Your bounce rate can be such a scary number, right?It’s common knowledge that a high bounce rate is bad, and a low rate is good.Every time you log into your Google Analytics account, it’s right there waiting for you. I understand the feeling when you see that number creeping up.
But the problem is that numbers can be misleading.After all, how high is too high, really?In this post, I’ll show you how to fully measure and assess your bounce rate. That way, you’ll know if it’s actually too high for your industry or if it’s perfectly normal. I’ll share tips and tricks on how to audit your bounce rate and understand what’s driving it up.I’ll also tell you some of my secrets for lowering your bounce rate. But first, let’s talk about exactly what a bounce rate is and why you should care.
What is a Bounce Rate and Why Does it Matter?
A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off of your site.By default, Google Analytics considers a visitor to have interacted with your site if they visited at least one additional page.
The bounce rate you see in your overview report on Google Analytics is your site-wide bounce rate. It’s the average number of bounces across all of your pages divided by the total number of visits across all of those pages within the same period. You can also track the bounce rate of a single page or a segment or section of your site. I’ll show you how once we start looking at the different segment reports.
The bounce rate of a single page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the total number of bounces divided by the total number of visits on a page. Inspired by common questions that we’ve heard, this infographic provides answers to the most asked questions about bounce rate and provides tips to help you improve your bounce rate.
If you run an e-commerce site with a blog, you may want to implement a segmented bounce rate.Why? Your blog posts may have a very different average bounce rate than your product pages. We’ll get into the exact details later, but segmenting the two can make your numbers more meaningful when you’re looking at the data. So, why is bounce rate important? According to SEMrush, bounce rate is the 4th most important ranking factor on SERPs.
Can they both be right?Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Google’s algorithm may not directly take bounce rate into account, but what it signifies is very important to it. As of 2016, RankBrain was the third-most important ranking factor of Google’s algorithm.If you’re not familiar with RankBrain, its main purpose is to improve users’ search results by better understanding their search intent. If a user clicks on your page and leaves without any interaction, that could signal to RankBrain that your site isn’t what they’re looking for.
It makes it look like your result doesn’t match the searcher intent well. As a result, RankBrain says, “Maybe this page shouldn’t be so high in the results.”Can you see how these connect?If you understand bounce rate properly, it can tell you if your marketing strategy is effective and if your visitors are engaging with your content. The key is to understand what your “target” is and break down your bounce rate in a way that provides meaning.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
Many different variables determine what a “good” bounce rate is.Things like your business type, industry, country, and the types of devices your visitors are using all influence what a good average bounce rate would be for your site. For instance, Brafton found that the average bounce rate is 58.18%. However, their research shows that bounce rates are higher for B2B businesses than B2C businesses.
If you’re still unsure about the bounce rate you should be targeting, Google Analytics can help you figure it out.Google Analytics provides a quick visualization of the average bounce rate for what it believes is your industry. It does this by benchmarking.First, you need to set up benchmarking in Google Analytics. Under the admin section, click on “Account Settings” and then check the “Benchmarking” box…Read more..
For someone performing their first technical SEO audit, the results can be both overwhelming and intimidating. Often, you can’t see the wood for the trees and have no idea how to fix things or where to even begin.
After years of working with clients, especially as the head of tech SEO for a U.K. agency, I’ve found technical SEO audits to be a near-daily occurrence. With that, I know how important it is, especially for newer SEOs, to understand what each issue is and why it is important.
Understanding issues found within a technical audit allows you to analyze a site fully and come up with a comprehensive strategy.
In this guide, I am going to walk you through a step-by-step process for a successful tech audit but also explain what each issue is and, perhaps more importantly, where it should lie on your priority list.
Whether it’s to make improvements on your own site or recommendations for your first client, this guide will help you to complete a technical SEO audit successfully and confidently in eight steps.
But first, let’s clarify some basics.
What is a technical SEO audit?
Technical SEO is the core foundation of any website. A technical SEO audit is an imperative part of site maintenance to analyze the technical aspects of your website.
An audit will check if a site is optimized properly for the various search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
This includes ensuring there are no issues related to crawlability and indexation that prevent search engines from allowing your site to appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
An audit involves analyzing all elements of your site to make sure that you have not missed out on anything that could be hindering the optimization process. In many cases, some minor changes can improve your ranking significantly.
Also, an audit can highlight technical problems your website has that you may not be aware of, such as hreflang errors, canonical issues, or mixed content problems.
Generally speaking, I always like to do an initial audit on a new site—whether that is one I just built or one I am seeing for the first time from a client—and then on a quarterly basis.
I think it is advisable to get into good habits with regular audits as part of ongoing site maintenance. This is especially if you are working with a site that is continuously publishing new content.
It is also a good idea to perform an SEO audit when you notice that your rankings are stagnant or declining.
What do you need from a client before completing a technical audit?
Even if a client comes to me with goals that are not necessarily “tech SEO focused,” such as link building or creating content, it is important to remember that any technical issue can impede the success of the work we do going forward.
It is always important to assess the technical aspects of the site, offer advice on how to make improvements, and explain how those technical issues may impact the work we intend to do together.
With that said, if you intend on performing a technical audit on a website that is not your own, at a minimum, you will need access to the Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts for that site.
How to perform a technical SEO audit in eight steps
For the most part, technical SEO audits are not easy. Unless you have a very small, simple business site that was perfectly built by an expert SEO, you’re likely going to run into some technical issues along the way.
Often, especially with more complex sites, such as those with a large number of pages or those in multiple languages, audits can be like an ever-evolving puzzle that can take days or even weeks to crack.
Regardless of whether you are looking to audit your own small site or a large one for a new client, I’m going to walk you through the eight steps that will help you to identify and fix some of the most common technical issues.
