Yep, it happened to me. I know better, but I was in a vulnerable place (over my data cap) and the promise of a good deal got me. Here’s what happened.

During one of my last press trips to the U.S. I accidentally watched a 40GB 4K movie over Plex on my mobile hotspot, and by day two of the trip, I was over my 50GB data limit and stuck using throttled speeds. I was able to make it with an eSIM I bought from Airalo, but at the end of the day I wasn’t happy since I knew when I got back to Canada, I’d still be out of data for another two and a half weeks.

Then, on the last day of the trip, a few hours before my flight, I got a call from someone claiming to be with Rogers’ win-back department. The conversation was a little sketchy, but I switch plans via win-back deals often and it always feels a little sketchy, so I decided to press onwards.

It started out nice enough, with the person asking what my current plan was and then making a counteroffer of basically the same plan at a lower price. For me, this was 100GB of Canada-U.S data for $37.

Things started to go south when the person on the phone asked for my personal information but didn’t transfer me to a secure line or send a link to a secure site for me to input it. During this process I gave up my address, driver’s licence number and credit card info (including the three-digit code on the back, which I learned after is not needed for a credit check).

By the end of that exchange I was getting really paranoid so I asked for the person’s employee number and the deal number, and to my surprise, they gave me those numbers, but then they told me another person would call me in a few days to let me know how to get my SIM card. Since I’d already given them my address, this felt really strange.

So I get off the phone with them, use the RBC app to put a pause on my credit card and contact Rogers proper to see if the employee number or deal number I was given were in their system. The first person I talked to was unable to find them and told me that I was most likely caught in a scam. From there, he set up a call with someone higher up at Roger’s who should be able to verify beyond a doubt if it was a scam or not.

A few days later, they call me to say that, as far as they can tell, it was a scam call. However, for my troubles, he offers me the same deal as the scammer and then tells me that someone from the win-back department will reach out to me. A day later they do, but they don’t offer me the deal and instead question me about an attempted purchase of an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I assume the scammer is the person behind this but since I’d canceled my credit card at this point, the deal didn’t go through. At the end of this call I was offered a different phone deal that was more expensive than my current Freedom Plan so I decided that I was just going to leave it at that and move on.

Overall, this was a pretty brutal experience and while I knew better, it just goes to show that anyone can be the victim of a scam. Make sure you can verify that the person calling you actually works for the company they say you do and to never give out your credit card numbers over the phone.

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

Happy Canada Day!

Every week, MobileSyrup outlines some of the most notable movies and TV shows that recently hit Canadian streaming platforms.

Our ‘Streaming in Canada’ column typically focuses on new content from Amazon’s Prime Video, Crave and Netflix, but other services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ will be mentioned when relevant. Premium video-on-demand (PVOD) platforms are also fair game as movies continue to come to digital early.

Finally, we’ll highlight shows or movies that are made by Canadian companies, involve notable Canadian cast or crew and/or are filmed in Canada.

Crave
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Original theatrical release date: March 29th, 2024Crave premiere date: June 28th, 2024Genre: MonsterRuntime: 1 hour, 55 minutes

After encountering more of his species in the Hollow Earth, Kong must reunite with Godzilla to stop Skar King and Shimo.

Godzilla x Kong: The Empire reunites Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong) with stars Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry, while Dan Stevens (Legion) joins the cast.

Stream Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire here.

An ad-free Crave Premium membership costs $22/month. Alternatively, there are two other subscription options: Crave Basic with Ads ($9.99/month) and Crave Standard with Ads ($14.99/month). Starz is available as a separate $5.99 add-on. More information on these memberships is available here.

The full list of movies and shows hitting Crave this month can be found here.

Disney+
Bluey (minisodes)

Only one week to go! Brand new Minisodes land on Disney+ July 3 #Bluey pic.twitter.com/iNFc6nCgvi

— Official Bluey TV (@OfficialBlueyTV) June 26, 2024

Disney+ Canada premiere date: July 3rd, 2024Genre: Animated preschoolRuntime: Seven (less than 10 minutes each)

Written by Bluey creator Joe Brumm, these new “minisodes” from the popular kids series highlight funny and sweet moments between Bluey and Bingo.

Stream Bluey here.

A Disney+ subscription costs $7.99/month (Standard with Ads), $11.99/month (Standard) or $14.99/month (Premium).

The full list of movies and shows hitting Disney+ Canada this month can be found here.

Netflix
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F [Netflix Original]

Netflix Canada premiere date: July 3rd, 2024Genre: Action-comedyRuntime: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Axel Foley must return to Beverly Hills and team up with a younger detective to save his estranged daughter.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the feature directorial debut of Mark Molloy and features returning series stars Eddie Murphy (Axel), Judge Reinhold (William “Billy” Rosewood), John Ashton (John Taggart), Paul Reiser (Jeffrey Friedman) and Bronson Pinchot (Serge), while Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception), Kevin Bacon (Footloose) and Taylour Paige (Zola) join the cast.

Stream Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F here.

For a breakdown of where you can stream the three other Beverly Hills Cop movies, click here.

July here

Sprint [Netflix Original]

Netflix Canada premiere date: July 2nd, 2024Genre: Sports documentaryRuntime: Four episodes (around 45 minutes each)

From the team behind Drive to Survive comes this docuseries about Olympic sprinters, featuring Sha’Carri Richardson, Noah Lyles, Shericka Jackson and more.

Stream Sprint here.

A Netflix ‘Standard with Ads’ subscription costs $5.99/month, a ‘Standard’ subscription (HD-supported) costs $16.49/month, and a ‘Premium’ membership is priced at $20.99/month (4K-supported).

The full list of movies and shows hitting Netflix Canada this month can be found here.

Prime Video
Space Cadet [Amazon Original]

Prime Video Canada premiere date: July 4th, 2024Genre: ComedyRuntime: 1 hour, 50 minutes

After submitting a doctored application, a Florida party girl finds herself enrolled in NASA’s ultra-competitive astronaut training program.

Space Cadet was written and directed by Liz W. Garcia (The Lifeguard) and stars Emma Roberts (Scream Queens), Tom Hopper (Umbrella Academy), Poppy Liu (Hacks) and Gabrielle Union (Bring It On).

Stream Space Cadet here.

Prime Video is included with an Amazon Prime membership, which costs $99/year. An additional $2.99/month fee is required to remove ads.

The full list of movies and shows hitting Prime Video Canada this month can be found here.

What are you planning to stream this week? Let us know in the comments.

For more suggestions, check out last week’s Streaming in Canada column.

Image credit: Netflix

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

Owners of the Pixel 6 series, be careful tinkering your phones at the moment. A bug has surfaced in recent days that is quite serious and may lead to your phone being bricked.

Over on Google’s Pixel Phone help community, a growing number of users are posting to inform Google that their Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, and Pixel 6a phones are now bricked after performing a factory reset.

In one thread that started on June 23, a user said they tried to factory reset their device, but it then got stuck on a boot screen with an error that only lets it return to recovery mode. Several folks have joined the thread to report similar happenings. In fact, so many users reported it to Google that they jumped into the thread after escalating the issue to confirm that this is a known bug. There is no word yet on a fix.

Unfortunately, Google has not yet said what the cause is, which software you would need to be on for this to happen, etc. At least one user was still on a May build of Android when their phone bricked. Others on the Android Beta subreddit have chimed in, so they may not be running fully stable builds.

We’ll do our best to report back with a fix from Google. Until then, take it easy on your Pixel 6.

