All Posts By

Wisam Abdulaziz

How to Optimize For Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Posted on August 3, 2020

LCP (largest contentful paint) is one of the most important core web vitals, it is the only core web vital that is related 100% to speed and hence it is the most difficult one to diagnose and optimize for. LCP could be measured using Google PageSpeed Insights which is powered by Lighthouse.

LCP should load within 2.5 seconds, if 75% of the loads ( regardless of which pages) on a website achieve that number, LCP will be marked as passing assessment. Only elements within the user viewport (above the fold) will be used to calculate LCP.

Google has provided a great tutorial how to optimize for LCP, in this post I will try to provide a check list and actionable directions that you can implement yourself or take to your web developer that is working on improving Core Web Vitals (mainly LCP).

14 improvements that you can do to improve LCP:

Adequate resources on the server
Enable browser caching
Enable GZIP (text compression)
Enable server caching like OPcache or reverse proxy
Keep your software up-to-date (CMS, Plugins, operating system like Ubuntu, control panel like Cpanel, PHP, MySQL and Apache with HTTP2 module)
Install a server side HTML caching for your CMS
Setup browser side caching using service worker
Minify JavaScript and CSS
Compress images and use the right format for them
Resize images to fit the required dimensions in the style sheet
Remove or defer files and codes that block critical rendering path for above the fold content
Inline critical CSS and critical JavaScript files where possible
Lazy load images below the fold
Use CDN for resources like images and JavaScript files or for the whole website
Fast DNS server

I will provide more details how to improve each of the items above, most of my examples will work best for WordPress that is hosted on Linux with Apache being the web server.

Adequate resources on the server:

You do not need to be cheap when it comes to web hosting, having more resources than what your website needs is better than lacking resources. Start with a VPS, possibly 2 cores, 4 GB of ram and SSD, and keep eye on your resources usage, your average CPU load must stay one or below and your RAM usage must be less than 50% on average. Add more resources if you did not achieve those numbers.

Enable browser caching:

This setup could be done in most cases using the server's configuration, Apache has mod_expires module that enables you to do that by adding the code below to your .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "\.(webm|ogg|mp4|ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|webp|js|css|swf|x-html|css|xml|js|woff|woff2|otf|ttf|svg|eot)(\.gz)?$">
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
AddType application/font-woff2 .woff2
AddType application/x-font-opentype .otf
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
ExpiresByType video/webm A10368000
ExpiresByType video/ogg A10368000
ExpiresByType video/mp4 A10368000
ExpiresByType image/webp A10368000
ExpiresByType image/gif A10368000
ExpiresByType image/png A10368000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A10368000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A10368000
ExpiresByType image/ico A10368000
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml A10368000
ExpiresByType text/css A10368000
ExpiresByType text/javascript A10368000
ExpiresByType application/javascript A10368000
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A10368000
ExpiresByType application/font-woff2 A10368000
ExpiresByType application/x-font-opentype A10368000
ExpiresByType application/x-font-truetype A10368000
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Expires "max-age=A10368000, public"
Header unset ETag
Header set Connection keep-alive
FileETag None
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

Enable GZIP (text compression):

This setup could be done in most cases using the server configuration, Apache has mod_deflate module that enables you to do that by adding the code below to your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddType x-font/woff .woff
AddType x-font/ttf .ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE x-font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype font/ttf font/eot font/otf
</IfModule>

Enable server caching like OPcache or reverse proxy:

Server caching will save popular pages in the memory of the server so they could be served quickly to users, PHP has OPcache that could be enabled to do that.

Keep your software up-to-date:

There is a lot of technology involved in running a website:

The server and its software (Operating system like Linux, web server like Apache with HTTP2 module, programming language like PHP, database engine like MySQL, control panel like Cpanel and more)
CMS, like WordPress.
CMS add-ons like Plugins.

Keeping all this software up-to-date is vital for both performance and security.

Install a server side HTML caching for your CMS:

For a CMS like WordPress to generate a page there will be few PHP calls to the database followed by a HTML version of the page passed by the web server (Apache) to the browser to parse it then render it, this is a long journey with too many variables. Caching a copy of every single page of the website in a HTML format will save a lot for work required by the server and enable it to pass a static HTML file to the browser for rendering, this is a big time saver. A plugin like WPfastest cache or WP Rocket can take care of that for WordPress.