Step 1. Crawl your website
All you need to get started here is to set up a project in Ahrefs’ Site Audit, which you can even access for free as part of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
This tool scans your website to check how many URLs there are, how many are indexable, how many are not, and how many have issues.
From this, the audit tool creates an in-depth report on everything it finds to help you identify and fix any issues that are hindering your site’s performance.
Of course, more advanced issues may need further investigation that involves other tools, such as Google Search Console. But our audit tool does a great job at highlighting key issues, especially for beginner SEOs.
First, to run an audit with Site Audit, you will need to ensure your website is connected to your Ahrefs account as a project. The easiest way to do this is via Google Search Console, although you can verify your ownership by adding a DNS record or HTML file.
Once your ownership is verified, it is a good idea to check the Site Audit settings before running your first crawl. If you have a bigger site, it is always best to increase the crawl speed before you start.
There are a number of standard settings in place. For a small, personal site, these settings may be fine as they are. However, settings like the maximum number of pages crawled under “Limits” is something you may want to alter for bigger projects.
Also, if you are looking for in-depth insight on Core Web Vitals (CWV), you may want to add your Google API key here too.
Once happy with the settings, you can run a new crawl under the “Site Audit” tab.
Initially, after running the audit, you will be directed to the “Overview” page. This will give you a top-level view of what the tool has found, including the number of indexable vs. non-indexable pages, top issues, and an overall website health score out of 100.
This will give you a quick and easy-to-understand proxy metric to the overall website health.
From here, you can head over to the “All issues” tab. This breaks down all of the problems the crawler has found, how much of a priority they are to be fixed, and how to fix them.
This report, alongside other tools, can help you to start identifying the issues that may be hindering your performance on the SERPs.
Step 2. Spotting crawlability and indexation issues
If your site has pages that can’t be crawled by search engines, your website may not be indexed correctly, if at all. If your website does not appear in the index, it cannot be found by users.
Ensuring that search bots can crawl your website and collect data from it correctly means search engines can accurately place your site on the SERPs and you can rank for those all-important keywords.
There are a few things you need to consider when looking for crawlability issues:
Indexation errors
Robots.txt errors
Sitemap issues
Optimizing the crawl budget
Identifying indexation issues
Priority: High
Ensuring your pages are indexed is imperative if you want to appear anywhere on Google.
The simplest way to check how your site is indexed is by heading to Google Search Console and checking the Coverage report. Here, you can see exactly which pages are indexed, which pages have warnings, as well as which ones are excluded and why:
Note that pages will only appear in the search results if they are indexed without any issues.
If your pages are not being indexed, there are a number of issues that may be causing this. We will take a look at the top few below, but you can also check our other guide for a more in-depth walkthrough.
Checking the robots.txt file
Priority: High
The robots.txt file is arguably the most straightforward file on your website. But it is something that people consistently get wrong. Although you may advise search engines on how to crawl your site, it is easy to make errors.
Most search engines, especially Google, like to abide by the rules you set out in the robots.txt file. So if you tell a search engine not to crawl and/or index certain URLs or even your entire site by accident, that’s what will happen.
This is what the robots.txt file, which tells search engines not to crawl any pages, looks like:
Often, these instructions are left within the file even after the site goes live, preventing the site from being crawled. This is a rare easy fix that acts as a panacea to your SEO.
You can also check whether a single page is accessible and indexed by typing the URL into the Google Search Console search bar. If it’s not indexed yet and it’s accessible, you can “Request Indexing.”
The Coverage report in Google Search Console can also let you know if you’re blocking certain pages in robots.txt despite them being indexed:
A robots meta tag is an HTML snippet that tells search engines how to crawl or index a certain page. It’s placed into the <head> section of a webpage and looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
This noindex is the most common one. And as you’ve guessed, it tells search engines not to index the page. We also often see the following robots meta tag on pages across whole websites:
This tells Google to use any of your content freely on its SERPs. The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress adds this by default unless you add noindex or nosnippet directives.
If there are no robots meta tags on the page, search engines consider that as index, follow, meaning that they can index the page and crawl all links on it.
But noindex actually has a lot of uses:
Thin pages with little or no value for the user
Pages in the staging environment
Admin and thank-you pages
Internal search results
PPC landing pages
Pages about upcoming promotions, contests, or product launches
Duplicate content (use canonical tags to suggest the best version for indexing)
But improper use also happens to be a top indexability issue. Using the wrong attribute accidentally can have a detrimental effect on your presence on the SERPs, so remember to use it with care.
An XML sitemap helps Google to navigate all of the important pages on your website. Considering crawlers can’t stop and ask for directions, a sitemap ensures Google has a set of instructions when it comes to crawling and indexing your website.
But much like crawlers can be accidentally blocked via the robots.txt file, pages can be left out of the sitemap, meaning they likely won’t get prioritized for crawling.
Also, by having pages in your sitemap that shouldn’t be there, such as broken pages, you can confuse crawlers and affect your crawl budget (more on that next).
You can check sitemap issues in Site Audit: Site Audit > All issues > Other.
The main thing here is to ensure that all of the important pages that you want to have indexed are within your sitemap and avoid including anything else.
A crawl budget refers to how many pages and how rapidly a search engine can crawl.
A variety of things influence the crawl budget. These include the number of resources on the website, as well as how valuable Google deems your indexable pages to be.
Having a big crawl budget does not guarantee that you will rank at the top of the SERPs. But if all of your critical pages are not crawled due to crawl budget concerns, it is possible that those pages may not be indexed.
Your pages are likely being scanned as part of your daily crawl budget if they are popular, receive organic traffic and links, and are well-linked internally across your site.