// Tech Issues Today

Images often make up the largest part of webpages.

They have their own tab on Google results and even their own algorithm. Appearing in image results should be part of a complete SEO strategy to reach users looking for images.

Your content should contain high-quality images either way, so why not optimize them too?

It’s like the search engines are giving away Oreos and milk for free. Don’t only take the Oreo – it’s way better dunked in milk.

This article will discuss each aspect of image SEO in detail and guide you on optimizing your images for better visibility in search engines.

How Search Engines Index And Understand Images

Search engines crawl webpages to discover images and extract data from images, such as metadata and file names.

Google considers factors – such as surrounding text, image file name, alt text, captions, and page content – to understand the context of images and uses image recognition technologies to understand the content of the images.

What Is Image SEO?

Image optimization is a set of techniques for increasing visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) based on our knowledge of how search engines crawl, understand, and rank images.

This involves compressing images to reduce load times, using responsive images for different screen sizes, implementing lazy loading, adding relevant alt text for a better user experience, using descriptive file names, and implementing structured data for images.

With this background, let’s dig into each optimization tip below.

1. Choose The Right Image Format

There are dozens of image formats available, but Google search supports only these formats: JPEG, PNG, WebP, BMP, GIF, and SVG.

Let’s understand the differences between these formats and how they impact your website and SEO.

PNG: Uses lossless compression, meaning no image data is lost. Thus, it produces better-quality images and supports transparency, but it comes with a larger file size and is ideal for printing.
JPEG: Uses lossy compression and causes image quality degradation, but you can adjust the quality level to find a good balance.
WebP: Developed by Google, it uses lossless or lossy and is more efficient than JPG (ranging from 25% to 80%), thus providing smaller file sizes at comparable quality levels. It is supported by all major browsers.
GIF: Uses lossless compression but is limited to 256 colors, making it less suitable for high-quality images and more suitable for simple graphics and animations.
SVG: This vector-based format is used for logos, icons, and other designs because it can be scaled to any size without increasing file size. This makes it ideal for responsive web design.
BMP: Large and uncompressed image files that maintain very high quality. Due to its size, it is not typically used for websites, as it can significantly slow down page loading times.

For me, the best option is PNG, which can then be converted into WebP format for web deployment.

Regarding GIF conversion to WebP, note that old browsers, such as Safari 15.6 (macOS Catalina) and older, don’t support animated WebP formats.

Typically, only a few users utilize outdated browser versions, so you don’t need to worry about it.

As a general rule, when you use a certain technology, it is advisable to regularly monitor the percentage of your traffic’s devices that support it via Google Analytics.

How Compression Affects Image Quality And Load Times

To understand this, let’s use a sample image in BMP format and convert it into different formats.

Look at how file size and load time on the webpage change based on my experience.

As a testing environment, we used a local Apache web server and included images on a sample HTML page.

This illustrates how effective a WebP format is. It has the lowest file size and loads five times faster than PNG and almost twice as fast as JPG files.

That is why it is recommended to use WebP. If you have done that, it means you already made great progress in optimizing for the load. (There are cases when WebP image size can be higher than the original file. Learn more about it at Google’s FAQ page.)

However, changing the image format, a.k.a. applying a compression algorithm, may cause it to lose its quality and sharpness. This means that you should choose the appropriate format based on the nature of your website.

For example, if you have a photography website where retaining high-level details in images is key to user experience, it is advised to use PNG rather than JPG or WebP.

In that case, you can display WebP format thumbnails that link to the full-quality PNG images.

We have learned about the various image formats and their respective compression methods.

You might be wondering what different image compression tools, such as ShortPixel or TinyJPG, do.

Image compression services use advanced algorithms and strip out unnecessary metadata (like EXIF data and GPS tags) to reduce file sizes beyond the basic compression inherent in standard file formats.

These services apply enhanced lossy or lossless compression techniques, selectively removing data that is less noticeable to the human eye.

For example, when the sample image above is converted from JPG to WebP using ShortPixel lossy, it results in an 8.3 KB file, while TinyJPG generates a slightly different 8.7 KB file.

Below is a list of image compression services you may consider using:

However, be aware that compression using these tools may noticeably degrade the quality of images. For example, when done in screenshots containing text, it may distort the text on the image.

Therefore, it is always recommended that optimization types be checked and chosen carefully.

What About The AVIF Format?

AVIF is a new format that is supported across all major browsers – but it is not yet supported by Google, so we didn’t include it in our initial list.

It offers an even higher level of compression using lossy compression.

The same image file, for example, is 11 KB in AVIF compared to 41 KB in WebP.

However, as you may notice from the comparison below, it degrades the quality of the image. This is evident in the flattening of irregularities that occur in an image when compressed using AVIF compression algorithms, as opposed to using WebP on the right.

However, if you are satisfied with AVIF quality and want to use it, you can do so by including it in the <picture> tag as the first <source>.

Browsers that support AVIF will render it even smaller.

Google, which still doesn’t support it as of the writing of this article, will simply ignore it and proceed to the next format specified in <picture> tag.

Here is a sample code:

<picture>
<!– AVIF format will be processed if client (i.e. browser ) supports it as a first in list–>
<source type=”image/avif”

>

<!– WebP format will be processed if client doesn’t support AVIF  –>
<source type=”image/webp”

>

<!– If WebP is also not supported, the browser will then fall back to the PNG format  –>
<source type=”image/png”

>

<!– Lastly, if none of the advanced formats are compatible, the browser will default to displaying the JPEG image. –>
<img src=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image-300w.jpg”

alt=”Description of the image”>
</picture>

This progressive enhancement guarantees maximum compatibility across various browsers and devices.

We will cover the srcset and sizes attribute later in this article, explaining how to use them to optimize images for different devices and screen sizes, thus ensuring they load efficiently and are mobile-friendly.

2. Create Unique Images

Too many websites are cluttered with the same generic stock photos, so you want your photos to pop on your site and bring unique value to the users.

If you fill your website with stock imagery, you’ll look unoriginal because Google understands the content of the image. Since the same stock photo can be used on other websites, it will be treated as duplicate content.

Think about a corporate website, a consulting firm, or a business that prides itself on customer service. All these websites use virtually the same-looking stock image of a businessman smiling.

I’m sure you’ve seen one that looks like this:

While you may have your stock images perfectly optimized, it won’t have the same impact or potential SEO benefits as an original, high-quality image.

The more original pictures you have, the better the user experience will be and the better your odds of ranking on relevant searches.

Remember, large images are more likely to be featured in Google Discover.

Google recommends images be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the  max-image-preview:large setting in robots meta tag to ensure they are surfaced as large images in Google Discover.

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, max-image-preview:large” />

Here is an example of how that can help your images appear big:

However, here is a caveat. As you can see, thumbnails can also appear small even though webpages use the required setting.

Google doesn’t guarantee that it will always be surfacing big thumbnails.

The best you can do as an SEO is to include the required setting in robots meta tag and make sure images are at least 1200px in width:

3. Optimize Image File Names

When it comes to SEO, creating descriptive, keyword-rich (not stuffed) file names is absolutely crucial.

Image file names alert Google and other search engine crawlers as to the subject matter of the image.

Typically, file names that look like “IMG_722019” or something similar don’t help Google better understand the image.

Even though Google can now understand the content of the image, it doesn’t hurt to set meaningful file names and help Google understand images better.

Change the file name from the default to help the search engines understand your image and improve your SEO value.

Depending on how extensive your media library is, this involves some work, but changing the default image name is always a good idea.

