Plano Social Media

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When it comes to online research, 46% of searches have local intent.

As a local retailer, this 46% represents real dollars. In fact, a study done by Google found that 76% of local consumers who perform local searches with their smartphones actually visit the business on the same day. What’s more, 28% of these visits result in a purchase.

So how can your brick-and-mortar business get in front of these local searches before your competitors do?

You need to prioritize localized organic search results. And to do this, you require a better understanding of an SEO fundamental – local search engine optimization (SEO).

What is local SEO?

Before we look at the actionable strategies that get your business in front of local customers, let’s define local SEO.

Much like traditional SEO, local SEO is all about improving your business’s online visibility to rank higher in local search engine results pages (SERPs). But, unlike conventional SEO practices, local SEO has a geographical component and works best for location-specific businesses.

Typical local searches use a variety of geo-modifiers (in [city] or near me) in their search query like so:

best pizza in brooklyn
barber near me
endocrinologist in los angeles
plumber near me

While organic SEO elements like on-page SEO and link building are still vastly crucial, local SEO also makes use of specific tools like Google My Business that helps your business attract more local search traffic.

The benefits of local SEO

Investing in local SEO is key to generating more foot traffic to your physical store, which, in turn, results in increased sales. Many retailers find it challenging to compete with online shopping giants like Walmart and Amazon in the current online landscape.

Local SEO is the underdog’s online advantage.

Google uses certain local signals such as social profiles, reviews, citations and more, to determine which businesses are most relevant to local search users. By targeting these local search signals, your business can quickly position itself at the top of local SERPs.

Other benefits of local SEO are:

Builds trust with local consumers
Boost site traffic
Increases lead generation opportunities
Ability to gain loyal customers
Improves online competitiveness with e-commerce giants

Who is impacted by local SEO?

As local SEO is a locally-targeted approach to traditional SEO, not every business can tap into the power of location-specific search. Companies with a physical location, cater to a specific service area, or are home-based best qualify for local SEO.

Examples of businesses that serve a local market include:

Bars, Restaurants, & Caterers
Skilled trades (plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc.)
Daycare centers
Real estate firms
Auto dealerships
Hospitals
Stationary food trucks
Kiosks & ATMs
Gas stations

Businesses without a local focus like e-commerce stores and other internet-type companies won’t lend themselves well to local SEO services.

Now that you have a clear overview of what local SEO is and how it can benefit your business let’s break down seven actionable strategies you can use today to rank in local search results.

1. Claim and verify your Google My Business listing

No other local search ranking factor is vital to a local business as Google My Business (GMB). A free tool provided by Google, GMB is a social profile that local companies and organizations can use to generate a Google Search and Google Maps business profile.

: Image Credit: SEO Sherpa

According to Bright Local, GMB is the most important local pack ranking signal at 33%. GMB has also risen in importance, climbing from 25% in 2018 to 33% in 2020.

So, just what does this local social profile do for your business?

As a SERP feature, Google My Business benefits your business by:

Increasing your local search visibility
Ensuring online consistency
Creating a strong first impression to local consumers
Boosting your SEO efforts
Providing a free and easy-to-use reviews platform
Letting you see customer insights

As an owner of a GMB listing, you can better manage business information, operating hours, and showcase products or services.

How to claim your GMB profile

To generate this invaluable local search tool, follow these steps:

Visit https://www.google.com/business/.
Enter your business name.
Select the GMB category that best fits your business.
Register your business’s location.
Add your business details like phone number and website.
Toggle email notifications.

And it’s that easy.

If your business name already exists on GMB but hasn’t been claimed yet, you can simply verify that you’re the owner of that existing listing. If another business owner has claimed that profile, you can try and contact them to gain ownership of the profile.

Google also has an Account Recovery help guide if the current listing owner fails to respond to your requests.

How to verify your GMB profile

Once you’ve claimed your GMB profile, you’ll be required to verify that you own the business in question. Until the GMB account is verified, the listing will not appear in Google Search or Google Maps.

The easiest and quickest way to confirm that you’re the business owner of the said listing is to verify through Google Search Console. Email is another quick way to verify your business. Other verification processes include phone and mail.

: Image Credit: Mike Blumenthal

Once your GMB listing is live, follow these GMB optimization strategies to gain a clear competitive advantage in local search:

2. Build key local citations for your business

Now that you have your GMB listing, it’s time to move on to another critical local search ranking factor, citations.

If you’re unfamiliar with citations, citations are online mentions of your business. These online references live on other websites and may or may not link back to your site. If, for example, you owned a restaurant, a business listing on Yelp would be considered a citation.

Other online directories or citations include:

Foursquare
Trip Advisor
Bing
Better Business Bureau
Yellow Pages
Facebook

Citations are essential to local SEO as it helps Google verify that your business is popular among its local community and local consumers actively engage with your business. Accruing more citations from highly qualified platforms increases your local search rankings.

There are several online tools you can use to find directories to list your business:

You can also contact your local Chamber of Commerce. Not only is it a quick link building opportunity for your brand, but by getting listed through your local chamber, you show Google that your business is super relevant to local consumers.

Once you’ve found some helpful local directories, let’s have a look at your brand’s NAP.

3. Ensure consistency with NAP

NAP is an SEO acronym that stands for name, address, and phone number. These business details should be consistent across every platform your business uses, from GMB and other social accounts to online citations and directories.

: Image Credit: BrightLocal

If your NAP is inconsistent or outdated, you’ll want to get that information fixed immediately. Inaccurate NAP information can lead to a frustrating user experience, which can contribute to loss of sales.

The best way to manage your NAP details is by using a citation tool like Whitespark or Loganix. These types of platforms will audit your NAP data and uncover any inconsistencies with your brand’s information.

Once you discover any NAP citations with outdated data, you can try to change it directly through the platform’s directory or reach out with an outreach email. You can request an update to your NAP data in your email and include the inconsistencies that need to be corrected.

4. Encourage customers to write your reviews

Online reviews are an incredible marketing tool. Many consumers trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation. The more positive reviews your brand has, the more trustworthy it becomes.

This credibility drives better online visibility and, more importantly, sales.

Review management is an essential part of local SEO. There are many ways for your business to gather reviews from its customer base. Google My Business has a built-in review platform as do many online directories like Yelp, Foursquare, and Facebook.

The most effective ways to ask for reviews are through email, SMS, and landing pages. If a customer physically visits a store, you can even request a review at the point of sale. Asking for reviews post-purchase is very popular as it helps build brand loyalty and advocacy.

Each business is different, so experiment by A/B testing customer feedback across various platforms and templates. CoSchedule has a great article on various review templates you can try out to encourage reviews.

Regardless of how you get reviews, be proactive with responding. Being prompt with your responses to reviews, whether positive or negative, can show that you’re listening to your community and are committed to ensuring customer satisfaction.

To help you formulate the correct responses to reviews, here are some best practices to help you strategically respond to all reviews.

5. Rank locally with on-page SEO

Focusing on your site’s on-page SEO can also contribute to higher local search rankings, attracting a wider crowd.

When it comes to local on-page SEO, the traditional best practices still apply. Standard on-page SEO practices to consider with your local SEO efforts include short and sweet URLs, compelling meta descriptions, keyword-optimized content, and local link opportunities.

When structuring your site, add location-specific landing pages complete with location-based URLs. Having optimized URL slugs will help your site target searches with local intent. This is particularly useful if you’re a service-area provider that works in multiple locations.

Having keyword-rich local content will allow you to compete with retail giants for local search queries that include “in [city]” or “near me” in their search terms. As mentioned, city-specific landing pages are great for increasing organic visibility.

: Image Credit: Brandify

Other content frameworks that can help you move up the ranks in local SEO include FAQ pages, local discounts and special offers, location-based events, “best of” guides, and press pages.

When formatting your local content, be sure to add your location-based keywords in essential areas of your content. These core areas include your H1 tag, title tag, URL, meta description, and within the first 100 words of your content.

These locally-focused content are great link building opportunities. For example, event organizers love to spread awareness about their event and are often more than happy to publish a mention of your site through their social accounts.

Local bloggers and newspapers are typically enthusiastic about supporting local businesses. By building the right professional relationships, you can find some low hanging link building fruits that provide promotional opportunities for your site and business.

Final thoughts

While these local SEO strategies will help to get you a step ahead of the competition, don’t let your foot off the gas. Local SEO may be distinct from conventional SEO, but the same principles apply.

SEO as a whole is a fast-evolving landscape. By keeping an eye on SEO trends, you’ll be able to stay up-to-date with the latest (and most effective) local SEO strategies. By strengthening your local business with local SEO, you’ll be able to dominate your location in no time.

What other local SEO tactics and techniques have you tried with your business? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Talks about the mid-June Core Web Vitals release made SEOs worry. Google states that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor, but doesn’t say a thing about how important this factor will be. Still, when it comes to ranking, it’s always better to optimize anything that could somehow affect your positions than just leave things as they are. Moreover, Core Web Vitals optimization will be useful anyway, even if its impact on ranking appears lower than it is supposed to be now. Core Web Vitals are all about user experience, so your users will only thank you if they see your website works smooth and fast.

The hype around the CWV release made SEOs ask for some new tools that could let them turn the Core Web Vitals optimization into an SEO routine. This demand for new optimization opportunities made many SEO software providers release new modules for working with Core Web Vitals. Still, the functionality of most of these tools is too limited to let you analyze all of your website’s pages in-depth. The features that you do need to effectively audit and optimize CWV are as follows:

Possibility to bulk check all the pages of a website to have them all optimized and bringing you traffic;
Possibility to check both Core Web Vitals field metrics (to see how Google sees and evaluates your website) and Lighthouse lab metrics (to see and fix any page performance issues);
Possibility to bulk export the data to easily share them with web developers or clients.

All this said, let’s take a look at the 5 popular SEO tools and see what they offer for CWV optimization.

