How to add Rich Snippets on WordPress?
SEO Basics
  4 min read
How to add Rich…
SEO Tester Online
12 December 2019

How to add Rich Snippets on WordPress?

Do you have a WordPress Blog and you’re looking for a way to create rich snippets?

Your search is over: in this article, you will discover the best plugins for rich snippets on WordPress!

If you don’t know what rich snippets are, and what benefits they can offer to your website or blog, we recommend you take a look at our complete guide before reading.

Rich Snippets: what they are and how they work

As you know, to make your rich snippets to appear in search results, you must implement Schema.org’s structured data on your pages.

To do this, you need to have some basic programming knowledge.

Luckily WordPress, with its countless plugins, makes your job easier.

Here are the best plugins to implement structured Schema.org data in minutes. In this way, you can bring rich snippets to appear in your search results without writing a line of code.

All-in-One Schema Rich Snippets

All In One Schema Rich Snippets Logo

All-in-One Schema Rich Snippets is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins to create rich snippets.

The plugin is free and supports the following types of structured data:

  1. Events
  2. People
  3. Products
  4. Recipes
  5. Software
  6. Video
  7. Articles

Besides, they have announced new integrations:

  1. Breadcrumbs
  2. Local businesses
  3. Books

Despite being widely available, Al-in-One Schema Rich Snippets is not among the most comprehensive plugins available on the market and does not have many customization options.

Nevertheless, it’s still a great free plugin that does its job well.

Schema Pro

Schema Pro Logo

If you are looking for a more professional solution and have a budget to spend on creating rich snippets, then you could consider the Schema Pro plugin, which offers a fast implementation of microdata for:

  1. Articles
  2. Books
  3. Recipes
  4. Products
  5. Courses
  6. Reviews
  7. Events
  8. Local businesses

With an intuitive interface and a three-step configuration process, you can implement the types of microdata that you think are most relevant to the content of your pages within seconds.

Schema App Structured Data

Schema App Structured Data Logo

Schema App allows you, in a very few steps, to automatically activate schema.org markups for all pages on your WordPress site. 

Specifically, you will be able to use markups of the following types:

  1. Page
  2. Post
  3. Search
  4. Author
  5. Category
  6. Tag
  7. Blog
  8. Breadcrumb
  9. Website

If you want to take full advantage of the potential of this plugin, then you can buy the paid version to be able to manage:

  1. Products on WooCommerce
  2. Links to Wikipedia and Wikidata
  3. Review widgets
  4. Custom posts

WP SEO Structured Data Schema

WP SEO Structured Data LogoSchema

WP SEO Structured Data Schema is a great plugin that offers extensive support for different types of structured data.

The microdata supported in the free version belong to the following categories:

  1. Organizations
  2. Local businesses
  3. News
  4. Blog post
  5. Events
  6. Products
  7. Video
  8. Services
  9. Reviews
  10. Restaurants

The pro version offers features such as:

  1. Auto-complete function
  2. Multi-site support
  3. Support for more microdata types

WP SEO Structured Data Schema is a complete plugin, and a great solution also in its free version.

WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro Logo

If you have a blog that mainly contains reviews of products or services, then a more specific plugin might come in handy.

It is WP Review Pro – available in both free and paid versions – a WordPress plugin that is ideal for integrating Rich Snippet for reviews.

WP Review Pro offers support for reviews of:

  • Products
  • Books
  • Games
  • Films
  • Music
  • Art
  • Places
  • Recipes
  • Restaurants
  • Software
  • Shops
  • TV series
  • Websites

Being a review-specific plugin, WP Review Pro offers several custom-designed solutions and rating systems.

An interesting feature of the paid version WP Review Pro is the integration of Google Places’ reviews on your WordPress site.

WP Product Review

WP Product Review Logo

An alternative to WP Review Pro is WP Product Review. It is the ideal solution to integrate specific microdata for reviewers.

Among the available features, WP Product Review offers:

  1. Custom ratings
  2. Comparison tables
  3. Shortcode for reviews
  4. Product lists
  5. Reviews written by visitors.

The plugin is extremely intuitive and highly customizable, although a bit too basic on the visual point of view.

WP Product Review is available in both free and paid versions. It is a great solution for review-based websites and blogs that sell products through affiliate programs.

Want to check if you’ve implemented structured data correctly?

Whether you used WordPress plugins or entered structured data manually, it is important to make sure you implemented it correctly.

You can verify that you have entered the structured data correctly with our SEO Checker tool for free:

Structured Data Test Tool

Another useful tool is Google’s structured data test tool.

To test the correct implementation of structured data, simply enter the URL of the page and the code snippet.

The tool will show the page’s microdata and their type, showing implementation errors.

Try it now.

White Hat, Gray Hat and Black Hat SEO: what are the differences?

SEO is a vast matter. It includes many techniques, approaches, and even points of view about professional ethics.

For this reason, SEO professionals identify three main categories of optimization practices:

  • White Hat SEO techniques;
  • Gray Hat SEO techniques;
  • Black Hat SEO techniques. 