Setup browser side caching using service worker:

The Service Worker API comes with a Cache interface, that lets you create stores of responses keyed by request. Service Worker can even enable the website to work totally off-line after first load.

Minify JavaScript and CSS:

Spaces and comments can inflate CSS and JavaScript files significantly, minifying those files manually or using a plugin if you have WordPress will improve performance. For WordPress WPcache can do the minification.

Compress images and use the right format for them:

Images have different format and purposes, JPEG, PNG, GIFs, SVG, and each of them also has multiple format like JPEG 2000, choosing the right format and resolution could be a huge size saver. For WordPress WPsuper cache plugin has an image compression module that makes image compression an easy process, you can also use plugins like ShortPixel.

Consider using WEBP, It can reduce your image size by 30% comparing to JPEG or PNG.

Resize images to fit the required dimensions in the style sheet:

The image dimensions should always match the required space on the page, having a 1000X1000 pixel images in 100X100 pixel space will add a lot of unnecessary bytes to the total page size.

Remove or defer files and codes that block critical rendering path for above the fold content:

Files that are blocking the critical rendering path could be checked using the coverage tab in Chrome Developer Tools:

Files that are not used for critical rendering must be deferred. If you have multiple JavaScript files that are partially used for the critical rendering path, you can combine them in two files, one that has all the codes that are required for the critical rendering path critical.js/critial.css and another one that includes codes that are not required for the critical rendering path non-critical.js/non-critial.css, the second file must be deferred.

Consider also preloading files that are required for critical rendering path:

<head>
<link rel="preload" as="script" href="critical.js">

<link rel="preload" href="critical.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>

<link rel="preload" href="critical.css" as="style">

<link rel="preload" href="bg-image-narrow.png" as="image" media="(max-width: 600px)">

</head>

You can defer JavaScript and CSS files using the codes below:

<head>
<script src="demo_async.js" async></script>

<link rel="preload" href="styles.css" as="style" onload="this.onload=null;this.rel='stylesheet'">
<noscript><link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css"></noscript>
</head>

You can also consider inlining CSS and JS codes that are required for the critical rendering path (read more below).

Inline critical CSS and critical JavaScript files where possible:

Web page rendering will be blocked by the browser until all included resources like JS and CSS are fully loaded, having CSS or JS codes that are required for critical rendering path in files will add an extra step to the rendering process which is requesting those file from the server (extra requests to the server). Inlining codes that are required for critical rendering path and put the rest in deferred files will improve website speed.

Lazy load images below the fold:

Images below the fold contributes to page load time but they are not seen by users during the initial page load, lazy loading those images will reduce load time without negatively affecting user experience.

WordPress 5.4 will natively support lazy load, for other CMS you can use a lazy load library or you can use the browser native lazy load attribution:

<img src="image.png" loading="lazy" alt="…" width="200" height="200">

Use CDN for resources like images and JavaScript files or for the whole website:

CDN has a lot of features that can help with speed:

Provide files to users from data centres close to their physical location which improves website speed
Reduces server load as most files will be served from the CDN's provider servers (normally powerful servers with load balance)
Firewall with DDOS protection
Caching content in static HTML (server side caching)

For WordPress Jetpack plugin can provide images and JS files caching, you can also use providers like Cloudeflare which providers a full website caching.

Fast DNS server

DNS is the system that connects readable domain name that human can read and remember (website.com) to an IP (internet protocol) which a machine/computer can understand and handle. This process takes in most cases less than 300 MS, but the difference between a slow DNS and a fast DNS is worth it considering how cheap good DNS providers are. See the screen shot below for Amazon.ca

Summary:

Be aware that optimization for speed is not one and done process, there is always something to improve. Keep monitoring your Core Web Vitals using Google Search Console and make sure your website is having good score.

Lab data VS field data VS Origin Summary Core Web Vitals

Posted on July 19, 2020

PageSpeed insights along with Google Search Console are the best tools when comes to assess a website performance against Core Web Vitals (LCP largest contentful paint, FID first input delay and CLS cumulative layout shift). However the terminology used in those tools could be sometimes confusing to users.

One of the most popular questions when it comes to Core Web Vitals assessment is what is the difference between lap data, field data and origin summary, in this post I will try to answer this question.