WebSite Auditor

WebSite Auditor is a well-known desktop SEO software solution. The tool loves the concept of “the more data the better”, which couldn’t but reflect in the new Core Web Vitals module. The tool features reports on more than 80 page speed metrics. What’s more, all the data are taken directly from Google via the official API, which means you see the same data and recommendations as Google does.

One of the WebSite Auditor’s undoubted benefits is the possibility to check all of your website’s pages at once. Thus, you don’t need to check any single URL manually as you’d have to in PageSpeed Insights.

WebSite Auditor lets you get all the CWV optimization details within a couple of clicks. Launch the tool, enter the domain and let the tool collect the information. Then, go to Site Structure > Pages, and switch to the Page Speed workspace.

Click the update sign on any column, put a tick on Page Speed data, and enter your Google API key. The tool will now collect the data and present them on the screen.

The Page Speed module will show you what pages pass the Core Web Vitals assessment and what don’t. The table will also specify what exactly makes your pages fall behind, and give you detailed instructions on how to optimize CWV.

You can find the optimization opportunities for a specific URL if you can click on it and look at the lower Page Speed table.

If you need a more detailed report on each page, you can go to Page Audit > Technical Audit, and analyze each page separately. Then, go to Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed section to check Core Web Vitals for desktop and mobile in more detail.

Core Web Vitals in Website Auditor

If you need to see all the Core Web Vitals optimization issues on your website, go to Site Structure > Site Audit, and scroll down to the Page Speed section. This section features 33 reports, each including the list of the affected pages.

One more advantage of WebSite Auditor is the possibility to save and bulk export CWV reports in CSV. So you can easily share these reports with your colleagues or send them to your clients.

Price: The most affordable edition — WebSite Auditor Professional — will cost you $125/year (unlimited number of pages to optimize). You can also use a free WebSite Auditor sandbox version to test the tool before the purchase. The free edition is nice for time-to-time checks for a smaller website (under 500 URLs).

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog lets you check your website for all the SEO troubles and provides suggestions on how to fix them. It also uses direct data from Google for its new Core Web Vitals module.

Just like WebSite Auditor, Screaming Frog will require an API key from Google. This means that the number of pages checked per day will be limited to 25,000. To start your work, launch the tool, go to Configuration > API Access > PageSpeed Insights, paste the API key from Google, choose the user agent (either mobile or desktop), and set up the metrics you want to see (you can choose all of them, too).

Then, enter the domain you need to check, click Start, and wait until the tool collects all the data. Switch to the Page Speed workspace to see which pages pass the Core Web Vitals assessment or not, and see specific data for each separate page speed metric.

Switch to the Overview workplace to see the opportunities for improvement. The workplace features the list of possible changes and tells you which pages they could be applied to. If you click on any specific URL, then the Page Speed details lower tab will show you more details about this page. The information will also include all the possible ways to optimize the page’s performance.

The downside of Screaming Frog is the inability to bulk export the Page Speed report. In case you need to do that, you’ll have to manually copy and paste the lines into an Excel table. Still, you can export the reports with Page Speed optimization opportunities to hand them to web developers for fixing.

Price: Keep in mind that you can only check the Core Web Vitals of your website with the paid version of Screaming Frog. One license costs £149 per year (around $209; may vary due to exchange rate fluctuations).

DeepСrawl

DeepCrawl is the cloud SEO software for businesses and corporate clients. Literally — you will need a corporate email to log in to the service. Emails like @gmail.com are not accepted. DeepCrawl doesn’t seem to use the Google API key, and all the Core Web Vitals data are taken from their own controlled environment.

To see how your website handles the Core Web Vitals assessment, you’ll have to switch on the JavaScript rendering feature. Then, just let the software crawl your website, and go to the Performance menu.

Click on the i sign to see additional information on how to optimize a certain metric.

The reports are available in the Data Studio connector. To fetch new reports in the existing dashboard, edit and reconnect the source.

Note: Core Web Vitals will only be measured for the desktop version of the website.

DeepCrawl will not show you any data on the First Input Delay (FID) metric. FID is a field metric; to collect it, the field real user experience data are needed, which cannot be anyhow simulated in any lab environment. That’s why the DeepCrawl creators suggest using their tool together with your own CrUX dashboard to receive more accurate data.

Important! Any cloud SEO software will not provide you the FID data. This happens due to the physical impossibility to retrieve the field data (at least, none of the cloud tools does this now). As Google only uses the field data to evaluate your pages, you should keep in mind the possible inaccuracy of the lab data. If you need clear and accurate data, you’ll have to use desktop software that collects the data via Google API. You can also keep checking pages with PageSpeed Insights, but you’ll hardly appreciate checking all of your URLs one by one.

Price: DeepCrawl doesn’t have the price listed on their website, and you’ll have to request pricing individually (you’ll also need a business email to do that). Still, many reviews on various forums and marketplaces mention that the tool is pretty costly, and will probably suit businesses with bigger budgets on SEO software. There’s no information on if there’s any kind of free trial, but you can book a personalized demo.

SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the most popular cloud SEO tools. SEMrush creators decided to keep this popularity, and enriched the tool with the Core Web Vitals module.

Auditing your website’s Core Web Vitals with SEMrish is easy. What you need is to perform a general audit of your website. Go to On Page & Tech SEO > Site Audit, enter the domain you want to analyze, and choose the type of user agent.

Once the data are collected, click on the Core Web Vitals widget. The graphs will demonstrate if something fails to pass the CWV assessment.

As SEMrush doesn’t use Google API and takes all the lab data from Lighthouse, you will not get the FID metrics data. Moreover, the Lighthouse lab data don’t fully reflect the real assessment of your page and are less likely to be considered by Google when ranking your pages.

Note: SEMrush shows the Core Web Vitals data for the homepage only.

As for the exporting, you cannot export the CWV report from the tool. If you need to show it to your clients or website developers, you’ll have to take a screenshot of the page.

One more downside of the SEMrush Core Web Vitals module is that you will not get the improvement opportunities on the spot. Instead, it is suggested that you visit the Site Performance report and see the suggestions listed there.

Price: The cheapest edition — SEMrush Pro — will cost $119.95/month. This edition lets you work on 5 projects and crawl up to 20,000 pages per project monthly. The largest package (Business) is limited by 40 projects up to 100,000 pages each, but the general monthly crawling limit cannot exceed 1,000,000 pages. You can also get a fully customized edition if ready-made plans don’t suit your business needs. A 7-days free trial is available for Pro and Guru editions, but you’ll have to provide your credit card data to get it.

MOZ

MOZ is another well-known cloud SEO tool. The growing industry demand on Core Web Vitals checks made the MOZ team release a Performance Metrics module (beta version available yet). This module shows the data for both mobile and desktop website versions. As cloud tools don’t seem to use the Google API key, MOZ takes the lab data from Lighthouse. These data don’t reflect the real users’ behavior.

The Performance Metrics module is placed under the Site Crawl tool. You can check all of your pages, or you can save some time and choose to check your top pages by page authority, top-ranked pages, or pages with any crawl issues.

Keep in mind that the number of pages you can check is limited as of now — you can check up to 6000 pages per project monthly.

Once the tool collects the data, you will see a table of results, which will tell you how your pages perform on both mobile and desktop devices.

For more details, click View Report.

As you can see, the field FID metric is replaced with the lab TBT (Total Blocking Time) one in this report.

The tool will also show you some basic opportunities for improvement on both mobile and desktop pages’ versions.

MOZ is probably the only cloud SEO tool that handles the bulk checks and collects the data for all types of devices. Despite the limited functionality of cloud software in terms of CWV checks, MOZ seems capable enough (mind that it’s just a beta version). The team also plans to enable exporting of the Performance Metrics report. As for now exporting is unavailable.

Price: The most affordable MOZ edition will cost $99/month. This edition is limited by 100,000 pages per week, but, as you remember, you are still limited to 6000 pages for CWV checks monthly. A free 30-days trial is available before the purchase (credit card credentials needed).

Bonus: PageSpeed Compare

PageSpeed Compare is not an SEO tool in the way it is usually meant. It’s a kind of free sandbox that can help you in competitor analysis. The tool lets you compare the Core Web Vitals of your page with the pages of your competitors. PageSpeed Compare will show you both lab and field data. Just like PageSpeed Insights, but you can enter several different URLs to compare them.

PageSpeed Compare is easy to use. You just need to check the URLs you want to compare one by one.

Once the page check is done, the tool will offer you the comparison report provided with diagrams and bar graphs. The menu under the URL line lets you navigate through various types of reports such as Lab data, Field data, Savings, and so on.

The tool will also show you the opportunities for improvement, both for your page and for competitors’ ones.

Each report may be downloaded in CSV, PNG, or JSON. Bulk export is unavailable.

As PageSpeed Compare is a free sandbox tool, you cannot save the results of your checks. Still, the checks don’t take much time, and you can easily repeat them as often as needed.

Conclusion

As Core Web Vitals became an agenda not so long ago, the list of SEO tools with the CWV module is likely to keep growing. As for today’s situation, it’s pretty obvious that desktop tools handle the Core Web Vitals checks better than the cloud ones. Anyway, no matter what tool you’re using, make sure that page experience optimization’s on your radar this year.

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A key component of your digital marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). You’re already using keywords in your website headlines, meta descriptions, and digital content as part of your SEO strategy. However, have you considered backlinks? Backlinks are when a website is mentioned and linked on another website.

Read on to learn about backlinks, how important they are to SEO, and how you can use them to boost your online presence.

Table of Contents

What are website backlinks?

Backlinks refer to any inbound link to your website. Whenever someone references your website on theirs and includes a link back to your original content or one of your landing pages, this is considered a backlink. Backlinks are also when someone shares a link to your website on social media.

This marketing tool helps enhance your SEO because it communicates to Google and other search engines that your site offers quality content.

