James McNulty

An UpBuild client recently asked why the image in Google featured snippets are often provided by a different website than the one from which the text content is taken. This has been the case for quite some time now and it’s fair to say that while a page may provide the most useful answer, the same page might not convey the most useful visual.

There is a system in place for images; we just (as is the case with most things Google does) don’t know exactly what it is, and it appears to be different than the one for text. SEOs talk a lot about how to structure text for featured snippets – I wanted to see if we can definitively learn how to get an image included in featured snippets too.

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A blog is a great way to regularly produce content that helps new people discover your site and keep returning users engaged. Over time, however, you may find your blog falling into the trap of producing repetitive, disengaging, and, dare I say it, useless content.

If this does happen, you may wind up with multiple pages targeting the same keywords,  competing with each other in search, and ultimately cannibalizing your site’s prominence for your target keyword altogether.

I’m going to walk through how I conduct a blog content audit to uncover the blog posts that are yielding great results, and the plan of action to take for the ones that are underperforming, and possibly negatively affecting organic search results altogether.

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Getting “Linked from” URLs is a really useful way to find URLs that are linking to pages on your site. This is really beneficial when you want to find and fix URLs that are linking to a page reporting a 404 Not Found Google Search Console, but there’s simply not a great way to get this data out of the Google Search Console interface (in either the old or the new version). Instead, we can use the Search Console API Service programmatic way to access the functionality of the platform), to obtain the information quickly and easily.
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This blog post is going to provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to run detailed page-level Lighthouse reports on multiple pages at once (even an entire site).

First of all, what is Lighthouse?

Developed by Google, Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of web applications.

When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs a barrage of tests against a page and then generates a report on how well the page did. From there you can use the failing tests as indicators on areas to improve.

I should note here that Lighthouse Reports are not solely referencing page load time. In fact, there are a lot of page speed metrics beyond what the end user experiences and those metrics are very important to Google. These reports are very detailed, and when Google releases a tool like this it helps us see through Google’s lens and help us understand the metrics that they consider important.

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