The Americans with Disabilities Act became law over 30 years ago, but it isn’t until recently that the legislation has applied to website owners. Interestingly, there has also been a resultant rise in law suits related to website accessibility issues. International law firm Seyfarth Shaw reported an increase of 16 percent in ADA lawsuits in 2017, with most of them related to non-compliant websites.

ADA and Website Accessibility

The Americans with Disabilities Act (or ADA) was created to procted people with disabilities from discrimination. Created before the world wide web, it has a very wide scope that covers:

• Private and public spaces
• State and local government institutions
• Employment opportunities
• Transportation and telecommunications
• Building codes

A background on website accessibility

There was naturally no need for the ADA the account for the accessibility of websites in its original outline. But this changed in 2003 when the Department of Justice published initial guidelines aimed at state and local governments on how to make their websites more accessible.

In 2018, a revised version of Section 508 under Title II of the ADA came into force. This was known as the Section 508 Refresh and it included accessbility standards that were based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is a list of requirements that websites need to meet in order to be deemed accessible. It is a global initiative that was published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) under the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Despite all of this, many website owners are still vulnerable to lawsuits.

The Problem with ADA and Website Accessibility

If you’re reading this you may think that it is the website owner’s fault when they are hit with a lawsuit. But often that isn’t the case.

The section 508 Refresh is only applicable to local and state government websites. There are no hard and fast rules for commercial businesses or anyone else. What businesses need to be aware of is Title III of the ADA, rather than Title II.

This Title mandate that public businesses remove “access barriers” that may prevent disabled people from accessing the goods and services they offer. It has been argued that any website that sells goods or services should also come under this ruling, even if they have no physical presence. As a result, website owners are under threat of ADA lawsuits.

How Can I Protect Myself Against ADA Lawsuits?

In 2018, the DOJ said that they would update Title II to include outlines for website accessibility. Unfortunately, they have yet to make these changes. Until then, the best thing for business owners to do is to use the same WCAG guidelines as used by government organizations.

Making your website accessible to everyone is incredibly tricky. But we can help. For more information on website accessibility, get in touch with our website experts for a free consultation on how we can help get your website in order.

Shopping in physical stores is becoming less and less common by the day. Many customers prefer the ease and speed of shopping online and having stuff delivered straight to their door. As many as 80 percent of customers won’t even visit a brick and mortar store unless they have their inventory online, says a report by Kibo.

The rise and rise of eCommerce is threatening to wipe out many local stores. But there are still opportunities to win online. One of them is Google’s Local Inventory Ads.

What are Google Local Inventory Ads?

Local Inventory Ads are a form of Google PPC ad that let physical store display their products at the top of the search engine results for relevant searches. If a searcher is looking for soap near her, a local beauty shop will be able to promote their own soap, for instance.

If a searcher clicks on the ad, they will be directed to the stores local storefront, and online version of their brick and mortar store that lets shoppers see what is on offer, how much it is and then provides directions via Google Map on how to get to the store.

What are the Benefits of Local Inventory Ads?

Google’s Local Inventory Ads provide several benefits to physical stores of all sizes

1. Take your physical store online

Google Local Inventory Ads offer a fast and easy way to get your store online and take a piece of the eCommerce pie. You don’t need any other presence and it’s very quick to get started. Best of all, because the searches are local, you’ll be able to tempt people to come and visit your store rather than buy online.

2. Showcase your products

Unless you are a huge brand it can be almost impossible to get your products on the front page of Google. Local stores simply don’t have the budget to pay for normal shopping ads. But Local Inventory Ads are different. Because they are local, they are much cheaper and there is far less competition. Any store can get on the front page of Google for relevant searches as a result.

It’s also a great way to build brand awareness. Even if searchers don’t click on your ad and visit your store, they will still see an advert for your business.

3. Stand out against competition

There’s a good chance that most if not all of your competitors are not using Local Inventory Ads at the moment. This gives you a great opportunity to separate yourself from the pack and win over a lot more customers.

How To Set Up A Local Storefront on Google?

At the moment, Local Inventory Ads can only be used by stores in the US, UK, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland.

You also need to pass several criteria:

• Owns a physical store which is open to the public
• Sells physical products which shoppers can buy without having to pay for anything else (i.e. membership)
• Physical store must be located in a country where ads will be targeted to
• Store owner must take precautionary and active measures to secure their customers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

If you do, you’re all set to have your products listed at the top of Google!

If you think E-A-T has anything to do with food, you’re dead wrong. It’s not about consuming something tasty, it’s about how well you rank in Google.

In this article, we’ll explain what E-A-T means and why it matters if you’re a website owner and what to do about it.

What is E-A-T?

E-A-T is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. All three are used by Google to determine how worthy your page and your website is of ranking.

Google is using more and more tactics in order to do so. Today, it doesn’t just look at the keywords on your page or even just your backlinks. It is now taking a comprehensive approach to your page and website’s quality, hence the inclusion of E-A-T.

Let’s look at what each of the factors mean in turn.

1. E for Expertise

Google is determined to serve up the best experts in the world on their search platform. That’s why the first thing it considers is your level of expertise.

Let’s take the health niche, as an example. If a health website that offers medical advice wants to have a high expertise score, they should make sure that their content is written by a medical professional and references relevant medical journals.

What counts as high expertise will naturally change depending on the niche you are writing in. Not everyone is able to reference medical journals, after all. But the more authoritative resources you can reference in your writing, the better.

2. A for Authoritativeness

Speaking of authoritativeness, that’s what A stands for. Google doesn’t just want you to be an expert on a particular topic, it wants your entire website to be considered an authority.