Lab data:

Things you need to know about lab data:

Lab data is empowered by LightHouse technology that simulates mobile throttling with a lower speed. Read more here.
Lighthouse uses in most cases a slower CPU than the average CPU available for users "Lighthouse applies CPU throttling to emulate a mid-tier mobile device even when run on far more powerful desktop hardware" .
Lighthouse in most cases will use one location (USA).
Lab data is generated only for the tested URL in Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
Lab data is a live data, it reflects the speed at the time the test was run.
Some users interaction elements like FID will not be visitable in the lab data.

When you run Lighthouse in Google Chrome Developer Tools, at the end of the report you will be able to see the settings that are used in that experiment:

Looking at the settings above we can easily see how Lighthouse is using a slower internet connection and slowing the CPU power by 5 times. The reasons Lighthouse does that is to get the test to cover all online users that use different type of computers and connect to the internet using different levels of speed.

Field data:

Field data is generate by actual Google Chrome everyday users, with:

Different computers/phones (different resources like CPU, RAM and GPU).
Different internet speed.
Different locations.
Field data is generated only for the URL that is tested in PageSpeed Insights .
Field data is based on Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), so it is not live data, it the average user data collected in the last 28 days for the tested URL.
Google uses the 75th percentile value of all page views to the tested page to produce the score, if at least 75 percent of page views to the tested page meet "good" threshold, the page is classified as having "good" performance for that metric.

So if most of your users coming from a population with a high internet speed and powerful devices, it is normal to see field data better than lab data.

On the other hand if your server is overloaded at the time you are running the test, it is normal to see lab data recording higher numbers than field data.

Original summary:

This is very similar to field data but it represents the average performance of all pages on your website/domain.

Google uses the 75th percentile value of all page views to that site/domain to produce the score, if at least 75 percent of page views to the tested site meet "good" threshold, the site is classified as having "good" performance for that metric.

The default Core Web Vital charts you see in Google Search Console represents the history of original summary:

Which data set to care mostly about?

Google will be using the field data (CrUX) and original summary data to judge your pages/website, which is also data that is available in Google Search Console.

What I recommend to monitor in the PageSpeed Insights report is the original summary data, which is most likely the data that will be used by Google algorithm updates in the future. It is ok to use lab data while working on speed improvements as you need an instant feed back.

	Field Data	Original Summary	Lap Data
Internet Connection speed	Different connection speed for real-world users	Different connection speed for real-world users	Latency: 150ms Throughput: 1.6Mbps down / 750 Kbps up.
Machine Hardware	Different CPU, RAM, GPU, depending or real-world users	Different CPU, RAM, GPU, depending or real-world users	Mid-Tier Mobile (4X slowdown of a high tier desktop)
Results time	Average last 28 days	Average last 28 days	Current
Location	Real-world user’ location	Real-world user’ location	California
Result for	Tested URL	Whole Domain	Tested URL

Why I do not see field data or origin summary data?

As those two data sets are actual user data coming from Google Chrome Experience Report (CrUX), it is normal for low traffic websites not to see data in one of them or in both of them.

In a situation like that is is recommended to adjust Google Chrome developers tool to match the most popular connection speed used by your users and do a lap test using those settings:

How To Measure The Impact Of a TV Campaign on Web Traffic

Posted on July 4, 2020

There are a lot of trackable footprints that could be included in a TV ad, some of them are almost automatically included in the ad (like the brand name) others need to be added:

The brand name, most TV ads will mention the brand name in a sound or tex format.
A trackable dedicated URL or a domain. If your domain is xyz.com you can include in the ad using a URL like xyz.com/tv or use a different domain like xyzpromo.com.
A trackable phone number that is dedicated only for the TV ad.
A unique product name, brand name + a product name or any statement that can trigger web search (example: cranberry sprite )

The more trackable footprints you have in the TV ad the easier it is for you to track the performance of this ad.

Metrics and tools that can be used to track a TV campaign:

An Increase in search for the brand name (trackable using Google Search Console).
A significant Increase in search for the product name “i.e. cranberry sprite” (trackable using GSC).
A CTR improvement. The TV ad will keep the brand at the top of people’s mind so they tend to click more on any page produced by that brand even if it is a blog (trackable using GSC).
An improvement in conversion rate for all products as a result of the brand enhancement (trackable in Google Analytics).
A very significant improvement in sales and conversion rate for the promoted product in the TV campaign (i.e. cranberry sprite).
Increase in brand’s equity (difficult to measure)
More social buzz and inbound links as a result of people talking about the promoted product online (could be measured by tracking social signals and inbound links).