Ahrefs, an organization specializing in SEO, indicated that websites with more backlinks get more organic traffic from Google. When people post links to your website on their sites or via social media, you can rely less on paid Google ads to drive traffic since your site will rank higher on search engines.

Why your company should utilize website backlinks

Website backlinks enhance your SEO and move you higher in search results while expanding your brand’s credibility and audience reach. High-quality backlinks establish you as a knowledgeable resource that, in turn, builds brand awareness with a wider audience.

If your company has ever benefited from a mention by a popular social media personality, you know what comes with being associated with influencers. You may have seen a substantial bump in Twitter followers after a celebrity retweeted you. A similar principle applies to backlinks. When you are quoted and sourced on a popular website, you expose your business to leads who may click on your website and potentially convert into customers.

How to build backlinks

One of the best ways to encourage people to link your company is by building relationships with vendors and clients. If your primary customers are businesses, you can encourage them to post backlinks, particularly if you work with the client frequently.

You can use tools like Google’s Check My Links plugin or a similar tool to search for existing links to your content. Once you’ve found them, check them out to see if they still work. If someone has a backlink on their website that is broken or redirects to a different page, reach out with the correct link.

Another way to build backlinks is by publishing high-quality content. Regularly posting blogs about topics that are relevant to your audience and using SEO that helps people find them can result in more backlinks. Additionally, using social media to promote these posts with hashtags helps people stumble on them, generating more useful links.

If your industry regularly offers conferences, apply to conduct presentations or author articles in the association’s trade publication. Doing so establishes you as an expert in your field and may entice people to cite your content in their blog posts, newsletters, and more.

For backlinks to be successful, they need to be organic. Don’t pay for them, and don’t promote your own company on a blog that you set up with the purpose of backlinking your content. The best way to generate backlinks is to build up your credibility and leverage existing relationships with your customers and adjacent professionals.

Examples of website campaigns

Guest blogs

When you have established relationships with clients, vendors, and others in your industry, you can leverage them to build brand awareness. Ask someone with whom you frequently work if you can author a guest blog on their website. In that post, you can offer backlinks to your relevant content. You can also offer to post links to their blog on your website, creating a reciprocal backlink to your partner company.

Aim to write guest blogs for companies that fit your business well. Your expertise should be apparent, and the topic should logically fit within your partner organization’s blog. For instance, if you own a hair salon, it would make sense to write a guest blog for a spa that offers other wellness services. You want to tailor your guest blog to be relevant to your partner’s customers.

Serving as an expert in interviews

If you’re a credible expert in your field, you may be approached by journalists and publicists to give interviews about certain topics. If you’re a small business owner, local bloggers, podcasters, media professionals, and content creators might not know you. But your expertise could be the perfect fit for an episode or an article.

Brainstorm potential interview topics and search the internet for bloggers, podcasters, and other media professionals who might interview you. Pitch your ideas to them. You’ll likely get rejected more than once, but one yes can lead to a larger pool of people who want to interview you. You can also build interest in your expertise by following these professionals on social media and contributing quality feedback to their work.

You can also set up a profile on Help a Reporter or a similar platform. This site serves as a resource that journalists and other media professionals use to find experts for stories about a wide variety of topics.

Joining groups

As part of your social media strategy, you likely have a LinkedIn page. LinkedIn offers several groups that you can join with your company’s page. Build brand awareness by regularly contributing to conversations. If it makes sense, you can share your blog posts and other content with these groups.

Don’t use a group simply for self-promotion, however. If the only thing you ever post in a group is links to your company’s blog, people will probably stop clicking on your content. Take time to add meaningful comments on existing posts and participate in discussions.

Creating infographics

Infographics are a visually appealing way to distill complex information into a format that is easy to understand. If you are an expert in a complicated process, creating infographics and featuring them on your website is a good way to entice people to add backlinks.

When creating infographics, keep them simple. Use fonts and colors that are easy to see and read. Keep your audience in mind when writing the copy for your infographics. You might be tempted to share everything you know about a topic, but successful infographics are more focused. Only include information that is most relevant to your target audience.

Promoting yourself

People can’t reference your company and backlink to your website if they don’t know about you. Use your digital marketing tools to promote your company and encourage people to share. When you write a blog or create a video, promote it across your social media channels hashtagging keywords that help people find it.

Another way to promote your web content is to install widgets on your blog page. Most website building platforms offer widgets, which are blocks of separate code that enhance the functionality of your website. You should be able to find available widgets in your website design template that let people share your page on social media. Include these blocks on your blog and video pages that make it easy for people to share your content through their social media feeds. Include a call to action at the end of every post encouraging people to share.

Cross promoting with other businesses

You don’t have to write a full blog post to get a backlink on someone’s website. Sometimes, you can ask them to provide a link to your page in any spot where it makes sense. Talk to your clients or professionals in adjacent industries to see where cross-promotion is feasible. Make sure they mention your brand and include information about your services.

Partner companies will probably ask you to promote their company on your website as well, so post their information where it’s best suited.

Sponsoring local events

Serving as a sponsor for events in your area not only gets you a spot in the promotional materials but you may also be backlinked on the organization’s website. For best results, set up a custom landing page on your site dedicated to the event while promoting your company. It can be something as simple as a listing with all of the event details and a link to buy tickets, or it could include a story about your company’s history with the organization.

Post the landing page’s link to your social media feed and tag the host organization. Use other hashtags that they are using to promote the event. People who follow you can then share this information on their social feeds.

Sponsoring local athletic teams through an entire season can also get you website backlinks from their websites and social media pages.

Hosting webinars

Following COVID-19 related shutdowns, professionals across industries were forced to leave the office, and many networking events shifted to digital platforms. While things are getting back to normal, and people are looking forward to in-person conferences again, there is still a benefit to hosting short webinars.

Hosting short yet engaging webinars makes it easier for people to learn about relevant topics in the industry without taking too much time out of their day. They’re also more cost-effective than in-person conferences since no travel is involved. When participating, find interesting angles on relevant topics in your field that can benefit others. Share a link to your presentation at the end of the webinar to encourage attendees to share it with others.

Giving testimonials

When you work with vendors who give excellent customer service, you can offer them testimonials. Not only is this a good marketing tool for your vendor, but they can also promote your company by including a link to your website.

If your favorite vendor hasn’t asked for one, send a quick email to touch base. Allow them to put your testimonial on their website. It’s ideal to save your testimonials for the vendors who provide excellent products or services.

Don’t send out testimonials just to build website backlinks. Offering a testimonial for a business that you aren’t enthusiastic about or for a business with low-quality customer service just to get a backlink can damage your credibility with customers who trust your professional opinion.

Listicle features

Many local news websites often feature a variety of “best of” articles. This type of content is popular because it is evergreen and encourages people to interact with their website. Set up Google alerts to be notified whenever your competitors and other key phrases in your industry are mentioned in an article.

This is an easy way to track which of your competitors have been included in local listicles and how often. You can also contact the writer or the webmaster and pitch your company. They may edit the listicle to include your company or they might keep your information and include you in a different article.

Where to start

Building backlinks is a key feature of your SEO strategy. Being promoted and linked on another website not only boosts your performance on Google and other search engines but also establishes you as an expert. Plus, a diverse and broad array of backlinks on various websites and social media pages builds brand awareness.

Start building a strong set of backlinks by looking for those that already exist and making sure the links are still valid. If not, ask the host of the website to fix your link. Once you know that your links are correct, scope out the competition. To make this easy, Constant Contact offers an SEO tool that you can use to track this information.

Looking for backlinks to your competitors’ websites can help you determine what types of content are shared most often. You might notice that one topic, in particular, gets quoted by multiple websites. Look for these trends, tailor your content around them, and then create high-quality blogs, videos, and social media posts to establish yourself as an expert.

With an arsenal of high-quality backlinks, your website will stay at the top of search engines, making it easy for customers to find you while encouraging organic web traffic. Tap into your network and start building your backlink strategies.

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SEO is a complex field that many businesses don’t manage effectively or even understand fully. Without the ability to implement an effective SEO strategy, you’re wasting precious resources and delivering far too few results in terms of reach. Today, we’ll discuss specialized SEO and whether, in fact, this is a new strategy or an adaptation of your strategy to the realities of your market niche.

Image courtesy of Yoast SEO Plugin

It is all too easy to get drawn into aspects of a strategy, like SEO, that aren’t really impactful on your business performance, and many companies find themselves in a tight spot when they invest in a marketing strategy but don’t see a sufficient return to justify their budget. Any business strategy that doesn’t generate a positive return is on the chopping block in most businesses as resources are inevitably scarce.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is ignoring specialized SEO companies that offer services to specific niches. Tailored to your industries and extremely knowledgeable about your business, specialized SEO agencies save the day when you’re struggling to achieve success on search engines. But why should you go with a specialist rather than an SEO generalist? Let’s discuss the benefits of specialized SEO. But first, I’d like to start our discussion with an overview of SEO to ensure all my readers are on the same page.

SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is critical for getting found by search engines. Below, you see how your rank in search results impacts your performance.

organic click through rates Image courtesy of Moz

Hence, your click-through rate drops as your rank in search results goes down, leveling off after about position 5. Once you drop to the second, third, or subsequent page of search results, you’re not seeing much in the way of clicks to your content. Without clicks, your opportunities for conversion plummet. Sure, you might argue, your social media strategy brings in sufficient clicks and you don’t need SEO. And, while you may convince yourself that this is true, the two metrics are intimately related, as we’ll see later.

Elements of SEO

Let’s first talk about what happens when you post a piece of content. Google (which is the big tuna when it comes to search engines), as well as other search engines, uses spiders (small pieces of javascript) to crawl the internet looking for new content. You can make this more efficient by submitting your sitemap to the search engine.

