current trends and best practices is a crucial strategy plan for SEO.