It is very important to discuss trackable footprints in the TV ad with the marketing team to come up with the best tracking options without jeopardizing the marketing part of the ad, after that a custom dashboard could be built using Google Data Studio could be built for that.

Using GTM to Track Shopify Conversions with Facebook and Bing

Posted on May 10, 2020

Shopify has a very nice integration with Google Analytics e-commerce tracking, all what it takes to enable it, is adding the property ID to Shopify and checking the enhanced e-commerce box, then going to Google Analytics to enable e-commerce tracking.

Integrating other codes like Bing or Facebook conversion code is not as easy, you can rely on the thank you page to trigger the pixels for those platforms but that will not be enough to provide very valuable data like the value of the transaction. Thankfully Shopify pushes all transaction variables to the source code of the thank you page using a JavaScript variable Shopify.checkout that has a JSON format:

That means you can add any value of that transaction as a JavaScript variable in Google Tag Manager, something like below:

You can read more about the available checkout variables here

Once you have this variable available in GTM you can use it in the sales tracking trigger (when the value is > 0 + thank you page):

You can also use its value in any pixel tracking code like Bing:

How to Forecast Natural Organic Traffic Growth

Posted on April 20, 2020

Forecasting organic SEO traffic to fit in a digital marketing plan is a very difficult task to do, there are many variables controlling organic traffic and many of them are not under our control. Let us go through the most popular forces behind organic traffic growth and try to evaluate their impact on our forecast:

Population and internet user growth of the target country:

Most countries grow their population by a certain percentage annually, here in Canada we grow by 1.4% annually, so if all things equal organic traffic should grow by this percentage. Internet user growth (internet penetration) can contribute also to organic traffic growth (please note that there is some overlap between population growth and internet user growth), in Canada our internet users grew by 1.5% last year, for most advanced countries this number will be low, but it could be much higher for developing countries like India where it reached 18% last year.

Do some research and some estimation to come up with a number that you feel comfortable with, if this number is 2.9% and the population of the target country is 1,000,000 then you will get 40,000 extra visits next year through population and internet user growth.

Popularity growth (brand awareness) :

Brand popularity can grow in many different ways:

Off-line advertisement (e.g. old media like TV, radio and newspapers).
Online advertisement (e.g. Google and Facebook ads).
Word of mouth (great products can generate a lot of word of mouth popularity).

First time advertisers in traditional media like TV can expect a large increase in their branded traffic (you can track that number in Google Search Console by monitoring branded keywords impressions and clicks), if branded traffic is 10,000/month a good ad campaign can take it to 20,000/month and that is a 100% YOY increase in branded search, the annual traffic growth as a result of that = (branded traffic grow/last year total organic traffic), let us assume this number is 2%

Please note that an increase in brand awareness can also improve the overall organic traffic for all keywords as people tend to click more on brands that they know in the SERPs (higher CTR is expected in this case).

Authority growth (link profile):

Link profile's strength is the most important ranking factor with all major search engines, if the website you are working on has:

A weak link profile.
Large number of quality unique pages.

Then you know that a with a good link building campaign you can possibly double this traffic, on the other hand if you are working on website with a strong link profile, a good link building campaign will have a smaller impact (in the single digit range at best).

Please note that brand popularity growth should help with link growth as more people will be talking about the brand on social media websites, forums and blogs.

I am going to assume that link building can provide a 10% YOY traffic increase.

Content growth:

Websites grow their content by adding more pages on a regular basis, it is very difficult to grow marketing pages (pages where products and services are sold) on a high rate, that is where a blog can be a good tool to keep a high content growth. First you need to check the average traffic on posts that are 1+ month old that were published in the previous year, then multiple that number with the number of posts you are planning to publish next year to get the traffic gain forecast.

Content enhancement:

There are three type of content that you need to optimize and enhance on a regular basis:

Pages that are losing traffic YOY, this content could be expiring/outdated content that needs to be refreshed or it is content that is getting a lot of competition and needs enhancement.
Content that is not getting any organic traction (could be thin content or low quality content), this content needs to be enhanced otherwise removed or redirected.
Content that ranks at the bottom of the first page or at the top of the second page in the SERPs, with some extra work this content can gain few more spots in ranking which can make a big difference in the amount of traffic it can generate.

It will be very difficult to estimate the amount of traffic growth that content enhancement will generate without going back to historical data and calculate the growth, so for this one you need to wait for year 2 to come up with the right amount, for year one you can:

Assume you are going to restore the lost traffic for pages that are losing traffic.
Use search volume on the keywords you are optimizing for and assume you can double their CTR.

