Do you want to upload a PDF to your site? It’s a good initiative, but you need to make sure it facilitates your reader, instead of troubling them. Yes, PDFs can be problematic if you don’t optimize them for your site.
Compress Snaps Wherever You Can
Load speed is important for pages, but it’s hard to navigate if there are heavy files. Realizing you invested great effort designing your document, you don’t need to remove anything.
Use online.sodapdf.com/ to compress images and heavy elements without having a difference in the quality. Compressing large files will make the document quick to load.
Break up Your Content
PDF is laced with information. Unfortunately, most people are not interested in digging in your in-depth information, and they need a shortcut to the specific info they need.
If they don’t find it quick, they will go somewhere else. So you need to deal with people who have a dwindling attention span. As a basic rule of writing, your paragraphs shouldn’t be any longer than 3-4 lines per paragraph.
Among the text blocks, signpost your narrative by interjecting a subheading which will give an idea what the reader will find below. If they are relevant, you can use a target query there.
Put Plain Text to Good Use
This is the key difference. When we view a PDF, we just see text. But when a search engine sees them, they see images with words on them. This makes it hard for major search engines to index the documents.
Fortunately, Search engines are improving at reading the content of these images, but they still prefer plain text over these.
There are a wide variety of tools including online.sodapdf.com/ which lets you ease this conversion. You can easily test it by copying and pasting the text from PDF, and see it’s in text or image format.
Alternative Text
A great SEO tactic, but it’s not universally employed. If you want, you can set the alternative text element on your images in a PDF. This procedure is different depending on the software you use to create, and convert PDF.
You need to see this as an opportunity to offer Google with Vital Signals about contents of documents with a means of ranking via image search. PDF is not the most prolific result for a search query, but images can change that.
Keep track of Your Performance
Adding a PDF to your site is different than adding a product page. The measurement of its success needs a different perspective.
You can believe your PDF was downloaded from an organic searcher, and it was a micro-conversion. Add this to the analytics package and keep track of how many people visited your site and how many times your PDF was downloaded.
You can get granular as compared to this. You can assess the path of your user within site to land on PDF. This is another marketing channel which demands a little research before interaction.