When the spider finds new content, it attempts to categorize the content and establish its quality using a complex algorithm of factors and weights assigned to each factor, since not all factors are equally important. That’s where SEO comes in. By optimizing your content based on current criteria, you improve your rank and drive more traffic to your content.

Some of the most influential elements of SEO are:

Fresh, valuable content produced on a consistent basis
Keyword phrases that match user intent as reflected by the query
Best practice use of keyword phrases such as including them in headings and subheadings, in image alt tags, in the meta description, and natively within the content
Backlinks to your content from other sites, which acts as a quality signal
Social media engagement, hence the reason your social media strategy and SEO are intimately linked
Security on the site, as evidenced by HTTPS protocols
Site speed
Mobile-friendliness
Other indicators of quality such as time on site, bounce rate, etc that indicated visitors like your content

Specialized SEO

As you should glean from the factors listed above, a successful SEO strategy relies heavily on a deep understanding of your market niche. Some agencies provide this specialization through divisions that focus on a narrow band of market niches while other agencies specialize in a specific market niche.

Here are some benefits you get from a specialized SEO agency.

Benefits of a specialized SEO agency

Superior market research

Market research is a crucial element of any SEO campaign. It’s important for SEO agencies to have a clear idea of the niche markets they serve, including understanding how they phrase queries, keyword phrases used, the competition for specific keyword phrases, and where a brand can achieve the highest engagement on social media. This is only possible with an emphasis on a particular market or several closely related markets. For example, a general SEO company knows what makes Google happy, in general, but they may not know what makes your customers happy and how they frame queries if you work in a niche field like construction. Despite the skill of your chosen agency, it’s a steep learning curve to bring them up to speed with what’s going on in your niche. In most cases, it will be easier to go with a specialist.

Understanding the competition

Every market is filled with competition, and this means that you can’t rely on simply knowing about the state of your own SEO or general SEO strategies. Alongside this, you need to compare the work you do with the SEO strategies employed by other companies in your niche, ensuring that you can build an understanding of what works in your niche. There are tools (paid) that allow you to dig deeper into the strategies employed by your competition and their success but those efforts are limited by privacy and proprietary issues.

Employing a specialist or agency that already knows about the competition and has experience that allows them to avoid common mistakes in the niche makes this process a lot easier. Not only will you know what competitors are doing, but you also benefit from knowing what strategies offer opportunities to overtake them.

Accurate content creation

Content creation has the largest impact on SEO, especially collectively when you consider the impact of content on backlinks, engagement, and keyword strategy. In fact, writing blogs and creating new web pages is vital to the SEO process. Working with a general SEO company to create content for you is a risky process, especially when you work in a niche with its own terminology and technical issues that your content creator must get right.

Conclusion

As you can see, SEO is quite complicated. It’s worth some analysis to determine whether working with specialized SEO companies that understand your niche as well as possible makes sense in your situation. A big part of this analysis includes a good understanding of the type of business you operate and how specifics in that niche differ from other markets. As time goes on, can assess your results and, if not satisfactory, change your decision.

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What is Google Search Console?

Search Console is a free Google tool that measures and tracks your website’s search traffic, ranking, and site performance over time. Search Console is free and available to anyone with a Google administrator account. Sign up for a free Google Account here.

While Search Console is tailored for Google’s search engine, the tool’s error-tracking and other built-in features are invaluable for better performance across Bing or Yahoo.

Why Use Google Search Console?

Search Console is one of the most useful tools available on the market for small business owners. For those limited on a budget, it’s an accessible tool to optimize your website for better organic search traffic and reduce user friction.

Not only is Search Console ideal as a centralized place for site owners to review content performance, including metrics like impressions, clicks, ranks, and search queries, but the tool’s Coverage report collects information including site errors and mobile performance.

To Catch an Error or Malicious Content

Important site issues are found through Google Search Console. The Coverage report pulls issues impacting your overall rankings. Issues like 404s, messages to users that a page is no longer live or accessible, are not easy to spot on their own. The Coverage report lists all pages that house errors or front-end malware content with clear descriptions of the problem and how to solve it for a better user experience.

Check out the Coverage report below for TheMarBlog.com:

If you click into any of the detailed descriptions, you’ll find a list of URLs impacted along with a timeline of how long those pages were affected.

For better content performance and development, Search Console identifies various ways online visitors actually get to your website. The tool’s Performance report visualizes the number of impressions, clicks, average click-through rate, and position across search queries, pages, countries, devices, and search appearance.

Below is the Performance report for TheMarBlog.com:

The Performance report defaults to the Queries view.

For other views, click on the tabs at the top of the page like Pages.

How to Set Up Google Search Console

Before you set up a Search Console account, you’ll need:

A secure HTTPS website (recommended) or an HTTP website (KeyCDN explains the difference)
A Google account with administrative access (Google’s Support page helps you get set up)

Steps to Set Up Your Account

Navigate to Google Search Console’s main page and click Start Now

2. Log in to your Google Account

3. Click on Add a property

4. Choose setup under Domain (recommended) or URL Prefix and follow the steps. A description of the differences is explained further down in this article.

5. Submit your request for review

You’re done!

Within a few days, you’ll see data populate under your Search Console property. Note that for some websites, it may take up to several weeks before you see any performance metrics, so just be patient.

For troubleshooting or developer support, you can always visit the Search Console’s Help page or visit the community page to review past tickets submitted by other users with the same issue.

Differences between Domain and URL Prefix Set Up

When you add a new property, you’re given the choice between a Domain (recommended) or URL Prefix set up. The differences between each option surround the steps you take to validate your website as well as which areas of your website are crawled within the Search Console.

You can learn more about how Search Console breaks out each verification requirement on the webmaster’s support page.

URL Prefix

This option is the easier between the two, however, using URL Prefix will only track site links that begin with the beginning portion of the URL you include.

For example, if your website is http://example.com/, Search Console will collect any category pages or blogs that begin with http://example/com/. Any site links that do not start with this prefix, Search Console will not capture.

Within URL Prefix, Search Console will capture the following:

http://example.com/dresses/1234
https://example.com/dresses/1234
http://www.example.com/dresses/1234

Pros with his option include ease of setup and the ability to easily tie the property with a Google Analytics account. Cons include the obviously limited nature of what segments of your website are included or excluded from the tool. This option is only ideal for websites that have the same prefix naming convention for all category pages on their website.

If you have an e-commerce site with subdomains, separate support pages, or a separate mobile site, you may want to use the Domain property setup option to avoid having to include multiple properties within one account.

Domain

While this option is the more involved between the two, it’s the most comprehensive in how Search Console crawls your site. The Domain setup will pull data across your entire domain, including main category pages, support pages, blogs, sub-category pages, and unique mobile versions of your website.

For example, if you have the website example.com, Search Console will crawl any page that exists under that property on your web server.

Within Domain, Search Console will capture the following:

http://example.com/dresses/1234
https://example.com/dresses/1234
http://www.example.com/dresses/1234
http://support.m.example.com/dresses/1234

Pros with his option include the comprehensiveness of the search crawl. Using this option, you’ll avoid the possibility of missing critical information from a key component of your website, simply because it was constructed differently from your other pages.

Cons include the more complex verification nature of the setup process. This method requires you to log in to your web hosting account and confirm the DNS via several steps that Google outlines in their DNS verification page. Alternately, if you have a developer or development team on your team, you can ask them to carry out the process instead.

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Buffer has been built on the belief that transparency builds trust, holds us accountable, and can push our industry forward. Our salaries have been transparent since 2013, and for the fifth year in a row, we’re sharing our transparent pay analysis. In this report, we share the difference between what men and women earn at Buffer.

We have come a long way in the last five years. Far from the ratio of 70 percent men and 30 percent women on the team when I first wrote this report, this year, we are close to 50/50. And at the time of this report, our leadership team is eight people, five of whom are women.

Here are all of our numbers from our 2021 pay analysis, along with more on the positive impact that transparency has had on the gender pay gap for us.

2021 Pay Analysis

Here’s what the unadjusted gender pay gap looks like at Buffer as of March 2021:

Buffer team: 83 people
Women: 39
Men: 44

Average salary for women: $123,707
Average salary for men: $131,923
Unadjusted percentage gap: 5.46%

Note: We specify an unadjusted pay gap as we are comparing earnings between all men and all women at Buffer, regardless of their role or experience level. An adjusted pay gap would be the earning gap between people who perform similar roles. We have no adjusted pay gap at Buffer as we use a salary formula for all of our salaries.

About the numbers

For the second year in a row, our gap has gone down, and this year it went down significantly compared to last year.

We’ve been tracking the unadjusted gender pay gap at Buffer monthly since 2019. Here, you can see our progress over the last year, where the gap has gradually gone from 12.5 percent down to 5.5 percent.

Compared to previous years
Here’s a comparison of all of the years we’ve been running this pay analysis. You can also read each full report at the following links: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017.

Our gender pay gap has gone down from 15% to 5% in the last two years — how did that happen?

We’ve been paying close attention to the gender wage gap at Buffer since we first started sharing transparent pay analyses, and we’ve been committed to lowering our gap.

Transparency has been a critical factor in lowering our gender wage gap.

There have been many small shifts we’ve made along the way, but the most significant factor for us has been transparency. We believe that transparency creates accountability, and it’s clear from our example that transparency can have a powerful impact on closing the gender wage gap.

Transparency led to more learning.

Through being transparent, we’ve learned more about the gender pay gap and have been able to keep making changes and adjustments every year. In 2017, when we first ran the report, we didn’t know much about equal pay. We also had a smaller team size with fewer teammates who identify as women and later realized that having one high-earning woman on the team made our gap lower in 2017, so our report wasn’t an accurate reflection of the year for us.

In 2019, we had our highest yet gender pay gap — 15 percent — and that came the year that we also increased the number of women on our team.

The correlation we saw is that when we hired more women that year, our gender wage gap became larger because many of those women were hired at lower experience levels. However, we’ve seen that gap slowly decrease over the years as more women joined the team, and more women have been getting promoted and earning more overall.