If you work with SEO, you are already using techniques that fall into one of these three categories, whether you are aware of them or not. In this article, we go into detail of the white hat, black hat, and grey hat SEO techniques and their features.

What is white hat SEO?

Professionals use White hat SEO techniques when they comply with the guidelines provided by Google and other search engines and doing their work without cheating.

The White Hat SEO consultant plays by the rules and doesn’t try to get around them. She doesn’t exploit the flaws of the algorithm, nor she damages her competitors.

Doing white hat SEO is the best solution if you aim to long-term results and don’t want to see your work go wasted after a Google’s algorithm update, penalizations, or manual actions

You’ll see results coming slowly, but steadily.

Examples of White Hat SEO techniques

  • Keyword research;
  • Optimization of the website user experience;
  • Natural use of keywords in the tag title and headings, in the content, in the alt text, and the anchor;
  • Constant quality content creation.

Black Hat SEO

As you can imagine, while White Hat SEO is linked to an ethical, rules-abiding way of working, Black Hat SEO is quite the opposite.

With Black Hat SEO, we mean an approach to search engine optimization that aims to get the best results as soon as possible with any means necessary, including techniques for SERP and algorithms’ manipulation, or even practices that are at the edge of the law, that slander or damage the competitors. 

What are the consequences of such practices?

Compared to White SEO, Black Hat SEO techniques can boost your results in no time. But their effect is always temporary. Eventually, the search engine will get the better of you, thanks to its constant updating and searching for malpractices. 

A Black Hat SEO strategy always ends up with a penalization and the disappearance of the website from search results.

Examples Black Hat SEO techniques

  • Keyword stuffing (it’s obsolete, anyway);
  • PBN (private blog network) creation;
  • Use of doorways;
  • Cloaking;
  • Duplicate contents

Gray Hat SEO

As well as in life, SEO it’s not necessarily a matter of black or white. There various shades of gray, and we’re not talking about anything kinky.

Grey Hat SEO techniques don’t break Google’s guidelines, but it does not mean that the search engine looks favorably upon them. 

They are strategies that the algorithm cannot notice and aim to improve the ranking of a website in a not-so-natural way.

Examples of Gray Hat SEO techniques

  • Moderate link building practices;
  • Edit the publication date of articles and make them appear as new;
  • Republish preexistent content with just little modifications.

White Hat or Black Hat?

SEO is a complicated matter, and a true professional must master many techniques. 

But SEO is not all about techniques and strategies. A relevant part of the job deals with ethical matters.

In the end, the choice is yours: will you be a diligent SEO or will you turn to the dark side?

Crawling, Indexing and Ranking: how do Search Engines work?

Search engines have evolved into answer engines. And very sophisticated ones.

Their job is to discover, interpret, and organize content on the internet; to show users results that are relevant to them and their needs. 

To be sure that your content appears to as many users as possible, you must understand how to make it visible first.

Visibility is the most critical aspect of SEO; the ‘zero moment’ when everything starts. If the search engine does not index your website, it cannot show it among its results.

But, how do search engines work? They do three things: crawling, indexing, and ranking.

  • Crawlingis the analysis of the webpages on the internet. The search engine scans the code and the content of every URL it finds.
  • Indexingis the gathering of contents found during the crawling process. If a page is on this list, it means that the search engine indexed it, and it can appear among the search results for the related queries.
  • Rankingis the order in which the indexed results appear on the result page (SERP). The list goes from the most relevant content to the least.

Crawling

Crawling is the process through which the search engine rummages the content on the world wide web: websites old and new, articles, product sheets, images, links, etc.

Search engines use crawlers (also called bots or spiders) that, through specific algorithms, decide which websites to scan and how often, distributing the so-called crawl budget.

The crawler discovers new content by identifying and recording every link it finds on the scanned pages and then puts them in a list of to-be-crawled URLs.

This action is critical for SEO because this is the moment when the search engine discovers the number and the quality of connections of a page, both inbound and outbound. 

Do you wanna know more about crawling? Learn how Search Engines’ crawlers work reading our article.

Indexing

Once it has extracted the page content, the crawler will put it on the index of the visited pages and organizes all the information. The information is then used to measure the relevance of the page compared to similar ones. 

Ranking

While the two previous activities are the “behind-the-scenes” of the work of search engines, ranking is the most evident one. 

SERP is where an SEO consultant can show its customers the results of her work. Once a user enters a keyword on the search bar, the search engine will search on its index the pages that match the search query.

Then it gives to these pages a score calculated out of 200 different ranking factors.

If you did a good SEO job, the page, blog post, or product sheet you worked on would get a better positioning than your competitors.

Ranking factors

A page ranking process includes different aspects.

Putting technicalities aside, an ‘answer engine’ like Google continually learns how to provide information in the best way possible, putting into relation different factors:

  • Website typology: a simple ranking, made by the search engine to tell a search query from another;
  • Context: related to each search query;
  • Time: The importance given to a single factor varies with the query;
  • Layout: SERP will show different results depending on the search intent. 

Website typology

As soon as the user types a query, the first thing the search engine does is to categorize it so that it can return the best typology for that query.

For example:

  • Your Money, Your life (YMYL) websites;
  • Local businesses’ websites;
  • Adults websites;
  • News websites.
  • Etc.

