365 SEO Tips: The Ultimate Expert SEO Guide (2024)

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SEO success is a long-term commitment. It requires extra time, effort, and money that you may not have available for other things like family or friends (or both).

Other things may need to be put on hold while you ensure the search engine rankings stay high; it can be lonely when all this work goes down without anyone who understands what’s happening behind closed doors!

We want to ensure that the time, money, and effort you invest in SEO is well worth it.

You don’t need to be an SEO expert, but you do want your site ranked well on Google. That’s why we created this comprehensive SEO guide; it will equip marketers and businesses of all sizes with access to 365+ expert tips that help anyone maximize their time/money/effort when doing search engine optimization (SEO).

This is your guide if you know little or nothing about search engine optimization. It breaks down everything in a very easy-to-understand format and provides valuable information.

It’s your one-stop destination for everything SEO. From the basics to advanced techniques, we’ve got you covered.

When you’re ready to take your company’s marketing and SEO efforts up a notch, contact Flying V Group. We specialize in custom-tailored digital and SEO solutions that will get results for any size business in any vertical.

SEO Blogging

Source: Matt Gray/Linkedin

A topic that seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds is why blogging for SEO is important. Not only for SEO ranking but for marketing and brand building as well. Most people consider blogging a form of content marketing, which it most definitely is!

The process of blogging allows you to share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. It also allows you to build relationships with your customers/clients and prospects by providing them with valuable information about your products/services or industry.

Blogging allows you to gain exposure for your business, build authority in your field, establish yourself as an expert and create new revenue streams through affiliate links or advertisements on your website.

It has been said that blogging is not easy. This is true. The problem with blogging is not the actual writing of the blog post but the research and planning that makes it possible.

The concept of writing a blog post is as follows:

• Write down your thoughts on paper or in a notebook.
• Choose an angle for your topic.
• Determine the number of words required and the length of each section.
• Start writing!

This isn’t a bad process, but it’s missing one crucial step: research!

Are You Aware of Today’s Top Three Blogging Challenges

Lack of Time

John Grisham had a writing schedule long before he was famous. He woke up at 5:00 each morning to start writing for an hour before heading to work.

“Write a page every day. That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years, and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough. Nothing will happen until you produce at least one page per day.”

Writer’s Block

Writing a blog can appear daunting at first. You want to write something useful and valuable to your readers, but where do you begin? What do they want to read? How do you know if you should discuss a particular topic or if it has already been discussed?“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration; the rest of us get up and go to work.” Stephen King

Crystal-Clear Focus

Writing blog posts can be difficult. I know. You need to stay on topic, write for the internet, write in the present tense and most importantly, come up with topics that your readers will find interesting.

Most of us, at some point, have craved an easier way to write without all these constraints. I believe this is one of the reasons why Facebook was created: we like our news quick, easy, and bite-sized!

Once you figure out your writing routine, it’s time to blog for business and turn yourself into a content machine.

Publishing Velocity – the Unfair Competitive Edge

Ashwin Satyanarayana details the importance of publishing velocity and the rate at which a publication is published (i.e., the consistency with which you post new content). The more frequently you publish, the faster your content gets indexed, found, and the more the spiders visit your site.

 

Source: Dimitrisdrakatos.com

Blog Content Length and How it Impacts SEO

Marta Szyndlar, a content marketing specialist at Surfer, offers the following advice on determining the ideal blog post length for SEO:

“SEO” is about data. There is no single answer to how long a blog article should be. No “perfect” word count can compete with keyword research.

SEO Blog length varies, but longer blog posts are not always better than shorter posts. A lengthy blog post doesn’t guarantee better results, just like shorter blog posts aren’t a guaranteed failure. It all depends on the topic at hand.

Analyzing your competition and determining user intent will allow you to check if the content length is a ranking factor for your keyword. And if it is,which length should you aim for.”

Worth further reading:

5 Content Elements More Important Than Word Count

Blog Content Quality is Just as Important as Quantity

Ben Goodey, founder, writer, and host at How the F*ck explains:

“For your content to rank #1, it must go the extra mile (how to be better).

Here’s How I Make my Content Better:

1. Length: Making it longer than the number one article seems to have a significant impact.

2. Completeness: Take the top five articles (the ones I mentioned in point 5) and ensure you include every heading/section they did. Now your articles cover everything they do in one place.

3. Uniqueness: Go the extra mile by running a survey, including new statistics you’ve covered, or interviewing an expert to include. This goes a long way to organically building backlinks, too.

4. Ease of reading: Add many ‘summaries’ (Investopedia is a master at this) and make the titles skimmable.

5. Extra content: I like to add a FAQs section that answers all the ‘people also ask’ questions Google surfaces. That way, you increase your article’s length and usefulness while capturing more search volume.‍”

Blog Post Optimization

When starting a new blog, getting your audience’s attention can be hard. You have to fight for organic views against all of the established sites that have been around for years. Even once you’ve established yourself, it’s still difficult to get comparisons against your competitors, especially when trying to make it in a niche with lots of similar blogs.

Luckily, there are several steps you can take to ensure your site is outranking and outsmarting your competitors. You first need to visit the site of your top competitor(s) to see what they’re doing right and wrong in order to decide how you’ll build your blog from the ground up. Here are some tips (by WPbeginner) for optimizing your blog’s ranking capabilities:

Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content

Categories and tags help you organize your content for your readers,  searchengines, and yourself.

Write an Effective Blog Post Title

“The title of your blog post is extremely important for search rankings. A good blog post title increases your article’s relevance to the search query. More importantly, it motivates users to click on your article when they see it in the search results.”

Make Your Articles Easier to Read

A good user experience is essential to search engines. Articles that are easy to read tend to rank higher than those that are not optimized.

Are Ultimate Guides Dead?

Digital marketing speaker and SEO specialist Sam Edwards writes:

“The answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.

While they’ve certainly lost some of their novelty, they aren’t exactly ineffective.

The key is understanding where they add value and how to best apply them today.

The word “ultimate” means last, furthest, maximum, conclusive, or decisive. It’s supposed to be the final, total, greatest, or best of its kind. It’s the most extreme, better than everything else that’s out there.

The problem is that we’ve watered down the word “ultimate” to the point that it doesn’t mean anything. And when everything is the greatest or best of its kind, nothing is.

When there are 217 different “ultimate guide to online marketing” posts, there’s no longer much-perceived value. Even if yours truly is the ultimate resource, how would anyone know?

It’s not any individual content creator’s problem, but ultimate guides are like the boy who cried wolf. Readers have seen the phrase so often that they won’t believe it when they actually stumble upon an extremely valuable piece of content.

You have to find a way to make people pay attention. You can’t just create the 99th “Ultimate Guide to Investing” and expect it to generate value for your brand. You have to be willing to create fresh and exciting content.”

Create ‘Listicles’ that Stand Out

Avoid being an armchair analyst. According to Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz, you can improve your next list article by following these five simple steps:

1. Develop new selection criteria.
2. Convince the reader by outlining your thought process.
3. Share personal experience to demonstrate credibility.
4. Lean on the experiences of others when personal experience is impossible.
5. Make a single, opinionated recommendation.

Are you struggling to come up with blog content ideas?

Try Hubspots’ blog idea generator free tool. Use it with caution, though.

SEO Monetization

Passion projects are great. Everybody should do a passion project at some point in their life. But, if you want to make a living from your blog or grow your business with SEO, you need to be able to monetize your website.

The problem is that if you try to monetize an unranked blog, you’ll get minimal results. No one will click your ads if your content isn’t high quality and valuable enough to rank high in Google’s search results.

There are so many steps to getting ranked that no one without experience can do it alone. The only way to get around this is to build a solid presence with many (relevant) backlinks and authority. The best way to do this is with the help of an SEO consultant or agency.

In no particular order, here are the recent ways to make money with blogs:

Start with Affiliate Marketing

Pro blogger Adam Connel from Blogging Wizard shares how to monetize blogs by promoting other people’s products and services;

Build an ‘Authority’ Site

“Initially, you would focus on a handful of products and expand outwards, creating more reviews and product-centric list posts as you go.

For example, this is the approach I’m taking with my guitar blog, Tone Island.

So I’m reading articles about all the guitar products I’m interested in.

Once you know which approach to take, it is time to find products/services to promote.

I recommend starting with the ones that you are most familiar with. Start with a quick online search to see if they offer an affiliate program. Search for something like “affiliate program”+“product/brand name.”

 Maintain their relevance by only promoting top-tier products. And disclose your affiliate links.

Host Virtual Summits

Marketing strategist and speaker Dorie Clark, in her Entrepreneur.com article, introduces NavidMoazzez and his virtual summit success story;

He looks at virtual summits as “podcasts on steroids.”

The concept is simple:

Virtual summits are 24-72 hour video interviews with experts on a specific topic. They are often free to subscribers and can be purchased with an “all-access pass” after the initial period expires.

Benefits to leveraging this strategy:

• Build a fast email list
• Tap into other experts’ authority
• Monetize your blog and audience

Write Product Reviews

Not sure if product reviews are right for your blog?

Commission academy website lists some interesting industry marketing statistics:

• 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
• 89% check reviews before buying anything online
• 90% say positive product reviews influence their buying decisions

“The person searching for a review already knows about the product and has pretty much decided they will to buy it. They just want to check a few details and confirm the product is good  first.

That’s where you swoop in with your stellar review and snag the commission!”

Use Contextual Advertising

Pooja Lohana, an Online Business Coach + Writer & Editor, explains how this content-based approach to displaying ads on your blog works with SEO monetization.

“A contextual advertising network or platform ensures that when a reader lands on your blog, they will only see ads that are deeply relevant to what they are reading.

These ads are not only non-intrusive but can also enhance your reader’s experience if done right. There’s a natural tendency for your readers to click on such ads because they easily blend with the content being read.

Of course, what also matters is the traffic on your blog. The more the traffic, the higher your earnings. You can then set an income goal and develop strategies to achieve that goal through your chosen contextual advertising network.

Google AdSense is one of the bigger names amongst advertising networks that can monetize your content. However, only working with AdSense may not be the best thing for a blogger looking to create a winning mix of ads that can generate incremental revenue.”

Amazon Associates

Beyond product review blog posts, affiliate expert and blogger Matthew Allen claims that almost ANY blog post can potentially be monetized with Amazon Associates by writing these six content types:

• List Posts
• How-To Guides (Tutorials)
• Checklists (Cheat Sheets)
• Interviews
• Guest Blogging
• Case Studies

Sponsored Content

Authority hacker blog shows an alternative way to sell ads on your blog by collaborating with brands to buy sponsored posts on your website.

“This means they will pay you a fee to create a blog post that fits within your blog’s theme but features their products.

Pinch of Yum is one popular blog selling sponsored posts to brands.

They even sell packages that include a sponsored post, an Instagram video and a story, all featuring brand products.

While it may seem complicated to work with brands, there are many “marketplaces” where bloggers with an audience of any size can connect with brands to work out sponsored posts deals.”

Products & Services

Graham Cochrane, business coach, founder, and author shares the following information with CNBC readers:

“When you’re offering a service, there are two main dials you can turn to make more money: getting more clients and raising your rates. But this can be a problem because there are only so many hours in a day to take on clients, and there is always a limit to how much you can charge in your industry.

The turning point for me was when I got the idea to turn my knowledge of audio mixing and recording into an online course. Selling digital products provided a passive income stream and allowed me to make far more money in a day  while putting in less time  than I did working as a freelancer.”

Donations

Kinsta blog gives some practical ideas about monetizing your blog by making it possible for your audience to make donations via WordPress plugins like Give, Charitable, and PayPal.

There are non-profits who leverage this method;

Bloggers like Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex “make $2493 every month from just 410 fans on Patreon. Keep in mind that Scott only blogs part-time and still has a day job.”

Or, “Tim Urban of Wait But Why, who makes over $12k per month on Patreon alone.”

Don’t think this is easy as it sounds, though; “Tim Urban spends between 40 to 80 hours writing and researching to create one of his blog posts, some of which are longer than the ebooks people sell.

That’s a lot of effort put  into  something he’s giving away for free.”

Hobbies

Shopify’s blog lists “12 common lucrative hobbies that make money, whether it’s through freelancing, becoming an affiliate, building an audience, or starting a business.”

1. Writing
2. Illustration and design
3. Music
4. Cooking
5. Gardening
6. Photography
7. DIY crafts
8. Comedy
9. Coffee
10. Memberships
11. Brewing beer
12. Gaming

Google SEO Algorithms

Google search engine uses an algorithm to determine a site’s ranking on its results page. That means it isn’t just about the number of links pointing to your page, but something much more complicated considering many factors.

In short, Google’s PageRank algorithm weighs the number and quality of backlinks, the length of a website’s domain history, keywords within the site, and how they appear in relation to each other. It also considers the reputation of the website’s owner, and the content’s relevance to a specific query.

The complexity of this algorithm has implications for many bloggers worldwide: anyone serious about finding success with their blog should be committed to understanding how everything works so they can adapt accordingly. But there are some things you can do to counteract these algorithms and keep your blog in good standing with Google search engine results pages.

Here is a list of the major algorithm updates from the past decade that have shaped Google’s algorithm:

Panda Update

Jennifer Slegg, longtime speaker and SEM expert, writes:

“Google Panda is one of Google’s ranking filters that seeks to downrank low-quality pages, which results in sites with higher quality and valuable content rising higher in the search results. But it is easily one of the most misunderstood algos.”