4. Write SEO-Friendly Alt Text

Alt tags are text alternatives to images when a browser can’t properly render them. Similar to the title, the alt attribute describes the contents of an image file.

When the image won’t load, you’ll get an image box with the alt tag present in the top left corner. Make sure the alt tags fit with the image and make the picture relevant.

Paying attention to alt tags also benefits the overall on-page SEO strategy.

You want to ensure all other optimization areas are in place, but if the image fails to load for any reason, users will see what the image is supposed to be.

Plus, adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images, as alt text is a ranking factor.

It provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. Google uses that information to help determine the best image to return for a user’s query.

Here is an example of bad and good alt text per Google’s official documentation.

Additionally, alt text is required under the American Disabilities Act for individuals who are unable to view images themselves.

A descriptive alt text can alert users to exactly what is in the photo. For example, say you have a picture of chocolate on your website.

The alt text could read:

<img src=”chocolate-1.jpg” alt=”chocolate”/>

However, a better alternative text that describes the image would read:

<img src=”chocolate-1.jpg” alt=”dark chocolate coffee flavored bar”/>

For further SEO value, the alt text can act as the anchor text of an internal link when the image links to a different page on the site.

5. Optimize Your Page Title & Description

Google uses your page title and description as part of its image search algorithm.

All your basic on-page SEO factors, like metadata, header tags, copy on the page, structured data, etc., affect how Google ranks your images.

It’s like putting all your toppings on your burrito; it tastes way better with guacamole. So, make sure to add the guac to improve image rankings.

6. Define Your Dimensions

Image dimension attributes are important for preventing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issues that can interfere with your Core Web Vitals optimization. This stops the page from jumping when it loads.

Making sure that you include width and height attributes for every image and video element is key.

This tells the browser how much space to allocate for the resource and prevents the annoying content shifting that lowers your CLS score.

Check out the short video demo below on how images without the width and height attributes set can cause a page to jump up and down.

7. Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly

As you may have noticed, we briefly touched upon the  srcset and sizes attributes when discussing image formats.

In essence, these attributes enable responsive images, allowing them to scale according to the size of the user’s device or resolution and load at optimal size by saving precious bandwidth, particularly on slow network connections.

Now, let’s dive deeper into these attributes to understand how they function.

Let’s break down this sample code:

<picture>
<!– WebP format for browsers that support it –>
<source type=”image/webp”
srcset=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-300w.webp 300w,
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-600w.webp 600w,
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-1200w.webp 1200w”
sizes=”(max-width: 600px) 300px,
(max-width: 900px) 600px,
1200px” >

<!– Fallback JPEG format –>
<img src=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image-300w.jpg”
srcset=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-300w.jpg 300w,
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-600w.jpg 600w,
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-1200w.jpg 1200w”
sizes=”(max-width: 600px) 300px,
(max-width: 900px) 600px,
1200px”
alt=”Description of the image”>
</picture>

The srcset attribute is used within the <img> tag to specify different image files and their widths.

Each file is listed with a ‘w’ descriptor indicating the width of the image in pixels. This is necessary because browsers cannot identify image sizes until they are downloaded.

That is why you must specify the width to inform the browser about the width of each version. For example: srcset=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-300w.jpg 300w, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-600w.jpg 600w”

The sizes attribute is used by the browser, along with the srcset attribute, to pick a resource. It specifies the intended display width of the image for different viewport sizes.

For viewports up to 600 px wide, it will choose a 300 px wide image; for viewports up to 900 px, a 600 px wide image; and for larger viewports, a 1200 px wide image.

Without this attribute, the browser defaults to using the viewport’s full width to select an image from the srcset.

You can also use the “x” descriptor, which tells the browser to choose the most suitable image size based on the device’s screen resolution (like 1x, 2x, or 3x for standard, retina, and super retina screens).

<picture>
<!– WebP format –>
<source type=”image/webp” >
<!– Fallback JPEG format –>
<img src=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image.jpg” alt=”Description of the image”>
</picture>

Additionally, you may use “x” descriptors for different screen resolutions (for example, retina displays) where the image size remains constant.

Meanwhile, “w” descriptors are suitable for fluid, responsive layouts where the image size varies based on the viewport size.

I can read your thoughts as you ponder how working with sizes and srcset attributes is quite challenging to automate, even if you know the layout of your webpages well.

Fortunately, Chrome recently started developing support for , which will instruct the browser to determine the size of the lazy-loaded images from the srcset attribute based on the HTML layout and CSS.

This means that the browser will consider downloading the appropriate image size according to how it would be displayed on the page, as dictated by your CSS rules, rather than assuming it takes up the whole viewport width.

Remember that this feature will work only on lazy-loaded images. This is because the layout is already rendered when lazy-loaded images start downloading, allowing the browser to accurately calculate the size they occupy on the webpage specified in CSS.

However, note that you always need to specify the width and height attributes of the largest size available.

By specifying image dimensions and utilizing CSS (width: 100%; height: auto;) to maintain the aspect ratio, the browser can accurately select and display the image from the srcset attribute when using the .

8. Lazy Loading And Preloading

Lazy loading is deferring the loading of images that are not visible in the user’s viewport (above the fold).

Instead of loading all images when the page loads, lazy loading downloads images only as they are about to come into view when users scroll.

This reduces initial load time, speeds up page performance, and can significantly improve LCP, especially on pages with many images.

Implementing lazy loading is as simple as adding loading=”lazy” attribute in your <img> tag.

<img src=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image.jpg” loading=”lazy” alt=”Description”>

But never lazy-load images above the fold, as this can negatively affect the First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric.

Instead, preload them or use the fetchpriority=”high” attribute.

The advantage of preload over the “fetchpriority” attribute is that preload is supported by all browsers, while the latter isn’t supported by Firefox and Opera browsers.

Below are examples of preload and use of fetchpriority:

<img src=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image.jpg” fetchpriority=”high” alt=”Description”>
<link rel=”preload” as=”image” href=”https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/image-optimization/image-600w.jpg” image image>

By using preload or fetchpriority, you instruct the browser to start loading the images as a priority, which is beneficial for improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

9. Add Images To Your Sitemap

Whether adding your images to your sitemap or creating a new sitemap for images, you want images somewhere in your sitemaps.

Having your images in a sitemap greatly increases the chances of search engines crawling and indexing your images. Thus, results in more site traffic.

If you’re using WordPress, Yoast and RankMath offer a sitemap solution in their plugin.

If you don’t use WordPress, you may consider using software like Screaming Frog to generate a sitemap.

10. Add Structured Data

Adding structured data to your images can enhance your webpages by guiding Google and other search engines to deliver better visual results.

For example, you can include images of your products along with details like price, availability, and ratings in the product schema. This makes your products stand out in search results, attracting more attention from potential buyers.

Another use case involves adding an image schema in Article schema with multiple sizes to enhance the visibility of your articles in Google Discover and different devices in Google Search.

Google may select the best matching size when surfacing them.

Here is an example:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “Article”,
“headline”: “Article Title”,
“image”: [
“https://example.com/photos/1×1/image.jpg”,
“https://example.com/photos/4×3/image.jpg”,
“https://example.com/photos/16×9/image.jpg”
],
“datePublished”: “2024-01-10T08:00:00+08:00”,
“dateModified”: “2024-01-10T09:20:00+08:00”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Author Name”
},
…
}
</script>
11. Using CDN For Daster Image Delivery

Content Delivery Network or CDN is a set of servers spread worldwide that hosts your content and delivers it to the users from a server location nearest to them geographically.

