Well done for getting to Day Four of our challenge—as usual, please watch the training video above, or download and read the slides if you prefer.

{Please note: this video is a bit longer than the others, because I wanted to make it as clear as possible, with some screenshots etc., to avoid confusion when it comes to the action challenge. Doing the challenge itself, though, should still be something you can do in around 10 minutes after watching the video!}

The SEO learning today is a quote from Google themselves about what SEO is all about—and, as usual, it just builds on what we’re already been learning about SEO over the past few days:

“You should build a website to benefit your users, and any optimisation should be geared toward making the user experience better. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content… Search engine optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content.”—Google

The latest Google algorithm update is all about prioritising pages with really good “page experience” in search results, so focusing on this is a way to really future-proof your website.

Now, when we talk about “user experience” and “page experience”, what do we actually mean?

There are so many different factors that can contribute to a website being user-friendly (for example loading speed, not having intrusive pop-ups, the website being optimised for use on mobile phones, the web address being secure…), which I explore in more depth in my free Intuitive SEO guide and my online course.

But here’s what Google themselves say is their motive behind the update:

“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.”—Google

They want to make the web more “delightful” for everyone using it—lovely, eh?!

So, our action challenge today: I’d love for you to add a call to action inviting your users to click onto another relevant or related page of your website to one or two key pages.

How is this related to page/user experience? Well, one of the factors that Google takes into consideration when looking at your website is how happy/interested/engaged your users seem to be with your content, and they measure this by how long they stay on the page and whether they click on to another page of your website after reading that first page vs. whether they just read one page and then X out.

Inviting someone to click on to another related blog post or a relevant resource you might offer, anticipating what else they might be interested in and need from you, is a beautiful way to serve your website users even better.

In today’s video, I explain how to find out which pages of your website are currently getting the most search traffic already—this can be a great place to put a call to action if you have an existing website with enough historical data on your search traffic. But you can also just choose one or two key pages like your Home or About page, or a particularly popular blog post, product or resource.

Don’t agonise over which page(s) to choose to start with—just give it a go and make a start!

By the way, a note to bear in mind: sometimes takes Google a few weeks to pick up on changes you’ve made to your website’s meta/SEO titles and descriptions that you updated for the challenge yesterday. If you want to try to speed up the process or make sure they pick up on the change, you can re-submit your website’s sitemap to Google Search Console, here:

Google have a guide to sitemaps and submitting them here, and I also walk my students through this process in my full in-depth SEO course. But if this all feels a little too much at this point for you, don’t worry about it. Google say themselves that it’s not essential to do this; the main thing is the work that you’re doing serving your ideal audience on your own website.

Well done for getting this far in the challenge—I’ll see you tomorrow for our final lesson and action challenge!