“Here is what we know about Google Panda, as confirmed by Google themselves so that webmasters who feel Panda impacts them can recover without shooting themselves in the foot.”

Penguin Update

Moz shares

“Following on the heels of Panda, the Penguin update was announced by Google as a new effort to reward high-quality websites and diminish the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) presence of websites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.”

Hummingbird Update

SEO agency owner and pro blogger, Neil Patel, explains that:

“The Hummingbird update focused on showing results with similar keywords to offer more relevant search results.”

For example, if you search for “small business,” you are directed to websites offering business loans, startup ideas, networking organizations, and other related topics. The results aren’t an exact match for what you searched, but they’re related and assumed to be relevant, so they show up at the top.

This Google algorithm update taught markets to optimize content for the main search term as well as relevant keywords. For example, if you have a burger shop, you should optimize your SEO content for related terms like fast food, snacks, breakfast, etc.

After these major Google algorithm updates, marketers began focusing on creating high-quality content with authoritative links to rank higher. Future algorithm updates also encouraged digital marketers to optimize their mobile viewing websites and improve the overall user experience.”

Pigeon Update

Gordon Donnelly published a post @ Wordstream.com about this:

“In July of 2014, Google released a significant local search algorithm update. The new local algorithm ties deeper into Google’s web search capabilities, including hundreds of core algorithm ranking signals, and features like the Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms, etc.” Search Engine Land dubs it “Pigeon” because “pigeons tend to fly back home.”

Mobile Update

Not sure how Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update Affects Your Website?

Verizon featured a syndicated article from Business 2 Community on the topic:

“Google’s announcement is somewhat unprecedented, providing specific details of the change and an exact roll-out date. “When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps,” the company noted. “As more people use mobile devices to access the Internet, our algorithms must adapt to these usage patterns.”

Medic Update

B2B content marketing expert, Elise Dopson, writes:

“On Aug. 1, 2018,Google rolled out a new core algorithm update. That’s not groundbreaking news; as explained by the internet gods, they release some updates several times a year.

But this one? It was pretty spectacular. And I don’t just mean the sheer size of it; the effects were devastating for some websites.

Huge sites like LiveStrong, The Kitchn, and Men’s Health lost thousands of organic visitors overnight.

Source: Coschedule

“That’s not to say site owners who don’t fall into the healthcare category are safe, though. In fact, eCommerce, business, technology, and finance took a sizeable dent of the disaster share, too.”

Google Mobile-First Indexing update (2018)

Content marketer and strategist Allie Decker, in a Hubspot article, reveals:

“The Mobile-First Indexing Update was another nod from Google to those websites that use a mobile-friendly website.”

Here’s how Google explains:

“[Historically,] our crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have typically used the desktop version of a page’s content, which may cause issues for mobile searchers when that version is vastly different from the mobile version.

Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the page’s mobile version for indexing and ranking to better help our  primarily mobile users find what they’re looking for.”

“When producing search results, Google will continue to pull from a single data index; this update means they’ll be populating more of this index with mobile versions of website content. Also, this update primarily affected how websites are indexed, not how they are ranked, but that’s not to say it’ll affect rankings down the line.

Bert Update (2019)

According to SEJ, when Google announced the BERT Update, it was calling it the biggest change to Google search in the past five years.

“Google uses BERT models to better understand search queries. Google said this change impacted both search rankings and featured snippets, and BERT ( Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) will be used on ten percent of U.S. English searches.”

Product Reviews Update (2021)

SEJ also gives insights about this algorithm update:

“This new search ranking algorithm update was designed to reward “product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” In their announcement, Google also shared nine useful questions to consider when creating and publishing product reviews.”

MUM Update (2021)

Kate Coleman, Content Strategy Manager at Status Labs, affirms:

“Google announced MUM in May 2021, and though it has moved to replace BERT, the goals are similar: to correctly interpret user search queries to fulfill their request as efficiently as possible.

What is MUM?

Put simply, MUM is a new algorithm that uses AI to help users find content relevant to their search intent across different languages and kinds of media. The ultimate goal of the update is to provide users with a more comprehensive and nuanced response to searches. MUM eliminates the need for multiple searches or refining your search while giving you all the information you need in the context that you need it for whatever you may look up online, almost mimicking how a person interprets a particular question.”

Guest Posting SEO

Guest blogging has recently become the most popular form of link building. It’s a great way to build traffic to your blog and generate visibility.

If you’re looking for a way to boost your audience quickly, this is it.

Guest blogging can take a lot of time, though. The process can be a little difficult and time-consuming, especially if you’re just starting out in the blogosphere. But it can still be worth it.

The hosts want you to put in the effort for a reason. They want their own blog and content to be regarded as the best in their niche. And by helping them achieve that goal, you’ll be doing the same for yourself through their blog’s success.

If you’re new to guest blogging, there are some things you should know:

– A good guest post should add value to the conversation. It should be informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

– Guest posts shouldn’t be viewed as blatant attempts at self-promotion.

– What makes guest posting so powerful is that it helps drive quality traffic to your own site, not just back-links.

– You’ll need to spend time building relationships before pitching for guest posts.

– Not all blogs accept guest posts.

– Not all blogs want your content for free.

– Not all blogs are worth writing for.

There are multiple reasons why guest blogging works:

See a Massive ROI

Social media blogger Mary Fernandez writes in a comment on the Bloggerjet blog

“After writing a handful of guest posts, I now have…

-Several high-profile “As seen in” logos (including Inc, which came about when they republished a guest post I wrote for CreativeLive)

-Half a dozen podcast interviews, an invitation to speak at a summit alongside influencers who I admire, and the opportunity to interview other influencers for my podcast

-Approximate 100 new email subscribers per guest post, on average

-Features on other authority sites besides the ones I wrote for(e.g., Neil Patel)

-Relationships with influencers (a result which is hard to quantify, it’s priceless, really)

-I even landed a job working for Syed Balkhi as Content Marketing Manager for OptinMonster!

I know I’m far from being the only one who has seen these kinds of results from guest blogging. But even if you only count the guaranteed “As seen in” logos, then guest blogging is totally worth it for someone looking to increase their credibility.”

Provide Value to Build Trust

Nico Prins, the Founder of Launch Space, says:

“My most effective link-building strategy is to leverage the guest posts I’m working on to generate new opportunities. When writing a guest post, I always try to include a link to content on a website  I hope to write for in the future. I’ll mix this up by asking for an insightful comment from someone from a suitable site to include in the article.

Providing value before asking for anything in return works really well. I get more responses from blog owners and businesses using this strategy than I do from a cold guest post request. It’s an effective way to network.”

Build an Audience

Guest posting is a great way to build your audience, but it can be very difficult to do well.

To build a loyal audience with guest posting, you need to create unique, valuable, and relevant content for your target audience.

If you want more traffic and subscribers, then you need to create content that creates an emotional response in your readers.

But how do you do that?

The first step is to discover what makes your target audience tick. What topics are they interested in? What kind of content would they like? What problems do they face?

Once you know this information, it will be much easier for you to develop ideas on how to create an emotional response with your content.

An emotional response can be a strong reaction, such as laughter or anger, or it can be a feeling like nostalgia or contentment. The type of emotion you want to evoke in your audience will depend on your goal for that piece of content.

For example, if you are writing an article about the various ways in which people are using botox to combat aging, you might want to use a humorous or sarcastic tone because an emotional reaction, in this case, would be laughter.

On the other hand, if you are writing an article on how to select the best long-term investments, then it would be more appropriate for you to use a serious tone to show your audience that there are no shortcuts when investing money.

Tone often has a lot to do with the topic of your piece. For instance, if you are writing about something controversial or emotionally charged,  your tone is more likely to be serious than if you are talking about something that is not important to anyone other than yourself.

A good rule of thumb is to follow what others have done before you to ensure that your work does not seem out-of-place or unnatural when compared with theirs.

Get Qualified Leads

Director of Digital Marketing, Luca Tagliaferro, wrote an article on how Kelsey Reaves got featured on Moz’s blog and her amazing results:

“We received several backlinks to our agency website.

I can’t say it helped us rank for non-brand keywords (that was never the goal), but we received two times the amount of referral traffic and leads than expected.”

Kelsey went deep with the stats and shared with us the numbers from that specific blog post:

“From the article on Moz.com, we got:

• Seven qualified leads.
• Traffic to our agency website grew by 230%. WoW!
• I was asked to contribute content to five other authoritative websites.”

Win Laser-Targeted Website Visitors

Brian Dean @ Backlinko reveals a method called Guest Post Bonuses to get more people to visit your website via guest blogging.

“With a Guest Post Bonus, you don’t just toss in a link at the bottom of your post.

Instead, you offer people something that makes them WANT to visit your website.

For example, a while back, I published this guest post on The Buffer blog.

Yes, I had an author bio link.

But I also created a Guest Post Bonus just for readers of my guest post.

And that single guest post brought in 471 visitors in the first month:

And lots of those new visitors signed up for my newsletter.

Boost Local SEO Efforts

Jason Hennessey, a serial entrepreneur, speaker, and SEO practitioner, claims that outreach to local businesses in search of guest posting opportunities may not always earn a link. Still, you can leverage their existing reader base to drive local traffic to your website.

He says:

“For example, WestSeattleBlog.com and VisitSeattle.org are both local, authoritative publishers in Seattle that often publish content from local businesses and bloggers.”

Next Level Guest Posting – 10X Guest Post

B2B SaaS writer Priscilla Tan shares:

“10X guest blogging is where you write a guest post that’s at least ten times better than the current top-ranking post about the topic.

Here’s an example of what we’d consider to be a 10X guest post by Ryan Stewart:

Source: Ahrefs

In this post, rather than rehashing general information about selling SEO services like most other posts on the topic, Ryan offers a contrarian viewpoint based on personal experience.”

Bing SEO & Google SEO

One of the most common questions I get from people is, “What’s the difference between Bing and Google?”

According to Erika Varagouli, global content strategist at Semrush, there are eighteen alternative search engines to Google (you should also optimize your website); and Bing is ranked #1.

If you want to understand how Bing finds, indexes, and ranks websites, check out Bing’s SEO guidelines.

Optimize for Bing and Yahoo

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the successful trio for SEO.

Consider this; as written on Clarity Ventures blog, we read:

“While considerably fewer searches are performed on Bing and Yahoo than Google, optimizing your website for them is still very important. Some of your most valuable potential customers may prefer to use Yahoo or Bing over Google. Some clients may only use Yahoo.

If your site isn’t optimized for Yahoo and is on the fifth page of their ranking, there is a slim chance that they will ever view your site. Your business can greatly benefit from both Google searchers and Yahoo and Bing searchers, which means  your website must be optimized for both.”

Google SEO vs. Bing: Ranking Factors

 

 (Source: Oberlo)

Inbound agency, p80, has some interesting insights on Bing compared with Google. According to Adam Vosler’s article,

 “Bing holds a 6.11% share of the U.S. market, according to Stat counter.” That number drops to 4.14% for the U.K., 4.36% for Canada, and even lower for the Asian and African search markets.

Bing isn’t all bad news. Some studies show Bing may offer certain advantages over Google, including:

• Lower bounce rates.
• More page visits per session.
• Higher average time on site.
• Higher subscription signup rates.

How Do You Optimize Your Website and Blogs for Bing?

“Optimizing your website for Bing is similar to optimizing for Google. Bing has its own ranking algorithm (called BERT), but it has much in common with Google. It helps the search engine understand what words mean within a given sentence and  broader context.”

Key difference: Bing factors “social signals” into its rankings. Here’s a quote straight from Bing on the matter:

“If you are a social influencer, your followers tend to share your information widely, resulting in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how your site ranks organically in the long run.”

Think Beyond Google

Eli Schwartz, Growth Advisor at Eli Schwartz, advises that not all SEO optimization has to revolve around Google.

“If you’re targeting an audience in countries where Google is a lesser force, you’ll need a different strategy.

For example, Google is banned in China, and you’ll want to rank on Baidu, which serves the Chinese audience.

Similarly, Yandex is Russia’s go-to search engine; you’ll want to optimize for it if you’re targeting Russians.

Even if most of your audience is on Google, don’t forget search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, which have their respective user base.”

Optimize for Natural Language Search

Sidra Condron, Director of Marketing at SpyFu, writes:

“Search engine queries are often phrased in everyday conversational language, known as a natural language search. Natural language search optimization is a crucial SEO step if you’re trying to appeal to users of voice search, who are usually in the mood to make a purchase. Natural language search is Bing’s main focus.

Google does its natural language search business via Google BERT. BERT is the search engine’s neural network for natural language processing. It gives Google a more nuanced and realistic understanding of sentence-length searches. It also helps Google to parse conjunctions and other modifiers properly so that the results it returns are relevant.

While it is not possible to optimize for Google BERT,  an approach similar to the one used to optimize for natural language on Bing will yield the right results. Content is more likely to land top ranking or a featured snippet through Google BERT if it is written to answer specific questions. We can see one of Google’s examples of BERT in action below.

 Here, the search item is “do estheticians stand a lot at work[?].” Before Google BERT’s introduction, a more generalized piece of content ranked first. With Google BERT in effect, a piece of content that answers that specific question has taken the top spot.