New pages—as well as those that are not linked internally or externally, e.g., those found on newer sites—may not be crawled as frequently, if at all.
For larger sites with millions of pages or sites that are often updated, crawl budget can be an issue. In general, if you have a large number of pages that aren’t being crawled or updated as frequently as you want, you should think about looking to speed up crawling.
Using the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console can give you insight into how your site is being crawled and any issues that may have been flagged by the Googlebot.
It is important to check your on-page fundamentals. Although many SEOs may tell you that on-page issues like those with meta descriptions aren’t a big deal, I personally think it is part of good SEO housekeeping.
Even Google’s John Mueller previously stated that having multiple H1 tags on a webpage isn’t an issue. However, let’s think about SEO as a points system.
If you and a competitor have sites that stand shoulder to shoulder on the SERP, then even the most basic of issues could be the catalyst that determines who ranks at the top. So in my opinion, even the most basic of housekeeping issues should be addressed.
So let’s take a look at the following:
Page titles and title tags
Meta descriptions
Canonical tags
Hreflang tags
Structured data
Page titles and title tags
Priority: Medium
Title tags have a lot more value than most people give them credit for. Their job is to let Google and site visitors know what a webpage is about—like this:
Here’s what it looks like in raw HTML format:
<title>How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process)</title>
In recent years, title tags have sparked a lot of debate in the SEO world. Google, it turns out, is likely to modify your title tag if it doesn’t like it.
One of the biggest reasons Google rewrites title tags is that they are simply too long. This is one issue that is highlighted within Site Audit.
In general, it is good practice to ensure all of your pages have title tags, none of which are longer than 60 characters.
A meta description is an HTML attribute that describes the contents of a page. It may be displayed as a snippet under the title tag in the search results to give further context.
More visitors will click on your website in the search results if it has a captivating meta description. Even though Google only provides meta descriptions 37% of the time, it is still important to ensure your most important pages have great ones.
You can find out if any meta descriptions are missing, as well as if they are too long or too short.
But writing meta descriptions is more than just filling a space. It’s about enticing potential site visitors.
A canonical tag (rel=“canonical”) specifies the primary version for duplicate or near-duplicate pages. To put it another way, if you have about the same content available under several URLs, you should be using canonical tags to designate which version is the primary and should be indexed.
Canonical tags are an important part of SEO, mainly because Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Also, using canonical tags incorrectly (or not at all) can seriously affect your crawl budget.
If spiders are wasting their time crawling duplicate pages, it can mean that valuable pages are being missed.
You can find duplicate content issues in Site Audit: Site Audit > Reports > Duplicates > Issues.
Although hreflang is seemingly yet another simple HTML tag, it is possibly the most complex SEO element to get your head around.
The hreflang tag is imperative for sites in multiple languages. If you have many versions of the same page in a different language or target different parts of the world—for example, one version in English for the U.S. and one version in French for France—you need hreflang tags.
Translating a website is time consuming and costly—because you’ll need to put in effort and ensure all versions show up in the relevant search results. But it does give a better user experience by catering to different users who consume content in different languages.
Plus, as clusters of multiple-language pages share each other’s ranking signals, using hreflang tags correctly can have a direct impact as a ranking factor. This is alluded to by Gary Illyes from Google in this video.
You can find hreflang tag issues in Site Audit under localization: Site Audit > All issues > Localization.
Structured data, often referred to as schema markup, has a number of valuable uses in SEO.
Most prominently, structured data is used to help get rich results or features in the Knowledge Panel. Here’s a great example: When working with recipes, more details are given about each result, such as the rating.
You also get a feature in the Knowledge Panel that shows what a chocolate chip cookie is (along with some nutritional information):
Image optimization is often overlooked when it comes to SEO. However, image optimization has a number of benefits that include:
Improved load speed.
More traffic you can get from Google Images.
More engaging user experience.
Improved accessibility.
Image issues can be found in the main audit report: Site Audit > Reports > Images.
Broken images
Priority: High
Broken images cannot be displayed on your website. This makes for a bad user experience in general but can also look spammy, giving visitors the impression that the site is not well maintained and professional.
This can be especially problematic for anyone who monetizes their website, as it can make the website seem less trustworthy.
Image file size too large
Priority: High
Large images on your website can seriously impact your site speed and performance. Ideally, you want to display images in the smallest possible size and in an appropriate format, such as WebP.
The best option is to optimize the image file size before uploading the image to your website. Tools like TinyJPG can optimize your images before they’re added to your site.
If you are looking to optimize existing images, there are tools available, especially for more popular content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress. Plugins such as Imagify or WP-Optimize are great examples.
HTTPS page links to HTTP image
Priority: Medium
HTTPS pages that link to HTTP images cause what is called “mixed content issues.” This means that a page is loaded securely via HTTPS. But a resource it links to, such as an image or video, is on an insecure HTTP connection.
Mixed content is a security issue. For those who monetize sites with display ads, it can even prevent ad providers from allowing ads on your site. It also degrades the user experience of your website.
By default, certain browsers restrict unsafe resource requests. If your page relies on these vulnerable resources, it may not function correctly if they are banned.
Missing alt text
Priority: Low
Alt text, or alternative text, describes an image on a website. It is an incredibly important part of image optimization, as it improves accessibility on your website for millions of people throughout the world who are visually impaired.
Often, those with a visual impairment use screen readers, which convert images into audio. Essentially, this is describing the image to the site visitor. Properly optimized alt text allows screen readers to inform site users with visual impairments exactly what they are seeing.
Alt text can also serve as anchor text for image links, help you to rank on Google Images, and improve topical relevance.
When most people think of “links” for SEO, they think about backlinks. How to build them, how many they should have, and so on.