Transparency brought more attention to making this change.

The act of reporting the gender wage gap every year has also brought more teams together to focus on how we can improve equal pay at Buffer. It’s not fun to publish a report showing that our gender wage gap is getting worse every year, and several teams have been highly motivated to improve this number.

Our Finance team started tracking gender pay data monthly instead of annually, and it gave us a clearer picture of the impact that new hires and departures have on our overall gap.

Our People team also played a huge role in diversifying our hiring pipeline over the years to bring on more women in higher-earning positions. Our People team’s work is especially impressive considering that as a long-term focused company, we aren’t growing our team considerably year-over-year. Our team size was 72 teammates in 2017 and is 83 teammates now.

The ratio of teammates who identify as men and women at Buffer has improved significantly.

When we first started reporting on equal pay, we were 70 percent men and 30 percent women at Buffer. That meant that any change to the number of women at Buffer had a significant impact on our gender pay gap, and it was much more likely to fluctuate when women joined or left Buffer.

Since then, our gender split has become nearly 50/50 with 44 men and 39 women on the team, and at the time of this report, our leadership team at Buffer is eight people, five of whom are women.

We’re confident about this positive downwards trend.

Now, we can safely say that our five percent gap isn’t a result of one high-earning person on the Buffer team. This consistent decrease of our gap over the last two years is a result of many areas of work, and it isn’t going to change drastically in one month.

What’s next for equal pay at Buffer?

We’re proud that our gender pay gap is at 5.5 percent, much lower than the industry average. We’ll continue doing everything we’re doing and closely watching our gender pay gap throughout the year. We’ll continue working towards no unadjusted gender pay gap and focusing on diversity overall in our hiring. We’re also hoping that our journey can help others looking to tackle the gender wage gap.

If you know of other companies sharing their gender wage gap publicly, or if you’d like to share yours publicly, send us a tweet. We’d be happy to chat!

Want to work at a company with pay transparency? We’re hiring, check out our open roles!

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Since we first kicked off a 4-day work week in May 2020, people have had a lot of questions about it. What day are we taking off? How long will we continue this practice? Is everyone really working four-days a week or are some people working more?

Some of the answers to these questions have changed over the last few months, and I’m sure some will continue to change and evolve as we learn more about operating within a four-day work week. A little while ago, I decided to answer questions about our four-day work week policy on Twitter, and I got a fantastic response. I’ve included a high-level recap in this post, but feel free to check out the whole thread if you’d like to see every reply.

Without further ado, here are some of the questions I got about the four-day work week organized into a few top categories, along with my replies and those of Caryn Hubbard, our VP of Finance, and Åsa Nystrom, our VP of Customer Advocacy, who contributed to several answers.

Why a 4-day work week?

Pranay asked: Why did it take a pandemic to implement it and why is a 4 day work week matter – cant it just be about the work itself instead of timing it?

We’ve thought about it for years, and I have a fundamental belief that 5-day workweeks aren’t necessarily optimal. The pandemic meant added stress for all of us, especially for the parents in the team. I wanted to get through it with the team, mentally, in the best position.

I believe that many businesses that are squeezing every last drop they can get out of their companies in terms of profit, productivity, etc. suddenly ran into issues in the pandemic. Growth goals to hit and no profit margin, meant layoffs for many companies.

And when you make layoffs, you erode trust significantly with your team. That can take years to build back. I wanted to build trust with my team through the pandemic. This was one of the best ways that I thought to do it.

How does it work?

Niel asked: Does everyone take the same day off? Or is it up to the individual? Or is it based on teams? Or something more nuanced?

In the beginning, we experimented with teams deciding the day, but knowing which day and having adequate time for cross-team collaboration was a challenge. Frankly it felt quite chaotic. Now, we do Fridays other than Customer Advocacy which rotate the day.

Shubham asked: Which 4 days of the week do you work? M – TH or Tu – Fr or something else? Do you find that the team tries to fit in 5 days of work in 4?

For the majority of the team, we do M – TH. In the beginning I tried Wednesdays as my day off, and enjoyed that but I prefer Fridays now. 3-day weekends are very powerful. I think overall, the team tries to work smarter. Perhaps trying to fit 4.5 days into 4.

David asked: woah didn’t know you were doing this – love it what would your reasons be for going back to 5 day?

The reasons would likely be not achieving our goals, which would be sad because I fundamentally don’t believe it’s putting in hours that will get us there.

And, one key thing is that over time, we’ve realized that 4-days should feel like a privilege, not entitled. So, if you get your tasks and goals for the week done, awesome – take that day off. If you didn’t quite do enough for us to reach our goals, spend part of Friday working.

Scott asked: Doing a 4, 10’s type of deal? Or not tracking exact hours, rather output and movement?

Not tracking exact hours, and more focus on tracking output. The goal is to achieve the same if not more, in less overall hours worked (more along the lines of 4 8’s).

Gaya asked: That’s awesome! Hopefully more companies will follow to normalise this. Q: Did the salaries stay the same? I know people who are holding back from working less because of decrease in pay

No change to salaries at Buffer with our 4-day workweeks. It’s less hours for the same pay. I don’t believe in same hours in less days, because for me 4-day workweeks are really about a more fundamental belief that hours worked are not correlated with results.

Stone asked: Love that you did this! Do you build in any deep work/no meetings time as well? Do you think the pandemic was needed for the transition/will you keep@it when offices reopen? How confident are you that people aren’t working longer 4 days or actually taking Friday off?

For many years we’ve had discussions and focus on deep work, and many teams have a day with no meetings. I don’t think the pandemic was needed to do it, but it was a motivator. I’m confident we’ll keep at it after, too. We’re already 100% remote so no actual offices.

I’m confident in most cases people are taking the Friday off. That said, we also don’t actively discourage working a little on Friday, if the team member feels that is needed to achieve our goals. We have big ambitions for what we can do for customers *and* innovating culture.

How do specific teams and teammates manage a 4-day work week?

Dwija asked: Do you have mothers working as full time employees? If working hours of those 4 days increase – how do they manage? I know it depends on them but just curious. Females are taking a hit – BIG TIME in Covid. ( For example: Yours truly)

From Caryn: We have many mothers and fathers at Buffer. Our shift to the flexibility of a 4 day workweek has been one of the most key things keeping my family of 5 healthy & safe this past year. The trust & flexibility to work the schedule that works for me & my family is everything.

From Joel: To add to the great insights Caryn shared, our decision to try a 4DWW was very much with parents in mind. Working hours haven’t increased. We work hard as a team to strive to achieve our goals without regularly working more hours. More here.

Mark asked: Does customer support participate in the 4-day week? If so, how do you stagger hours / meet customer expectations?

Yes, they do, but we still want to serve customers to the same high level. Over time, we’ve tweaked our 4-day workweek to drive us to push ourselves in the 4-days and feel like we’ve really earned that day off, not entitled to it.

Our customer support team is the one team that switches up the day off in order to make sure we maintain coverage for customers.

Stefan asked: Are the customer-facing teams doing 4-day work weeks as well? If so, are they all off on Fridays? If so, are customers’ emails/calls not answered till Monday?

No, we have to take a slightly more unique approach in our customer service team. We’re fully committed to providing world-class service, and we know the world works M-F (and even weekends). The specific day is different per team member, so more of a relay in that team.

Have y’all had any issues with a handoff from one team member to another in this relay system?

From Åsa: Jumping in to help with this q. No issues! We work in four-day blocks and use an assigned inbox flow to keep consistency in our customer communications. Our team covers most of the globe and are in constant communication across the week to keep on top of issues etc.

Jean asked: Do you have a strong customer support team in terms of number of people? Are you also applying this formula to tech team?

Our customer support team is 21 people out of 85. All teams adopt the 4-day workweek, but we also have goals we strive for and we see the 5th day as something earned not entitled.

Mercer followed up with: Does that mean that your support team doesn’t always get the same time off? How do you strive to protect the time of your customer-facing teams (who so frequently don’t get the same blessings as the other teams around them)?

It’s not necessarily that different for our support team, but it’s often more measurable for a support team. So we aim to be mindful of that. But we also have engineering teams that will work the 5th day if they don’t feel on track. Most teams work 4-days now.

From Åsa: Everyone on the CS team works a 4-day block & has the same days off every week to make sure we have the same ability to disengage and recharge! Being customer-facing doesn’t mean we can’t participate in company initiatives like these, it just means we need to plan a bit more.

Sllyllyd asked: Do the more senior team members stick to four days?

In general, yes. Often the more senior team members are the ones who feel the most accountability and energy for goals, and so we sometimes work the extra day to get make sure we’re on track. It’s not the norm, though, and when we do it’s usually just a couple of hours.

From Caryn: There’s a high level of flexibility and trust that we’ll meet our shared and individual goals w/in the schedule that works best for us. As a mom of 3, my needs look different than fellow colleagues but I thrive with that mutual respect & trust. Sometimes I choose to work 5 days.

How is it going?

Daniel asked: What’s better than you expected? What’s worse than you expected?

Better: The extra day builds in reflection time that we often don’t make room for, where many of us solve problems. So in many ways, we do more meaningful work.

Harder: Purpose becomes even more important. We need to feel driven to do great work in the precious 4 days we have.

Purpose on an org level or individual level?

Both. Especially with the past year we’ve had. The real magic is when org purpose feels intertwined with a personal sense of purpose, something worthy to go after that can really make a difference. If org purpose feels like it serves society, individual purpose usually follows.

Jesse asked: Are people get as much done? Do you have hourly staff?

We have no hourly staff, which is important. This isn’t less hours for less pay, it’s less hours for the same pay. In terms of productivity, that’s hard to measure in this wild past year we’ve had. But, things look promising. Philosophically, I believe we can get as much done.