Develop question-oriented content that will help you catch natural language searches that are relevant to your product. For instance, if you find that your user personas are conducting many natural language/voice searches for the question “How can I improve my company’s SEO performance?” you can build content centered on that particular question.”

Act Local

Digital Media Strategist Nicole Rendewrote:

“Bing favors websites with well-optimized local listings, so make sure you claim your listings like a champ with www.bingplaces.com.

In addition to these to-dos, it is also important that you use the same ethics and standards as Google and avoid the following:

• Cloaking
• Shady Backlink Strategies (i.e., paying for links).
• Shady Social Media Strategies (i.e., increasing the number of followers too fast).
• Duplicate Content.
• Too Many Keywords Within the Content.”

Expired Domains for SEO

Welcome to the world of ‘expired’ domains, also known as ‘dropped’ domain names! These are websites that, for whatever reasons, were not renewed by their owners and became available for purchase.

Expired domains can still be profitable because some have many web pages that are still indexed in the search engines, and some may hold multiple rankings in the SERPs for a dozen relevant keywords to your business.

Aged domains with high Domain Authority (DA) and quality backlinks are gold nuggets but not impossible to find.

So if you’re thinking about buying a premium expired domain name, keep reading because I will explain what these types of websites have in store for SEO purposes and how to buy yours sooner than later.

First of all, brand-new isn’t always better: this is why you need an aged domain, titled Adrian Nita’s article for Entrepreneur.com. Inside, he explained to startup founders and business owners the benefits of leveraging expired domains.

For example, regarding:

Domain Authority vs. Age vs. Trustworthiness

Adrian says:

“Many online marketers falsely believe they can increase their domain authority by simply buying an older domain. However, this isn’t always the case because age doesn’t necessarily equal trustworthiness.

Some domains may have “aged” but still lack credibility and authority if they haven’t been updated or maintained over time. It’s important to remember that links and content  add value to a website, so even if you purchase an aged domain, it might not be worthy of being ranked higher just yet.”

Do Expired Domains Have Any Ranking Advantages?

You might want to read John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, explain how Google handles expired domains. You’ll learn the difference between a ‘parked’ and an ‘expired’ domain name and how Google had handled this issue since 2003 when they changed their algorithm to reset the PageRank of expired domains.

Expired Domains and SEO Scammers

Haje Jan Kamps wrote for Techcrunch a solid yet controversial piece on buying and selling expired domains; how SEO scammers buy expired domains, more precisely, vexing Google.

You’ll read what the spammers are doing, how they think, how they analyze an expired domain, the tools they’re using, and everything else.

Not Sure Where to Buy Expired Domains From?

Full-time blogger and SEO expert, Anil Agarwal, uncovered the top 9 expired domain marketplaces to help with that; Flippa is the first one listed inside, but not always the best choice.

However, if you’re just starting, you may not know what to look for when buying expired domains.

Thus, consider these three major things before buying any dropped domains:

1. Make sure to find out the DA and trust flow of the domain you buy.
2. Verify whether the domain you want to buy isn’t banned anywhere.
3. Check the number of backlinks of the domain you are interested in.

Pitfalls to Avoid Before Buying Expired Domains

You cannot just buy any expired domain name that these tools provide. You have to research and qualify these dropped domain names using specific criteria.

Due diligence is just as important to buying expired domains as it is to buying a car or an apartment because you’ll want to use and keep them for many years to come.

The following are some of the main things to avoid when buying a domain name for your website:

• Spammy Backlinks

Expired domains often have spammy backlinks because they were once used as spammy landing pages or affiliate sites. These links can hurt your search rankings, and Google will penalize your site if it finds them.

• Poor Domain Authority

Expired domains tend to have low domain authority because they’ve been off the market for so long, and no one has cared about them since then. That means it may take longer for your site to get ranked higher in search results compared to other sites with higher domain authority scores.

• Low Page Authority

If you’re not sure what page authority is, here’s a good guide from Moz that explains it and its comparison with domain authority.

You can use Ahrefs’ URL rating (UR) to check the page authority of any website page or blog post link. They’re taking into account both internal and external links.

• Lack of Quality Content

If the content on an expired domain is low quality or spammy, then you shouldn’t bother with it, especially if you plan on publishing new content on the site.

• No Relevance to Your Business

This one goes without saying: if there’s no connection between your business/niche and the content on an expired domain, then don’t buy it!

SEO User Experience (UX)

In the last decade, we have seen an explosion of new websites and applications that are better than ever. But if you look at them closely, they all have one thing in common: they are user-centered. They are designed around what people want, not what designers think they should do or how developers can build them faster and cheaper.

The result has been an unprecedented increase in user satisfaction across every industry and market segment. From education to entertainment to finance,  leading to increased sales conversions, customer retention and loyalty, and other business benefits such as more positive reviews and referrals from happy customers.

That’s why UX is now (one of) the most important factors regarding search engine optimization (SEO). It’s also why Google wants good UX as part of its algorithms.

Why Invest in UX

If you’re not convinced yet, then let me give you a few more reasons why UX is the future of SEO and business success.

1. UX Imporoves Conversion Rate

SEO is about getting more visitors to your website and converting them into paying customers. By improving the user experience, you can significantly improve the number of people who buy from your website or sign up for a service. If you want to increase your conversion rate, you must ensure that your website is easy to use and understand.

2. UX Increases Customer Satisfaction

The better your user experience, the happier your customers will be with their experience in using your company’s products or services. A satisfied customer will tell their friends about how good their experience was, and they’ll come back again to buy more products or services from the same company in the future. This leads to repeat customers, which is great for businesses as it helps them grow their revenues over time without spending more money on marketing campaigns or advertising efforts.

Website Design UX

According to the content marketer at SE Ranking, KseniiaKyslova,  17 UX design elements  impact your website’s SEO success:

1. Text formatting
2. Images and illustrations
3. Above the folder and footer
4. Navigation menu
5. CTA buttons
6. Language switcher
7. Breadcrumbs
8. Left/right sidebars
9. Faceted navigation
10. Related or featured items
11. Social proof elements
12. Social share buttons
13. User input elements
14. Free online tools
15. Comments and reviews
16. iFrames for video, ads, maps

Kneniia recommends

“To build a great website, you should decide what types of pages you’ll need and what structural elements they should have.

First, consider what’s common for your industry so you can be sure to include all the page elements people expect to see.

Then think about what you can add or change to become different, without breaking SEO rules.”

Bounce Rate UX

According to Contentsquare, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site and exit without viewing a second page.

To calculate bounce rate, “divide the total number of one-page visits by the total number of entries to your website.”

Moreover, “a high bounce rate on your site indicates your landing experience is not meeting your visitor’s expectations.”

There are many reasons that people close the tab on your website, but by looking at your bounce rate, you’ll be able to find and fix them quickly:

• You’re targeting the wrong audience or pain points.
• Your visitors can’t find what they are looking for.
• Your on-site experience is confusing, and visitors don’t know what to do next.
• Your on-page content isn’t addressing their needs/it’s irrelevant.
• Your calls to action are not performing.
• Your page loads too slow or gives (technical) errors.

Mobile First Strategy UX

According to Jes Scholz, CMO at Ringier, there are 11 breadcrumb SEO best practices for a mobile-first strategy; she says: “Typically, breadcrumbs navigation is a line of contextual links that indicate where the user is on a website. They are a form of secondary navigation, allowing users to trace their path in the site hierarchy.”

Further, Jes mentions 3 SEO benefits of breadcrumb navigation and structured data:

1. More crawling
2. Better indexing
3. Higher ranking, SERP clicks, and organic sessions

Font Types UX

Brand Creative Director, Fernando José Pérez, gives insights into choosing the right fonts for your website:

“The fonts that you use on your website go a long way towards establishing the feel of your brand. Is it professional, quirky, serious, fun, etc.? They also play an  important role in providing an excellent experience for  visitors, including those with vision impairments.”

Quick Tips:

1. Consider legibilitThink about brand identity
2. Stick to just a couple of fonts
3. Choose the right font size
4. Consider accessibility
5. Avoid all caps in paragraphs

Google Fonts has a huge library of free fonts. It’s easy to see how they would be perfect for your branding, and they’re also great for personal use. You can also preview them with their handy tools.

Use a plugin; if you have a theme that doesn’t include fonts, or these fonts don’t suit your needs, the best option is to use a free plugin like WP Google Fonts or Custom Fonts.

Page Dwell Time UX

CEO @ Exploding Topics, Brian Dean, explains:

“Dwell Time is the amount of time that a Google searcher spends on a page from the search results before returning to the SERPs. Many SEO professionals consider Dwell Time an important Google ranking signal.”

Brian argues that embedding videos can significantly boost your page’s Dwell Time and can prove this with some statistics:

“the Wistia blog increased their Dwell Time by 260% simply by adding a video to their content.”

Menu Design UX

Kathryn Whitenton– UX Designer at Power Takeoff – says that…

“Helping users navigate should be a high priority for almost every website and application. After all, even the coolest feature or the most compelling content is useless if people can’t find it. And even if you have a search function, you usually shouldn’t rely on search as the only way to navigate. Most designers recognize this and include some form of navigation menu in their designs.”

Kathryn advises avoiding common mistakes by following these guidelines for usable navigation menus:

1. Don’t use tiny menus (or icons) on large screens.
2. Put menus in familiar locations.
3. Make menu links look interactive.
4. Ensure that your menus have enough visual weight.
5. Use link text colors that contrast with the background color.
6. Tell users ‘where’ the currently visible screen is located within the menu options.
7. Use understandable link labels.
8. Make link labels easy to scan.
9. For large websites, use menus to let users preview lower-level content.
10. Provide local navigation menus for closely related content.
11. Leverage visual communication.
12. Make menu links big enough to be easily tapped or clicked.
13. Ensure that drop-downs are not too small or too big.
14. Consider ‘sticky’ menus for long pages.
15. Optimize for easy physical access to frequently used commands.

Page Speed UX

Want to improve page load time on your website?

According to Josh Hinds,  SEO & organic traffic specialist,  “page speed matters!

If your page load time is slow, it affects user experience, bounce rate, search performance, and revenue. Site speed has long been a Google ranking factor.

How to Improve Page Load time?

Here’s a list of twelve different website speed optimization tips that can improve your user experience and SEO.

1. Configure a fast infrastructure or use a fast host.
2. Use a CDN.
3. Use Gzip for file compression.
4. Reduce the number of HTTP requests.
5. Minify CSS and JavaScript.
6. Streamline your HTML.
7. Optimize images for faster page load time.
8. Clean up your media library.
9. Clean up your database.
10. Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
11. Use Expires Headers.
12. Avoid URL redirects.

SEO Brand Marketing

According to Jason Vana, Brand & Content Strategist for B2B service companies, “your brand should repel people.”

The wrong people.

The less-than-ideal customers.

The people who will never like your style.

The “I hate what you stand for” type of people.

The “Your services are way too expensive” crowd.

The “I don’t like #sassyjason” trolls. (maybe just me?)

The people who don’t understand why you do what you do.

Build THAT kind of brand.

You’ll never waste your time on unqualified leads again.”

Google is Factoring Branded Search

Brendan Hufford, SEO Director at Clique Studios and the founder of SEO for the Rest of Us, says:

“Google is factoring branded search more and more into the authority of entities. The real key to branding yourself for search is not only to create a personal brand or overarching brand but to brand your ideas and processes.

We see this with Moz branding “10X content” and other similar examples.

Integrated Working Between SEO and PPC

Lee Wilson, Head of Services at Vertical Leap, affirms:

“Integrated working between SEO and PPC” to reduce paid brand bidding and still maximize total brand visibility within the search engine results pages (SERPs) is one of the first things I like to experiment with when exploring brand exposure in this way.

The tactic involves systematic and planned testing of increasing organic brand focus both on-page and off-page, with the incremental reduction (on a keyword by keyword basis, or campaign level for larger accounts) of paid CPC.

You will get to a pivot point whereby you can often increase the combined impressions and clicks for brand terms, decrease the paid spend, and maximize the total return on advertising over both channels.

As a side effect of this, you can frequently improve further (even with the brand) the quality scores and the wider website impact on brand power.”

Supercharge Brand Awareness With SEO

Matt Bertram, Enterprise SEO Consultant at EWR Digital, claims:

“Publishing quality, valuable content on your website regularly is one of the most effective ways to increase your rankings on search engines, build brand awareness and attract quality leads to your website.

Content marketing can help you build trust with people, educate consumers and inform people of your products and services.

To create a foundation of outstanding content, focus on giving your audience what they need. This may include answering common questions, offering unique perspectives on industry-related topics, or crafting engaging pieces that people can’t wait to consume.

Content marketing isn’t limited to blog posts and case studies. You can create everything from e-books and infographics to videos, podcasts, webinars, and other creative pieces to engage your audience.

“Your brand image reflects how your users feel about you.”

Neil Patel, the co-founder of NP Digital, recognizes that to create the best possible brand image, you must consider how your users feel about your business.

They’ll respond much better to a positive experience that is continuously tailored to their needs and expectations.

(Source: NeilPatel.com)

Consider these:

Useful

Your content should be high quality, useful and relevant.

Usable

Your site should be easy to navigate.

Desirable

Your design should appeal to your target audience.

Findable

You should focus on content and make searching for information easy.

Accessible

Your site should be mindful of people with disabilities.

Credible

Your brand must show signs of authority and prompt trust.