What many people don’t realize is the sheer importance of internal linking. In fact, internal links are like the jelly to backlinks’ peanut butter. Can you have one without the other? Sure. Are they always better together? You bet!
Not only do internal links help your external link building efforts, but they also make for a better website experience for both search engines and users.
The proper siloing of topics using internal linking creates an easy-to-understand topical roadmap for everyone who comes across your site. This has a number of benefits:
Creates relevancy for keywords
Helps ensure all content is crawled
Makes it easy for visitors to find relevant content or products
Of course, when done right, all of this makes sense. But internal links should be audited when you first get your hands on a site because things may not be as orderly as you’ll want.
4xx status codes
Priority: High
Go to Site Audit > Internal pages > Issues tab > 4XX page.
Here, you can see all of your site’s broken internal pages.
These are problematic because they waste “link equity” and provide users with a negative experience.
Here are a few options for dealing with these issues:
Bring back the broken page at the same address (if deleted by accident)
Redirect the broken page to a more appropriate location; all internal links referring to it should be updated or removed
Orphan pages
Priority: High
Go to Site Audit > Links > Issues tab > Orphan page (has no incoming internal links).
Here, we highlight pages that have zero internal links pointing to them.
There are two reasons why indexable pages should not be orphaned:
Internal links will not pass PageRank because there are none.
They won’t be found by Google (unless you upload your sitemap through Google Search Console or there are backlinks from several other websites’ crawled pages, they won’t be seen).
If your website has multiple orphaned pages, filter the list from high to low for organic traffic. If internal links are added to orphaned pages still receiving organic traffic, they’ll certainly gain far more traffic.
External links are hyperlinks within your pages that link to another domain. That means all of your backlinks—the links to your website from another one—are someone else’s external links.
See how the magic of the internet is invisibly woven together? *mind-blown emoji*
External links are often used to back up sources in the form of citations. For example, if I am writing a blog post and discussing metrics from a study, I’ll externally link to where I found that authoritative source.
Linking to credible sources makes your own website more credible to both visitors and search engines. This is because you show that your information is backed up with sound research.
Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often times, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.
As always, just like anything else, external links can cause issues. These can be found in the audit report (similar to internal links): Site Audit > All issues > Links.
As you can see from the image above, links are broken down into indexable and not indexable and you can find the same issues across both categories. However, each issue has a different predetermined importance level—depending on whether the link is indexable or not.
Page has links to broken page
Priority: High (if indexable)
This issue can refer to both internal and external links and simply means that the URLs linked to are returning a 4XX return code. These links damage the user experience for visitors and can impair the credibility of your site.
Page has no outgoing links
Priority: High (if indexable)
Again, this issue refers to both internal and external links and essentially means a page has no links from it at all. This means the page is a “dead end” for your site visitors and search engines. Bummer.
But in regards to external links specifically, if your page has no outgoing links, it affects all of the benefits of external links as discussed above.
Step 7. Site speed and performance
Site speed has become quite a hot topic among the SEO community in recent times, especially after Google announced that mobile speed is indeed a ranking factor.
Since May 2021, speed metrics known as Core Web Vitals (CWV) have been utilized by Google to rank pages. They use Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to assess visual load, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to test visual stability, and First Input Delay (FID) to measure interactivity.
Google’s goal is to improve user experience because, let’s face it, no one likes a slow website. In today’s society, the need for instant gratification encourages site visitors to leave before they finish what they intend to do.
Within the Ahrefs audit report, you can find information about site speed: Site Audit > Reports > Performance > Overview.
Recommendation
You can get detailed page speed data from Google PageSpeed Insights if you enable Core Web Vitals in the Crawl settings.
There are also a number of excellent speed testing tools available, including PageSpeed Insights from Google and my personal favorite, GTmetrix.
Speed optimization for sites that are very slow can be a complex process. However, for beginners, it is advisable to use one of the available tools such as WPRocket or NitroPack (both paid) to significantly improve site speed.
In the world we now live, more individuals than ever before are continuously utilizing mobile devices. For example, mobile shopping currently has 60% of the market, according to Datareportal’s 300-page study.
It is no wonder that over the last few years, Google has looked to switch to mobile-first indexing.
From a technical standpoint, it is good practice to run a second audit on your site using Ahrefs’ mobile crawler. As a standard, Ahrefs’ audit tool uses a desktop crawl to audit your site; however, this can easily be changed under “Crawl Settings” within your “Project Settings.”
Our comparison function will compare your mobile and desktop sites and inform you what has changed or if any “new” issues have arisen once you have crawled your site a second time, e.g., problems that exist only on mobile.
From here, you can select any of the “New,” “Added,” or “Removed” numbers to determine what has changed with respect to each problem.
In all honesty, this is just scratching the surface when it comes to performing a technical SEO audit. Each of the points above can easily have an entire blog post about it and additional, more advanced issues like paginations, log file analysis, and advanced site architecture.
However, for someone looking to learn where to get started in order to successfully complete a technical SEO audit, this is a great place to begin.
Whenever you perform a technical SEO audit, you’ll always have tons to fix. The important thing is to get your priorities straight first. Luckily, Ahrefs’ Site Audit gives you a predefined priority rating for each issue.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that regardless of the issue, its importance depends on the website or page you’re working on. For example, the main pages you want to rank will always take priority over pages you don’t want to index.
Jenny is an award-winning SEO consultant who specializes in using branded PR to maximize SEO results for clients by building E-A-T and has an extensive background in niche affiliate and technical SEO.