It is an-ever changing ranking, but it helps determine to which ‘place’ a query belongs.

Context

The search engine considers context, too. It extracts any relevant information form the user who types a query, understanding the social, historical, and environmental factors in play and providing the most useful answer. These factors are, for example, position, time, query type. 

Time

Another aspect that you must keep into consideration is the relation between the ‘weight’ given to a query, the time it has been performed, and the time the content has been indexed.

This because every search query has a different intent, and the search engine knows it.

For this reason, results for, say, “First World War” are more influenced by the source authority, while for “movies out now” the search engine prioritizes the content freshness.

Results layout

The choice to show the knowledge graph rather than videos or related results depends on the query.

If the researched content is mainly video, videos are what Google will show on the SERP.

Google SERP typing "how to make pizza"

If instead, the search intent is about a topic with many relevant queries, the “people also search for” box appears.

People also ask box

And this also goes for other SERP elements, such as topics and related searches.

Google searches related to dog food

Heading tags: what they are and how to use them

What is the first thing you notice when browsing a website or blog? Nine times out of ten, it’s the heading.

The reason is simple: the heading makes both users and Google understand the topic of a webpage.

It is crucial to use the title, h1, h2, and other heading tags the right way, so you can make your arguments clear to your readers and increase your ranking on search engines.

How to use heading tags

These are the types of heading tag you should use to organize your content:

  • H1 tag: this is the heading that more than any other is used to introduce the main topic of a page. It plays an important role when it comes to ranking, so give it extra attention: it must be consistent with the main keyword you have chosen.
  • H2 tag: this is the heading tag for single paragraphs. It must introduce its topic. Also, they must follow a logical order.
  • H3 tag. It’s the subtitle heading of a paragraph. You should use it when the title needs more explanation. Besides, it’s a good sign of credibility.
  • H4, H5, and H6 tags are less used and provide further information about the topic. 

Why use heading tags?

Use heading tags is like putting titles inside a textbook: they help the reader orient herself during reading.

However, there are some differences between reading a book and reading a webpage. These are the moment, the context, and the need.

In the first case, we have an enthusiast who reads for pleasure.

In the second case, a busy and easily distracted person, who is probably reading our content while commuting. For this reason, she needs that the information would be as organized and understandable as possible.

This is what headings are for: to make browsing easier, even for the most absent-minded reader.

How to optimize heading tags

  1. Whether you’re writing for a personal blog or a company one, you should ask first: “what is my goal?”, “Who are my readers?”, “What are they looking for?”.
  2.  If you’re writing to position your pages within the SERP, your heading tags should include your main keyword or related ones. But remember they must make sense to humans, too.
  3. Avoid keyword stuffing, which is the excessive repetition of the same keyword in titles and paragraphs: spiders would penalize your page.
  4. Heading tags follow a decreasing order: start with an H1 tag, and go on with H2, H3, etc.
  5. Although there are no official rules, you really should use just one H1 tag. You can ignore the rule when your page is partitioned into sections. In this case, every section can have its H1 tag. Be sure that all the tags follow a hierarchical order.
  6. Always consider keyword prominence and keyword proximity. 

What is <Title> tag

To create perfect and SEO-oriented titles, in addition to heading tags, you need to focus on the title tag, too. 

You can find it on the HTML code between the <title> and </title> tags. Its goal is to tell both Google and users what the page is about.

The title tag is not displayed on the page, but you can find it on the snippet with the URL and the Meta Description.

Snippet example

Differences between title and H1

Both work as page titles. In fact, they can coincide. Anyway, you should keep in mind that the tag title appears on the SERP (the search result page), while the second is visible on the page.

The title must be 65-70 characters long, so it will not appear as truncated on the snippet. Actually, Google calculates the pixel length, not the characters (i.e., an m will take more space than an l). 

Anyway, 65-70 characters sum up to the number of allowed pixels (400px circa).

For the H1 heading, in its turn, you don’t have to fit into this limit. You can add more to the H1 title’s meaning. 

To take advance of the differences between the two titles, make them different but consistent with each other. It can increase your chances to rank your page for different keywords and attract more traffic to your website. 

How to use H2 and H3

To use the textbook metaphor, the H1 is your book’s title, the H2s are chapters’ titles, and H3s are paragraphs’ titles.

It makes no sense then to ask what is more important between the two. It would be like to ask what is more effective between a chapter’s title and a paragraph’s title.

How to build an internal index of headings

An important aspect of headings is that they can be used as items of the internal menu. This can be done thanks to anchors.

You can create them by editing the page code, or by using plugins that convert titles into links. 

This can benefit your ranking in two ways:

  1. Google will make the internal anchors visible on the SERP and boost our ranking.
  2. It will make reading easier for users.

What not to do with headers? Let Google speak

We talked about what you should do, but it’s also useful to talk about what you should not do.

In its playbook, Google says that in your headings you must not:

  1. Put useless text;
  2. Misplace heading tags;
  3. Use heading sizes that are inconsistent with the hierarchy (i.e., make h2s smaller than h3s);
  4. Use too many headings;
  5. Write too long headings;
  6. Use heading tags by keeping in mind only the text style.