However, delivery is not the only advantage of CDNs; they also offer transformation and optimization capabilities.

By passing parameters along with image URLs, you can request different image sizes or convert images to more efficient formats like WebP.

For instance, services like Cloudflare’s Polish can automatically optimize image formats by detecting the browser’s compatibility with WebP format. It can serve PNG and JPEG images in WebP format upon request.

For example, at Search Engine Journal, we use that technique to serve WebP format with our server’s built-in CDN.

Even though images have “.jpeg” or “.png” extensions, our CDN serves WebP if browsers support it.

When validating pages with PageSpeed Insights, it is advisable to ensure that you pass the audit “Serve images in next-gen formats.”

Below are a few of the most known CDN services you may consider using:

12. Beware Of Copyright

Regardless of the image files you choose to use, make sure there’s no copyright conflict.

The Postal Service is paying $3.5 million in an image copyright lawsuit, and Skechers was sued for $2.5 million.

If Getty, Shutterstock, DepositFiles, or some other stock photo provider owns an image you use – and you don’t have a license to use it – then you’re risking an expensive lawsuit.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you could be issued a notice if you have violated any copyright issues. If the owner of a piece of content sees their content on your website, they can issue a DMCA Takedown, which you must comply with.

Image Optimization Key Takeaways

So, before you begin uploading your image to your site, follow the image optimization rituals from above.

The most important thing is ensuring the image and alternative text are relevant to the page. Other key takeaways:

Choose the right file format.
Serve the right file size for faster page load speed.
Make sure your on-page SEO elements (metadata, structured data, etc.) pair with your image.
For crawlability, create an image sitemap or make sure your images are featured in your sitemap.

Optimizing images is no joke. With recent advances in search, especially when Google started prioritizing visuals in search results, your entire site will benefit from taking the steps above.

Happy optimizing!

Read More:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Responsive search ads are very flexible ads that automatically adapt to show the right message to the right customer. You enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating the ad. Google’s machine learning systems will mix headlines and descriptions and test different combinations of the ads to learn which performs best over time. The most relevant message will be shown to the customer.

Responsive search ads are the default ad type in Google Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) search campaigns as of February 18, 2021. This change isn’t surprising, considering Google’s increased focus on automation in Google Ads.

Since responsive search ads adapt their content to show the most relevant message to match customer search terms, they help you reach more customers and may help to increase conversion rates and campaign performance. According to Google, advertisers who use responsive search ads in their ad groups can achieve an increase of up to 10% more clicks and conversions as compared to standard text ads.

But responsive search ads have many more benefits:

Here is an example of a responsive search ad from Google search results:

How to set up responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaign

Sign into your Google Ads PPC account and select Responsive Search Ad from the Ad menu:

Select Ads and extensions in the left menu

Click on the blue plus button on the top

Select Responsive Search Ad in the menu

Now you can enter the headlines and descriptions and the landing page for the responsive search ad:

Select a Search Campaign

Select an Ad Group

Enter the Final URL ( this is the landing page URL).

Enter the display paths for the Display URL (this is optional).

Enter at least 5 unique headlines. The minimum is 3 and the maximum is 15. The tool will suggest keywords from the ad group to include in the headlines.

Enter at least 2 unique descriptions. The minimum is 2 and the maximum is 4.

As you create the ad, an ad strength indicator will indicate the ad strength.

As you type the ad, you will see a preview of the Ad in different combinations in the preview panel.

Save the ad

Follow the best practices below to optimize responsive search ads for better performance.

5 best practices when using responsive search ads in your Google Ads PPC search campaigns

These tips will help you optimize your responsive search ads in your Google Ads search campaigns and increase clicks and conversions.

1. Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group with “good” or “excellent” ad strength

Google recommends adding at least one responsive search ad per ad group. Use the ad strength indicator to make sure the responsive search ad has a “good” or ”excellent” ad strength, as this improves the chances that the ad will show. Remember, the maximum number of enabled responsive search ads allowed per ad group is three.

It’s best to create very specific ad groups based on your products with at least three quality ads, as recommended by Google. This enables Google’s systems to optimize for performance and may result in more clicks.

2. Add several unique headlines and descriptions

The power of the flexible format of responsive search ads lies in having multiple ad combinations and keywords that can match customer search terms. This helps to increase search relevance and reach more customers.

When building your responsive search ads, add as many unique headlines as you can to increase possible ad combinations and improve campaign performance.

The headlines and descriptions in a responsive search ad can be shown in multiple combinations in any order. It’s therefore important to ensure that these assets are unique from each other and work well together when they are shown in different ad combinations.

When creating a responsive search ad, you can add up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions. The responsive search ad will show up to three headlines and two descriptions at a time. On smaller screens, like mobile devices, it may show with two headlines and one description.

Here are tips for adding headlines and descriptions:

1. Create at least 8-10 headlines so that there are more ad combinations to show. More ad combinations helps to increase ad relevance and improve ad group performance.

To increase the chances that the ad will show, enter at least five headlines that are unique from each other. Do not repeat the same phrases as that will restrict the number of ad combinations that are generated by the system.

You can use some headlines to focus on important product or service descriptions.

Include your popular keywords in at least two headlines to increase ad relevance. As you create the responsive search ad, the tool will recommend popular keywords in the ad group to include in headlines to improve ad performance.

Make sure that you DO NOT include keywords in three headlines so that more ad combinations are generated. Instead you can highlight benefits, special services, special hours, calls to action, shipping and return policies, special promotions, taglines, or ratings.

Try adding headlines of different lengths. Do not max out the characters in every headline. Google’s systems will test both long and short headlines.

There are 30 characters for each headline.

2. Include two descriptions that are unique. The maximum is four descriptions.

Descriptions should focus on describing product or service features that are not listed in the headlines, along with a call to action.

There are 90 characters for each description.

An example of creating a responsive search ad with headlines and descriptions is shown in the figure below.

3. Use popular content from your existing expanded text ads

Use headlines and descriptions from your existing expanded text ads in the ad group when writing your headlines and descriptions for the responsive search ads. This helps you get more ad combinations with keywords that have already been proven to be successful in your marketing campaign.

4. Pin headlines & descriptions to specific positions to control where they appear. Use sparingly.

Responsive search ads will show headlines and descriptions in any order by default. To control the positions of text in the ad, you can pin headlines and descriptions to certain positions in the ad. Pinning is a new concept introduced with responsive search ads.

According to Google, pinning is not recommended for most advertisers because it limits the number of ad combinations that can be matched to customer search terms and can impact ad performance.

Use the pinning feature sparingly. Pinning too many headlines and descriptions to fixed positions in the responsive search ad reduces the effectiveness of using this flexible ad format to serve multiple ad combinations.

1. If you have text that must appear in every ad, you should enter it in either Headline Position 1, Headline Position 2 or Description Position 1, and pin it there. This text will always show in the ad.

2. You can also pin headlines and descriptions that must always be included in the ad to specific positions in the ad. For example, disclaimers or special offers.

3. To pin an asset, hover to the right of any headline or description when setting up the Ad and click on the pin icon that appears. Then select the position where you want the headline or description to appear.

4. Pinning a headline or description to one position will show that asset in that position every time the ad is shown. For increased flexibility, it is recommended to pin 2 or 3 headlines or descriptions to each position. Any of the pinned headlines or descriptions can then be shown in the pinned position so that you still have different ad combinations available.