The tally:

Once you have the percentages or numbers from the four items above just add them up to find the organic traffic increase forecast for next year.

Disclaimers you need to include in your forecast when you submit it to your manager for review:

Make sure your manager understands that this is an estimate (educated guess) and there are many variables that can throw this plan off like:

Popularity decline as a result of a brand crisis.
Algorithmic update (Google does multiple updates every year that can affect rankings positively or negatively).
SERPs layout update (Google keeps changing SERPs above the fold area by adding featured snippets or more ads which can negatively affect CTR and traffic).
Technical issues (the website can go down for a while or the technical team can make a mistake that can cause traffic loss like blocking Google bots form crawling the website).
Production delays (executing the SEO plan is not guaranteed especially in a tight resource situation).

Another disclaimer that you need to include, the website will go throw a traffic loss situation in a case your SEO plan is not approved. The risk of stopping or slowing SEO efforts could result in:

Website/content stagnation which is a bad signal to send to search engines and it can cause reduction in authority (if you are the authority in your space you are expected to produce and refresh content on a regular basis).
Expiring/outdated content (e.g. legal related content will lose ranking YOY if stayed unchanged).

How to Evaluate the Quality of a Link Quickly Without DA or PA

Posted on January 5, 2020

If you are starting a link building campaign the first question jumps to your mind is how to evaluate the quality and eventually the impact of each link on your ranking, the right evaluation will help you to decide how much efforts is it worth putting to acquire that link.

Back in the day Google used to provide a metric called PageRank (a metric that reflects your website popularity on the web based on the number of quality links pointing back to it), it was publicly available to everyone and ranges from 0 to 10, obviously 10 refers to a very strong website which makes it high quality link for SEOs.

PageRank used to be available as a green bar in Google's tool bar, Google stopped supporting that feature in 2016 leaving SEOs running in the dark looking for quick ways to evaluate the quality of their links. Many companies found an opportunity in that and started crawling the web to gather link data to sell it as a service.

On a side note, Pagerank is still part of Google's ranking algorithm but it is not available anymore for the public.

PageRank alternatives that came to fill the gap for the hidden Google's Pagerank:

Since Google stopped showing page rank publicly many third party link crawlers started offering their own version of page rank:

MOZ offers DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) which become very popular metrics among link traders.

Majestic's link quality metrics are TF (trust flow) and CF (citation flow)

Ahrefs link quality metrics are DR (domain rating) and UR (URL rating)

SEMrush's link quality metrics are Domains Score, Trust Score and Authority Score

But the big question that faced link builders is can I trust those metrics? the metrics above work well for highly trusted websites like cnn.com but they are easy to manipulate by spammer, there are many websites with a DA of 50 but yet they are not even indexed by Google, so what is really the best Pagerank alternative?

The best page rank alternative which is even better that page rank is organic traffic data:

The answer is simply organic traffic and the number of keywords the domain is ranking for in Google, if Google is happy with a website's:

Content
Link profile
Authority
Technical elements like website speed

They will simply rank it for more keywords and send it more traffic, and thankfully this data is available for any domain using the same tools that are scoring the link profile (SEOmoz, SEMrush and Ahrefs), my favorite tool for that is SEMrush:

The analysis above shows that this domain gets 209 desktop visits/month and ranks for 527 keywords, not really that good but better than a DA 100 domains with 0 traffic.

Interestingly enough link suppliers like TheHoth finally got that point and started offering links based on traffic (I am not encouraging buying links here):

You can see that links with minimum high traffic (1000 visits/month) worth twice as much as domains with minimum DA which is 10.

Summary:

Link metrics that are not offered by Google are good to use for some competition analysis but when it comes to link acquisition, traffic and number of organic keywords must be the two metrics that should be used to evaluate the value of that link.

How To Block link Crawlers like Majestic Ahrefs Moz and SEMRush

Posted on November 10, 2019

The web has a lot of web crawlers, some of them are good and vital for your website such as Google bot, others can be harmful like email harvesting crawlers and content scrapers. Link crawlers come short of harmful but far from useful. They are not useful for your website, and they are not harmful in way they try to scrape content or anything like that, but they could be consuming your server resources with no benefit.

For SEOs that adopt black hat tactics like PBN (private blog network) those crawlers are a nightmare and can expose the network to competitors if left open, which in most cases will lead to a spam report causing the whole network to be de-indexed + a manual action applied to the money site if not a total deindexation.