Are your Heading Tags optimized?

Making sure that the headings of your web pages are correctly optimized is a best practice when you work at your On-Page SEO. You can check if the heading tags are optimized using our SEO Checker, that will generate automatically some suggestions to improve the headings in the page you analyzed.

Check if your Heading Tags are optimized for SEO.

What is crawling and why is it crucial for SEO?

To understand SEO and its dynamics, it is crucial knowing how a search engine analyzes and organizes the pieces of information it collects.

One of the fundamental processes that make search engines to index content is the so-called crawlingBy this term, we mean the work the bot (also called spider) does when it scans a webpage.

How crawling works

The search engines use crawling to access, discover, and scan pages around the web. 

When they explore a website, they visit all the links contained in it and follow the instructions included in the robots.txt file. In this file, you can find the directions for the search engine on how it should “crawl” the website. 

Through the robots.txt file, we can suggest the search engine to ignore particular resources within our website. Through the sitemap (i.e., the list of the site URLs), instead, we can help the crawler navigate our website, providing it with a map of its resources.

Crawlers use algorithms to establish the frequency with which they scan a specific page and how many pages of the website it must scan.

These algorithms help crawlers to tell a frequently updated page from one that doesn’t change over time: the crawler would scan the first one more regularly. A key concept, from this point of view, is the crawl budget.

Crawling of images, audio and video files

Usually, search engines don’t scan and index every URL address that they meet on their way.

We are not saying that crawlers are not capable of interpreting content other than text files. They are, and they’re getting better at it. Anyway, it’s better to use filenames and metadata to help search engines reading, indexing, and ranking the content on the SERP.

Crawlers on links, sitemaps, and submit pages

Crawlers discover new pages by scanning the already-existing ones and extracting the links to other pages.

The crawler adds the addresses to the yet-to-be-analyzed file list and, then, the bot will download them.

In this process, search engines will always find new webpages that, in their turn, will link to other pages.

Another way search engines have to find new pages is to scan sitemaps. As we said before, a sitemap is a list of scannable URLs.

Sitemap xml example

A third way is to send the URLs to search engines manually. It is a solution for telling Google that we have new content without waiting for the next scheduled scan. 

We can ask for a scan via Google Search Console.

However, you should resort to it only when you want to make Google scan several pages (imagine submitting one page at the time). Conversely, Google prefers XML sitemaps for large URL volumes.

How do Search Engines work?

For sure, Search Engines are fascinating. Their algorithms are more and more complex each day and it’s not easy (sometimes even impossible) to fully understand how they work.

If you want to know more, we suggest you read our article about the Crawling, Indexing and Ranking phases of Search Engines.

Image Optimization: an SEO Guide

Image searches are often underrated. They have great potential for many search queries. For many of them, images are the main results that the SERP returns.

As well as text, images need to be optimized if you want the crawler to like them. If you succeed, images can boost the ranking of your page within the SERP.

There are many ways to use images to improve your positioning, as mentioned in Google’s best practices for images

These are the most important ones.

Optimize the image alt-text and filename: best practices

For now, the crawler can recognize content, any content, only by its textual content. If you want your images to be SEO-friendly, you must work on their alt text and filename.

What is the alt-text?

Alt-text is the short form for alternate text. It is the piece of text that appears on the web page when it fails to load an image. 

You would do a lovely thing for your visitors if you provided them with an accurate description of the image. And what happens if the visitor is happy? You got it. The crawler is happy. Not only because you’re helping humans, but because you’re helping it, too.

Remember? It cannot “see” images, so it needs a bit of help to understand what the image is showing.

How to optimize the alt-text

Put a detailed description of the image. Of course, it must contain the appropriate keyword. And it must be coherent with the image. Because you did your keyword research, right?

Now it is time to put the alt-text in the image. There are many ways:

image optimization seo editor screen

An example of a good alt-text

For this image, you can write «a picture of a cat,» sure. But you can be more specific. What about: «a picture of a sleeping black European cat?». Be as descriptive as you can be.

Title and description

You can also add a title and description to the image. You can use these fields to add further information to the image for the crawler. Respectively, you should use a shorter and a longer text than the one you used for the alt-text

Optimize the image filename and URL

Another way to help the crawler is to use a descriptive filename. It helps the spider understand what the image is about, too. 

Also, the image must have a descriptive URL — something like:

www.yoursite.com/images/black-cat-sleeping.jpg

How to optimize images for your web page

The first thing you should know is that image quality influences the ranking. If you cannot produce images on your own, there are a few links from which you can download high-resolution images for free.

How to optimize the image quality and size

So, high-quality images are critical for a good ranking. But so it is the page loading time, as you should know. And high-quality images mean slow loading times. 

How to kill two birds with one stone?

You can use your favorite image processing software, but you can also use one of the many online free image compression tools:

  • Kraken: can optimize the image size without virtually any loss in quality. It is a freemium solution. You can optimize up to 100MB for free. After that, you have to subscribe to a paid account.
  • TinyPNG: can convert for free both PNG and JPEG images. Sometimes it returns errors. In that case, retry.
  • Iloveimg: Many tools in one. You can convert the image format, add watermark, edit, reduce the file size and resolution, and much more. 
  • Squoosh: very straightforward. Just drag and drop the image you want to convert.
  • Optimizilla: can optimize batches of images.