5. Click Save.

The image below shows a headline pinned in position 1 and a description pinned in position 2. The Ad will always show this headline and description in the pinned positions every time it runs.

5. Increase ad strength to improve performance

As you create a responsive search ad, you will see an ad strength indicator on the right with a strength estimate. The ad strength indicator helps you improve the quality and effectiveness of your ads to improve ad performance.

Improving ad strength from “Poor” to ‘Excellent’ can result in up to 9% more clicks and conversions, according to Google.

1. Ad strength measures the relevance, diversity and quality of the Ad content.

2. Some of the ad strength suggestions include

Adding more headlinesIncluding popular keywords in the headlinesMaking headlines more uniqueMaking descriptions more unique

3. Click on “View Ideas” to see suggestions provided by the tool to improve ad relevance and ad quality.

4. The ad strength ratings include “Excellent”, “Good”, “Average” , “Poor” and “No Ads”.

5. Try to get at least a “Good” rating by changing the content of headlines or descriptions or by adding popular keywords. If you have a lot of assets pinned to specific positions, try unpinning some of the assets to improve ad strength.

Are expanded text ads still supported?

Expanded text ads are still supported but they are no longer the default ad format in Google Ads paid search campaigns.

You can still run expanded text ads in your ad groups along with the responsive search ads. Google recommends having one responsive search ad along with two expanded text ads in an ad group to improve performance.

However, Google has removed the option to add a text ad directly from the Ads and extensions menu. When you add a new ad, the menu now lists only options to add a Responsive Search Ad, Call Ad, Responsive Display Ad and Ad variations.

You can still add an expanded text ad although you cannot add it directly from the Ads and extensions menu. Follow these steps,

In the Ads and extensions menu, click to select Responsive search ads.

This opens up the editing menu to create a responsive search ad.

Then click on “switch back to text ads” on the top to create a text ad.

The removal of expanded text ads from the Ad and extensions menu certainly suggests that Google may be planning to phase out expanded text ads in the future. However, they continue to be supported at this time.

Conclusion

In summary, responsive search ads continue the progression towards automation and machine learning in Google Ads. We have used responsive search ads in PPC search campaigns at our digital marketing agency, and have seen an increase in clicks and CTR as compared to expanded text ads.

You can improve the performance of your Google Ads PPC search campaigns by following these five best practices for responsive search ads:

Add at least one responsive search ad per ad group.

Add several unique headlines and descriptions.

Use popular content from your expanded text ads.

Pin some of the assets to control where they appear in the ad.

Increase ad strength to at least a “good” rating to improve ad performance.

Other best practices recommended by Google include:

Have other optimization tips? Share them with #MozBlog on Twitter or LinkedIn.

In this guide, you will learn about alternative text (known as alt text): what it is, why it is important for on-page SEO, how to use it correctly, and more.

It’s often overlooked, but every image on your website should have alt text. More information is better, and translating visual information into text is important for search engine bots attempting to understand your website and users with screen readers.

Alt text is one more source of information that relates ideas and content together on your website.

This practical and to-the-point guide contains tips and advice you can immediately use to improve your website’s image SEO and accessibility.

What Is Alt Text?

Alternative text (or alt text) – also known as the alt attribute or the alt tag (which is not technically correct because it is not a tag) – is simply a piece of text that describes the image in the HTML code.

What Are The Uses Of Alt Text?

The original function of alt text was simply to describe an image that could not be loaded.

Many years ago, when the internet was much slower, alt text would help you know the content of an image that was too heavy to be loaded in your browser.

Today, images rarely fail to load – but if they do, then it is the alt text you will see in place of an image.

Alt text also helps search engine bots understand the image’s content and context.

More importantly, alt text is critical for accessibility and for people using screen readers:

Alt text helps people with disabilities (for example, using screen readers) learn about the image’s content.

Of course, like every element of SEO, it is often misused or, in some cases, even abused.

Let’s now take a closer look at why alt text is important.

Why Alt Text Is Important

The web and websites are a very visual experience. It is hard to find a website without images or graphic elements.

That’s why alt text is very important.

Alt text helps translate the image’s content into words, thus making the image accessible to a wider audience, including people with disabilities and search engine bots that are not clever enough yet to fully understand every image, its context, and its meaning.

Why Alt Text Is Important For SEO

Alt text is an important element of on-page SEO optimization.

Proper alt text optimization makes your website stand a better chance of ranking in Google image searches.

Yes, alt text is a ranking factor for Google image search.

Depending on your website’s niche and specificity, Google image search traffic may play a huge role in your website’s overall success.

For example, in the case of ecommerce websites, users very often start their search for products with a Google image search instead of typing the product name into the standard Google search.

Google and other search engines may display fewer product images (or not display them at all) if you fail to take care of their alt text optimization.

Without proper image optimization, you may lose a lot of potential traffic and customers.

Why Alt Text Is Important For Accessibility

Visibility in Google image search is very important, but there is an even more important consideration: Accessibility.

Fortunately, in recent years, more focus has been placed on accessibility (i.e., making the web accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities and/or using screen readers).

Suppose the alt text of your images actually describes their content instead of, for example, stuffing keywords. In that case, you are helping people who cannot see this image better understand it and the content of the entire web page.

Let’s say one of your web pages is an SEO audit guide that contains screenshots from various crawling tools.

Would it not be better to describe the content of each screenshot instead of placing the same alt text of “SEO audit” into every image?

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Alt Text Examples

Finding many good and bad examples of alt text is not difficult. Let me show you a few, sticking to the above example with an SEO audit guide.

Good Alt Text Examples

So, our example SEO guide contains screenshots from tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.

Some good examples of alt text may include:

<img src=”google-search-console-coverage-report.jpg” alt=”The Coverage Report in Google Search Console showing the number of indexed and excluded pages”>
<img src=”google-search-console.jpg” alt=”Google Search Console tool from Google”>
<img src=”screaming-frog-html-pages.jpg” alt=”List of HTML pages in Screaming Frog”>
<img src=”screaming-frog” alt=”Screaming Frog crawl in progress”>

Tip: It is also a good idea to take care of the name of your file. Using descriptive file names is not a ranking factor, but I recommend this as a good SEO practice.

Bad And/Or Spammy Alt Text Examples

I’ve also seen many examples of bad alt text use, including keyword stuffing or spamming.

Here is how you can turn the above good examples into bad examples:

<img src=”google-search-console-coverage-report.jpg”alt=”seo audit free, seo audit cheap, seo audit specialist, seo audit, seo audits”>
<img src=”google-search-console.jpg” alt=”google seo ,seo google, google, seo, google search console seo”>
<img src=”screaming-frog-html-pages.jpg” alt=”seo auditor, seo audit, seo audits”>
<img src=”screaming-frog” alt=”seo audit”>

As you can see, the above examples do not provide any information on what these images actually show.

You can also find examples and even more image SEO tips on Google Search Central.

Common Alt Text Mistakes

Stuffing keywords in the alt text is not the only mistake you can make.

Here are a few examples of common alt text mistakes:

Failure to use the alt text or using empty alt text.
Using the same alt text for different images.
Using very general alt text that does not actually describe the image. For example, using the alt text of “dog” on the photo of a dog instead of describing the dog in more detail, its color, what it is doing, what breed it is, etc.
Automatically using the name of the file as the alt text – which may lead to very unfriendly alt text, such as “googlesearchconsole,” “google-search-console,” or “photo2323,” depending on the name of the file.