Pringle, G., Allison, L., and Dowe, D. (April 1998). “What is a tall poppy among web pages?”. Proc. 7th Int. World Wide Web Conference. Archived from the original on April 27, 2007. Retrieved May 8, 2007.Laurie J. Flynn (November 11, 1996). “Desperately Seeking Surfers”. New York Times. Archived from the original on October 30, 2007. Retrieved May 9, 2007.
Zoltan Gyongyi & Hector Garcia-Molina (2005). “Link Spam Alliances”(PDF). Proceedings of the 31st VLDB Conference, Trondheim, Norway. Archived(PDF) from the original on June 12, 2007. Retrieved May 9, 2007.Hansell, Saul (June 3, 2007). “Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine”. New York Times. Archived from the original on November 10, 2017. Retrieved June 6, 2007.
Strategic thinking is a critical skill in life. Interestingly, a lot of us hear about it for the first time in our lives through our managers “You are great at execution, but you need to start thinking strategically.” Previously considered a blatant corporate mumbo jumbo term, strategic thinking wasn’t a popular concept in the early years of my career. I kind of assumed that strategic thinking was reserved for corporates and people higher up in the company who needed to make crucial decisions around the future of an organization. It never occurred to me that thinking strategically isn’t a skill you acquire when you reach a certain position, it’s a skill you build to get to a certain position.
Strategic thinking is a critical skill in life.
Interestingly, a lot of us hear about it for the first time in our lives through our managers “You are great at execution, but you need to start thinking strategically.” Previously considered a blatant corporate mumbo jumbo term,strategic thinking wasn’t a popular concept in the early years of my career. I kind of assumed that strategic thinking was reserved for corporates and people higher up in the company who needed to make crucial decisions around the future of an organization.It never occurred to me that thinking strategically isn’t a skill you acquire when you reach a certain position, it’s a skill you build to get to a certain position.
I also believed that when I was ready to climb the corporate ladder, my manager would give me the training to help me build my strategic thinking skills and the opportunities to practice those skills. Call me naive, but that was the corporate world I lived in back then. Much has changed since, but one thing has remained constant: Strategic thinking is as important now (and may be even more) as it was many years ago.While universally, everyone is expected to have strategic thinking skills at some point in their career, no one is taught to think strategically at work, in college, or at school. Much of our education system is structured around a curriculum and how to fit our minds within a box.At school, we are praised for sticking to conventional wisdom and not asking too many questions. The trend continues in college.
In the early years of our career, we are rewarded so much for our speed of execution that we fail to realize that our journey ahead is less about doing things and more about deciding the right thing to do.When a large part of our life is spent executing someone else’s idea, it isn’t easy to break out of that mold and rewire our brain to think above and beyond. But strategic thinking is not a skill you can develop without practice.
Strategic thinking is a muscle that we all need to build because using it right at work can be a strategic advantage in your career growth as an individual. Much like a rubber band, you need to stretch and exercise your thinking. It requires crossing the boundary of the comfort zone to think about an idea to its extreme without mental guardrails to put it down. It requires uncovering new insights that moderate thinking would never surface.
Getting started on the strategic thinking mindset
Before we jump to the strategies to embrace a strategic thinking mindset, here are a few questions to kick-off your thinking. You need to ask yourself these questions from time to time. Write them down if you want them to be more effective:
Where do you stand right now?
Where do you want to be next year and the year after that?
What skills do you need to get there?
How can you practice those skills?
How can you increase your chances of success?
How can you use your time effectively and maximize it for impact?
Who can help you validate your ideas and give you feedback to expand your thinking?
Once you are able to spend some time thinking deep and hard about these questions, you are ready to embrace a strategic thinking mindset. Follow these 4 key strategies:
Challenge and Question Assumptions
Many parents and even teachers are annoyed with kids who ask too many questions: “Why do I have to go to school?” “Why do I have to sleep early when you can be awake till late?” “Why can’t I play video games?” “Why do I have to finish my homework?” You may have not gotten all these answers as a kid. None of us did. But not getting these answers as a child shouldn’t stop you from asking questions as an adult. Curiosity and the ability to express that curiosity constructively is a great skill to have at work.
One of the biggest problems I see in organizations is how people do certain things because they have always been done that way. Emailing a report every morning to hundreds of employees that no one cares to open. Spending hours and hours of meeting time in planning discussions when no one cares about those plans a few months down the line. Far too many inefficiencies creep into the corporate system over a long period of time.
One big component of building a strategic thinking mindset is to challenge how certain things are done in your organization – not with the intent to put someone down or establish your superiority, but to identify ways to do them better. Ask targeted questions on specific problems within your organization or your line of work. Learn from how others respond or think about these problems. Different points of view on these problems will not only expand your own thinking, they will give you a direction on the areas that are worth investing your time in.
Observe, Interact and Draw Connections
The hustle and bustle of getting things done, moving faster, quicker and making things happen can prevent you from noticing and investing in activities, ideas and projects that are more important in the long-term, but need your attention right now. We have all fallen for the lure of attending to the urgent while pushing the important stuff to the side. The instant gratification from solving the problem in the short-term is always more alluring than the prudent decision. We may optimize for a small gain in the moment without analyzing the potential impacts of our decision in the future. Building a strategic thinking mindset requires delaying that gratification. It requires living with a small, unimportant problem and putting all your energy and focus on other important ideas and activities that require long-term planning and execution.
Create mental space for new ideas to kick-in. Without the quiet time to sit with your thoughts, facing the uncomfortable silence, and letting your mind wander away, you cannot draw useful connections. It will not happen the first time around and probably not even the second time. But if you are persistent in your efforts, without digital and other distractions of daily life, you will start to notice new patterns of thinking. New ideas that you never thought about before will start to surface.Another great strategy is to not restrict yourself to knowledge within your current scope of work.