Branding Impacts Click-Throughs (CTR)

Kaspar Szymanski, ex-Google web spam hunter, SEO consultant & co-founder of SearchBrothers, states that although brand is not a ranking factor for search engines, branding matters when it comes to getting more people to click through from search engine results.

“High brand recognition when paired with ongoing, testing-driven snippet optimization results in higher than average CTRs.”

Expanding your brand’s content strategy to include social media marketing and advertising is essential to improving SEO-relevant user signals.

Changing how you do things with a long-term strategy for market-leading websites will improve the quality of your branding efforts.

Branding is About User Intent and its Satisfaction

Cyrus Shepard, Founder of Zyppy, has some interesting insights;

He recommends that to rank well on Google, brands should optimize their website content for the specific intent of each user and deliver a high level of user satisfaction.

To target consumers’ intent, brands should use the search terms people are looking for. Also, it’s important to measure website rankings and see if the correct search terms are being targeted.

As a company, the keywords you choose to optimize for should reflect your brand promise and values; these keywords will have the highest conversion rates and bring in the most traffic.

Keyword research is the first step toward your SEO strategy to rank on Google and other search engines. Use the keywords relevant to your business to target searchers and increase visibility for your products or services.

“Developing a strong brand takes longer than any sales cycle.”

The more people know about your brand, the better. This can be done by leveraging social media, reviews, backlinks, citations, and other platforms where people congregate.

Chris Wilks, Director, Digital Marketing at BrandExtract, writes:

“That conversation around your brand will signal your relevance in your specific market to Google and other search engines. And since there is a positive correlation between your brand’s visibility and your rankings, you should begin to earn more traffic and customers.”

Podcast SEO

Podcast SEO is a new form of SEO that people are just starting to catch on to. This is how you can use podcasting to help your SEO and get your blog or website to rank higher in search engines.

A podcast is essentially a series of audio or video files uploaded to a website and then subscribed to by other users who want to receive regular updates when new episodes become available.

Podcasts allow people to listen while driving, walking, or doing any other activity that doesn’t require their full attention.

Podcasts have been around for decades, but they started gaining popularity in 2004 when Apple introduced iTunes 4, allowing users to subscribe directly from their device rather than manually searching for new episodes each time one became available.

Here’s how to leverage podcasts for SEO to help propel both your website and podcasts into the top SERPs.

Transcribe Every Podcast Episode

Phil Belleville, Internet marketing veteran, explains:

“One of the ways that your podcast can be understood by search engines much better is through the use of transcriptions. This not only helps users have a text version of your podcast episode but also allows Google to understand the content in the same way that video transcriptions on YouTube help do the same, thus improving its searchability.

Based on the demonstration at Google I/O, it looks like Google’s way of picking parts of the episode related to a keyword is through reading audio transcriptions.

While podcast transcriptions can cost a significant amount, it is an investment worth making, as you are helping your podcast get more listeners to discover your content.”

Provide Timestamps

Anya Logue, Digital Content Creator at Kagool, writes:

“Most people have a specific question in mind when they come to Google. If it takes too long for them to find their answer in your content, they’ll click off and go elsewhere. So you’ve got to make it easy for people to skip  what they need.”

Anya recommends splitting your podcast into different parts with questions or topics. Then you can list a table of contents with timestamps in your show notes and episode descriptions so listeners can easily find what they want.

Source: Podcast.co

Repurpose Your Podcast Into Blog Posts

Blog posts still make up the majority of search results, so it’s an excellent way to improve your SEO. Start by using a raw transcript from your podcast as the starting point for an article, and then develop it further by adding headings, explanations, and other text chunks that you can break into easily-readable sections.

Further reading:

7 Easy Ways to Repurpose Your Podcast.

Use Internal Links

When people come to your website, you want them to come back again and again. The same applies to podcasts: you want your listeners to feel loyal and keep coming back. To achieve this, strive to create content they can’t get anywhere else.

Lilach Bullock, social media power influencer, admits:

“You should do things based on the principle of “ask, and you shall receive.” You can leave options for them to make a request or leave a link for them to listen to another related episode. You can leave two or three links to a few episodes.

Make sure you categorize your pages or have a category list for users to navigate the website conveniently. You can group the podcasts based on the theme or other related elements.

Include links so that they help with not only enhancing user experience but also the distribution of authority between pages. It will also help the pages rank high in search results. You can look up the most commanding pages with the links and share the juice content by linking them to your podcast episodes.”

Optimize for Podcast Searches

Marie Turner, an SEO Specialist at Vertical Leap, writes:

“Podcast searches take place across two key platforms: search engines and dedicated podcast discovery platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.”

Marie further articulates a key fact:

“Google is among the biggest players in both of these fields, with the world’s number one search engine and its own dedicated podcast platform Google Podcasts. Best of all, Google shows podcast content in the organic SERPs for relevant searches, so people looking for things like ‘business podcasts’ may see something like this:

 

Source: thedrum.com

This is ideal for head term keywords involving the primary subject covered in your podcast content. To get your episodes ranking in Google Search, you need to claim your podcast on Google Podcasts Manager, which makes you discoverable in both Google Search and Google Podcasts.”

Follow the Basics of SEO Keywords and Structure

Planning your podcast is not just about creating great content but also identifying relevant keywords and topics that will help you reach more people with the correct information.

To do this successfully,  we as podcasters (and potential guests)  must plan out the questions we want answers to or issues to be addressed before recording our shows so they don’t end up being generic ones like “How should I start my business?” rather than something tailored explicitly towards one’s niche audience such as entrepreneurs who are just starting off.

Hannah Jesse, Social Media Strategist at fischerAppelt live marketing, has some practical SEO insights for podcasts:

“When planning your podcast, you should already be researching keywords to identify topics, questions, sub-aspects, and related issues that are relevant to the target audience.

Don’t just address these topics and questions in the podcast itself, but also mention them in the description text.

You should also structure your description text by using the following elements:

• For structuring your description, use headings starting with H2 since H1 is reserved for the main heading, i.e., the page’s title
• Text-structuring elements such as paragraphs, bullet points, lists, and highlighted text elements
• Internal links to your other landing pages with additional podcast episodes with similar content

Research a relevant, unique focus keyword, and provide a title and meta description for the snippet of every page, as well as a title and alt tags for images.

Where appropriate, you should not only insert the keyword and the word “podcast” or related terms in several places in the text but also in the headings, title, and image title. ”

Build Each Episode Around a Keyword

Marketing Manager, Akash Singh, recommends in his article,  ‘How to Get Your Podcast to Appear in Google Results’ the following:

“With your title and meta description optimized, you now should use your keyword research to plan your episodes.

Build each episode around one targeted keyword. Doing this increases the opportunities for the episodic content to appear in rankings.

The narrower topic also boosts the chances that a searcher with informational intent will listen.

The episode keyword should be used in the episode title and description. As with the podcast title and description, the episode title and description should clearly convey what it covers, particularly as it relates to a searcher’s intent.

Social Promotion is Key

Blythe Brumleve @ Digital Dispatch Podcast warns us not to be afraid to share our episodes on social channels more than once; the reason is that:

“Social media algorithms are a beast, and chances are only 5-10% of your audience (if that) saw the post the first time around.

Share an episode multiple times, and don’t forget to tag any guests/companies/tools mentioned during that episode to help with additional organic boost.”

On-Page SEO

Are you wondering why (most of) your website pages and blog posts are not appearing on the first page of search results?

In an article posted on his website, Romain Brabant (founder of SEO Buddy) defines on-page SEO thus:

“On-page SEO is the process of making and optimizing the content on your web pages so that it appeals to both search engines and users. In this context, content refers mainly to the site’s formatting, images, and written content,  but not general website coding elements. The text you’re looking at right now is content.”

There are a few key things to keep in mind when optimizing your website’s on-page SEO, and here are two of the most important ones:

1. Creating high-quality content that appeals to both search engines and readers will give you a competitive advantage.
2. Consider the search intent;create content that aligns with a user’s intention when visiting your site, most often their desired outcome. When considering the information you want to put on the site, a focus keyword can help ensure that what ends up on the site is cohesive, organized, and in line.

 Algorithms have indeed evolved, but keywords are still very much relevant for SEO on the page.

 

Image via Google

Content Optimization

Do you know that there is an ‘easy’ way to boost the performance of your content?

Don’t believe me; take a look at this snippet of an article by Priscilla Tan:

“Content optimization dramatically improves your content’s performance and helps you meet your marketing goals.

Without it, you miss out on visibility, rankings, traffic, leads, and sales.

The challenge is that the optimization techniques that move the needle forward aren’t always obvious.

For instance, optimizing content for SEO vs. conversions requires two different approaches. The former involves keyword research, while the latter involves copywriting and a product-led approach.”

How to optimize content for SEO; Priscilla offers six tips:

1. Target a keyword with traffic potential.
2. Align it with the search intent.
3. Cover everything searchers want to know.
4. Make it easy and enticing to read.
5. Write a compelling title tag and description.
6. Get/attract enough backlinks.

Blog Post Optimization

Do you struggle with making your blog posts SEO-friendly?

Writing blog posts that rank well and provide readers with relevant information is a skill like any other. The more you do it, the better at it you’ll become.

According to Digital Marketing Consultant & Trainer  Alex Chris,  he writes:

“Despite what many people think, it’s not a complicated process. There are some simple steps to follow to ensure that everything you publish on your website or blog is SEO-friendly.

Things like the title of the post, the structure of a blog, text formatting, headings, and paragraphs are easy to fix and yet play a vital role in rankings.”

Here are ten tips for writing SEO-friendly blog posts

As recommended by Alex in his article:

• Think before you start writing.
• Create the structure of the blog post.
• Craft the title and URL.
• Use headings correctly.
• Keep your paragraphs short.
• Add links when it makes sense.
• Do make use of keywords (but not keyword stuffing).
• Optimize the length of your blog post.
• Optimize your meta description.
• Optimize your images and other media elements.

Landing Page Optimization

Are you struggling to convince your website visitors to take the desired action?

Thanks to Hailey Friedman (CEO of Growth Marketing Pro SEO Agency and Co-Founder of GrowthBar), we have a good description of what landing page optimization is all about;

In short, landing page optimization is a bit more complicated than blog post optimization. You want to lead visitors towards your call to action and do everything you can to ensure they convert.

When creating SEO-rich content, you aim to capture the reader’s attention and engage them for as long as possible. The goal is to keep the answer to the question they came looking for in their minds after they leave your site.

 

(Source: Convertkit.com)

Long-Tail Keywords

Are you looking for a scalable keyword research strategy?

According to Roberto Popolizio (SEO Consultant & Digital PR), in an article shared on his timeline, we read:

Find Long Tail Keywords On Google

This is the first step in any SEO campaign. We can spend a week talking about different ways to do it, but in the end, it all comes down to understanding what your customer would type in Google’s search engine

The simpler, the better. Start with the most basic search term you can think of. For example, Tenerife is one of Thomas Cook’s most popular holiday destinations, so let’s start with that keyword.

Now, we’re not actively trying to rank here, we’re just trying to get an idea of what sort of content might work while looking into the clues Google is giving us.

First of all, let’s have a look at what Google Autosuggest is showing in the dropdown:

 

And then the related searches:

This gives us a list of potential ideas to work with:

1. A guide to the top things to do in Tenerife.
2. A blog about the best beaches in Tenerife.
3. A page about the weather in Tenerife.

Internal Linking

Matt Bertram, Enterprise SEO Consultant at EWR Digital, claims:

“Publishing quality, valuable content on your website regularly is one of the most effective ways to increase your rankings on search engines, build brand awareness and attract quality leads to your website.

Content marketing can help you build trust with people, educate consumers and inform people of your products and services.

To create a foundation of outstanding content, focus on giving your audience what they need. This may include answering common questions, offering unique perspectives on industry-related topics, or crafting engaging pieces that people can’t wait to consume.

Content marketing isn’t limited to blog posts and case studies. You can create everything from e-books and infographics to videos, podcasts, webinars, and other creative pieces to engage your audience.

“Your brand image reflects how your users feel about you.”

Neil Patel, the co-founder of NP Digital, recognizes that to create the best possible brand image, you must consider how your users feel about your business.

They’ll respond much better to a positive experience that is continuously tailored to their needs and expectations.

Image SEO

If you are concerned about your page speed and rankings, Romain Brabant (Founder of SEO Buddy) explains how image SEO can offer immense benefits when leveraged correctly:

“Image SEO is the practice of optimizing website images to help search engines crawl, understand, and index them better. This contributes to your overall SEO efforts and helps boost SERP rankings.

Image SEO can also help your images rank higher in  Google image search results.

There are two key goals of image SEO:

• To make your images more discoverable.
• Ensure that images don’t slow down page speed.”

(Source: SEOBuddy.com)

SEO Titles

Does Google keep changing your title links?

The owner of Martini Buster, Roger Montti, offers simple tips to help you avoid changing your title tags.

“Google offers seven best practices for writing title tags that will influence what Google shows in the search results.

• Make sure every page has a title tag.
• Write concise title tags that describe what the web page is about.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Avoid boilerplate that is repeated across the site.
• Branding phrases are okay until they become boilerplate.
• Google sometimes uses what’s in the heading elements in the title links.
• Use the Robots.txt correctly.”

Meta Description

Did you know that unique meta description tags can influence your rankings in search results?

