SEO

Hello again from the depths of the Google Page Experience Update! My last post was written around the time that this update began to roll out, and it was intended to explain the update and define a “good” page experience in as complete a way as I could manage without pitching the reader into a swamp of details. This one is coming not long after the rollout was expected to be complete, but since I don’t feel any closer to understanding the algorithm’s basis for assessing page experience than I did in June (as I don’t believe anyone in SEO does), I’m going to use this occasion to offer up a list of five tactics for improving your page experience (however good or bad it might be now) that are universally applicable, measurably valuable, and above all, easy. After all, we’ve never needed to “understand” the algorithm before in any kind of meaningful depth in order to be able to do SEO, so let’s take the same attitude now. Here are five things you can do right now that are guaranteed to improve your page experience.

[Read more…] about 5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Page Experience

When you visit a web page, your browser requests all of the resources it needs to build it. Often a page will end up loading resources, such as JavaScript and CSS, containing code that isn’t actually needed to build the page in question; as a result, page load speed increases needlessly.

Most code is processed and loaded in the browser through what is known as the main thread. Think of it as a single-lane, one-way road. Each resource is a single car driving down that road, all of which have to arrive at their destination — the browser — for the page to finish loading. The more code you are trying to process, the longer it will take to finish loading the page. JavaScript and CSS typically take the most time to parse, compile and execute. Additionally, user interactions also run on that main thread. This means that the longer that JavaScript or CSS take to execute, the longer the page remains unresponsive to user interactions, leading to a less-than-satisfactory user experience.

With Page Experience (notably Core Web Vitals, for the purposes of this discussion) being taken into account by Google’s algorithms for ranking, it is important to make sure that you are doing everything you can to provide a good user experience, including reducing page load times and other page experience metrics such as Time to Interactive.

This guide will show how to quickly identify unused code in JavaScript and CSS resources so that you can take action, only load what is necessary, and improve your page load speeds.

[Read more…] about How to Find and Remove Unused CSS & JavaScript

As of June 2021, users on mobile phones account for 55.44% of all web traffic worldwide. Even though Google has been shifting to mobile-first indexing for the entire web, many website creators are still taking a “desktop-first” approach to UX and design.

Ensuring that your site is providing an enjoyable experience for your mobile visitors is a crucial SEO factor, so let’s review some commonly overlooked best practices for optimizing web content for mobile devices.

[Read more…] about Sizing Content for Mobile Usability

This post is written for the in-house folks leading the marketing efforts of high-growth companies. While the team at UpBuild enjoys sharing content by and for advanced SEO practitioners, our audience — our customers — are the savvy marketing leaders within organizations. People who likely could do SEO for their websites, but are never going to, simply due to lack of time and, perhaps, passion (it’s okay not to be passionate about SEO; UpBuild has enough of that to go around). We like to think of ourselves as the secret weapon in the back pocket of in-house marketers. 

So if you’re an SEO professional hoping to pick up a cutting-edge SEO idea today, you’re out of luck this time. This post isn’t for you. Check back next week! 

This post is for in-house marketers who have EOY numbers to hit and are ready to get to work. If that’s you, read on. 

[Read more…] about 8 SEO Tactics for the 2021 Home Stretch

On June 15 came the news that the gradual rollout of Google’s Page Experience Update had finally begun. It’s expected to take until August to complete, but the beginnings are upon us, and when it’s done, it’s going to put page performance and usability closer to the forefront of SEO than they’ve ever been before.

[Read more…] about UpBuild’s Answer to the Google Page Experience Update