Google uses several factors to measure the authoritativeness of websites. These include:

• Customer reviews and ratings
• Backlinks (the kinds of websites linking back to you)
• Mentions and citations by other authors
• Sites where you appear in (such as in guest posting)

In other words, you want your website to be one of the go-to resources in your niche.

3. T for Trustworthiness

Google wants to provide safe results for its users. As a result, it wants to reward websites that it considers trustworthy and rank them above other websites.

Part of this is achieved with the above two factors, writing expertly about topics and being a renowned resource. But there is also a technical element, as well. Your website will need to have an SSL certificate if Google is to consider you trustworthy. And if you are an ecommerce store you should go over and above to make sure you are protecting user data.

Why E-A-T Should Matter to You

Google has stated that they use E-A-T as part of their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. So if you don’t have a good E-A-T score, Google is going to punish you.

If you want help understanding your E-A-T score or want help improving it, our team of SEO experts can help. Get in touch today for a free consultation.

Do you know page speed is more important than ever before? It can have a huge impact on the way in which you rank in Google. The faster your site, the better you rank and the more visitors will stay on your website. That’s right, when you have a slow site, people leave in droves. In fact, Google has recently claimed that over half of users will leave a site that takes more then three seconds to load.

If you want to improve your page speed, this is the guide for you.

How to Improve Page Speed on the Front-end

Everyone sees the front-end of your website. It is the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that make up the way the site looks and works. Making it load quicker here is all about improving design elements.

1. Optimize fonts and images

You use fonts and images to make your site look awesome. But did you know they could also be slowing your website down, too?

You’ll need to look at both if you want to make your website as fast as possible. With fonts, try to use standard fonts where possible. These should be embedded as an inline SVG or they should be Google Web Fonts. These are universal fonts that load faster than any others.

With images these should be as small as possible. The bigger the file size, the longer it takes to load. So shrink the as much as possible without sacrificing quality.

2. Minify your JavaScript and CSS

You may also want to shrink your code as well as your images. This should only be done if you are a web developer as it can make your code hard to read. But minifying both your CSS, JavaScript and HTML can make your site load much, much faster.

3. Choose a content delivery network

A content delivery network is a system that stores a cached version of your website on servers located across the globe. Rather than load your website fresh everytime, CDNs will instantly load up a saved version of your website. This is perfect if you don’t change your site much.

How to Improve Your Page Speed On The Back-end

You can improve site speed on the back-end of your website, too. This is more technical, however, and should only be done by an expert.

1. Set up a reverse proxy and HTTP headers

A Reverse proxy and HTTP headers work in a similar way to CDNs in that they cahe pages and serve up saved versions to visitors. The benefit of reverse proxies is that you, unlike CDNs, you keep everything on your server.

2. Prolong the TTL of your cache

Did you know that caches aren’t stored forever? After a set amount of time they are wiped and need to be loaded again. If this happens often it can take a lot of time. You can increase the Time To Live (TTL) of your pages so that this happens less often.

For more information on increasing site speed, get in touch with our team today.

You probably haven’t heard of TF-IDF unless you are a bit of an SEO guru. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article. On the face of it, it looks like a confusing term. It becomes even more so when you learn that it is a form of statistical math.

But you shouldn’t feel confused or intimidated. We’re going to teach you exactly what it means, how it works and how to calculate it.

What is TF-IDF?

TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency. This numerical statistic is used by Google to workout what relevance a page has for a particular search term.

It works because TF-IDF is a statistical calculation of the frequency a term within a document compared to its frequency in all content across the internet. We can take an article on SEO as an example of this. If Google wants to calculate how relevant an article might be for the term SEO, it can look at its TF-IDF. If the TF-IDF is high, i.e  SEO is mentioned more times in that article than the average across all articles, it suggests that it is relevant.

You might now be thinking that TF-IDF is similar to keyword density. But it isn’t at all.

TD-IDF vs Keyword Density

Keyword density is a measure of the frequency of a term compared to all of the words in that article. If a term is mentioned 5 times in 100 words, it has a keyword density of five percent.

TF-IDF is similar to this, but instead of measuring the frequency of a term compared to all the words in a document, it compares it to the frequency of that term across all the words online.

As TF-IDF is more complex, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Google has started to use TF-IDF more than it uses keyword density.

How you can  Calculate TF-IDF

We’ll now look at how to easily calculate TD-IDF without doing complicated math. The first thing to do is to sign up for Ryte. You can pay for the tool but there is a freemium version, too.

• Step 1. Log in to your free Ryte account and click on ‘Content Success’. You should find it on the left side of your screen.
• Step 2. Under Content Success, click ‘Go to Analyze’ and input your keyword, the country, and the language you are targeting.
• Step 3. Click on ‘Start Content Analysis’ and wait for a few seconds until the page displays keyword recommendations and competition.
• Step 4. Next, click on the ‘Competition’ tab. You should see a list of your keyword recommendations alongside competition.
• Step 5. To view the TD-IDF, refer to the circles under each competition. Their size and color indicate thea following:
  • Small-sized, pale blue – Low TF-IDF (Low Relevance)
  • Medium-sized, aqua blue – Medium TF-IDF (Medium Relevance)
  • Large-sized, dark blue – High TF-IDF (High Relevance)

The higher the relevance, the tougher it is to beat your competition.

When you hover over the circles, you’ll see the relevancy score of a keyword (that is, its TD-IDF) and number of times it is mentioned in a page.