There is another way to use high quality yet fast-to-load images. You can embed them directly from Instagram. 

  • Select the image you want to use on Instagram
  • Tap on the three-dot icon;
  • Select “embed” on the pop-up menu;
  • Copy the snippet and paste it on your webpage

Use responsive images

Users can view your webpage on a multitude of devices and, thus, screens of different sizes. An excellent way to speed up loading times is to use various versions of an image, so to load a smaller (read: faster to load) one on smaller devices. 

To learn how to do it, and what sizes to choose, read Google’s fundamentals for images

The Image Sitemap

We already mentioned that Google could not ‘read’ images. So we must provide the crawler with something that tells it what images are on a webpage and what they’re showing.

You can help it with an image sitemap. It is a document that tells how many and what images are on a single webpage. To create it, follow Google’s guide.

Besides the practices to optimize images for search engines, remember that they are part of your content, and it must be coherent with all the rest. 

Put your images near relevant text and, above all, always keep quality in mind!

What is Google’s SERP?

Are you taking your first steps in the world of SEO and don’t know where to begin?

Let’s start with the basics. SERP is a fundamental part of SEO and therefore deserves an in-depth study.

What is SERP?

As you can imagine, SERP is an acronym. It stands for Search Engine Results Page.

Keeping it simple, it’s that page that contains the results that Google (and other search engines) provides to those looking for information about a particular keyword.

SERPs have evolved and have become much more complicated than a few years ago. Take Google’s. It’s easy to notice how much its SERPs have changed over time.

As always, it comes with a minimal style: a simple search bar below the logo, which is often replaced by a doodle.

Besides them, there are few other buttons: links to Google’s products and services (Gmail, Google Images, Google Apps, and Google Accounts) and the “customize” feature.

But, to discover Page and Brin’s creature’s real magic, we must type a query. Here, we can see how Google never ceases to surprise us: welcome to the actual SERP!

The filter bar and search tools

Between the search bar and Google’s SERP, we find search tools and filters. Depending on the topic you are looking for, the order of these items can change.

We type, for example, Sergio Leone. In addition to the main news in the Web section, we can refine the search by Images, Videos, News, and Books.

SERP example typing Sergio Leone

This order is neither random nor fixed: Google understands we’re searching for a director and gives us the most relevant information and the most relevant content first.

Thanks to Universal Search, the Google page also shows various elements of the results. In addition to the traditional Snippets that lead to web pages, we find the news box, images, videos, and the Knowledge Graph.

If the search intent is local – the user searches “restaurant + City Name”–, the maps will be in second place because the user is looking for a restaurant nearby. 

How does the SERP change?

The Search Engine Result Page will show a series of items based on the type of search: navigational, informational, or transactional.

In some cases, if the search is for a buyable item, paid results may appear.

An example? If the user searches for a “Gucci watch” on Google, she will find ads that will lead her to buy that watch.

SERP example typing Gucci Watch

We can find advertisements on the right side of the SERP, in the beginning, or the final part.

The SERP is no longer a simple list of URLs. It is a page that, depending on the query, provides different types of results and tries to refine itself over time, learning to respond to the user’s search intent.

To make its service more efficient, Google gives logged users the ability to use the “Your Related Searches” feature. This feature takes advantage of the user’s search history to return the most accurate results for her.

To satisfy the user’s search intent, the SERP can answer to the user even before showing results. If the query typed on the search bar is a question like What is the distance between Earth and Moon, the SERP will return a box with Google’s direct answer.

The elements that make up the SERP results

We start with the standard result – i.e., the snippet. It is crucial if you want to rank well within the SERP.

The snippet can be broken down into three elements.

Page title: By clicking on it, the user lands on the page.

URL. It is colored green. Sometimes we can see the breadcrumbs instead of the URL. The latter being the description of the path that goes from the website’s home to that specific page. 

In this way, the user can access the page category.

Meta description: It is a description of the page. We can enter it on the page code through a specific tag. If we don’t set it, Google will create one taking an excerpt from the page that it considers consistent with the user’s search.

The snippet can also include other elements that will help your result to stand out against the competitors. We are talking about sitelinks, minilinks, and rich snippets.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links to the internal pages of the site. They also are a clue of a good SEO job because Google only shows them for the first result and only if it finds them useful for the user.

Minilinks

Like the site links, they are a series of links shown below the snippet. Minilinks allow the user to go from the page snippet to a different page of the same website.

Unlike site links, they can also appear for rankings other than the first one.

Rich snippet

Finally, rich snippets are search results that show on the SERP additional information.

Rich snippets example

Search engines use structured data to make a rich snippet appear in the SERP. It is a set of semantic tags that help the algorithm to interpret information.

Thanks to structured data, we can allow Google to show the ratings our customer gave to our products, to notify the user of events, or show the cost of a product or service.

To learn more about rich snippets, we suggest you read our dedicated article.