Alt Text Writing Tips

And finally, here are the tips on how to write correct alt text so that it actually fulfills its purpose:

Do not stuff keywords into the alt text. Doing so will not help your web page rank for these keywords.
Describe the image in detail, but still keep it relatively short. Avoid adding multiple sentences to the alt text.
Use your target keywords, but in a natural way, as part of the image’s description. If your target keyword does not fit into the image’s description, don’t use it.
Don’t use text on images. All text should be added in the form of HTML code.
Don’t write, “this is an image of.” Google and users know that this is an image. Just describe its content.
Make sure you can visualize the image’s content by just reading its alt text. That is the best exercise to make sure your alt text is OK.

How To Troubleshoot Image Alt Text

Now you know all the best practices and common mistakes of alt text. But how do you check what’s in the alt text of the images of a website?

You can analyze the alt text in the following ways:

Inspecting an element (right-click and select Inspect when hovering over an image) is a good way to check if a given image has alt text.

However, if you want to check that in bulk, I recommend one of the below two methods.

Install Web Developer Chrome extension.

Next, open the page whose images you want to audit.

Click on Web Developer and navigate to Images > Display Alt Attributes. This way, you can see the content of the alt text of all images on a given web page.

How To Find And Fix Missing Alt Text

To check the alt text of the images of the entire website, use a crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.

Crawl the site, navigate to the image report, and review the alt text of all website images, as shown in the video guide below.

You can also export only images that have missing alt text and start fixing those issues.

Alt Text May Not Seem Like A Priority, But It’s Important

Every source of information about your content has value. Whether it’s for vision-impaired users or bots, alt text helps contextualize the images on your website.

While it’s only a ranking factor for image search, everything you do to help search engines understand your website can potentially help deliver more accurate results. Demonstrating a commitment to accessibility is also a critical component of modern digital marketing.

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

In 2009, by issuing a call to arms to “make the web faster”, Google set out on a mission to try and persuade website owners to make their sites load more quickly.

In order to entice website owners into actually caring about this, in 2010 Google announced that site speed would become a factor in its desktop (non-mobile) search engine ranking algorithms. This meant that sites that loaded quickly would have an SEO advantage over other websites.

Six years later, in 2015, Google announced that the number of searches performed on mobile exceeded those performed on desktop computers. That percentage continues to increase. The latest published statistic says that, as of 2019, 61% of searches performed on Google were from mobile devices.

Mobile’s now-dominant role in search led Google to develop its “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP) project. This initiative is aimed at encouraging website owners to create what is essentially another mobile theme, on top of their responsive mobile theme, that complies with a very strict set of development and performance guidelines.

Although many site owners and SEOs complain about having to tend to page speed and AMP on top of the other 200+ ranking factors that already give them headaches, page speed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making the web faster. They found that “As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.”

In July of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches, and today Google will incorporate even more speed-related factors (called Core Web Vitals) in its ranking algorithms.

With the average human attention span decreasing all the time, and our reliance on our mobile devices growing consistently, there’s no question that page speed is, and will continue to be, an incredibly important thing for website owners to tend to.

How to optimize a website for speed
Think like a race car driver

Winning the page speed race requires the same things as winning a car race. To win a race in a car, you make sure that your vehicle is as lightweight as possible, as powerful as possible, and you navigate the racetrack as efficiently as possible.

I’ll use this analogy to try to make page speed optimization techniques a bit more understandable.

Make it lightweight

These days, websites are more beautiful and functional than ever before — but that also means they are bigger than ever. Most modern websites are the equivalent of a party bus or a limo. They’re super fancy, loaded with all sorts of amenities, and therefore HEAVY and SLOW. In the search engine “racetrack,” you will not win with a party bus or a limo. You’ll look cool, but you’ll lose.

Image source: A GTMetrix test results page

To win the page speed race, you need a proper racing vehicle, which is lightweight. Race cars don’t have radios, cupholders, glove boxes, or really anything at all that isn’t absolutely necessary. Similarly, your website shouldn’t be loaded up with elaborate animations, video backgrounds, enormous images, fancy widgets, excessive plugins, or anything else at all that isn’t absolutely necessary.

In addition to decluttering your site of unnecessary fanciness and excessive plugins, you can also shed website weight by:

Reducing the number of third-party scripts (code snippets that send or receive data from other websites)

Switching to a lighter-weight (less code-heavy) theme and reducing the number of fonts used

Implementing AMP

Optimizing images

Compressing and minifying code

Performing regular database optimizations

On an open-source content management system like WordPress, speed plugins are available that can make a lot of these tasks much easier. WP Rocket and Imagify are two WordPress plugins that can be used together to significantly lighten your website’s weight via image optimization, compression, minification, and a variety of other page speed best practices.

Give it more power

You wouldn’t put a golf cart engine in a race car, so why would you put your website on a dirt-cheap, shared hosting plan? You may find it painful to pay more than a few dollars per month on hosting if you’ve been on one of those plans for a long time, but again, golf cart versus race car engine: do you want to win this race or not?

Traditional shared hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites onto a single server. This leaves each individual site starved for computing power.

If you want to race in the big leagues, it’s time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress sites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress sites faster.

If managed WordPress hosting isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have a WordPress site, upgrading to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) will result in your website having way more computing resources available to it. You’ll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to “tune-up your engine” with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Varnish caching, and other modern web server technologies. You’ll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting company’s greed as they stuff more and more websites onto your already-taxed server.

In short, putting your website on a well-tuned hosting environment can be like putting a supercharger on your race car.

Drive it better

Last, but certainly not least, a lightweight and powerful race car can only go so fast without a trained driver who knows how to navigate the course efficiently.

The “navigate the course” part of this analogy refers to the process of a web browser loading a webpage. Each element of a website is another twist or turn for the browser to navigate as it travels through the code and processes the output of the page.

I’ll switch analogies momentarily to try to explain this more clearly. When remodeling a house, you paint the rooms first before redoing the floors. If you redid the floors first and then painted the rooms, the new floors would get paint on them and you’d have to go back and tend to the floors again later.

When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called (coincidentally) “painting.” Each page is “painted” as the browser receives bits of data from the webpage’s source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently (i.e. painting walls before refinishing floors), or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could’ve/should’ve been done earlier in the process.

Image source: WebPageTest.org Test Result (Filmstrip View)

Here’s where things can get technical, but it’s important to do whatever you can to help your site drive the “track” more efficiently.

Caching is a concept that every website should have in place to make loading a webpage easier on the browser. It already takes long enough for a browser to process all of a page’s source code and paint it out visually to the user, so you might as well have that source code ready to go on the server. By default, without caching, that’s not the case.

Without caching, the website’s CMS and the server can still be working on generating the webpage’s source code while the browser is waiting to paint the page. This can cause the browser to have to pause and wait for more code to come from the server. With caching, the source code of a page is pre-compiled on the server so that it’s totally ready to be sent to the browser in full in one shot. Think of it like a photocopier having plenty of copies of a document already produced and ready to be handed out, instead of making a copy on demand each time someone asks for one.

Various types and levels of caching can be achieved through plugins, your hosting company, and/or via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs not only provide caching, but they also host copies of the pre-generated website code on a variety of servers across the world, reducing the impact of physical distance between the server and the user on the load time. (And yes, the internet is actually made up of physical servers that have to talk to each other over physical distances. The web is not actually a “cloud” in that sense.)

Getting back to our race car analogy, utilizing caching and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack.

Those are two of the basic building blocks of efficient page painting, but there are even more techniques that can be employed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via a plugin or plugins (again, WP Rocket and Imagify are a particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this):

Asynchronous and/or deferred loading of scripts. This is basically a fancy way of referring to loading multiple things at the same time or waiting until later to load things that aren’t needed right away.