Spend time learning about your business and industry. Meet with other functions within your organization to understand how they operate, what their challenges are and how they make decisions. All of this knowledge will enable you to apply different mental models to connect ideas from different domains thereby expanding your circle of competence and building your strategic thinking skills.Remember, building strategic thinking skills involves looking beyond the obvious and now to prodding and shaping the uncertain future. You can’t do that without the willingness to face a little discomfort in the present to build the skills you need in the future.
Put it Into Action
Now, to the most important part. I have discussed this before. In any organization, both big picture thinking and nitty-gritty details are important. Strategic thinking requires the right balance of thinking ahead while actioning in the now. It’s the perfect amalgamation of what the future holds to what must be done now in the present to make that future possible. Strategic thinking not only involves the long-term view into the future, it also involves the choices you need to make to make that future possible. It requires determining which path to take and which to abandon. It requires evaluating the cost and making the trade-offs. Doing something will always come at the cost of not doing something else.While a good strategy is important to get started, a strategy by itself won’t get you anywhere.
You need both strategy “the intent” and tactics “putting that intent to action.” Break down your strategy into the specific things you need to do.Plan what day of the week, and what specific time of the day you are actually going to give life to your strategy. To make sure you don’t let things slip by, or fail to grab the right opportunities, plan these activities on your calendar. Don’t let lack of time or other excuses be the reason for inaction. Plan your time to make things happen.
Craft and Communicate
Finally, to embrace a strategic thinking mindset, don’t work in silos. Find people around you that you can trust, respect or admire. Exchange your ideas with them, request them to challenge your thinking, enable them to ask you tough and uncomfortable questions.By answering these questions, you will not only expand your thinking, you will open your mind to consider new possibilities. Instead of sticking with your original conclusions, you will be willing to challenge your assumptions.
Strategic Thinking is an Ongoing Process
You can’t build a strategic thinking muscle unless you audit your outcomes, inquire about other opinions and adapt to the changes around you. The world is changing very fast and you need to adapt your thinking to the demands of the tomorrow and not the expectations from the past.
To adapt your thinking, follow these 3 practices:
Audit:
Make it a habit to review how you are doing against your goals. Typically a brief review every month and a quarterly deep dive should be sufficient to get a handle on your state of affairs. Examine your strategy from time to time and audit it to ensure you are still leaning against the right wall.When things are going well, put your strategic thinking hat to determine how you can do better:
Does an area seem more promising than you originally envisioned?
Does it make sense to invest more resources in that area?
What kind of changes can you foresee based on market shifts or other industry trends?
How can you make sure you aren’t biased in your thinking by relying only on confirming pieces of evidence while rejecting data that contradicts it.
When things aren’t working out as expected, ask yourself these questions:
Is it a specific tactic that’s causing your strategy to not work. Should you reconsider another tactic?
If the tactic is not a problem, do you need to reconsider the strategy itself?
Is it possible that external circumstances beyond your control are causing your strategy to not work?
Has something changed since you implemented this strategy that you have not considered yet? Is it possible that change is making your strategy ineffective?
Is your ego getting in the way and making you invest in a failed cause? Can you look past the sunk costs into other better opportunities?
Inquire
It’s easy to get muddled up in our own thinking and assume we are making the right decision even when we are not. Others can clearly see what we are sometimes not able to see ourselves.Seeking an outside opinion and encouraging different perspectives that challenge our viewpoint is a great way to uncover our blind spots. Strategy for your personal life? Seek feedback from close family and friends. Strategy for an organization? Seek inputs from colleagues and other coworkers.Don’t stay with your opinion unless you have solid data and people to back up your thinking. Ask others these questions:
What’s the one thing wrong with my strategy?
What’s the one thing I can do better with my strategy?
What would you do if you were in my place?
What would you not do if you were in my place?
What circumstances or events would cause you to evaluate other options?
Adapt
Finally, use the inputs from your audit and inquiry to adjust your strategy. Adapt your future strategy based on the learning from your past. What worked? What didn’t work? What mistakes did you make? Strategic thinking is as much about the future as it’s about learning from your past. Visualize your future. Look at your past. Adjust the gap with the changes you need to make to build that future for yourself and others. You don’t need a breakthrough idea, just the simple choices that will move you forward one step at a time in the direction of your goals.
Many people make the mistake and assume they aren’t thinking strategically if they don’t come up with an innovative idea. Strategic thinking is less about innovation and more about the ability to make the right connections.
Summary
Strategic thinking: The ability to visualize the long-term while planning the short-term to align with the long-term is a critical skill in life.
Much like other things in life, strategic thinking is a muscle that gets better with repetition and practice.
To get started on your strategic thinking journey, start with challenging and questioning assumptions. Identify new ways to do small things at work.
Make time and space to allow your brain to form new connections. Learn about your industry, business and other functions in the organization to expand your thinking beyond your current scope of work.
Give life to your strategy by putting it into action. Break down your strategy into tactics, the specific things you need to do to implement your strategy.
Don’t be rigid in your thinking. Open your brain to new possibilities by seeking others’ opinions and encouraging them to challenge your assumptions.
Finally, strategic thinking is an on-going process. You need to audit, inquire and adjust your strategy based on your learning from the past and the demands of tomorrow.
The Internal Revenue Service entered this tax filing season severely backlogged and shorthanded—the result of decades of underfunding exacerbated by Covid-19 related strains. As of early last month, the agency had 23.5 million tax returns and pieces of correspondence awaiting manual processing, including some paper returns filed as far back as April of 2021.
Last filing season, 160 million of 195 million taxpayer calls to the IRS didn’t even get through; only 11 million callers got to talk with an IRS employee while another 24 million callers got automated answers.