Don’t believe me; take a look at these real-life answers from Google that Roger Montti shares in his article.

Google’s Recommendations On Meta Descriptions

“Google’s documentation of snippets notes that meta descriptions are used to generate search results snippets.

If a meta description is properly used, then the meta description displayed in the search results will communicate to the potential website visitor what the page is about and give them an idea of what to expect if they click the link and visit the website.”

On-Page SEO Tools

If you are looking for a way to dig deeper into your on-page SEO tactics to boost your organic rankings, check out these amazing tools Neha Kaushik suggests in her comprehensive guide;

According to Neha, on-page SEO tools aim to:

• Track SEO strategies.
• Make improvements to simplify getting traffic.
• Fix SEO errors that are affecting the traffic.
• Uncover areas that can help you go a step higher than competitors.

Her top 10 recommendations for on-page SEO tools:

• Serpstat
• Semrush
• PageSpeed Insights
• SERanking
• SEO PowerSuite
• Sitechecker
• Ahrefs
• Seobility
• SEO Tester Online
• Moz”

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about the links you get. The more high-quality, relevant links you point to your site, the better it will rank in the search engines.

How to make your website a link magnet

Engage in online communities and forums, write guest posts for other websites, and participate in ethical link-building campaigns.

The best way to improve your off-page SEO is with content marketing. The more people who link to your website from their own sites, the more Google and other search engines will take notice and rank your pages higher.

Off-Page Signals

Do you want to check your website’s trustworthiness, but you aren’t sure how to go about it?

According to RankScience’s CEO, Ryan Bednar, off-page SEO is the answer:

“Off-page SEO involves all the elements outside your site that impact your rankability. These signals are meant to confirm the trustworthiness of your site. They refer to link building, citation building, content distribution, and other effects that give you a competitive edge.

Think of off-page signals as external references. When you apply for a job, you don’t usually submit a resume and call it a day. You’ll often be asked to provide a list of references and/or a portfolio of your work. All these serve to demonstrate your expertise.

Similarly, Google is like a recruiter who’s looking to validate the claims that you make about your site. Before it decides to award you with a highly coveted first-page position, it will verify that your site is, in fact, honest and helpful.

Once you’ve successfully won over Google’s trust, you’ll enjoy an easier time ranking on SERPs.”

Link Authority

Are you tired of creating low-authority pages and need to boost your link authority?

According to Joshua Hardwick, in his article on link authority, he says that:

“Not all links are created equal. Quality matters.

This fact is built into the way PageRank works. The higher the “authority” of the linking page, the more authority it passes onto the pages it links. In other words, a link from a high-authority page is worth more than one from a low-authority page.

 

So the question is, how do you judge the “authority” of a web page?

Google used to have public PageRank scores but discontinued them in 2016. While no exact replica of PageRank exists, there are a few similar metrics around, one of which is Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR).

UR shows the strength of a target URLs backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100.

To see the UR score for any web page, paste the URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer.”

Unique Domains Backlinks

Morgen Henderson,  Off-Page SEO & Digital PR specialist,writes about the importance of unique domains in organic ranking and link building:

“While links alone are great, having links on unique domains will do more for your SEO than having multiple links on the same domain. See how many unique referring domains your competitors have compared to your own site.

If a competitor has 1,000 links on 200 domains and another has 1,000 links on 500 domains, the one with 500 domains likely gains more SEO benefits. You’ll want to look at those 500 domains as the number to beat.”

Dofollow vs. Nofollow

What’s the difference, and why does it matter?

Take a look at what the Head of Content at Mangools, Vlado Pavlik, has to say about it:

“From the technical point of view, the only difference between a nofollow link and a standard “dofollow” link is the presence of the rel=”nofollow” tag.

The practical difference is that nofollow links do not pass the link equity (also known as “link juice”).

In other words, a nofollow backlink means that the linking page doesnot pass the authority to your page. It won’t improve your rankings or transfer any PageRank.”

Vlado went further to talk about four situations that require the use of nofollow links, which are as follows:

• Pages you don’t want to endorse
• Sponsored links
• Affiliate links
• User-generated content

Topical Relevance

Do you know that you can diversify your backlink profile with topical relevance?

Don’t take my word for it; take a look at what Erika Varagouli, the Global Content Strategist at Semrush, has to say about topical relevance:

“You should always aim to land links from sites that topically align with your own. For example, if you run a travel site, you should aim for most of the links you earn tocome from other travel sites; bloggers, online publishers (such as Lonely Planet), tourism boards, and the like. It makes sense.

That said, it is okay to have some links from other topics if they are natural and make sense; aim for the majority to be closely topically aligned.”

Anchor Text

Do you want to improve your site’s ranking in SERPs, but you’re not sure how to leverage anchor text?

Thanks to his years of experience doing SEO, Christian Lazaro talks about anchor text as a good way to positively impact your rankings.

“These are words or phrases that harbor a link- clickable words. Although you may not have control over the anchor text, when the link coming to your site is anchored on a text with a keyword you are targeting, it has a more significant impact.

However, when you are guest blogging, avoid using anchor texts with the keywords you are targeting as Google may penalize you.”

Reverse Outreach

Have you been looking for a way to build links at scale?

Brian Deanshows us a five-step process of how he did it using a new strategy called “Reverse Outreach.”

“Reverse Outreach completely flips the script on outreach-based link building.

Instead of reaching out to bloggers and journalists, you have them come to you.

Specifically, you target keywords that bloggers and journalists search for. And create content that they WANT to link to.”

Brian listed the step-by-step process of reverse outreach as follows:

• Step #1: Find “Journalist Keywords.”
• Step #2: Outline Your Content.
• Step #3: Collect Your Data.
• Step #4: Optimize Your Stats Page.
• Step #5: Get Backlinks.

You can read the full blog post for a detailed overview of each step.

Social Signals

Are you worried about your social signals impacting your organic search rankings?

Usman Akram, SEO Growth Strategist at Flying Cat Marketing, advises us on ways to leverage social signs for SEO:

“Although there are limitations to using social signals as a ranking factor, still the use of social media isn’t bad and, in fact, can indirectly empower your off-page campaign.  For example, you can use social media to:

• Build connections that can be later used for link-building.
• Build your brand, which can lead to passive brand mentions.
• Drive brand awareness which can then lead to branded searches inside search engines.
• Distribute unique content which gains traction and acquires links.
• Drive referral traffic to your content pieces right from those platforms.”

Brand Mentions

Are you struggling to get backlinks for your new website or blog?

Speaking on the importance of brand mentions as a major way to build more links, Antonio Tinoco (International SEO & Content Marketer expert) says:

“A great way to build more links is to locate unlinked brand mentions.

It can be particularly helpful for new websites trying to get those first 50 to 100 backlinks.

The easiest and most effective way to monitor your brand mentions is using a third-party tool.

Once you have uncovered websites that mention your brand, you can send them an email and politely request they add a link to the brand mention.

In doing so, you can get brand-new backlinks while also gaining referral traffic.”

Podcasts

Have you given up on starting a podcast as part of your SEO strategy?

Here’s what Sagar Waykar (Manager, Digital Growth) has to say about podcasts in his Infidigit.com article:

“Any form of audio content like podcasts was not considered an SEO asset by Google until very recently. Knowing how to make podcasts SEO-friendly can significantly help your off-page SEO strategy.

 

For instance, Google’s NLPs are now very capable of detecting verbalized keywords. This can also help you organically advertise on your podcast to gain more visibility on the search engine.

Additionally, having a strong and recognizable voice in your podcast can also help smooth things out for Google in detecting these keywords. Another trick here is to transcribe your podcasts properly.

Transcripts will play a crucial role as they will be primarily used to match a podcast with search queries.”

SEO + Paid Ads

How does paid advertising affect SEO? It’s a question that many businesses ask themselves, but the answer isn’t always straightforward.

Paid ads can help your business get ahead of the competition in terms of visibility and rankings. But they can also hurt your organic traffic if you don’t use them correctly.

The goal of any paid advertising campaign is to drive qualified leads to your website, where they will then convert into paying customers. This may sound simple enough, but it’s something that many businesses struggle with because they don’t clearly understand how paid ads work or how they can be integrated into an overall strategy.

Here are some tips for using paid ads effectively:

Find out what works best for your industry: To determine which type of ad will yield the best results for your company, it’s important to do some research first.

Look at how other companies use their marketing budgets and what type of campaigns they run (display vs. video vs. native). You should also consider any trends that might exist within your industry (i.e., mobile ads outperforming desktop).

Furthermore, we asked some top SEO guys about the benefits of leveraging SEO and paid ads, and here are their responses:

James Parsons, Founder, and CEO of Content Powered, says:

SEO-Optimized Curated Ads Boost Ranking

Marketers can use paid ads to quickly boost SEO rankings since most of them are published by media agencies on high-domain authority websites.  For paid ads to boost SEO, you must carefully choose the keywords for banner ads, sponsored articles, and display ads. They must be optimized based on the brand’s target audience, niche, products, and services.

Paid ads are directly equivalent to money value. Using SEO tools for creating ad content is important to generate and use the right keywords and other keyword-related analytics data and link data. These tools can help brands create relevant content that can drive organic traffic and help a website’s web pages land on top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Ivan Messina, CEO at SupportHost, writes:

The first and most important reason to use PPC is to test our copywriting from day one instead of waiting for GSC to gather a good amount of data while some initial quick traffic to our pages. Two important factors that give us an edge over our competitors are relying solely on content for SEO and ads for their money pages.

One thing I must say is that this is an aggressive approach that is only suitable for companies with a good budget because it’s easy to screw up if you don’t thoroughly understand their strengths and limitations  (so you may need to employ more people with different specializations), and also because PPC can’t really be separated once you rank #1. It’s well known that most of the traffic obtained through PPC is not moving automatically to the same site’s ranking page after pausing the ad.

Freddie Chatt, Ecommerce SEO Consultant, says:

Businesses using Google Ads can find high converting keywords to ensure they focus on the right keywords. If they have a long history of paid ads which is an absolute goldmine because you will know exactly which keywords to focus on to maximize the return on investment from your SEO campaign.

On the other hand, if they are starting with paid ads, you can work directly with the paid ads team to test out specific keywords to get an early result of what your SEO campaign may bring over time.

You can get all this data straight from the Google Ads platform or within Google Analytics.

Abe Breuer, CEO and Owner of VIP To Go, writes:

Conduct SEO keyword research to determine where you should focus your ad campaigns. This will help you discover the ad targeting keywords with a high or low search volume.

Create content around those keywords to increase your rankings on the search engine results page.

VIP to Go conducts extensive keyword research on social media to influence our social media ads. We manually look for popular and trending topics or hashtags. To save time, we use Netbase, a social listening tool that uses artificial intelligence to gather real-time insights into customer conversations and monitor hashtags and posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Jason White, CEO of All About Gardening, affirms:

Keywords are integral in optimizing SEO to boost both rankings and organic traffic. I find that using the same keywords for SEO campaigns and paid ads helps me optimize my page for better rankings. This significantly improves the success rate of my paid ads because it also creates ad copies that are particularly for targeting the right users.

Identifying the right keywords is one thing and using them strategically is another. Knowing how to optimize them for my ad and SEO efforts has greatly improved the search presence of my blog.

Ian Carroll, Founder & SEO Expert at Digital Funnel, says:

If you combine a solid SEO campaign with a powerful PPC effort, you’ll see some serious results. If your organization is looking to lock down a particular set of keywords, promote a new service/product/location, or simply just want to raise your brand’s profile and total brand awareness, have a look at combining SEO & PPC.

As we all know, when running a paid ad campaign, you end up with a huge amount of data and metrics, such as, what’s working, what’s not, your overall CTR, and so on. You must use this data to inform your SEO efforts.

Start optimizing your PPC ads and web pages for the same hard-to-rank keywords.

Look at your CTRs and see which topics and pages are the most popular on your site. Start optimizing these landing pages and the SEO to capture this trend and promote these areas with a PPC campaign.

Generally speaking, for our paid ad campaigns, we focus on Facebook predominantly as it has seen the best returns for ourselves and our clients.

-MohdFaizan Fahim, Growth Hacker @Breeze

I managed SEO and marketing for Breeze.io.

I use retargeting ads with SEO. SEO brings the person to the page/blog posts, and retargeting ads remind the visitor for days. The page defines the user’s location in the funnel, and the ads depend on the funnel location.

Google retargeting ads are the best when used with SEO. The highly relevant ads reduce the ad cost, and we scale up the ads. User’s first visit is organic, but we can leverage this visit by running the ads to get the second visit at an affordable cost.

-Nunzio Ross, Founder, and CEO @ Majesty Coffee

Using paid ads to leverage your SEO rankings revolves around optimized pages and content. The main objective of both campaigns focuses on conversion rate, which means optimizing landing pages and producing targeted content are crucial in ensuring the success of paid ads in boosting your SEO rankings.

It means directing users to user-friendly, mobile-friendly landing pages and insightful resource pages is critical in boosting conversion rates in the long run.

Paid ads are wasted when users leave your website due to unoptimized, cluttered, and non-functional pages.

Enterprise SEO

Brian Dean at Backlinko explains:

“Enterprise SEO is the practice of improving search engine rankings for a large, enterprise company. Common enterprise-level SEO approaches include scaling content, ongoing technical SEO management, and automation.”