Preloading and prefetching. Basically, retrieving data about links in advance instead of waiting for the user to click on them.

Lazy loading. Ironic term being that this concept exists for page speed purposes, but by default, most browsers load ALL images on a page, even those that are out of sight until a user scrolls down to them. Implementing lazy loading means telling the browser to be lazy and wait on loading those out-of-sight images until the user actually scrolls there.

Serving images in next-gen formats. New image formats such as WebP can be loaded much faster by browsers than the old-fashioned JPEG and PNG formats. But it’s important to note that not all browsers can support these new formats just yet — so be sure to use a plugin that can serve up the next-gen versions to browsers that support them, but provide the old versions to browsers that don’t. WP Rocket, when paired with Imagify, can achieve this.

Image source: WP Rocket plugin settings

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Lastly, optimizing for the new Core Web Vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) can make for a much more efficient trip around the racetrack as well.

Image source

These are pretty technical concepts, but here’s a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of a page. A lot of times this is a hero image or large slider area, but it varies from page to page, so run the tool to identify the LCP in your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element load faster.

First Input Delay (FID) is the delay between the user’s first action and the browser’s ability to respond to it. An example of an FID issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a set of three big words that refer to one simple concept. You know when you’re loading up a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above it or below it? That movement is CLS, it’s majorly annoying, and it’s a byproduct of inefficient page painting.

In conclusion, race car > golf cart

Page speed optimization is certainly complex and confusing, but it’s an essential component to achieve better rankings. As a website owner, you’re in this race whether you like it or not — so you might as well do what you can to make your website a race car instead of a golf cart!

Having a website that doesn’t convert is a little like having a bucket with a hole in it. Do you keep filling it up while the water’s pouring out — or do you fix the hole then add water? In other words, do you channel your budget into attracting people who are “pouring” through without taking action, or do you fine-tune your website so it’s appealing enough for them to stick around?

Our recommendation? Optimize the conversion rate of your website, before you spend on increasing your traffic to it.

Here’s a web design statistic to bear in mind: you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression. If your site’s too slow, or unattractive, or the wording isn’t clear, they’ll bounce faster than you can say “leaky bucket”. Which is a shame, because you’ve put lots of effort into designing a beautiful product page and About Us, and people just aren’t getting to see it.

As a digital web design and conversion agency in Melbourne, Australia, we’ve been helping our customers optimize their websites for over 10 years, but it wasn’t until mid-2019 that we decided to turn the tables and take a look at our own site.

As it turned out, we had a bit of a leaky bucket situation of our own: while our traffic was good and conversions were okay, there was definitely room for improvement.

In this article, I’m going to talk a little more about conversions: what they are, why they matter, and how they help your business. I’ll then share how I made lots of little tweaks that cumulatively led to my business attracting a higher tier of customers, more inquiries, plus over $780,000 worth of new sales opportunities within the first 26 weeks of making some of those changes. Let’s get into it!

What is conversion?

Your conversion rate is a figure that represents the percentage of visitors who come to your site and take the desired action, e.g. subscribing to your newsletter, booking a demo, purchasing a product, and so on.

Conversions come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what your website does. If you sell a product, making a sale would be your primary goal (aka a macro-conversion). If you run, say, a tour company or media outlet, then subscribing or booking a consultation might be your primary goal.

If your visitor isn’t quite ready to make a purchase or book a consultation, they might take an intermediary step — like signing up to your free newsletter, or following you on social media. This is what’s known as a micro-conversion: a little step that leads towards (hopefully) a bigger one.

A quick recap

A conversion can apply to any number of actions — from making a purchase, to following on social media.

Macro-conversions are those we usually associate with sales: a phone call, an email, or a trip to the checkout. These happen when the customer has done their research and is ready to leap in with a purchase. If you picture the classic conversion funnel, they’re already at the bottom.

Micro-conversions, on the other hand, are small steps that lead toward a sale. They’re not the ultimate win, but they’re a step in the right direction.

Most sites and apps have multiple conversion goals, each with its own conversion rate.

Micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions: which is better?

The short answer? Both. Ideally, you want micro- and macro-conversions to be happening all the time so you have a continual flow of customers working their way through your sales funnel. If you have neither, then your website is behaving like a leaky bucket.

Here are two common issues that seem like good things, but ultimately lead to problems:

High web traffic (good thing) but no micro- or macro-conversions (bad thing — leaky bucket alert)

High web traffic (good thing) plenty of micro-conversions (good thing), but no macro conversions (bad thing)

A lot of businesses spend heaps of money making sure their employees work efficiently, but less of the budget goes into what is actually one of your best marketing tools: your website.

Spending money on marketing will always be a good thing. Getting customers to your site means more eyes on your business — but when your website doesn’t convert visitors into sales, that’s when you’re wasting your marketing dollars. When it comes to conversion rate statistics, one of the biggest eye-openers I read was this: the average user’s attention span has dropped from 12 to a mere 7 seconds. That’s how long you’ve got to impress before they bail — so you’d better make sure your website is fast, clear, and attractive.

Our problem

Our phone wasn’t ringing as much as we’d have liked, despite spending plenty of dollars on SEO and Adwords. We looked into our analytics and realized traffic wasn’t an issue: a decent number of people were visiting our site, but too few were taking action — i.e. inquiring. Here’s where some of our issues lay:

Our site wasn’t as fast as it could have been (anything with a load time of two seconds or over is considered slow. Ours was hovering around 5-6, and that was having a negative impact on conversions).

Our CTA conversions were low (people weren’t clicking — or they were dropping off because the CTA wasn’t where it needed to be).

We were relying on guesswork for some of our design decisions — which meant we had no way of measuring what worked, and what didn’t.

In general, things were good but not great. Or in other words, there was room for improvement.

What we did to fix it

Improving your site’s conversions isn’t a one-size-fits all thing — which means what works for one person might not work for you. It’s a gradual journey of trying different things out and building up successes over time. We knew this having worked on hundreds of client websites over the years, so we went into our own redesign with this in mind. Here are some of the steps we took that had an impact.

We decided to improve our site

First of all, we decided to fix our company website. This sounds like an obvious one, but how many times have you thought “I’ll do this really important thing”, then never gotten round to it. Or rushed ahead in excitement, made a few tweaks yourself, then let your efforts grind to a halt because other things took precedence?

This is an all-too-common problem when you run a business and things are just… okay. Often there’s no real drive to fix things and we fall back into doing what seems more pressing: selling, talking to customers, and running the business.

Deciding you want to improve your site’s conversions starts with a decision that involves you and everyone else in the company, and that’s what we did. We got the design and analytics experts involved. We invested time and money into the project, which made it feel substantial. We even made EDMs to announce the site launch (like the one below) to let everyone know what we’d been up to. In short, we made it feel like an event.

We got to know our users

There are many different types of user: some are ready to buy, some are just doing some window shopping. Knowing what type of person visits your site will help you create something that caters to their needs.

We looked at our analytics data and discovered visitors to our site were a bit of both, but tended to be more ready to buy than not. This meant we needed to focus on getting macro-conversions — in other words, make our site geared towards sales — while not overlooking the visitors doing some initial research. For those users, we implemented a blog as a way to improve our SEO, educate leads, and build up our reputation.