The most popular link crawlers are Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz and SEMRush, please note that their crawlers user-agents will not match their brand name and can change in the future, so it is very important to keep an up-to-date list with the user-agents used by those crawlers. I will list below different ways to block them:

Robots.txt:

You add few lines to your robots.txt file that can disallow most popular link crawlers:

User-agent: Rogerbot
User-agent: Exabot
User-agent: MJ12bot
User-agent: Dotbot
User-agent: Gigabot
User-agent: AhrefsBot
User-agent: SemrushBot
User-agent: SemrushBot-SA
Disallow: /

The method above will be very effective assuming:

You trust those crawler to obey the directions in the robots.txt file.
The crawlers do no keep changing their user-agent's names.
The companies that operate those crawlers do not use third party crawling services that come under different user-agents.

.htaccess:

The issue with this method is that it requires your hosting provider to be Apache based, if your host supports htaccess you can use the code below to block most popular link crawlers:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (ahrefsbot|mj12bot|rogerbot|exabot|dotbot|gigabot|semrush) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

This method is better that robots.txt as the crawlers have no choice but to obey assuming they are not changing their user-agents, or using third party crawlers.

Using PHP:

If you website is built with PHP like WordPress you can add the code below to your header.php to block all link crawlers:

$badAgents = array('rogerbot','mj12bot', 'ahrefsbot', 'semrush', 'dotbot', 'gigabot', 'archive.org_bot');
foreach ($badAgents as $blacklist) {
if (preg_match("/$blacklist/", strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) ) {
exit();
} }

This methods is good if your server doesn't support .htaccess , if you are using this method you need to make sure you block also the RSS feed feature in WordPress, you can do that by adding the code below to your function.php file in the theme folder:

function wpb_disable_feed() {
wp_die( __('No feed available,please visit our <a href="'. get_bloginfo('url') .'">homepage</a>!') );
}
add_action('do_feed_xml', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);

Aggressive blocking (for PBN users):

If you are a regular webmaster that it is willing to save some server resources by blocking link crawlers, applying any of the methods above should be suffice; however, if you are a webmaster that wants to leave no chance for those crawlers to sneak in, you need to apply harsher measurements.

Robots.txt will be as below:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

This will allow only Google bot to crawl the website assuming the crawlers will obey robots.txt directions. You can also allow other agents used by major search engines like Bing.

If you are using Wodrepss you can hide the links from all user-agents excluding Google using the code below in functions.php:

add_filter( 'the_content', 'link_remove_filter' );
function link_remove_filter( $content ) {
if (!preg_match("/google/", strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) && !preg_match('/\.googlebot|google\.com$/i', gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])) ) {
$content = preg_replace('#<a.*?>(.*?)</a>#is', '\1', $content);
}
return $content;
}

This code will allow only Google to see the links, it verifies also that the IP address belongs to Google and it is not faked.

Make sure also to block RSS using the code listed in the previous step, the code above will not be impacted by those crawlers changing their agents or coming with different agent's names.

Integrating Google Ads Lead Form With CRMs

Posted on November 9, 2019

Google has announced the rollout of Lead Form Extensions that enable advertisers to capture form submissions directly from the ad without sending users to a landing page, the submissions will be stored in Google Ads' database and will be downloadable as a CSV file, there is also an option to integrate with CRMs using a webhook, this howGoogle explained the integration:

A webhook is an API that enables you to send lead data to your CRM system in real-time. To set it up, you will need to add a webhook URL and key to your lead form extension. You may need to do some configuration within your CRM system to generate the URL and key.

The URL is the delivery path: after the user submits a lead form, an HTTP POST request is sent to the configured URL, allowing the lead data to go directly into the CRM system. The key is used for validating the leads sent.

The explanation above is confusing for marketers and at least unclear for developers. What is the webhook URL and where to find it? This program (Google ads lead form extension) is in Beta now, and I am not sure if there is any CRM that supports it at the moment, even Salesforce doesn't have a webhook URL for it yet.

How to generate a webhook for the lead form extensions?