Brian further shares a few examples of the types of sites that might need enterprise-level SEO:

• Fortune 500 companies.
• Large e-commerce sites with 10k+ pages.
• Businesses with multiple locations.
• Enterprise businesses with several websites.

You may be asking yourself:

“What tools or platforms are best for enterprise SEO, and how can we leverage them effectively?”

We asked a couple of SEO specialists this same question, and here’s what they had to say:

Max Benz, Founder, and CEO at BankingGeek, write:

Deciding which tools or platforms are best for enterprise SEO is a complex decision. There are many factors to consider, such as the size of the organization, the industry, the level of competition, and the budget.

That said, some general guidelines can be followed. For example, larger organizations will likely need more comprehensive tools that can scale to their size.

On the other hand, smaller organizations may get by with less expensive and more basic tools.

Additionally, businesses in highly competitive industries may need to leverage more sophisticated tools to stay ahead of the competition.

Ultimately, the best way to determine which tools are best for enterprise SEO is to consult with an expert. Someone with experience in the field can assess the organization’s needs and make recommendations accordingly.

Animesh Das, SEO Executive at FirstPrinciples.io, says:

Where there is a myriad of enterprise SEO tools, there are specific SEO tools that I prefer personally because of their usage benefits. SEOClarity is one of the best SEO tools, allowing users to create customizable SEO dashboards.

You can also perform site audits, and the tools assist in detecting duplicate content and site errors. Furthermore, for the enterprises based in diverse locations, the tools have features that assist you in leveraging the local keywords helping you make your business discoverable.

Another tool such as Ahrefs offers you insights on the accurate number of backlinks to your domain. You can have the brevity and asses when you have earned the most backlinks and identify broken links quickly.

The paid version of SEMRush displays the position for which a keyword ranks. It offers you the data on the amount of traffic driving to your site, and you can also drill down the keyword’s search volume.

Leveraging SEMrush, you can conduct competitor gap analysis and audit your SEO copywriting.

Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster, is another excellent tool for enterprise SEO to get behavioral insights. You can get data on click-through rate (CTR), clicks, and impressions. Besides, the tool can easily be integrated with reporting tools such as Google Data Studio, and you can track down your SEO efforts to bring up-to-date search metrics.

These SEO tools offer you a  results-driven performance marketing strategy, the correct metrics to deliver the results, and also aid in fueling the approaches to optimizing campaignsdelivering results aligning with measurable goals.

Johannes Larsson, CEO of johanneslarsson.comshares:

I highly recommend Ahrefs for enterprises looking for an all-in-one SEO tool. It has all the features I need to rank better on Google, including keyword research, content gap analysis, backlink metrics, and much more.

It works incredibly well for my needs since I can use it for the different brands I manage. It’s also great for collaboration, as I can give individual team members access to specific campaigns and pay on a per-user basis, making it very cost-effective.

Ivan Messina, CEO atSupportHost, writes:

Our SEO consultant,Roberto Popolizio, suggested using Ahrefs for competitors and backlinks analysis, Screaming Frog on one of our VPS for ongoing monitoring of our site’s health, and a custom script to semi-automate our outreach process.

Combine all these tools with Google Sheets, and we have a complete set of data ready at hand at any moment for all team members.

The next step has been to leverage our coding abilities (we are a team of developers, after all) to automate as many processes as possible by integrating these tools and GA+GSC APIs to streamline our content performance reporting.

The key benefits we can see from this system are a better capability to measure our results and immediately identify issues or room for improvement in our processes. APIs for data integration and management are really the key here.

James Parsons, Founder, and CEO of Content Powered, says:

Because most enterprise-level websites have many pages, leveraging regular on-page optimization and robust link-building efforts can boost rankings quickly.

The SEO strategies for enterprises don’t apply traditional SEO suitable for small websites. Attaining a multi-million dollar enterprise-level website entails using a robust SEO tool that can effectively, accurately, and securely analyze data.

SEMrush is a reliable enterprise SEO tool that can help attain this goal. With its paid version, enterprise-level marketers can expose keyword rank positions across search engines, providing keyword search volume.

This SEO tool reduces the crawl ability, indexability, prioritization, team collaboration, and legacy site issues that most enterprises face because of its intuitive metric tracking features and dashboard.

One can easily audit SEO content, research relevant topics, and analyze competitor SEO performance.

Michael Haas, President, and Pitmaster @AngryBBQ

BrightEdge is a top enterprise-grade SEO platform that doubles as a content performance management platform. It integrates website analytics data with content performance and social data to view your SEO program thoroughly.

Share of Voice is a unique feature that businesses like you should take advantage of. It can comprehensively measure your content’s visibility based on tools such as local carousel, video, images, links, and videos. Through a single dashboard, you could understand how your content is faring in search engine results pages compared to competitors. This way, you can prioritize your content plans and keep abreast of changing trends.

Abe Breuer, CEO and Owner, VIP To Go affirms:

seoClarity is a highly reliable enterprise SEO for unlimited site audits. You can crawl your site whenever necessary as it carries out over 100 technical health checks,  broken links, 404 errors, and duplicate content. This way, you can ensure that your site is always accessible, indexable, and possesses all SEO elements needed to improve the user experience and rankings.

You can quickly add meta titles, descriptions, and alt tags in your posts, especially if it’s missing them. You can customize the SEO reports, too, to show the most important metrics for your brand.

seoClarity’s basic plan starts at $750 per month.

Jamie Irwin, Director & Founder of StraightUpSearch.com, shares:

Pitchbox

Pitchbox is one of the leading tools for enterprise-level email outreach. It offers a powerful suite of features that make it easy to manage large-scale campaigns with precision and efficiency. Some of the key benefits of Pitchbox include its ability to automate your outreach process, analyze campaign performance in real-time, and personalize each email with dynamic responses. This is something we couldn’t live without when servicing enterprise-level clients

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful suite of tools widely used for our enterprise-level SEO clients to analyze and optimize their website performance. Some of the key features of Ahrefs include its ability to track rankings, crawl and audit websites, identify backlink opportunities, and monitor keyword performance over time.

Wrap Up

What makes both of these tools essential for our client’s service is the reporting facilities within each. KPIs and transparent reporting are crucial for enterprise SEO as they often have to provide feedback on marketing campaigns to internal and external stakeholders like investors.

Some key factors to consider when choosing a tool include its ease of use, price, level of automation, features, and overall performance. Ultimately, the best way to fully take advantage of these tools is by working closely with an experienced SEO expert who can help you customize and optimize your campaigns to achieve the best results. With the right approach and planning, you can leverage tools like Pitchbox or Ahrefs to successfully scale your enterprise-level SEO efforts and achieve top rankings in your industry.

Roberto Torres, owner of The Local Marketer, says:

I recommend Sitebulb for enterprise SEO for a variety of reasons. The first is its client-side crawler.

For larger enterprise websites, thousands of pages can make hosted solutions very expensive.

Second, their documentation and guides are top-notch.

Sitebulb provides solutions for the hints and errors it finds after crawling your site. This enables an internal marketing team with a wide variety of skills to learn and use best practices within the whole team. Lastly, Sitebulb shines in customer support.

Enterprise customers need access to support that is responsive and able to move quickly. If you look at their release notes, you’ll find an agile response to problems and bugs discovered.

Gosia Hytry, Head of Content @Spacelift, writes:

 Many enterprise SEO tools/platforms are available at our disposal nowadays, each with its competitive advantages. There’s Conductor, BrightEdge, seoClarity, and more; however, I have always enjoyed using Semrush, and here’s why:

It’s an all-in-one SEO platform that analyzes the traffic distribution from the channel down to the referring site and keyword levels in the Traffic Analytics report across mobile and desktop.

The platform can track up to 5K keywords (updated daily) from the country to the postal code level in the Position Tracker report. It also automates site crawling and action item recommendations.

Semrush is useful for extracting actionable insights from the data and is trusted by brands such as Amazon, Tesla, and P & G.

Sofie Koevoets, Digital PR & SEO Content Manager @ Superside, affirms:

As the SEO specialist for Superside, I use several platforms that make my daily life much easier! Platforms like Buzzstream, Ahrefs, and SEMRush help us with outreach and site audits.

Of course, we also keep a good eye on our own performance and the Google Suite products like data Studio and Search Console.

Sean O’Dell, Head of Developer Relations @Spacelift, recommends:

SEO Powersuite

SEO Powersuite is the most powerful installable SEO software you can download to Windows, Mac, and Linux. SEO PowerSuite is a suite of SEO tools that comes in one package. It includes four apps:

• Rank Tracker: To track the rank of unlimited keywords.
• SEO Spyglass: To track the various SEO metric of the website.
• Link Assistant: To track the backlinks and find the backlink opportunities.
• Website Auditor: To audit the website for crawl-ability and indexing issues.

Regarding enterprise SEO, cloud SEO apps, including Semrush, Ahrefs, and KWPro, demand very high pricing. Though an enterprise can afford it, it does not need all those features all the time. We cannot scale up/down quickly. Hence, enterprises end up paying for the unused resources.

SEO Powersuite allows us to scale it up whenever there is a requirement. It runs on the local server, and if we ever need more power and performance, we can migrate the software to a dedicated server, which costs significantly less than cloud SEO tools.

The biggest advantage of SEO Powersuite for enterprises is data security. All the cloud SEO apps collect data by crawling the website. SEO Powersuite stores data to the local disk, so there is no risk of data sharing with competitors.

SEO Powersuite is a must-have tool for any enterprise doing SEO. And for $199/year, it is a steal deal if we compare the cost with the advantages.

Chris Zacher | Content Marketing Strategist @ Intergrowth, writes:

Linkdex

Linkdex is a collaborative tool that allows teams to plan, track, and measure link-building campaigns.

Like Ahrefs and SEMRush, Lindex shows you which domains link to your competitors’ sites. However, it also has project management features that allow you to keep track of all your outreach efforts. You can organize your publisher correspondences, pending pitches, and link disavowal attempts in the app.

It’s an excellent tool for big teams conducting large-scale backlink outreach.

Ilija Sekulov, Digital Marketing Consultant & Senior SEO/SEM Specialist at Mailbutler GmbH, answers:

I am mainly using these tools:

• Ahrefs (Inbound Links)
• SEMRush (Keyword Research)
• Google Search Console (Keyword Research)
• Systeme io combines all the essential tools to create and manage an online business.

With a little on-page optimization and link building, most enterprise domains contain many pages that can easily make up ground in the rankings against competitors. And with those bigger budgets for SEO, they can afford high-quality tools to accomplish their SEO goals. But even with one tool like SemRush and Google search console, you can achieve great results.

Nunzio Ross, Founder and CEO ofMajesty Coffee, says:

BrightEdge is one of the best enterprise SEO platforms with intuitive and newbie-friendly features for an inexperienced SEO team. It gives valuable insights into your SEO bottlenecks and challenges you can leverage to prioritize tasks to manage your SEO weak points more effectively. It offers a unique Share of Voice feature that shows your overall presence and visibility in different e-commerce signals.

SEO + Social Media

SEO and social media are two of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. In fact, if you’re not using both of them to their full potential, you’re missing out on a lot of free traffic and potential customers.

Mark Traphagen, VP of Product Marketing & Training @seoClarity, claims there are five ways social media supports organic search marketing campaigns:

1. Create Links Opportunities

Design a social media marketing strategy for promoting “linkable” content that can be linked and shared by others regularly

2. Increase Brand Awareness and Positive Mentions

Be sure to look for opportunities where new consumers might be encountering your brand, create relationships with them, and find ways to foster positivity.

Create great content and engage people so they can see what sets your company ahead of its competitors; that’s how you grow loyal brand advocates.

3. Build Partnership

Respond to people’s questions and comments on social media; be professional when providing constructive feedback.

Also, have you ever thought about co-creating content with an influencer in your niche who is not being a direct competitor?

4. Establish Authority

Your website is the heart of your brand. Build authority with long-form blog posts, podcasts, and videos. Use social channels to direct traffic back to your content.

5. Boost Content Lifespan and Engagement

Sharing your newly published content on social media will make it discoverable and more likely that people will share it afterward, allowing the content to circulate with a longer lifespan.

‘Old’ yet high-performing content can be revitalized to maximize its lifespan. The only thing you need to do is to make sure it fits your audience’s current needs and trends.

According to Aaron Mackel, Director of Agency Strategy at Hurrdat,YouTube videos help SEO; he explains:

“Search engine results pages (SERPs) are changing rapidly.  With ever-expanding features like featured snippets, People Also Ask, FAQ snippets, photo, and video results, local search results, news results, shopping results, and more, Google is making it easier for searchers to find the answers they need online.

Unfortunately, this also means the traditional approach of getting your website to rank in search results isn’t enough anymore. You must explore every possible avenue to capture SERP real estate and get found.”

“YouTube videos are being featured in Google search regularly.  Incorporating YouTube videos into your marketing strategy makes you more likely to get your content in front of searchers, particularly those who want video content.”

According to Krystin Pipkin, Social Media and Reputation Manager at Boostability, Pinterest and SEO work together as follows:

“Social media can help SEO, and Pinterest is no different. As a Pinterest user, you can save or “pin” any image you find online or add it to your account.

You create different boards and categorize collections with the topics and collections you’re interested in.

When they are pinned, most images are linked to the original websites they’re from. That’s why Pinterest and SEO can both benefit one another.“

Krystin further adds:

“There are four main factors that influence Pinterest SEO. Those factors are domain quality, pin quality, pinner quality, and topic relevance.