Nina E. Olson, a tax lawyer and the founder and executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, describes the current problems at the IRS as the worst she’s ever seen. And she’s seen a lot. From 2001 to 2019, she served as the IRS’ National Taxpayer Advocate—an independent voice within the agency charged with helping individual taxpayers and making recommendations to Congress for change.
Before that, she spent years representing clients and running a clinic for low-income taxpayers. The only thing that comes close to the current mess, Olson says, was 1985, when workers at tax return processing centers were struggling with a then new computer system (which is still in use) and fell so far behind that a few famously resorted to hiding returns in closets and in trash bags.
“That was the worst to date. And I think this filing season and the last filing season have really shown that it’s just far worse (now),’’ she said last week during a conversation for Forbes subscribers.
The good news is that the IRS’ problems won’t affect the majority of taxpayers—they can still file their 2021 1040s electronically and see their expected tax refunds appear in their bank accounts within a few weeks. (As of March 4th, the IRS had issued 38 million tax refunds averaging $3,401 each.)
But tens of millions of other Americans won’t be so lucky. The IRS itself has projected that nearly 21 million electronically filed returns could be delayed this tax season because of discrepancies related to changes Congress made in the refundable child and dependent care credits.
That’s on top of millions of other returns that will get kicked out of the IRS’ normal computer processing stream for some other reason—say, a suspected case of identity theft or fraud, a Social Security number that doesn’t match its records or a mismatch related to the 2021 $1,400 per person Economic Impact Payments i.e. stimulus checks.
Olson’s advice is built on her deep understanding of what information is and isn’t available from the IRS and where the worst bottlenecks are—mainly in the agency’s handling of paper, which suffered from Covid-19 shutdowns and restrictions and in the human intensive “error resolution process” which was been overwhelmed by all the Covid relief Congress doled out through the tax code. “Throughout all of 2021, it just never got caught up,’’ Olson says.
What information can’t you get from the IRS? Consider its much advertised “Where’s My Refund?” app. That service can tell you that your return was received, or your refund was approved or that a refund has been sent.
But it won’t tell you anything useful between the received and approved phase, Olson warns. It won’t, for example, tell you that your return was kicked out of normal processing for some discrepancy. (That could be why a pitiful 24% of “Where’s My Refund” users who took a survey last year found it helpful—down from 51% in 2019.)
Here’s another piece of Olson advice that’s particularly relevant this season. Back in December and January, the IRS sent a “2021 Total Advance Child Tax Credit (AdvCTC) Payments” statement—also known as a 6419 letter—telling families with children how much in advance 2021 child tax credits the IRS had paid them. (The payments, made monthly in July through December, were supposed to come to half of the benefits due.)
What if the IRS number is more than what’s shown in your own records—which could well be the case if, for example, you changed your bank account or moved late last year and the money the IRS thinks you got didn’t actually reach you? The IRS recommends you check online to see if it has a more updated number. And if the numbers still don’t match?
Olson recommends you file your return electronically using what you believe is the correct number. True, your refund will get kicked out of the normal processing stream and go into the error resolution system. And true, last year returns waited an average of 75 days in error resolution purgatory to even be assigned to a human being to work.
But the IRS has supposedly programmed its computers to automatically adjust more returns with discrepancies related to stimulus checks and child credits, so the delay shouldn’t be so long this year, Olson says. A key and little understood point, she adds, is you’ll get a refund from the IRS for the lesser amount it thinks you’re due, and eventually receive a “math or clerical” error notice from the IRS explaining why it has reduced your refund.
Why not send in a paper return with an explanation of why your numbers may be different than the ones the IRS has? “Who knows when a paper return is going to be processed?’’ she answers. And then, she adds, when it finally is processed, “probably what will happen is you’ll get a math error adjustment eventually on the paper return, they won’t have looked at your additional information you sent in, and you’ll have to send it in again.”
By filing electronically, she explains, you’ll get the part of your refund the IRS agrees with faster, and you’ll also get your chance to dispute the IRS faster.
About those math error notices—they’re really not about a mistake in calculation in most cases. What they are is the IRS using statutory authority Congress has given it to adjust the numbers on your return, without an audit and without contacting you first. The IRS might reduce your refund, say you owe more, or (if you’re lucky) give you a bigger refund.
If you disagree, it’s crucial you respond within 60 days asking the IRS to abate the change, Olson says. (She suggests you send your objections and any documentation supporting your case by certified mail, which provides you with a mailing receipt to prove you did this in a timely fashion.) Given the IRS’ own delays—no guarantee it will open your letter quickly—was is the 60 days important?
As Olson’s organization explains in a fact sheet, If you miss the 60-day deadline, you can still call or mail information to the IRS showing why you believe it is wrong. But you’ll lose the right to go to the U.S. Tax Court if the IRS continues to disagree with you, and if the IRS says you owe more money, it may begin trying to collect the tax due while it is still reviewing your documentation.
But who wants to hire a tax lawyer and go to court? You can file your suit in the U.S. Tax Court without a lawyer (there are instructions on the Tax Court web site for doing so), and without paying any disputed amount first, answers Olson. And if you do file a suit, your case will get kicked to an appeals officer at the IRS. “Tax Court is actually one way to get to that live human being,’’ she explains.
Speaking of live human beings—“I hate to say this,’’ Olson observes, but there are times when you should actually (deep breath) call the IRS. The IRS projects it will answer 35% of calls this season—an improvement but still not great. The point is there are times when reaching a human at the IRS can make a huge difference. For example, if the math error relates to a mistake your made when you entered a Social Security number, a human agent may be able to fix that with you over the phone, Olson says.
