
Google is all about ‘user experience’ and ‘visitor satisfaction’ in 2020 so it’s worth remembering that usability studies have shown that a good page title length is about seven or eight words long and fewer than 64 total characters. Longer titles are less scan-able in bookmark lists, and might not display correctly in many browsers (and of course probably will be truncated in SERPs).

QUOTE: “While, as a whole, web usability has improved over these past several years, history repeats and designers make the same mistakes over and over again. Designers and marketers continuously need to walk a line between providing a good user experience and increasing advertising revenue. There is no “correct” answer or golden format for designers to use in order to flawlessly reach audiences; there will inevitably always be resistance to change and a desire for convention and predictability. That said, if, over the course of over ten years, users are still lamenting about the same problems, it’s time we start to take them seriously.”  Therese Fessenden, Nielsen Norman Group 2017
Alt text (alternative text), also known as "alt attributes" describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. Alt text uses: 1. Adding alternative text to photos is first and foremost a principle of web accessibility. Visually impaired users using screen readers will be read an alt attribute to better understand an on-page image. 2. Alt tags will be displayed in place of an image if an image file cannot be loaded. 3. Alt tags provide better image context/descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly.
You can more strategically target a specific location by narrowing down your keyword research to specific towns, counties, or states in the Google Keyword Planner, or evaluate "interest by subregion" in Google Trends. Geo-specific research can help make your content more relevant to your target audience. For example, you might find out that in Texas, the preferred term for a large truck is “big rig,” while in New York, “tractor trailer” is the preferred terminology.

Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It's just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we're stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Watch this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.


The last time I looked Google displayed as many characters as it can fit into a block element that’s about 600px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text (on desktop). So – THERE IS NO BEST PRACTICE AMOUNT OF CHARACTERS any SEO could lay down as exact best practice to GUARANTEE a title will display, in full in Google, at least, as the search snippet title, on every device. Ultimately – only the characters and words you use will determine if your entire page title will be seen in a Google search snippet.

QUOTE: “Medium pages achieve their purpose and have neither high nor low expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. However, Medium pages lack the characteristics that would support a higher quality rating. Occasionally, you will find a page with a mix of high and low quality characteristics. In those cases, the best page quality rating may be Medium.” Google Quality Evaluator Guidelines, 2017
An SEO meta description is a brief description of content found on a web page. The meta description is shown to users in search engine results pages to help them decide which search result to click on. Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor in the eyes of a search engine, but they can influence how many people click on a result -- which directly affects the result's organic ranking.
QUOTE: “high quality content is something I’d focus on. I see lots and lots of SEO blogs talking about user experience, which I think is a great thing to focus on as well. Because that essentially kind of focuses on what we are trying to look at as well. We want to rank content that is useful for (Google users) and if your content is really useful for them, then we want to rank it.” John Mueller, Google 2015
If you are improving user experience by focusing primarily on the quality of the MC of your pages and avoiding – even removing – old-school SEO techniques – those certainly are positive steps to getting more traffic from Google in 2020 – and the type of content performance Google rewards is in the end largely at least about a satisfying user experience.
Determine who your main online competitors are. Research how they work, how they market and how big of a market share you believe they have. Sign up for e-newsletters, research their press releases and determine the strengths and weaknesses of each online competitor. You may even need to purchase something from them in order to understand how they complete their sales process.