Awesome. Are people happier and more excited to come to work? Boost in moral? Did you see it level off?

Yes, to all of that! You nailed it. We’ve not felt it level off yet, there’s still a ton of gratitude for the 4-day workweeks 9+ months in.

André-Paul asked: What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed within your team? Any new routines/behaviours/processes?

Well, there’s definitely a new level of gratitude. We’re here, trying out this wild new thing, and gaining this extra day for family or ourselves. It’s awesome. And with that, a sense of alongside gaining flexibility, giving flexibility too.

What I mean by gaining flexibility and giving flexibility is, especially as a global team, we need to be open to meetings once in a while earlier in a morning or late at night, to make everything happen. Especially with a 4-day workweek.

So, a renewed sense of, we’re lucky to have this extra freedom but let’s be smart about how we work in order to make 4-day workweeks really work for us as a company and for customers, so we can keep having them.

Ali asked: Has the rate of burnout gone down?

It’s hard to measure, but I believe absolutely, it has. Or rather, 2020 was a year that drove much more burnout than most years and we minimized the amount in part through implementing the 4-day workweek.

Michelle asked: I can always find more to do. Are people self-disciplined enough to really take Friday off and are people good enough at knowing how much they can really get done in a week or do they set goals that are too lofty and usually end up working Fridays?

Great question. I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I genuinely think most people now take Fridays off. But, we still have big ambitions as a company and so once in a while we need to work a Friday. The real magic is when the Friday off helps you actually get more done.

Luthfur asked: How are you measuring productivity? Put another way, how do you intend to make the decision on whether this is going well or not.

Ultimately, we will make our decision based on whether we achieve our goals as a company. I fundamentally believe though, that the 5-day workweek is a relic of the industrial era and not necessarily the most effective way to work. So I believe we can achieve our goals in 4DWWs.

One of the benefits we have, is that investors do not control our company. We can take longer term stances and decisions, that we believe will lead to great results in time.

—

If you or your team are trying a 4-day work week send me a tweet to share how it’s going for you, I’d love to hear about it!

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Today’s youth is craving to be at the forefront of successful movements, tearing down and rebuilding structures and enacting positive change around the world. Increasingly, nonprofits are leveraging this desire and turning to younger generations to drive change and become the future leaders of the world. Their main catalyst of change? Social media.

This is the driving notion at Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), a young, vibrant, and growing organization that is pushing for bolder actions to make universal access to modern and clean energy happen by 2030. They believe that the younger generations are the driving forces of the current climate action movements; they ask the most challenging questions, are open-minded, and use their own network to reach new audiences of leaders and supporters. Through their platforms, SEforALL truly hopes to channel the right mindset and influence the future leaders of the world.

In this interview, you’ll hear directly from Meriam Otarra, Communications Specialist at SEforALL, and you’ll learn:

Why it’s important for nonprofit organizations to appeal to younger audiences nowadays
How to connect on a deeper level with younger audiences through reader-friendly, modern, dynamic content
The marketing tactics that work best to reach younger audiences
Tips on building awareness and community around important causes via social media

This post is part of the #BufferBrandSpotlight, a Buffer Social Media series that shines a spotlight on the people that are helping build remarkable brands through social media, community building, content creation, and brand storytelling.

This series was born on Instagram stories, which means you can watch the original interview in our Highlights found on our @buffer Instagram profile.

There are so many great nonprofits working hard to make the world a better place. We want to help a tiny bit when it comes to their social media marketing efforts. We offer a 50% discount to all registered nonprofit organizations. Here’s how you can apply for the discount!

Tell us more about you! What’s Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) all about and what’s your role there?

Hi my name is Meriam Otarra and I’m a Visual & Digital Communications Specialist for international organizations. I currently lead the creative communications and social media for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL). SEforALL is a young, vibrant, and growing organization that works with the United Nations, international organizations, governments and the private sector to ensure we achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) — access to modern, clean, reliable, and sustainable energy for all — by 2030. We’re soon celebrating a decade of SDG7 progress since SEforALL was initiated by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. Since then, there has been an increasing demand for SEforALL platforms and products, and that’s why as part of the communications team, I make sure that these digital products are:

Reader-friendly, modern, dynamic;
Reaching the right audiences!

Meriam Otarra, Communications Specialist at Sustainable Energy for All

Tell us about the “This is Cool” campaign! What has made this campaign so successful?

From where I’m from, which is the Philippines, a day never passes by without hearing someone say, “It’s hot.” (Either that, or “Oh my god, it has been raining non-stop for 7 days!”) And without urgent actions to the climate crisis, the rural and urban poor in developing countries in Africa and Asia are getting more and more at risk of the consequences of heat, because they can’t access or afford whatever cooling technologies are available out there.

SEforALL started the #ThisisCool campaign last year after releasing one of the household reports called Chilling Prospects, which tracks the global development of delivering universal sustainable cooling. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the current cooling situation (last year it was found that around *1.02 BILLION* people are at high-risk due to lack of access to cooling!), its challenges, and what can be done across the world to make sustainable cooling for all a reality.

As part of the campaign, we created a microsite with Greenhouse PR, with different cooling case studies—from cool rooftops to farming innovations—and provided a nicely illustrated toolkit that can be used by anyone and everyone to start the conversation on sustainable cooling. Check it out at thisiscool.seforall.org!

People living in public housing rely on their governments to reimagine housing with affordable, safe & #sustainable cooling systems ❄️🌱

An eco-town in Singapore🇸🇬 combines green design & smart innovative technology to bring #sustainablecooling to 42,000 homes! #ThisIsCool pic.twitter.com/3QwMShHh9l

— Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) (@SEforALLorg) April 6, 2021

A 1.5°C ‘warmer world’ could see +350M people exposed to potentially deadly heat🌡️ by 2050. #Sustainablecooling is essential not just for public safety, but also for health💊 & food security🥬

How hot does it get in your city & what #ThisIsCool solutions have you seen so far? pic.twitter.com/mmmtK3Lmgx

— Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) (@SEforALLorg) July 28, 2020

Why do you believe it’s important for nonprofit organizations to appeal to younger audiences nowadays?

We’ve said it before at SEforALL (and we’re definitely not the first ones to say it!), but youth are the driving forces of the current climate action. They aren’t afraid to speak out and demand better policies or a better response to the pandemic that’s affecting us, youth, both short- and long-term. As social media managers, sincere engagement is what we ultimately aspire to build, and at least for what I can say as the frontline of SEforALL social media, youth are the ones who ask questions, are open-minded, share ideas, and use their own network to help SEforALL reach other audiences who may have otherwise not heard about SEforALL before. Through our platforms, we can only hope to channel the right mindset and influence the future leaders of the world.

As social media managers, sincere engagement is what we ultimately aspire to build, and at least for what I can say as the frontline of SEforALL social media, youth are the ones who ask questions, are open-minded, share ideas, and use their own network to help SEforALL reach other audiences who may have otherwise not heard about SEforALL before.

As a nonprofit international organization, how do you connect on a deeper level with younger audiences?

We’re not scared to dive into conversations with youth. That’s why we created the SEforALL Youth Summit last February, organized by the SEforALL youth representatives ourselves, to show that youth voices are needed to be heard and that SEforALL is here to listen. The outcomes of that Summit are also going to feed into the high-level meetings on energy happening this September.

What marketing tactics have you found work the best to reach younger audiences?

We found showing data and infographics that hit closer to home for younger people have had better engagement and reactions than most other content. Two good examples that we’ve pushed out during the Summit were (1) showing data through an infographic on the amount of energy the whole country of Senegal uses versus the amount of energy Californians use playing video games; and (2) no energy access, no internet.

Alarming #energy fact of the day: The ENTIRE country of Senegal uses less electricity than Californians use playing video games🎮

We need to #EndEnergyPoverty to provide opportunities for better jobs, health, education & women’s empowerment⚡ Visit https://t.co/tuq91c10Wv #SDG7 pic.twitter.com/bVCfQ3XV4E

— Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) (@SEforALLorg) January 25, 2021

We found showing data and infographics that hit closer to home for younger people have had better engagement and reactions than most other content.

For our #ThisisCool campaign, we also reached out to youth influencers in the climate action sphere in Africa and Asia by commenting on their posts related to passive cooling (see example below). And only when they follow us back do we actually send them a personalized message on Twitter telling them about our campaign and ask them for their emails so we can send the toolkit directly to them. It’s important for us to know that they believe in our message as we do with them before we bombard them in their inbox. With the support from Greenhouse PR, we selected them not just based on their following count, but also the quality of content that they put out.

Hi👋🏾 My name is Elizabeth! I’m a Kenyan🇰🇪 #climate activist, founder of @GGI_Kenya and an advocate for green spaces🌱

Join me today for #EarthDay2021 as I tell you why planting trees🌳 is a sustainable, #passivecooling solution that will help us #RestoreOurEarth 🌍#ThisisCool pic.twitter.com/z3Qk10A6Tk

— Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) (@SEforALLorg) April 22, 2021

As far as advocacy goes, our Twitter and LinkedIn profiles have had the most impact on SEforALL projects. Twitter is fast-paced and straight to the point and easy to connect with our audiences in the international organization sector. As we (and our partners) always have events, knowledge products to release, it’s usually the first platform we utilize for any campaign. And while LinkedIn is quite the contrary, we’ve used our LinkedIn to establish thought leadership in the energy access scene, as well as show value and appreciation to our staff. It’s also quite surprising but a lot of our youth audiences are mostly on LinkedIn.

We’ve used our LinkedIn to establish thought leadership in the energy access scene, as well as show value and appreciation to our staff. It’s also quite surprising but a lot of our youth audiences are mostly on LinkedIn.

Two words—timely and timeless. At SEforALL, we don’t want to be just quick, we also want our content to be relevant yesterday, today, tomorrow. It helps to create content that puts the cause into proper context, one that is straight forward, relatable, short.

