Welcome to the latest Relevance round-up of Moz’s Top 10 website search optimisation tips. This edition covers everything from getting people to open your outreach emails to the effect duplicate images has on your SEO. Moz continues its focus on local digital marketing ideas in points eight to ten, including working with charities, improving your Google Business Profile with images and getting customers to edit negative reviews.
Website search engine optimisation tips
1. How to perfectly optimise your website
Is your site being sluggish? Find out what’s slowing it down with this concise tutorial from Kyle Faber and Nick LeRoy. NickLeRoy.com gained a perfect score of 100 for desktop and 89+ for mobile through making several changes related to hosting, themes, images, plugins and resources. Solutions include migrating to a better hosting provider, setting up a clean install of WordPress, ditching Google fonts, and many other useful steps outlined in this post. Follow this process to boost your page speed and website search engine optimisation.
2. Getting your link building outreach emails opened – A 5-point guide
Moz’s recent Whiteboard Friday covers link building and getting your outreach email opened. Shannon McGuirk guides you through five ways for successfully supercharging your email outreach. Did you know, for example, that using the journalist’s name in the subject line generates far more opens? Other tips include headline language, colour and emojis.
3. Do duplicate images affect your rankings?
This fascinating study from Reboot delves into the subject of duplicate images and the effect that stock images have on web optimisation. Does Google prefer articles that include original and new images? The 3-month experiment resulted in some dramatic findings that are sure to help you with your content and images strategy.
4. 150k small business website teardown – Part 2
Fresh Chalk’s packed second part to its ‘150k small business website teardown’ (see part 1) turns its attention towards website builders, hosting and site speed. How so Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and WordPress measure up? Check out the sequel’s analysis on speed, google rank and market share for the big website providers.
5. Googlebot has adapted its evergreen rendering
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog has informed users that Googlebot has adapted the evergreen Chromium renderer. Despite the update, it will continue to be called “evergreen”. It essentially means that Googlebot is using the latest stable Chromium to run JavaScript and render pages. Send any feedback or questions to Google’s webmaster forum or Twitter.
6. Native lazy loading for the web
Lazy-loading is your key to improving page load times, minimising user bandwidth, and reducing memory usage, but it can be a hassle. Starting with Chrome 76, a new and convenient attribute allows you to ditch custom lazy-loading in favour of something even more… well, lazy. Take a look at the quick demo video to see how it is now significantly easier for you to improve your website search engine optimisation and page performance.
7. What will really improve gender equality in the workplace?
Sometimes it’s difficult to see how progress is being made when half (54%) of women actively feel that their gender has negatively affected their career progression. Based on a survey, a report details men and women’s perceptions of inequality and what they believe will help. From the transparent sharing of salary information to wanting an open dialogue, the report’s findings are illuminating on the subject of how men can be better allies to women in the workplace.
8. Customers can be persuaded to edit their negative reviews – Here’s how
Negative reviews are the bane of businesses’ existence. People are quicker to complain than compliment, but is there anything that can be done once the worst happens and you find yourself with a scathing review from a disgruntled customer? Moz believes local business customers are more forgiving than we would ever expect and they can be won over. This article should provide some hope – and actionable steps – about how to respond to negative reviews to restore trust and get those all-important edited reviews from existing customers.
9. Building quality links with local charities and events
Build links and local community simultaneously with local SEO strategy so that good deeds are rewarded with website search engine optimisation for your own company. Search Engine Journal guides you through everything from qualifying local charity prospects to building relationships. Getting to know the people you are partnering with and attaching yourself to a given community can lead to more business opportunities.
10. Use Google Business photos to boost your appearance on local SERPs
If you haven’t adorned your Google Business Profile with photos, now is the time. Google’s image recognition technology seems to be having more of an impact on local results these days. Google matches your photos to user queries and accuracy has continued to improve. This means you need to be strategic about the quality of the photos you upload and make them easily identifiable to enhance your website search engine optimisation.