Pinterest determines pin quality by the freshness of the content, the popularity of the saved pins, and the amount of engagement it receives from users.

For example, if someone else shares a pin from your board with theirs, Pinterest will track the engagement from every instance of the pin. Improving and optimizing pin quality is important for Pinterest and SEO.”

What is Going to be More Important: SEO or Social Media?

It’s difficult to say what will be more important in the future, SEO or social media.

For now, while you can succeed with either one, at the end of the day, it’s best to use a combination of both.

Social media marketing increases social engagement and funnels traffic back to your website. SEO makes that content accessible to search engines and brings free organic visitors.

SEO + Email Marketing

SEO and email marketing are two types of marketing that work well together to help you reach your audience and convert prospects into clients or sales.

Both SEO and email marketing are effective in their own right, but when used together, they can be even more powerful, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.

We have asked some of today’s best digital marketers how they use SEO and email marketing, and their answers will surprise you:

Sarah Jameson, Marketing Director @ Green Building Elements, says:

Consistently check your email and website analytics.

Understanding customer behavior can improve your website traffic and conversion rates. Knowing their behavior can give you a better idea of what content to target in your email marketing campaign and which landing pages to link.

Try various email marketing content.

Use video or infographics to capture new customers and keep the enthusiasm of your existing clients. Many people who check emails could take a break from reading written text and give them high-quality visual content, making it easier to comprehend and compatible with every device.

Post-purchase automated messages.

Extend the positive customer buying journey by keeping in touch with them even after making their purchase. Keep them in the loop on the latest deals and discounts on offer as well, so you also build customer loyalty instead of just website traffic.

Personalize content according to your subscriber’s behavioral triggers.

Customer segmentation and audience research will help you target your subscribers with content in a smarter way.

This saves you time and resources by giving customers the relevant content they are already interested in. You can also automate this, so it’s easier for the marketing team to keep track.

Mohamed Natheem S, SEO Expert @ Mailmodo, writes:

None of your marketing channels should exist in a vacuum. They must be connected in a way that benefits your business. We have leveraged emails for:

1. Email Outreach Campaign

Email outreach is the most effective technique to connect with relevant websites in your niche to earn links, which will help you rank higher. At Mailmodo, the results of our outreach outperform all our campaigns.

2. Email Survey Campaign

User intent is the most underrated SEO strategy. Understanding your audience persona will help you create better content for your blogs, ad campaigns, and newsletters.

You can send an email campaign with interactive survey forms containing all the data points you need to collect.

Bonus Tip:

If you see a good response on an email title or CTA, you can re-engineer and use it on relevant pages on your website.

Gosia Hytry, Head of Content @Spacelift, affirms:

The micro-niche influencers newsletters are the best way to promote your content through email marketing. It gets the eyeball of the industry leaders, audience, and a targeted group.

The content gets quick traffic due to promotion and also gets the ‘approved’ certification from the influencer who sent the email. The subscribers find the content authentic, reducing their resistance to sharing the content further.

People want to look smart, and the easiest way to look smart is to share quality content. Once the content makes it to the newsletter they follow, it gets the respect it deserves. People link back to the content, share it on social media and promote it to their circle.

Influencer email marketing is the best way to promote the content and push it on the SERP.

For example, tons of SEO and marketing articles are published daily. But only several of them are featured in the Aleyda Solis newsletter. Featured articles are considered authentic quality content and typically get shared on Twitter.

Jamie Irwin, Director & Founder at StraightUpSearch.com, shares:

Some of the best practices we use in-house include sending out regular email newsletters with engaging content, using targeted subject lines to entice subscribers to open emails, tracking click-through rates and conversion rates to analyze performance, and incorporating incentives such as discounts or free shipping to encourage website visitors to make a purchase.

While these are some of the things that have worked well for us, it’s important to experiment and find what works best for your audience.

There are many different tips and strategies that can be used to boost SEO through email marketing.

Some of the most effective include:

• incorporating keywords into your subject lines and body copy,
• creating engaging content that encourages clicks and shares,
• targeting subscribers with relevant offers based on their online activity,
• and tracking performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to analyze performance over time.

Additionally, some experts recommend utilizing bonus tips such as

• including visual or multimedia content in your emails,
• encouraging users to sign up for your mailing list through contests or incentives,
• and leveraging third-party tools like email marketing platforms or services to help optimize your efforts.

DanavirSarria, Founder @ SupplyDrop, writes:

 Email can affect organic traffic and rankings through branded search, direct traffic, and overall awareness that can lead to word of mouth or even digital PR.

The key is to have a great newsletter strategy that subscribers enjoy, which you can identify by seeing if you have a 40% or higher open rate.

For this, you will want a well-curated newsletter that contains content within the email, rather than just a list of articles like most bloggers send.

Deni Ivanov, Digital Marketing Director @ Royal Cleaning, affirms:

Using email marketing to gather customer ratings and feedback can aid your SEO efforts. By providing incentives and means for your customers to leave feedback on your website, you can ensure additional traffic to your site and improve engagement on the page.

Your customers’ feedback is valuable for SERPs, and the keywords they use to describe your products and services can notify your content creation and SEO.

Email marketing can also fuel customer referrals, which ultimately helps boost site traffic. Offering discount coupons through emails to customers is a great way to reward loyalty and can also help expand your reach.

Every new recipient of your email who will click through the email CTA and get directed to the site are additional traffic, and potential customers reached through your existing customers.

Jeffrey Zhou, Co-Founder & CEO @ Fig Loans, shares:

When sending emails to your list, use the power of storytelling. Instead of boring round-ups and “Hey, you might have missed our blog this week…” you can tell relatable stories that can pique the interest of your audience.

If you don’t have epic stories. You can tell anecdotes and small vignettes of your daily life, then find a way to relate that to the content or blog you wish to promote.

Storytelling humanizes you and makes you resonate with your customers. It prompts them to check out what else you have in store in your blog posts, so theywill most likely visit your website and read.

Amit Raj, FounderofThe Links Guy, writes:

Email marketing is one of the greatest strategies to boost traffic, but to succeed, you must be strategic in designing your campaigns.

Personalization in email marketing is key to gaining more traffic; in our link-building marketing strategy, we automate an email template specifically designed for a batch of contacts with a personalization strategy that piques the readers’ interest.

Most agencies usually create a template and spam the inboxes of any contact person related to the website they’re doing outreach on. This is true if your outreach focuses on quantity rather than quality.

Make sure to slow down and take time with each outreach email. This means researching what you’re pitching, which website you’re pitching for, and to whom you’re pitching.

This strategy is going for quality rather than quantity. Once we understand how to bridge what we’re pitching with the website’s audience and the person we’re reaching out to, the email transforms. It’s no longer a cold email, it’s become a conversation starter.

Yanna Berman, Founder of Urban Mamaz, shares:

Most of us, content creators, pour our heart and soul into creating a good piece of email marketing with hopes of being opened by everyone on our list.

We use dependable resources so that our information is solid. We add a good call to action and even some exclusive promotional materials to subscribers.

But for these emails to work or for people to read all the good content we write there, subscribers still need to open and read them.

That being said,  in order for people to see and open your emails, you must have a very enticing subject line. That is your only time to make an impression, so use it wisely.

Your subscribers get dozens of emails every day, including yours. This means you’re not special, and one way to stand out is with a clever subject line.

Logan Mallory, VP of Motivosity.com, says:

Shorter emails that include graphics (images, gifs, charts, etc.) are great ways to boost organic website traffic. They’re designed to funnel traffic onto the website.

The email is a teaser or a preview, so someone has to click on the website to learn more.

To increase open rates for the emails, have your most important points in the header and a few bullet points at the top so people don’t have to scroll to read them.

This technique boosts both open and conversion rates, as well as funnels organic traffic to your website.

SEO Copywriting

SEO copywriting is a form of copywriting where you create content that will help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The main difference between SEO and regular copywriting is that you must write SEO content in a way that appeals to search engines. This means using keywords, key phrases, and phrases related to your business in your content.

SEO copywriters know how to use these keywords and phrases effectively so that Google knows what your website is about, what it offers, and why users should click through to it.

If you are looking for an effective way to improve your website’s ranking in Google’s search results, then hiring an SEO copywriter might be the right thing for you.

SEO Copywriting Strategy

Are you finding it difficult to balance SEO and content in a way that will appeal to search engine crawlers and your target audience?

In her article, content specialist Rebekah Carterelaborates on what makes a good SEO copywriting strategy.

“While most people assume that keyword research is the only important element of a good SEO copywriting strategy, there’s much more to balancing SEO and content than shoving the right words into your website copy and blog posts.

As anyone providing a good SEO copywriting service will tell you, the key to a successful strategy is finding the right balance between what the search engine crawlers need from your content and what your users need.

While copywriting is the art of using content to convince customers to convert or make a purchase, SEO is about enhancing that content to ensure that you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages.”

“Today, if you want to get the most out of your SEO copywriting campaign, then you need cohesive, well-written content that suits the machines and the audience you want to engage.

As with any other digital marketing technique, the better your strategy, the more likely you will achieve your goals. With an SEO copywriting strategy, you ensure that you’re making the right impact on all the right audiences.”

An SEO copywriting strategy is a process that helps you in creating content that increases your website’s visibility in search engines. There are many aspects of creating an effective SEO copywriting strategy, such as:

• Understanding your audience’s needs and goals.
• Learning how people search for information online.
• Creating engaging titles and meta descriptions for your pages.
• Writing keyword-rich text for each page on your website.

Content Expansion SEO

Top copywriters know how to expand and upgrade your website content and blog posts to maximize the SEO impact.

If you are unsure of how content expansion can help you grow your online traffic, here’s what Search Engine Optimization specialist James Dooleyhas to say about it.

Getting your pages to rank for as many different phrases relevant to the corpus it’s in is key to growing your organic traffic.

When looking to grow your traffic online, many people think Content Expansion is just adding more articles to your website.

Although adding more articles is expanding your reach for keywords to be ranking, you will be surprised by how many more phrases your existing content could start to rank for by expanding on the page level gap analysis.

The new Information Gain SEO Google Patent is a clear statement to all SEOs to provide additional value to your content that your competitors are not talking about.

There are several ways in which you can expand the content reach on your website:

• Domain Level Gap Analysis – Checking what pages your domain is missing.
• Page Level Gap Analysis – Checking what headings your page is missing.
• Heading Level Gap Analysis – Checking what phrases your header section is missing.

Content Editing SEO

When it comes to content marketing and copywriting, it pays to be specific.

One way to be specific is to combine “new” with familiar concepts, names, businesses, products, etc.

Charles Miller, Founder of Writing To Riches, gives us an excellent example:

“Familiar names create more attention and emotion than general terms.

When it makes sense, don’t write:

• Car
• Watch
• Coffee
• TV
• Fast food

Instead, write:

• Ferrari
• Rolex
• Starbucks
• Netflix
• McDonald’s”

SEO Plagiarism Checker

Any content marketer or blogger knows how important it is to have a good reputation in the industry. Yet, some of them overlook the power of SEO plagiarism checker tools.

An SEO plagiarism checker helps online content creators to avoid plagiarism and skip the risk of getting penalized by search engines for copying other people’s work;

Copyright infringement and intellectual property theft are important topics to understand and follow.

Copyleaks.com discusses these issues in greater depth:

“Content theft is a serious issue, and if you fail to deal with it, your content will get scraped away, or someone takes your credit, which you can never allow to happen for all that hard work you have put in.

With a plagiarism checker tool for SEO, you get an alert against any stealing of your research paper, case studies, marketing collateral, or any other important content.

The tool is known for offering advanced features like tracking your website for any content theft and reporting immediately for security measures, checking for SEO plagiarism and saving you from any penalties, and avoiding any damages to your website.”

Title Rewriting SEO

Title rewriting is a technique that can be used to increase the click-through rate of your content in the SERPs, also known as organic CTR. It is useful when writing for SEO purposes. It helps to make sure that your content is engaging and more likely to get more views.

You should know that Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag.

More recently, Google started to rewrite title tags; their official blog reads:

“We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within H1 tags or other header tags, and large and prominent content through the use of style treatments.”

There are case studies that prove Google is doing such. Take, for example, SEO SaaS Zyppy. Their CEO,  SEO consultant, Cyrus Shepard, wrote a post entitled:

“We Studied 81,000 Page Titles,and  Google Rewrote 61% of Them.”

Inside you’ll gain insights on:

• How character length impacts google title rewriting.

• Does google favor [brackets] or (parentheses)?

• Which title separator does google prefer?

• Fighting google title rewrites with H1 tags.

• Tips to beat the algorithm.

Your blog post titles should draw people in, but sometimes they’re too long, generic, or don’t contain compelling keywords. Rewrite them for better SEO and more traffic.

Are you trying to rank for a specific keyword? Write targeted, informative, and keyword-optimized page titles and headings to increase your SEO score.

Optimized titles will make the search engines crawl through your pages and rank your content higher for certain phrases or topics.

Peter “Dr. Pete” Meyers, the marketing scientist for Moz, has an interesting take on the topic.

Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Peter mentions three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Keyword stuffing light

Scenario 2: Superlatives

Scenario 3: Site architecture

You may want to read his full-blown post and watch the accompanying video.