Check your site’s SERP ranking

Now that you’ve fully understood what Google’s SERP is, what it’s made up of, and what elements can help a website’s ranking, you may be wondering how to verify the ranking of your pages within the SERP.

Use Google!

The first way to verify the ranking of your website is to use a search engine. Log out to not influence the search engine and perform your tests on the search bar.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that, among its many features, it also allows checking the pages’ average ranking.

To check your ranking regarding specific keywords, we just have to click on “Performance” on the left menu.

From this screen, you will be able to view locations based on:

  1. Search queries
  2. Pages
  3. Countries
  4. Devices
  5. Appearance in search
  6. Date

 

Keyword Explorer Tool Guide

Keyword Explorer Tool is the tool that allows you to identify the best keywords to position yourself on the first page of search engines.

Using it, you can find out what the search volume for a given keyword is, and get hundreds of related keyword suggestions.

How to access the Keyword Explorer Tool?

To access our keyword research software, you will need to click the tool icon on the left side menu.

How to search?

In addition to keyword searches, for which you only have to type in your keywords and click the magnifying glass, with our software you can also search by domain.

This function is useful in order to find out with which keywords your competitors’ websites have positioned themselves.

To start this analysis, simply select the item “Domain” (1), type the URL of the site in the search bar (2) and, after choosing the location (3) among more than 35, click on the magnifying glass magnification (4).

You can also start from a search already done in the past, by clicking on one of the results to the right of “Last search:” (5), or click “find out more” to start a short slideshow useful for using the tool in the right way.

After clicking on the magnifying glass, you will be able to view valuable information on new positioning opportunities!

What types of results can I identify?

Each keyword search returns three types of results:

  • Autocomplete (1)
  • Related searches (2)
  • With equal terms (3)

Let’s analyze them in detail.

Matching Phrases (Autocomplete)

They are those keywords that contain the words analyzed in the same order in which you typed them.

Related Searches

By selecting “Related Searches” you can identify the keywords semantically linked to the searched keyword, without necessarily containing it within them.

With equal terms

The “With equal terms” option, on the other hand, lists the keyword suggestions containing the words you entered in your analysis, but in a different order from the one you typed, so as to provide all possible combinations.

How to set the filters?

In order to make your search even more detailed, you can use the “Filters” function (1) by clicking on the button of the same name. 

This will allow you to set the following parameters:

“Search volume” (2) or the average number of monthly searches over 12 months in a given country; a useful metric to estimate the potential traffic for a certain keyword. 

The higher the volumes of a certain keyword, the more traffic you can get from it. Usually, the higher the search volume of a keyword, the greater the effort required to rank among the top results in the SERP.

“Competition” (3) or the level of competition for a given keyword in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

A higher level of competition results in a higher CPC for that particular keyword.

“Cost per click” (4) is the estimated bid, in Google Ads, for a given keyword.

In other words, it is the average price incurred by the advertiser for each click generated by a paid advertisement.

“Keyword difficulty” (5) shows the difficulty of ranking in the top 10 results for a given keyword.

When it comes to Keyword Research, KD is a relevant data that strictly concerns organic research.

The Keyword Difficulty takes into account various factors such as the authority of the websites positioned and their backlink profile. 

Furthermore, you can enter one or more keywords, separated by commas, to be included (6) or excluded (7) in the results of your analysis.

If you want to go back to the previous search settings click on “Reset” (8), if you want to confirm the new indications click on “Apply” (9).

How to copy keywords?

To copy the keywords to the clipboard, you need to select the keywords you are interested in, using the ticks to their left, and click on the “Copy” button at the bottom.

How to create keyword lists?

The keywords can also be saved in lists, in order to group them and always have them at hand. Then, select the keywords you are interested in, by clicking on the small empty square to the left of the keyword and finally click on the “Add to list” button.

The number of selected words will appear at the bottom left.

After clicking on this window will appear.

Add your keywords to an already created list, searching for it by typing the name of the keyword list in the “Search list” field, or create a new one by clicking “+ Create list”.

In this case, rename your keyword list and click on apply to complete the operation.

How to export keywords in CSV?

As for data saving, the tool allows you to export keywords in .csv format.

To do this, select the keywords you want to include in the document (if you want to insert them all, just click the empty square next to “Keyword”) and click on the “Export CSV” button at the bottom.

The file download will start automatically. Once downloaded, the .csv document can be used as a spreadsheet on programs such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets / Spreadsheet.

How to analyze the SERP?

In addition to the keyword analysis, you can also perform the SERP analysis, displaying the top 10 Google results for each keyword.

In fact, by clicking on a specific keyword, a preview of the Google results will appear on the right of the screen with many useful information, such as:

  • SEO difficulty
  • Authority metrics (PA and DA)
  • Estimated visits per month (EV)
  • Number of shares on Facebook (FB)
  • Average number of backlinks on the top 10 results (below the graph)
  • Number of links to the first 10 pages positioned (Links)
  • Presence of ads and featured snippets
  • Search trend

In this way, you can carry out a very thorough SERP analysis.

