It turns out you don’t have to be a large, well-established company with a huge budget in order to achieve competitive SEO results.

By ensuring that your company follows certain best practices when it comes to pop-ups and SEO, you can help position yourself in the ranks of some of the most high achieving companies in your field.

1) User interaction with the pop-up is important.

User experience should always be your priority. If the pop-up is negatively affecting the user’s ability to see and read the content that they want, then the pop-up is a liability to your website’s SEO. Google will penalize websites who compromise user experience by forcing unnecessary interaction with a pop-up.

Particularly in the case of mobile SEO guidelines, Google has become stricter and stricter. Google might remove tags that are mobile-friendly, or anything else beneficial for SEO, to punish offenders.

It’s not worth putting your search engine results at risk of the wrath of Google– so make sure your pop-up is easy to minimize and close.

2) The pop-up’s content should serve a useful purpose.

If your company is all about advertising pop-ups, you should definitely reconsider your strategy immediately. A Call to Action (CTA) might not be so harmful for SEO, but pure advertising that is detrimental to the user experience of a site is exactly what Google likes to penalize.

On the other hand, if the pop-up’s content is 100% necessary for the function of the website, Google does not care. For example, if you need to have users check a box agreeing to certain terms or conditions before they enter your site, then of course Google is not going to punish you for that.

Or, another prime example: if you are a specialty wine e-commerce store, you might require a pop-up to have users assert that they are of the legal drinking age, and that’s fine.

3) The timing of the pop-up is critical.
Google certainly takes into account when a pop-up appears.

If the pop-up immediately shows up after a webpage is finished loading, then Google will not treat that pop-up the same as one that appears after several minutes on the page.

Generally, it’s better not to bombard users with a pop-up just milliseconds after the page loads.

Google also will punish your search result ranking if the pop-up takes too long to disappear on its own. You are not doing your SEO any favors by making the pop-up linger longer. Also, the length of time a pop-up exists is supposed to be short, so if you don’t want users to get frustrated, keep it very brief.

4) Google notices the pop-up’s engagement impact.

Perhaps the biggest consideration at the end of the day should be: is this pop-up hurting or helping user engagement on my site? If your user experience is awful, Google can tell right away, you will damage your click through rate (CTR) and users will leave your site as soon as they can.

If people are not willing to jump through whatever hoop you’ve created for them to get access your content, Google notices.

If you are having a positive impact, like providing a pop-up about a discount you’re providing that benefits users and improves your website CTR, then that’s excellent. However, if you are not cognizant of your engagement impact, and it’s preventing users from having a smooth experience on your site, that’s a bad sign to Google.

IT’S POSSIBLE TO USE POP-UPS IN A SMART AND INTENTIONAL WAY TO IMPROVE AND NOT HARM YOUR SEO EFFORTS.

You might find these points intuitive, but unfortunately a myriad of companies still latch on to an outdated, ineffective, and SEO-harming approach to using pop-ups.

Whether you use pop-up elements that fall under the category of overlay, interstitial, modal, or if it’s just your classic pop-up, you will benefit from knowing these facts. Heed the advice of all digital marketing experts who have their clients’ best interests in mind, and don’t try to outsmart Google.

As SEO experts, Chainlink Relationship Marketing wants to help your company become an industry leader by enhancing your online credibility, web traffic, click-through rate, and ultimately sales conversions. We can guide you and provide you the tools you need to ensure your pop-ups and SEO strategy is up to date and competitive.

Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help your business grow online. We’d love to give you a free consultation.

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