At SEforALL, we don’t want to be just quick, we also want our content to be relevant yesterday, today, tomorrow.

We recently did a 2-minute explainer on why we need universal energy access or Sustainable Development Goal 7. It was also created to reach out to those who are not yet familiar with the Sustainable Development Goals in general. We talked about current events, why energy is needed for cold chains for vaccine deployment, why children need energy to access online education, etc. Art and copy have to go hand in hand. At SEforALL, I’m lucky to work with multimedia wordsmiths that make my work easier.

WATCH⚡ In 2 minutes, we explain why universal #EnergyAccess is crucial to achieve the 16 other @UN #GlobalGoals 🌐🎯#SDG7 #MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/JiQ6lYsO0H

— Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) (@SEforALLorg) April 12, 2021

What actions can businesses and individuals take today to make sustainable cooling a reality?

When we think about cooling, the first thing that comes to mind is air conditioning. But cooling for all depends on many different solutions and with the climate, economic, health crises that we are facing, we need to make sure we prioritize efficient and affordable solutions that (1) won’t spike energy demand, and (2) don’t have negative environmental impacts.

Business, corporations, individuals—all stakeholders—can think about cooling solutions in four ways:

Passive cooling solutions: no-energy solutions like trees that provide shade or natural ventilation in buildings
Policy solutions: governments prioritizing passive cooling in building codes or cities ensuring enough green space to keep the city cool
Financial solutions: making energy-efficient refrigerators and air conditioners easier to purchase by the mass public
Service solutions: training people and companies how to be more sustainable and how to create sustainable products

To find out where we are in delivering sustainable cooling for all and what the newest cooling innovations are out there, we’re having a virtual event on the release of our 2021 Chilling Prospects report this May 5!

We hope this interview with Meriam helps you get started with or double down on your social media efforts. You can follow Sustainable Energy for All on Instagram here and on Twitter here!

As part of #EarthDay2021, we’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how @SEforALLorg leverages social media to empower younger generations to take action and build awareness around their mission. 🌎 🌱

Learn more: https://t.co/8KzNged0WM pic.twitter.com/sV9UdzqoFF

— Buffer (@buffer) April 22, 2021

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I’m happy to share that Tyler Wanlass recently became Buffer’s VP of Design. 🎉

Tyler has been on the Buffer team for over five years now, initially joining as a Product Manager before he transitioned to our first Head of Design.

Throughout 2020, while we were hiring for a new Product leader, Tyler took on that role in the interim and did an incredible job. I’ve been impressed with how he’s juggled so much, operated at a high level, and contributed at layers from the leadership team down to the individual 1:1 level with product team members. He’s lead Product excellently, introduced new processes and alignment, and put things in a fantastic place for Maria, our CPO, to come and take us to a new level. Since working with Maria, he has formed a strong partnership and they’ve already achieved some incredible milestones together as well as jointly brought new energy to how we approach Product overall.

A key reflection I had over the past six months is that at Buffer, we’ve always spoken about Product being at the core of Buffer. We’re a truly product-led organization, putting the Product at the center of everything we do. We don’t have a sales team, and much of our growth comes through word of mouth based on our customers’ experience. With this in mind, it started to occur to me that having two Product leaders, both Maria and Tyler, within the leadership team would be the most appropriate structure going forward and help us to create the right balance and approach to strategy over time. VP of Design is not a role we previously had at Buffer, and in these first few months, it has felt completely natural and highly impactful. This decision reflects the importance we place on product innovation and quality, which is fundamental to a lot of the outcomes we are pushing for.

I’m so grateful for everything that Tyler does for Buffer and our customers. Tyler has been an awesome partner in some big decisions this year. I believe customers and all of us at Buffer are better as a result of Tyler’s significant contributions.

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I’m happy to share that Caryn Hubbard was recently promoted to Buffer’s VP of Finance. 🎉

Caryn has been on the Buffer team for over five years now and has made huge contributions in her time on the team, both as the leader of our Finance team and as a member of our Executive team. She was instrumental in our $3.3M buy back of VC investors, in helping us navigate the turbulence of the financial impact of the pandemic, as well as in launching Buffer’s annual charitable donations. She has also piloted several projects that advanced Buffer’s transparency around compensation, including multiple versions of our salary formula.

Beyond the Finance team, Caryn has overseen Buffer’s legal and compliance focus through industry changes and Buffer’s expansion. She continues to be a strong leader for the financial team and most recently has been working on our approach to liquidity and equity.

I’m so grateful for everything that Caryn does for Buffer and our team. Buffer’s financial future is more secure, and we have a more sustainable business as a result of Caryn’s hard work. She is a trusted and calming presence who is relied on to provide regular thoughtful updates on Buffer’s finances to our team and investors. You can see the most recent report here.

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As with the rest of the Buffer team, our Advocacy team was thrilled when we first experimented with a four-day work week in May 2020. Unique to this team, though, was a bit of wariness around the success of a four-day work week for a customer-facing team.

As a company, Buffer has always had a high bar for customer support. We aim to provide fast, personal, and informed customer support responses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also assign one Advocate to every ticket so that each customer gets a sense of continuity with us. The thing about Advocacy is that even if we are working one less day per week, the incoming ticket volume remains mostly unchanged.

So how do we aim to set the bar high when we’re working four-day work weeks?

We’ve tried several different setups and are quite happy with where we’ve landed. Here’s exactly the system we currently use to make a four-day work week work for our Customer Advocacy team, along with a transparent look at our team goals and metrics from the last year of working a four-day work week.

How Advocacy is set up for a 4-day work week

Over the years, the Advocacy team has done a few different rounds of summer Fridays, where our teammates took half-days on Fridays for a month in the summer. We learned quite a lot from those, so we already had a framework for what the challenges and opportunities would be as we entered into the four-day work week.

In general, a shorter work week is a great opportunity for the Advocacy team to learn and grow in several areas:

Communication: With a four-day work week, we have to have excellent communication with a key focus on asynchronous communication.
Knowledge management: We already put a lot of effort into how we share knowledge and document our processes, and this is another chance to improve how we do so.
Experimenting with time management: It’s a chance to explore how we can work more efficiently each day, and how we can better manage our energy.
Setting individual goals: This was a great opportunity to rethink individual goals and give the team clear objectives to work towards.

Where we started with the four-day work week

When the whole Buffer team first started working four-day work weeks, we gave each team at Buffer the freedom to choose the day of the week to take off. The whole company mostly fell into two camps: Wednesdays or Fridays.

We already knew that choosing a consistent day each week wouldn’t work for us on the Advocacy team because we need to be available seven days a week for our customers. Any day that we have no Advocates working, ticket volume builds up, and customers don’t get responses. There’s also a chance we miss a bug or issue with the Buffer product that comes through the inbox.

From the get-go, we knew we would need a variety of days off for different team members. Initially, we rotated days off, so teammates were off on a different day every week, but there were always some teammates online. We did this for the first month, and it wasn’t a popular option. First, there was far too much admin work involved to set up this schedule; second, it was tricky for Advocates to plan anything when the day they were offline was continually rotating.

The system that works for our team

The schedule we have now is the schedule we landed on in July 2020, three months into us adopting the four-day work week. We asked team members for their preferences for a day off, and we try to follow that as much as possible. Most folks opted to have Friday off, some prefer Monday off, and a smaller group takes off Wednesdays. Now, it’s consistent every week, so we know exactly who will be online each day of the week.

An important part of this system for us was building it to optimize for most folks on the team to be able to take three days off in a row. This work structure — four days on, three days off — can be really replenishing, and we wanted that for our team members.

Also, it can get tricky to have an ongoing conversation with a customer if you’re off one random day in the middle of the week. We built the schedule with that in mind, though we have a few team members who find value in taking Wednesdays off and we support that. For the majority of the team, though, it’s Monday or Friday off.

How we manage weekends

As you can see in the above chart, we have customer support coverage on the weekends as well. That’s something we’ve done since the early days of Buffer, and we hire a few people specifically for weekend shifts. By default, they work one of the weekend days and not both, so they have one weekend day off. The exception is that one teammate prefers to work Friday to Monday and have Tuesday to Thursday off.

For those taking weekend shifts, we still optimize for having three days off in a row to maintain the benefits of that added rest and maintaining flows for communicating with customers.

Goals and metrics and the 4-day work week

In general, we set goals and measure our incoming volume across seven days instead of the four that each teammate is working. The challenge for us is making sure that, collectively, we are as productive across those seven days with this new schedule. Honestly, we struggled in the first six months with this; we did the best that we could, but we didn’t have clear goals and we weren’t able to have clear expectations for increased productivity.

This year, we’ve been much more clear with our goals, specifically around ticket-number targets to hit within four days. That clarity means that teammates can hit our response time goals and continue to work a four-day work week. As with other teams at Buffer, Advocates also have the option to work a partial or full fifth day of the week if they feel they haven’t been able to achieve what they set out to do in a given week. We call that fifth day an “overflow day.”

A look at our goals and how they’ve evolved

Our two main goals for the Advocacy team have always been our response time to customers and individual ticket goals (how many tickets an Advocate gets through in a day). These goals were based on what we thought were realistic targets for the team and for the level of each individual.

In Q1 of 2020 (before we were working a four-day work week), our goal was to respond to customer emails within six hours. We also had individual ticket goals that were based on daily volume. When we moved to four-day work weeks in Q2 of 2020, we implemented new targets for tickets per day, but we didn’t tie these to the customer experience we wanted to provide or set these based on achieving the same output in four days instead of five.

We ended up evolving our business hours for offering customer support. At the beginning of our 4-day work week experiment, our business hours were Mondays at 3 am ET through Fridays at 8 pm ET — i.e. 24 hours a day during the work week. To create more consistent expectations for our customers, we changed our hours to be 6 am to 8 pm ET each day, Monday through Friday.