How to export SERP to CSV

As with keywords, the Keyword Explorer allows you to export SERP data in .csv format as well. 

To do this, click on the keyword you are interested in studying the results page and go to the “Export SERP” button located at the bottom right. The download of the file containing the data of the first 10 websites will start after a few moments.

Lead Generation Tool Guide

The Lead Generation Tool is the tool that allows you to generate free SEO lead magnets to offer to your potential clients to start a lead generation process.

This will allow you to gain valuable new leads to increase your opportunities to provide SEO consulting services as a freelancer or if you work in an agency.

How to access the Lead Generation Tool?

To start using our software, simply click on the respective icon in the side menu on the left or access your dashboard from here.

How to create your first form?

Once you click the link or icon you will land on this page.

In order to start your first lead generation project and start acquiring new contacts, you must first give a name to your form, entering it in the appropriate box (1), keeping in mind not to exceed 40 characters (2).

Then you can choose one of the available lead magnets. You can give the possibility to the users who fill in your form to analyze their website or that of a competitor with our SEO Checker. If you prefer this option and want your users to be redirected to our platform click “Analysis on SEO Tester Online” (3).

In case you want to have your future leads to download an advanced white label SEO report, just click “SEO Report with your brand“(4). Want to have your prospects receive a custom file of yours? Choose the third option “Your .PDF file“. (5).

The last two choices mentioned above are only available to subscribers of a paid plan. In order to take advantage of the potential of “SEO Report with your brand” and “Your .PDF File“, you will need to subscribe. You can choose the plan that best suits your needs here.

The last alternative “Partner Network” (6) is currently unavailable. Follow our Telegram channel to find out when this feature will be activated and to keep up with the latest SEO News.

After naming your form and choosing the lead magnet to feed to your users, click on “Create your first form“.

How to create a new form?

You can generate a new form whenever you want by returning to the main screen of the Lead Generation Tool, clicking the respective icon in the side menu on the left or from here, and selecting the button at the top right “+ Create Form“. Form that we remind you, you can later insert on your site by pasting an embed.

What is an embed?

It is nothing but a small portion of HTML code that you will have to paste to the code at the base of your site (we will see how later) to make the contact generation form appear on your web pages.

The form will have the structure of the one presented on the right of this screen and will allow users of your site or users who visit the landing page on which you will install your embed, after entering their site name, their email, a keyword and/or other required data, to get an SEO analysis via SEO Tester Online, a white label SEO report or a file prepared by you.

When your prospect downloads their lead magnet, you will receive their contact and other information entered in the form. Fundamental information to undertake targeted marketing and sales actions in order to convert him from a simple user to a paying customer.

In the left part of the screen (1) you can decide the changes to be made to your form, while in the right part (2), instead, you can see them applied, in real-time.

Now that you have understood what an embed is, and what its function is, let’s see how you can customize your form.

First of all, you can decide which fields to have your user fill in. With the drag and drop function (1) you can choose the order of the fields by dragging them. From the left to the right the type of field, indicated by an icon (2), the name of the field (3), in this case, “website”, the box “Required” (4) to check when you want to declare a field as mandatory and the toggle (5) to choose whether to insert a field or not.

In this case, both the box and the toggle are colored in gray as selected by default. Without this data, it would not be possible to carry out the SEO analysis that is the basis of the generation of contacts.

You can ask your user for other data such as email, keyword, phone, and name. Be careful, generally, a higher number of requested data generates more profiled leads but in smaller numbers and vice versa.

You can enter a new field by clicking “+ Add a Field” (6). You will land on this screen.

To create a new field, simply enter these four pieces of information. Enter in “Field label” (1) the name of the field you want to appear in the form. Once written it will automatically generate a “Field ID” (2) that you can change to your liking at a later time. Select from the 6 options available (short text, long text, link, email, select, hidden) the “Field type” (3) that best suits your needs and the information you want the user to enter in the form. Finally, choose a “Placeholder” (4) or a text that appears below the name of the field and that explains the action that your potential customer must take or shows an example of what to write.

 

Click “Go Back” (1) to go back or “Save” (2) to permanently add a new field or confirm changes made to a pre-existing box.

On the left, you can monitor the new fields added, set them as mandatory or not, and enable or disable them through the use of the toggle (as shown above).

Scroll down to the design section, where you can change the layout of your form. We suggest, for the choice of colors, customize the form making it as much in line as possible with the design and brand image of your website.

The best option is definitely to stay true to your brand palette by choosing and entering the hexadecimal codes (color codes, e.g. #130D41) that you use for your site.

Do you want to insert a custom title in the embed shown to your users? Write it in the box below the words “Title of your form” (1). Remember not to exceed 100 characters. Explain to your potential lead what they will get after entering their information and clicking the button. You’ll be able to see the changes on the right side of the tool (4).

Want to give a different subtitle to the embed? Write it in the field below the words “Subtitle of your form” (2). Remember not to exceed 100 characters. You will be able to see your changes in the right part of the tool (5).

Do you want to modify the text of the CTA that will be shown in the button inside the form? Do it in the box below the text “Call to action button text” (3). Remember not to exceed 40 characters and clearly indicate the action the user will have to take to get his reward. You will be able to see the changes in the right part of the tool (6).