Or, if it’s a case of suspected identity theft, you may be able to establish you are the legitimate taxpayer over the phone, without having to wait for an appointment at an IRS office. In addition, if your refund has been delayed, but you haven’t gotten a math error notice yet, an agent may be able to tell you what the issue is and maybe help you fix it. (That depends on where your return is in the process.)
What about getting help from Olson’s old domain—the Taxpayer Advocate Service? Olson disagrees with a decision last November by current National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins to reject cases where the sole issue is the delay in the processing of an original or amended tax return—Collins took that action on the grounds that TAS itself was overwhelmed and that delays at the IRS were so severe that the IRS couldn’t give priority to some returns without slowing down processing of others.
Under pressure from members of Congress, who referred 66,000 cases to TAS last year, six times the annual number before the pandemic, TAS is now taking some cases involving processing delays of amended returns—particularly those, for example, involving employers’ quarterly payroll tax returns claiming the Covid-era Employee Retention Credit.
Olson recommends that if a delay at the IRS is causing you financial hardship you both contact your member of Congress and call TAS or fax in a request for TAS assistance (on a Form 911 and yes, the IRS still uses fax machines). There are some issues where TAS is definitely ready to help. For example, if you haven’t gotten your refund because you are the victim of identity theft, TAS will help you get an appointment to get it resolved.
“You’ve got to press on every single lever,’’ says Olson. “I really personally think you should be going to TAS and making them take your case. And I personally think you should go to the members of Congress.” Some constituent cases Congress sends to TAS do get help, she says, and members of Congress “can use that information to force change on a systemic level.”
She points out that the just signed new omnibus spending bill gives the IRS more money for taxpayer service (including $75 million taken from its enforcement budget to process backlogged returns). It also grants the IRS authority to speed up hiring of 10,000 new employees—if it can find them. That, of course, won’t be much help to taxpayers waiting now for their delayed refunds and getting no satisfaction from the “Where’s My Refund?” app.
The video of Olson’s conversation with Forbes is available to subscribers here.
I’m the Washington D.C. bureau chief and an assistant managing editor of Forbes. During my three decades with Forbes, I’ve reported extensively on taxes — tax
Taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are set to face a bumpy 2022 tax filing season, which the IRS announced will begin January 24th and run through April 18th. Two major challenges await taxpayers: a second year of navigating pandemic-related tax relief on their returns and IRS backlogs that may delay processing and refunds.
Over the past two years the IRS has dealt with such challenges as pandemic-related disruptions for staff and the need to quickly administer several large and complicated relief packages enacted through the tax code. The implementation issues at the IRS have exposed the trade-offs of using the tax code to administer social support, especially during the pandemic.
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed in March 2021, provided pandemic-related aid to taxpayers through the tax code that can be claimed during the tax season and may affect the size of tax refunds for some taxpayers.
For tax year 2021 only, the ARPA expanded the value of the child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 per child up to $3,600 for younger children or $3,000 for older children. It also eliminated the earnings requirement and work-related phase-in, expanding the number of households eligible for the credit.
Tax refunds will be impacted by the expanded CTC. Whether they raise or lower individual refund amounts compared to the past depends on individual circumstances, such as the advanced monthly payments last year that were worth up to half of the benefit.
Jack Ma, CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, speaks in Paris. After a year of massive losses ... [+] AFP via Getty Images
Shares of Chinese tech giants trading in the United States posted stunning losses Friday amid intensifying concerns over U.S. regulatory efforts to ramp up financial disclosures for foreign entities after ride-hailer Didi Global’s catastrophic trading debut this year, yielding one-day losses of more than $80 billion for the ten largest U.S.-listed Chinese stocks.
Heading up the Friday plunge, Didi shares had plummeted 18% by 12:30 p.m. EST, wiping out $7 billion in market value after the embattled Beijing-based firm announced it would begin removing its shares from the New York Stock Exchange and instead list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Though widely expected, the delisting “represents the beginning of the unwinding of a large part of U.S.-China business relations,” David Trainer, the CEO of investment research firm New Constructs, said in emailed comments, calling China’s relaxed financial disclosure requirements irreconcilable with U.S. laws.
Fueling concerns over additional delistings, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday proceeded with plans that could eventually force many Chinese stocks off U.S. exchanges by subjecting foreign entities to heightened disclosure requirements, including U.S. government financial audits.
Shares of e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba, the largest Chinese company listed in the U.S., were among the hardest hit, down 8% on the New York Stock Exchange to a nearly five-year low of $112, deflating its market capitalization to $305 billion.
Fellow online retailers JD.com and Pinduoduo, the second- and fourth-largest firms, posted similarly staggering losses, falling 9% apiece to shed about $12 billion and $6 billion in market value, respectively.
The selloff hit a wide array of sectors: Online gaming company NetEase, electric carmaker NIO and internet firm Baidu plunged 6%, 15% and 8%, respectively.
All told, the ten largest Chinese companies trading in the United States have lost about $83 billion in market value on Friday—nearly 10% of their $850 billion in combined worth.
Chinese stocks trading in the United States have lost massive amounts of value since Beijing officials issued a series of sweeping private sector regulations this summer—in one instance banning the for-profit education business virtually overnight. “Yes, there’s a huge market and lots of growth potential, but obviously there are regulatory risks that seem to be growing larger with every passing month,” Tom Essaye, author of the Sevens Report, wrote in a recent note.
Epitomizing the effect on stocks, Didi shares have tanked 53% since they started trading in June, and Alibaba, once worth more than $858 billion, has crashed about 50% this year.
The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China index, which tracks Chinese businesses trading in the United States, is down 8% Friday and 42% this year. The index is at its lowest point since March 2020.
I’m a senior reporter at Forbes focusing on markets and finance. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I double-majored in business journalism