Now in 2021, we’ve set ambitious company and team-level OKRs (objectives and key results) around customer response times and overall service experience. It’s important to us that we don’t sacrifice customer experience for efficiency. We’ve aimed for a two-hour first response time, and subsequent replies sent within seven hours (for email tickets).

A few results so far in Q1 2021:

Our customer satisfaction score went from 92.3% in Q4 2020 to 94% this quarter.
We hit our goal of a two-hour first response time, with a median of 1.6 hours during business hours.
Our team sent 71% of second responses within seven hours (our goal was 90%).

We have also standardized our team targets for ticket replies sent per week (148-170 tickets) and ticket quality we expect from each individual. These goals ensure a level of output we need to achieve our objectives while being able to take that fifth day off.

Parting thoughts

We are proud that we’ve been able to improve our customer response times and experience in 2021 while working a four-day work week. Even with that, we know there is still room to evolve what a four-day work week looks like for our team.

The reduction of hours available across a global team means we’re at times a bit short of hands when we’re impacted by external factors such as third-party downtime or issues with APIs. Whilst we might be able to get the same amount of tickets done in four days as five, there is always going to be value in being available on specific days and times within the world of customer support.

As a team, we’re continuing to discuss how we can embrace a bit more flexibility around coverage in our strategy for the future.

Do you work on a customer support team that has four-day work weeks? Or do you have more questions about how we approach a four-day work week? Drop us a tweet! You may just hear from one of our Customer Advocates.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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We analyzed 208,085 webpages to learn more about Core Web Vitals.

First, we established benchmarks for Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint.

Then, we looked into the correlation between Core Web Vitals and user experience metrics (like bounce rate).

Thanks to data provided by WebCEO, we were able to uncover some interesting findings.

Let’s dive right into the data.

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:

1. 53.77% of sites had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. 46.23% of sites had “poor” or “needs improvement” LCP ratings.

2. 53.85% of websites in our data set had optimal First Input Delay (FID) ratings. Only 8.57% of sites had a “poor” FID score.

3. 65.13% of analyzed sites boasted good optimal Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores.

4. The average LCP of the sites we analyzed clocked in at 2,386 milliseconds.

5. Average FID was 137.74 milliseconds.

6. The mean CLS score was 0.14. This is slightly higher than the optimal score.

7. The most common issues impacting LCP were high request counts and large transfer sizes.

8. Large layout shifts were the #1 cause of poor CLS scores.

9. The most common issue affecting FID was an inefficient cache policy.

10. There was a weak correlation between Core Web Vital scores and UX metrics.

11. We did find that FID did tend to slightly correlate with page views.

53.77% of Websites Had an Optimal Largest Contentful Paint Score

Our first goal was to see how each site performed based on the three factors that make up Google’s Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay.

Specifically, we wanted to determine the percentage of pages that were classified as “good”, “needs improvement” and “poor” inside of each site’s Search Console.

To do this, we analyzed anonymized Google Search Console data from 208k pages (approximately 20k total sites).

Our first task: analyze LCP (Large Contentful Paint). In simple terms, LCP measures how long it takes a page to load its visible content.

Here’s how the sites that we analyzed fared:

Good: 53.77%
Needs Improvement: 28.76%
Poor: 17.47%

As you can see, the majority of sites that we looked at had a “good” LCP rating. This was higher than expected, especially when taking into account other benchmarking efforts (like this one by iProspect).

It may be that the websites in our dataset are especially diligent about page performance. Or it may be partly due to a sample size difference (the iProspect analysis continuously monitors 1,500 sites. We analyzed 20,000+).

Either way, it’s encouraging to see that only about half of all websites need to work on their LCP.

53.85% of Websites We Analyzed Had Good First Input Delay Ratings

Next, we looked at Search Console reported First Input Delay (FID) ratings. As the name suggests, FIP measures the delay between the first request and a user being able to input something (like typing in a username).

Here’s a breakdown of FID scores from our dataset:

Good: 53.85%
Needs Improvement: 37.58%
Poor: 8.57%

Again, just over half of the sites we looked at had “good” FID ratings.

Interestingly, very few (8.57%) had “poor” scores. This shows that a relatively small number of sites are likely to be negatively affected once Google incorporates FID into their algorithm.

65.13% of Sites Had an Optimal Cumulative Layout Shift Score

Finally, we looked at the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) ratings from Search Console.

CLS is a measurement of how elements on a page move while loading. Pages that are relatively stable through the loading process have high (good) CLS scores.

Here were the CLS ratings among the sites that we analyzed:

Good: 65.13%
Needs Improvement: 17.03%
Poor: 17.84%

Among the three Core Web Vitals scores, CLS tended to be the least problematic. In fact, only around 35% of the sites that we analyzed need to work on their CLS.

Average LCP Is 2,836 Milliseconds

Next, we wanted to establish benchmarks for each Core Web Vital metric. As mentioned above, Google has created their own set of guidelines for each Core Web Vital.

(For example, a “good” LCP is considered to be under 2.5 seconds.)

However, we hadn’t seen a large-scale analysis that attempted to benchmark each Core Web Vital metric “in the wild”.

First, we benchmarked LCP scores for the sites in our database.

Among the sites that we analyzed, the average LCP turned out to be 2,836 Milliseconds (2.8 seconds).

Here were the most common issues that negatively impacted LCP performance:

High request counts and large transfer sizes (100% of pages)
High network round-trip time (100% of pages)
Critical request chains (98.9% of pages)
High initial server response time (57.4% of pages)
Images not served in next-gen format (44.6% of pages)

Overall, 100% of pages had high LCP scores at least partly due to “High request counts and large transfer sizes”. In other words, pages that are heavy with excess code, large file sizes, or both.

This finding is in line with another analysis that we did which found that large pages tended to be the culprit behind most slow-loading pages.

Average FID Is 137.4 Milliseconds

We then looked at FID scores among the pages in our dataset.

Overall, the mean First Input Delay was 137.4 milliseconds:

Here are the most prevalent FID-related issues that we discovered:

Inefficient cache policy (87.4% of pages)
Long main-thread tasks (78.4% of pages)
Unused JavaScript (54.1% of pages)
Unused CSS (38.7% of pages)
Excessive Document Object Model size (22.3% of pages)

It was interesting to see that caching issues tended to negatively affect FID more than any other problem. And, not surprisingly, poorly-optimized code (in the form of unused JS and CSS) was behind many high FID scores.

Average CLS Is .14

We discovered that the average CLS score is .14.

This metric specifically looks at how the content on a page “shifts”.Anything below .1 is rated as “good” in Search Console.

The most common issues affecting the projects’ CLS included:

Large layout shifts (94.5% of pages)
Render-blocking resources (86.3% of pages)
Text hidden during web font load (82.6% of pages)
Not preloaded key requests (26.7% of pages)
Improperly sized images (24.7% of pages)

How LCP Correlates With User Behavior

Now that benchmarks were set, we then set to find out how accurately Core Web Vitals represent real-life user experience.

In fact, this relationship is something that Google themselves highlight in their “Core Web Vitals report” documentation:

To analyze Core Web Vitals and their impact on UX, we decided to look at three UX metrics designed to represent user behavior on webpages:

Bounce rate (% of users leaving a website’s page upon visiting it)
Page depth per session (how many pages users see before leaving the website)
Time on website (how much time users spend on a website in a single session)

Our hypothesis was as follows: if you improve a website’s Core Web Vitals, it will positively affect UX metrics.

In other words, a site with “good” Core Web Vitals will have a lower bounce rate, longer sessions, and higher page views. Fortunately, in addition to Search Console data, this data set also contained UX metrics from Google Analytics.

Then, we simply had to compare each website’s Core Web Vitals against each UX metric. You can find our results for LCP below:

LCP and Bounce Rate

LCP and Pages per Session

LCP and Time on Site

On the three graphs, it was clear that all three different segments (Good, Poor and Needs Improvement) are somewhat evenly distributed on the graph.

In other words, there wasn’t any direct relationship between LCP and UX metrics.

FID Has a Slight Relationship With Page Views

Next, we looked at the potential relationship between First Input Delay and user behavior.

Like with LCP, it’s logical that a poor FID would negatively impact UX metrics (especially bounce rate).

A user that needs to wait to choose from a menu or type in their password is likely to become frustrated and bounce. And if that experience carries across several pages, it may lead to them reducing their total page views.

With that, here’s how FID correlated with their behavioral metrics.

FID and Bounce Rate

FID and Pages per Session

Note: We found that a high FID tends to correlate with a low number of pages per session. The opposite was also true.

FID and Time on Site

Overall, the only instance where we see hints of correlation is when we compare FID to the number of pages viewed per session. When it comes to bounce rate and time on site, a website’s FID appears to have no influence on user behavior.

How CLS Impacts User Behavior

Next, we wanted to investigate a potential link between CLS and user activity.

It seems logical that a poor CLS would frustrate users. And could therefore increase bounce rate and reduce session time.

However, we weren’t able to find any case studies or large-scale analysis that demonstrated that high CLS scores influence user behavior. So we decided to run an analysis that looked for potential relationships between CLS, bounce rate, “dwell time” and pages viewed. Here’s what we found:

CLS and Bounce Rate

CLS and Pages per Session

CLS and Time on Site

Overall, we didn’t see any significant correlation between CLS, bounce rate, time on site, or page views.

Summary

I hope you found this analysis interesting and useful (especially with Google’s Page Experience update on the way).

Here’s a link to the raw data set that we used. Along with our methods.

I want to thank SEO software WebCEO for providing the data that made this industry study possible.

Overall, it was interesting to see that most of the sites that we analyzed performed relatively well. And are largely ready for the Google update. And it was interesting to find that, while Core Web Vitals represent metrics for a positive UX on a website, we didn’t see any correlation with behavioral metrics.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What’s your main takeaway from today’s study? Or maybe you have a question about something from the analysis. Either way, leave a comment below right now.

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