Do not forget to enable GDPR consent field (1), the General Data Protection Regulation, and remember to set the language of the form (2) by selecting Italian, English, Spanish and Polish.

How to enter the embed on my site?

To copy the embed code to your own website or that of your clients, simply click on the purple button at the top right “Copy to Clipboard“.

How to edit the SEO report?

What language do you want your report to be generated in? Decide among the 4 available languages “English” (1), “Italian“, “Spanish” or “Polish“.

Insert your brand logo in the report by clicking “Upload” (2) and further customize the document that your user will download.

Edit the report header by entering your data (company name, email, phone, website, or any other useful information) in the appropriate field (3). Remember not to exceed 50 characters.

If you want to upload your logo drag and drop your image file or insert it by clicking “Upload” (1). Go back by clicking “Go back” (2) and click “Confirm” (3) to continue customizing the report. Remember that the image must not exceed 5 MB in size.

By default, the report that your users will download after filling out the survey will contain the SEO score of the page or site, a brief exam description, and a simple solution to the problem.

It will also contain all exams from all categories: Basic, Content, Speed, and Social. Selecting and deselecting work the same as in the situation described above and will allow you to include or exclude each of these aspects or exams.

You will be able to choose to select or deselect an entire category (1) or a single exam (2).

Finally, you can edit your report by setting paragraphs or headers in the last section “Add some notes“.

How to monitor the results of your forms?

Once created you can, at any time, track the results of your lead generation project through the dashboard of our tool, which you can access from here.

You’ll be able to see the number of contacts collected (1), the conversion rate of the form (2), that is the percentage ratio between the views of the form (3), and the number of leads obtained.

You will be able to create a new one (6), verify the name (4) and by clicking the 3 dots “” (5) you will be able to:

  • Rename (1) the form
  • View the statistics (2)
  • Delete (4) the form

If you selected “Rename” on the previous screen, you can give a new name to your form by writing it in the box. You can undo this action by clicking “Undo“, going back, or confirm by clicking “Rename“.

By clicking on “…” in the initial screen and then on “Statistics” you will land on this further screen for further information. Thanks to the menu at the top of the tool dashboard you can move between 3 sections: Overview (1), where you can view the data and metrics of your Lead Generation project, Form (2), where you can edit your contact form, and Settings (3).

How to interpret the overview section of the Lead Generation Tool?

Once you have accessed the dashboard of the tool, you will have available in an all-inclusive screen all the data related to the performance of your form.

In the top left corner, you will find the name of the form (1). In the first box, you can see the number of contacts collected (2), the conversion rate of the form (3), i.e. the percentage ratio between organic visits (or views of the form) (4), and the number of leads obtained.

In the middle, there is a pink graph representing the acquisition trend, i.e. the trend related to the acquisition of leads during the days, weeks, or months in which the form was active.

On the same screen on the right the total number of acquired contacts that are waiting to be unlocked (5) and the contacts that you can still unlock (6) and therefore the total number of leads that you can still get information about. If you want to extend this limit, just click on the button “+ Add Credits” (7).

You will land on this page.

Choose the number of new contacts you want to unlock each month. Select the “+25 contacts/month” solution (1) or “+10 contacts/month“(2) and finalize your operation by clicking “Unblock” (4). To return to the previous screen click “Back” (3).

Also in the “Contacts” screen, scroll down to display a table with in-depth information for each lead.

You can move from one page to another by clicking the arrows in the box (1). You can select all the emails collected by clicking the square next to the word “Email” (2) and select a single email by clicking in the box to the left of the specified email address (3).

At the top right of the table you will see the number of contacts you have collected but which are blocked, that is, whose information you cannot know.

Once you have selected one or more emails, you can decide to unblock them by clicking the pink “Unblock” button (2). You can also export the leads and their information by clicking “Export” (3).

In case you decide to click “Unlock” you will see this screen.

Click “Go back” (1) to cancel the operation and “Continue” (2) to confirm what you have done.

If you choose to click the blue button in the upper right corner, then the “Export table will immediately start downloading a .csv file containing all the information of the selected leads.

How to change form settings?

Click on “Settings” (3) in the top menu to get to the respective section.

Here you’ll be able to rename the form, typing the new name in the box to the right of “Form Name” (1) and choose to “Automatically unlock leads” (2) once collected, so you don’t have to manually unlock the collected contacts, as shown above.

By clicking “Test your form” on the same screen, you’ll land on this page in the menu on the left.

By inserting email addresses in Whitelist you will have the possibility, once you’ve accessed the page where you’ve applied the embed code, to test the form without being deprived of credits.

Once completed you will receive an example report, similar to the one that will be generated for your future customers.

To verify your embeds you just need to insert an email in the box highlighted in the image and click Enter. Click the “X” to the right of the addresses already inserted to delete them.

Thanks to the side menu you can easily reach our “Integrations” section. Here you can discover how to connect your favorite digital marketing tools with SEO Tester Online. To do so, just follow the 4 steps illustrated in the section.

For other doubts or questions do not hesitate to contact us at support@seotesteronline.com.