10 Tips to Make Your PDFs SEO Friendly
1. Choose the File Name Carefully
This is usually the first step toward converting a text document to the universally transportable PDF format. It is therefore all too easy to save the file as whatever is automatically suggested, rather than considering the SEO impact this can have on essential factors like the page URL
As an SEO, if the document is passed to you when it is already in PDF form, conduct some keyword and competitor analysis before renaming the file using a phrase that is in line with user demand. Be sure to capitalize the first letter of each word and separate words with hyphens.
2. Link to the Document Internally
It can be difficult to include PDFs within the internal linking structure of a website.
Although these documents are typically high-value assets (e.g., surveys or reports), they serve such a specific use that they aren’t called upon as often as a product page, for example.
As a result, all too often they end up as orphaned pages within the site hierarchy.
That has a direct impact on their SEO potential. If we take a quote from an interview with Google’s John Mueller in 2016, the significance of linking to a PDF hits home:
“If we are not able to index those pages[…] it might just be that we are saying we have enough content indexed from your website already. We are not ready yet to add a significant batch of more content.”
Sending contextual internal links to your PDFs will give Google the signs it needs to recognize that these are pieces of content you want to have indexed and ranked.
Although decreasing in significance as a ranking factor, optimizing the anchor text that points to the document internally should help, too.
3. Link Out to Relevant Content
This applies primarily to content that resides within your website (although it’s fine to link to authoritative third party sites whenever it’s in the user’s best interests).
By linking back to your own web properties from a PDF, you can increase the likelihood that a search engine will view the content as an important part of your site.
Another great benefit that comes with using PDFs is that external sites are more likely to link back to them, due to their value as a permanent resource. If you include links within the document to important pages on your site, you can end up gaining authority (and rankings) for more than just the PDF.
4. Add a Unique, Optimized Title
This is an SEO basic, but it is so often forgotten when it comes to PDFs.
The title for a PDF can be set in the ‘Document Properties’ section. A search engine will use this in the same way that it uses an HTML title tag. Therefore, this will be the clickable text a user sees in search results.
Think carefully about the terms you would like to rank for, however.
The reality is that PDFs are typically best suited to ranking for specific, long-tail queries. By their nature, the documents hone in on one area of investigation – the title and description should reflect that.
Optimizing a PDF for a broad, conversion-focused term is unlikely to be successful.
5. Tailor Content for the Mobile PDF Experience
This advice applies to just about every area of digital marketing these days, so it’s no surprise that it also applies to SEO for PDFs.
The lengthy nature of a lot of PDFs means that they don’t lend themselves to the bite-sized format that so much mobile content takes.
There are simple, actionable changes you can make to counteract this.
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By aligning content to the left side of the page, you will make it much easier to scroll through the content on a mobile device without having to scroll horizontally first.
You can also make use of bullet points and bold text to make the content more digestible for itinerant, time-sensitive readers.
Images are great too, but be wary of file size.