The best resource that can help with that is the developer guide provided by Google, anytime the form is submitted to Google a JSON POST request will be sent to the webhook URL added in the form lead extensions, something like below:

{
"lead_id": "lead_id1",
"form_id" : "form_id1",
"user_column_data":[ {"column_name":"Full Name","string_value":"John Doe"},
{"column_name":"User Phone", "string_value":"12345678"},
{"column_name":"User Email", "string_value":"[email protected]"}],
"api_version":"1.0",
"google_key" : "secret"
}

Firs you need to decide what is the best way to capture this data, for me I am going to use PHP to do that, my webhook could be something like this https://www.wisamabdulaziz.com/webhook.php with the code below:

$json = file_get_contents('php://input');
$form_data = json_decode($json);
$leadid = $form_data->lead_id ;
$form_id = $form_data->form_id ;
$fullname = $form_data->user_column_data[0]->string_value;
$phone = $form_data->user_column_data[1]->string_value;
$email = $form_data->user_column_data[2]->string_value;

At this point all the values are available in the code and ready to be pushed to any CRM or a local database, most popular CRMs like SalesForce and Hubspot have APIs with PHP libraries (they have also libraries available for the most popular programming languages) making it easy to push the data to those CRMs.

Additional values like campaign and keyword could be available also in the fields and worth saving. Before pushing any values to your CRM make sure to create fields to match all the values you will be saving.

How to Diagnose Organic Traffic Loss

Posted on November 4, 2019

Traffic loss is one of the most popular issues that can face SEO specialists, traffic can not go up forever and each website at some point will face a traffic loss situation that needs to be diagnosed. To help you to diagnose a traffic loss situation I will take you first thorough the most popular reasons to lose organic traffic, understanding those reasons and learning how to monitor them will make diagnosing traffic loss an easier task.

Most popular reasons to lose traffic:

1- Ranking loss:

Position #1 in the SERP can enjoy 30% or more click through rate, after that CTR will go down for every lower position in the SERP, position #10 can get 5% CTR or less. If a website losses ranking for highly searched keywords, the overall organic traffic will go down.

The most popular reasons for ranking loss are:

Algorithm updates (search engines like Google runs multiple updates every year).
Losing authority (e.g. Losing a lot of quality inbound links) or slow link growth.
Losing popularity (e.g. Less social signals and lower branded searches).
Website stagnation (no new content or no content refreshment).
CMS change or content change (e.g. website redesign which can include CMS change, URL change and content change).
Increase in competition, competitors could be providing better content and promoting their website more, so they get higher ranking.
Technical issues with search engines like crawlability, indexability, downtime, slow loading and manual actions.

2- SERP layout Change:

Google keeps changing the SERP layout, putting more ads at the top sometimes or featured snippets which can affect CTR while keeping the same ranking.

In the example above even a website ranks #1 it will be still below the fold, which can bring CTR significantly down, so we are not going to enjoy 30% CTR being number one anymore, we could be receiving 10% CTR only with the new layout.

3- Trending change and user behaviour:

Human needs and behaviours change throughout the years. Products and brands get disrupted sometimes and that can change search volume. A product like mini DVD has been disrupted by smart phones and tablets, what brought the search volume for it close to zero:

Another example could be online dating, the need for dating did not decline nor the need for online dating, but social media websites like Facebook are becoming a go-to destination for people that are looking for dating, which brought down the interest for the keyword online dating:

Step by step traffic loss audit:

Now that you know the most popular reasons to lose traffic, it is time to run some analysis on key metrics that can help us to evaluate a website against each traffic loss reason.

1- Identify which keywords are losing traffic using GSC:

Any traffic loss will be linked eventually to ranking and search volume for the keywords that are driving organic traffic, when a website is losing organic traffic the direct reason for that is either some keywords are getting less traffic or less keywords getting traffic, so the main focus of any traffic loss audit should be identifying which keywords are losing traffic, thankfully this analysis is made easier with GSC, just use the comparison feature and choose the too time spans that you want to analyse for traffic loss and identify which keywords are causing that loss:

Once you identify the keywords you need to assess what is causing them to lose traffic by running them against the reasons of losing ranking explained above.

2- Check the brand name in Google trends to make sure that the brand is not losing any popularity.

Run the checking for the last 5 years in the target audience country.

3- Link profile analysis:

Check the domain using Majestic SEO or Ahrefs to see if there is any recent link loss, the screen shot below is taken from Majestic:

Link loss will lead to lower authority which in most cases will cause ranking loss.

4- Check index growth in Google Search Console:

This will help to identify any deindexation issue:

Losing more indexed pages means losing ranking for any keywords those pages are ranking for. Deindexation could be a result of:

Technical errors in the website (e.g. server errors or very slow load time).
Duplicate or thin content.
Issues with setting up the canonical tags.
Algorithm update that affect crawling standards.
Losing authority (e.g. the link profile is getting weaker).