User insight can also help you shape the feel of your site. We discovered that the marketing managers we were targeting at the time were predominantly women, and that certain images and colours resonated better among that specific demographic. We didn’t go for the (obvious pictures of the team or our offices), instead relying on data and the psychology of attraction to delve into the mind of the users.

We improved site speed

Sending visitors to good sites with bad speeds erodes trust and sends them running. Multiple studies show that site speed matters when it comes to conversion rates. It’s one of the top SEO ranking factors, and a big factor when it comes to user experience: pages that load in under a second convert around 2.5 times higher than pages taking five seconds or more.

We built our website for speed. Moz has a great guide on page speed best practices, and from that list, we did the following things:

We optimized images.

We managed our own caching.

We compressed our files.

We improved page load times (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). A good web page load time is considered to be anything under two seconds — which we achieved.

In addition, we also customized our own hosting to make our site faster.

We introduced more tracking

As well as making our site faster, we introduced a lot more tracking. That allowed us to refine our content, our messaging, the structure of the site, and so on, which continually adds to the conversion.

We used Google Optimize to run A/B tests across a variety of things to understand how people interacted with our site. Here are some of the tweaks we made that had a positive impact:

Social proofing can be a really effective tool if used correctly, so we added some stats to our landing page copy.

Google Analytics showed us visitors were reaching certain pages and not knowing quite where to go next, so we added CTAs that used active language. So instead of saying, “If you’d like to find out more, let us know”, we said “Get a quote”, along with two options for getting in touch.

We spent an entire month testing four words on our homepage. We actually failed (the words didn’t have a positive impact), but it allowed us to test our hypothesis. We did small tweaks and tests like this all over the site.

We used heat mapping to see where visitors were clicking, and which words caught their eye. With this data, we knew where to place buttons and key messaging.

We looked into user behavior

Understanding your visitor is always a good place to start, and there are two ways to go about this:

Quantitative research (numbers and data-based research)

Qualitative research (people-based research)

We did a mixture of both.

For the quantitative research, we used Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and Hotjar to get an in-depth, numbers-based look at how people were interacting with our site.

Heat-mapping software shows how people click and scroll through a page. Hot spots indicate places where people naturally gravitate.

We could see where people were coming into our site (which pages they landed on first), what channel brought them there, which features they were engaging with, how long they spent on each page, and where they abandoned the site.

For the qualitative research, we focused primarily on interviews.

We asked customers what they thought about certain CTAs (whether they worked or not, and why).

We made messaging changes and asked customers and suppliers whether they made sense.

We invited a psychologist into the office and asked them what they thought about our design.

What we learned

We found out our design was good, but our CTAs weren’t quite hitting the mark. For example, one CTA only gave the reader the option to call. But, as one of our interviewees pointed out, not everyone likes using the phone — so we added an email address.

We were intentional but ad hoc about our asking process. This worked for us — but you might want to be a bit more formal about your approach (Moz has a great practical guide to conducting qualitative usability testing if you’re after a more in-depth look).

The results

Combined, these minor tweaks had a mighty impact. There’s a big difference in how our site looks and how we rank. The bottom line: after the rebuild, we got more work, and the business did much better. Here are some of the gains we’ve seen over the past two years.

Our dwell time increased by 73%, going from 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

We received four-times more inquiries by email and phone.

Our organic traffic increased despite us not channeling more funds into PPC ads.

We also realized our clients were bigger, paying on average 2.5 times more for jobs: in mid-2018, our average cost-per-job was $8,000. Now, it’s $17,000.

Our client brand names became more recognizable, household names — including two of Australia’s top universities, and a well-known manufacturing/production brand.

Within the first 26 weeks, we got over $770,000 worth of sales opportunities (if we’d accepted every job that came our way).

Our prospects began asking to work with us, rather than us having to persuade them to give us the business.

We started getting higher quality inquiries — warmer leads who had more intent to buy.

Some practical changes you can make to improve your website conversions

When it comes to website changes, it’s important to remember that what works for one person might not work for you.

We’ve used site speed boosters for our clients before and gotten really great results. At other times, we’ve tried it and it just broke the website. This is why it’s so important to measure as you go, use what works for your individual needs, and remember that “failures” are just as helpful as wins.

Below are some tips — some of which we did on our own site, others are things we’ve done for others.

Tip number 1: Get stronger hosting that allows you to consider things like CDNs. Hiring a developer should always be your top choice, but it’s not always possible to have that luxury. In this instance, we recommend considering CDNs, and depending on the build of your site, paying for tools like NitroPack which can help with caching and compression for faster site speeds.

Tip number 2: Focus your time. Identify top landing pages with Moz Pro and channel your efforts in these places as a priority. Use the 80/20 principle and put your attention on the 20% that gets you 80% of your success.

Tip number 3: Run A/B tests using Google Optimize to test various hypotheses and ideas (Moz has a really handy guide for running split tests using Google). Don’t be afraid of the results — failures can help confirm that what you are currently doing right. You can also access some in-depth data about your site’s performance in Google Lighthouse.

Tip number 4: Trial various messages in Google Ads (as a way of testing targeted messaging). Google provides many keyword suggestions on trending words and phrases that are worth considering.

Tip number 5: Combine qualitative and quantitative research to get to know how your users interact with your site — and keep testing on an ongoing basis.

Tip number 6: Don’t get too hung up on charts going up, or figures turning orange: do what works for you. If adding a video to your homepage slows it down a little but has an overall positive effect on your conversion, then it’s worth the tradeoff.

Tip number 7: Prioritize the needs of your target customers and focus every build and design choice around them.

Recommended tools

Nitropack: speed up your site if you’ve not built it for speed from the beginning.

Google Optimize: run A/B tests

HotJar: see how people use your site via heat mapping and behaviour analytics.

Pingdom / GTMetrix: measure site speed (both is better if you want to make sure you meet everyone’s requirements).

Google Analytics: find drop-off points, track conversion, A/B test, set goals.

Qualaroo: poll your visitors while they are on your site with a popup window.

Google Consumer Surveys: create a survey, Google recruits the participants and provides results and analysis.

Moz Pro: Identify top landing pages when you connect this tool to your Google Analytics profile to create custom reports.

How to keep your conversion rates high

Treat your website like your car. Regular little tweaks to keep it purring, occasional deeper inspections to make sure there are no problems lurking just out of sight. Here’s what we do:

We look at Google Analytics monthly. It helps to understand what’s working, and what’s not.

We use goal tracking in GA to keep things moving in the right direction.

We use Pingdom’s free service to monitor the availability and response time of our site.

We regularly ask people what they think about the site and its messaging (keeping the qualitative research coming in).

Conclusion

Spending money on marketing is a good thing, but when you don’t have a good conversion rate, that’s when your website’s behaving like a leaky bucket. Your website is one of your strongest sales tools, so it really does pay to make sure it’s working at peak performance.

I’ve shared a few of my favorite tools and techniques, but above all, my one bit of advice is to consider your own requirements. You can improve your site speed if you remove all tags and keep it plain. But that’s not what you want: it’s finding the balance between creativity and performance, and that will always depend on what’s important.

For us as a design agency, we need a site that’s beautiful and creative. Yes, having a moving background on our homepage slows it down a little bit, but it improves our conversions overall.

The bottom line: Consider your unique users, and make sure your website is in line with the goals of whoever you’re speaking with.

We can do all we want to please Google, but when it comes to sales and leads, it means more to have a higher converting and more effective website. We did well in inquiries (actual phone calls and email leads) despite a rapid increase in site performance requirements from Google. This only comes down to one thing: having a site customer conversion framework that’s effective.