Summary:

Organic traffic loss can happen to any website, diagnosing the situation and finding the reasons behind it is not quick nor easy in most cases, sometimes you get lucky to find out that a technical issue on the site caused it, the webmaster can fix it quickly and things will go back to normal in few weeks, but for most other cases recovering may not be even possible or can take a very long time. The key thing when it comes to traffic loss is finding about early and start reacting to it immediately.

Track Form Abandonment Using Google Analytics Funnel Visualization

Posted on November 1, 2019

My previous post was about CRO, in that post I included form optimization as an important step for a better CRO. Form optimization can not be done without collecting data about users interaction with the form, and form abandonment is probably the most important metric that can do that.

What is form abandonment:

Form abandonment is the event where people start filling a form (at least filling one field) but did not click the submit button, so they have the intent to fill the form but due to possibly some hurdles the did not complete it, possible hurdles:

Long form (too many fields)
Technical issues (the form is not working on some devices or browsers)
The form has personal questions that users are not willing to fill
The form is broken or the Captcha is so difficult.

There are some online service like Hotjar that can track form abandonment, but unfortunately Hotjar does not work with every form easily, not mention that the data lives outside Google Analytics which means you have another platform to work on and monitor. You can see the form tracking chart offered by Hotjar below, it gives you the time spent by users field each field and the abandonment rate for each field.

In this post I will provide a step by step tutorial how to do form abandonment tracking using Google analytics. I will assume you a simple form on your website like the one belwo:

The source code of the form will like like this:

I will assume that the submission will lead to a thank you page like www.yourwebsite.com/thank-you, please be aware that this tutorial will require a good knowledge of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM).

The method I will be explaining will be utilizing the funnel visualisation feature in Google Analytics, which is not designed initially for that, it is designed more to track multiple pages funnel. Considering that a high level of accuracy is not required here the method below should provide a good insight on where and why people abandoning your form.

Step #1:

First step will be pushing an event to the data layer when a user try to fill in a field along with the field name, you can do that by adding the JavaScript code below as a custom HTML tag to your Google Tag Manger:

(function($) {
$(document).ready(function() {
$('form :input').blur(function () {
if($(this).val().length > 0 && !($(this).hasClass('completed'))) {
switch($(this).attr('name')) {
case "first_name":
virtualp = "first-name";
break;
case "last_name":
virtualp = "last-name";
break;
case "phone_number":
virtualp = "phone";
break;
case "email_address":
virtualp = "email";
break;
case "comments":
virtualp = "comments";
break;
default:
virtualp = "unknown";
}

dataLayer.push({'eventCategory': 'Form - ' + $(this).closest('form').attr('name'),
'eventAction': 'completed',
'feildLabel': virtualp,
'event': 'gaEvent'});
$(this).addClass('completed');
}
else if(!($(this).hasClass('completed')) && !($(this).hasClass('skipped'))) {
$(this).addClass('skipped');
}
});
});
})(jQuery);

Please note that:

The code above assume that jQuery is installed already on the website.
You need to change the case to match your field names.
You can change virtualp (which is going to be the virtual page URL) to anything also just make sure the page is not already existing on your website.

Step #2:

Add a datalayer variable to track the field name:

Step #3:

Create a virtual page view to track every form field filling as a pageview:

The firing rule for the tag above will be as below:

After that publish your GTM container.

Step #4:

In Google analytics create a goal that tracks the thank your page with funnel steps that reflect the virtual page names you have set in step #1:

When you have enough data you should be able to see a funnel visualisation as below:

The funnel above should tell which field is causing that highest abandonment rate so you can either remove or change it.

Step #5 - Bonus - Track scrolling down as a page view:

Some forms are placed below the fold, or they are multiple step forms where people need to scroll down to see the other parts of the form. For those forms you can add the scrolling down to the form location as a virtual page view (see the tag and the trigger below and use them in GTM):

Summary:

Form tracking abandonment is an important part of conversion rate optimization, always do it with any tool you feel comfortable with, there are other things you can do from a CRO prospective when it comes to form:

Exit intent pop-up window trying to give users unrefusable offer to stay on the page and fill the form.
Tracking filled fields even if people did not click submit and use it to better understand user behaviour.

Older Posts

Newer Posts