Landing Page SEO

A landing page, also known as a conversion page or squeeze page, is a single web page that you use to convert site visitors into leads and customers. And since landing pages are used to generate leads and sales, they need to be optimized for conversion.

For example, if you have an e-commerce store and want to increase sales, you could create a landing page that promotes your top-selling product or service.

Or maybe you want more leads and subscribers, so you can create a landing page that offers something valuable in exchange for their contact information (e.g., an ebook).

That’s called a squeeze page.

Whatever your goal is with your landing pages, there are certain things they should all have in common:

• A clear call-to-action (CTA)

• An irresistible headline

• A compelling description of the offer

• A video demonstration or testimonial

Here are four ways you can use SEO copywriting to improve your landing pages:

1) Write with your audience in mind.

Always focus on their biggest challenges or pain points.

2) Make sure your call-to-action (CTA) calls to action customers to do something specific.

Avoid generic information at all costs.

3) Be consistent with formatting and language throughout the page.

Too many landing pages are poorly formatted and designed.

4) Use strong headers, subheadings, and bullet points

Compelling copy wins.

Bucket Brigade SEO

Do you want to read more of your website content or blog posts?

Not sure how you can turn typical ‘page skimmers’ into engaged readers?

The ‘bucket brigade’ technique can be used to improve any type of content, from landing pages and sales letters to blogs and emails.

In addition, it can help you increase dwell time, reduce bounce rates and enhance user experience while boosting your rankings on search engines.

This technique is based on the old bucket brigade, in which buckets of water are passed from person to person to put out a fire.

In SEO copywriting, the virtual assistant conducts keyword research and then passes on this information to an SEO copywriter to execute the bulk of the content.

Here’s another application of this technique; the Peppercontent.io team wrote a useful post about it.

They recommend that whenever you need to transition to a vital portion of the story, introduce a new concept, or if your post is starting to lag and needs some spicing up, you use the “bucket brigade” method.

Here are some examples featured in their article:

• In other words
• Not so fast
• Meanwhile
• In my experience
• Even better
• By now
• And it doesn’t stop there
• By the way
• What does this mean for you?
• Think about it

There are hundreds of other variants you can use when applying this technique.

Storytelling SEO

Storytelling is an ancient art used for centuries to communicate with tribes and individuals. Today, it is an unfair competitive advantage,  an engaging and memorable way to bond with your prospects and clients.

Storytelling SEO (also known as narrative SEO) can be a powerful tool for any business or brand that wants to stand out from the competition. This type of SEO leverages human senses, which makes your content more memorable and engaging.

A story stimulates the human senses by engaging all five of them (sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound) and our imagination through our mind’s eye.

A great story will also stimulate our emotions by creating empathy in us for its characters and setting up tension or suspense.

There are many ways to tell a story, and each one is different. It all depends on the story you want to tell and your audience’s needs.

In short, there are three types of storytelling: linear, branching, and interactive storytelling.

Linear storytelling follows a chronological order of events while branching stories have multiple possible endings depending on the choices made by the reader or player during the story.

Interactive stories mix between linear and branching elements, allowing readers to choose their own path through the narrative.

Riley Hooper, a filmmaker, and non-fiction aficionado mentions in her post on Vimeo’s blog the four P’s of storytelling:

1. People:

Who is in the story?

2. Place:

Where does the story take place?

3. Plot:

What is the conflict and the journey?

4. Purpose:

Why should anyone care about this?

When done right, storytelling can help boost your website traffic, increase sales and improve brand awareness. But how do you go about using storytelling in your SEO strategy?

Here are some storytelling SEO tips:

1) Start with Research

Find out what kind of content people in your niche are creating online and what topics they’re interested in discussing. While creating something completely original is tempting, finding a unique angle is often easier when you take inspiration from what others have done before you.

2) Make it Visual

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so make sure that every piece of content you create includes one or multiple graphics  (e.g., 3rd party charts, statistics, quotes, custom visuals, screenshots, etc.)

3) Create a Character Who Represents Your Brand

This character should be consistent across your marketing materials, from social media posts to print collateral. You want people who come across this character in any medium to feel like they’re interacting with that brand as a whole, rather than just one piece of it.

4) Create Videos that Tell Stories Instead of Just Showing Off What Your Company Does

This helps customers understand how your product or service will improve their lives, making them more likely to buy from you than from competitors who simply describe the features and benefits of their offerings.

Website SEO Audits

Website SEO audits are a vital part of a website’s health and can be performed by an SEO agency or the client themselves. They are used to identify areas that need improvement and help create strategies for improvement.

An SEO audit’s purpose is to review a website’s performance, including its performance in search engines, crawl budget, indexing rate, and more. The audit will also check for on-page optimization mistakes that can negatively affect user experience and ranking.

When do you need them?

You never know what you might find. Therefore, SEO Audits should be performed before any changes are made to your website. Here are some common scenarios when you should perform an audit:

• After launching your website or before making any major changes (such as adding content or making structural changes)

• After implementing new features on your sites, such as e-commerce, blog posts, or widgets

• When starting an SEO campaign with an agency or after hiring someone new to manage your accounts

Website SEO Audit Benefits

Website SEO audits are important for several reasons.

They can help you determine where your website needs the most work, so you can focus on those areas. For example, if you find that your site isn’t indexing properly or that it’s not mobile-friendly, then you can use an SEO audit tool along with manual methods to find out what needs to be done.

They can also help with keyword research and determining which keywords to target. If your site isn’t ranking well for certain terms, then you’ll want to take note of that and see how you can improve your rankings.

A blog SEO audit and a website SEO audit are different from one another. A blog SEO audit is usually completed by looking at individual posts, while a website SEO audit is completed by looking at all of the pages on your website.

Bonus What is an SEO Audit

According to Neil Patel

“An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website and its search engine ranking (SERPs), including where improvements can be made.”

SEO audits help you leverage multiple opportunities like:

• site speed
• content gaps
• technical SEO issues that reduce traffic
• where competitors are outranking you
• ways to improve UX

Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization and the foundation for everything that follows. It’s also something that many businesses can overlook, but it shouldn’t be.

Technical SEO Audit: What Is It?

A technical SEO audit reviews your website’s code, links, and structure to ensure that it’s optimized for search engines. In other words, it’s a way to ensure everything on your site works as intended and gives you the best possible chance at ranking well in search results.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO is essential to any successful SEO strategy because it ensures that search engines can easily crawl your pages and index them accurately. Without this step, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to rank well in Google (or Bing).

If a page isn’t optimized properly, even with great content and links, it won’t rank as well as it could because search engines won’t be able to access all its content.

Corey Patterson, Editor for MarTech and Search Engine Land, reveals four essential technical tasks that help boost organic visibility:

1. Optimizing your website’s architecture.

Architecture = your foundational stage

1. Ensure your pages are crawlable.
2. Check which pages allow indexing.
3. Improve page experience.

These tips were shared by ShacharRadinShomrat, CMO of Deepcrawl.

Bonus Blog SEO Audit – Blog Checklist

The main goal of a blog SEO audit is to find out how well your blog is currently performing. It’s a good way to see which areas need improvement and how much work you can expect before seeing results.

Here are some key points to consider when conducting a blog SEO audit:

Keywords:

Check which keywords you’re using in the title tag, meta description, and body text of each post. Are they relevant? Do they accurately describe the content? If not, you may want to change them. Also, be sure you’re using one primary keyword and a few other secondary key terms per post.

On-Page Optimization:

Ensure every blog post features engaging headlines, relevant visuals, and interactive elements such as a table of contents and social sharing buttons.

Internal Links:

Do your internal links point to relevant pages that are already ranking well for their target keyword(s)? Are there any broken or outdated links that should be fixed? If so, make sure that you update these as soon as possible!

According to Ben Rea at Nomadicsoftware.com:

“Adding fresh content regularly to your blog is great and should always be in your wheelhouse. But not everyone realizes SEO success may be right in front of them already.

If you have preexisting blog content on your site, it’s a great idea to look at the data for those articles and assess how they could be improved or repurposed.

Often times you’ll find opportunities to gain new traffic to your site or improve rankings.

This checklist will help you review and audit your work to ensure it’s up to par.

Added to this list is a set of questions presented by Google themselves that will give you insight into how their algorithm works and what they’re looking for in quality content.”

Local SEO Audit

A local SEO audit assesses how your web page ranks in search engine results and how you can improve its ranking to generate more revenue and conversions. The audit diagnoses your website’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can make effective adjustments to attract more visitors.

 What is Local SEO?

Local SEO (also known as geo-targeting) is a specific type of search engine optimization that helps businesses rank higher in local search results. Local SEO campaigns are designed to target relevant keywords, including the names of nearby cities, towns, or counties.

Bonus Why Should I Invest in a Local SEO Audit?

A local SEO audit can help improve your visibility online by better positioning you for organic searches conducted by prospective customers searching for goods and services in your area. By identifying areas where there are gaps in your current marketing strategy, you’ll be able to make changes that will result in increased traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.

Enterprise SEO Audit

An SEO audit on a big company’s website is usually pretty comprehensive. These sites have hundreds or thousands of pages and rank well for many keywords across multiple countries or cities.

Enterprise SEO is more complicated than regular SEO. It comes with specific challenges typical of large businesses and sites.

Here are some of the challenges:

1. Crawling and Indexing.
2. Integration among Team Members.
3. Too many Locations, Subdomains, or Websites.
4. No Quick Fixes.
5. Traditional Methods of Fixing Issues may not Work.
6. Delay in Approvals.

An enterprise SEO audit looks at all aspects of a website’s performance.

This includes:

• Site architecture
• Content creation
• Technical implementation
• On-page AND off-page factors

Ecommerce SEO Audit

An e-commerce SEO audit is a process of analyzing your e-commerce site’s on-page and off-page SEO. This audit aims to determine the present state of your e-commerce site, optimize it for better performance and increase sales.

Having an e-commerce SEO audit done by a professional can help you identify the areas you need to focus on to achieve better results from your online store. The audit will also provide recommendations on how to improve the site’s performance through various search engine optimization techniques.

Paul Klebanov, the Marketing Educator at SEMrush, wrote a 15-point e-commerce SEO checklist to help you dissect your SEO strategy and identify the opportunities to impact organic traffic significantly;

You should consider these points when doing an SEO audit for an e-commerce site; Paul asks 15 key questions and delves into more details in his full-blown post:

1. Did you set up tracking and measurement tools?
2. Have you selected keywords?
3. Does each page have a unique title?
4. Does each page have a unique meta description?
5. Are you blocking unnecessary pages from being crawled?
6. Do your subpages contain breadcrumb navigation?
7. Does your site have enough content?
8. How are you handling out-of-stock product pages?
9. Are you creating content for informational keywords?
10. Do your URLs contain relevant keywords?
11. Do you have reviews on product pages?
12. How speedy is your site?
13. Is your site mobile-friendly?
14. How are customers using your internal site search?
15. Have you added canonical tags for filtered pageviews?

Shopify SEO Audit

You should consider conducting an SEO audit for your Shopify store or hire a specialist if you answered ‘yes’ to most of the following questions:

• Online sales have been lower than normal lately, right?
• Is your store suffering from low conversion rates?
• Are you sick & tired of customers abandoning carts and checkout?
• Are you losing sales due to slower site load speed?
• Do you want to increase your average order value?

Yuliya Nastić, e-commerce Specialist at Mementia, writes:

“Shopify website audit is a process that helps to analyze the entire Shopify ecosystem in order to determine what kind of malfunctions the platform has and how to improve them to get the best performance and results.”

Here’s a quick Shopify website SEO audit checklist

(for detailed how-to tips, we recommend you read Yuliya’s entire article)

1. Detect any Shopify SEO issues.
2. Check duplicate content.
3. Check Shopify page speed.
4. Detect Shopify malware.
5. Check Shopify security certificate.
6. Check all backlinks.
7.  Assess overall website usability.

Best SEO Audit Tools

What is the Best Tool for Conducting SEO Audits?

According to Jamil Ali Ahmed, Manager SEO & Organic Growth@Cloudways,  there are 20+ SEO audit tools for effective website analysis, and Ahrefs is the first one featured in his post;

“Ahrefs Site Audit is like a mini lab to examine your site’s health. You will quickly find and fix whatever there is to harm your website’s rankings (broken links, redirects, images or entire CSS and JavaScript files). The system can recognize 110+ technical issues, from critical errors to less-pressing matters.

When you see a totally unclear issue, there’s no need to Google it. You can check Ahrefs’ dashboard to understand what’s wrong and how to make it right. Quite convenient!

What also makes Site Audit convenient is that there’s no clunky software to install; this is a cloud-based tool.

It all depends on your website size, but in total website, scanning goes quite fast. Since Ahrefs can crawl JavaScript pages besides HTML, no page will remain unchecked, and you’ll get a full picture of your site’s health.”

SEO Backlinks

Leveraging SEO for backlinks can be a great way to get more traffic and improve your search engine rankings. But there are some things you need to know before you start.

Here are the most important things you should know about SEO and backlinks:

1. The content and its quality is more important than the number of backlinks.
2. You need relevant, audience-centered content on your website or blog.
3. The anchor text needs to match the content of your page
4. The anchor text does not need to be exactly the same as the one in the link’s URL.
5. You want to create links that will help you rank in Google, but not ones that can get you banned from the search engine.

Backlinks Strategy

If you’re looking to increase your website rankings and get more organic traffic, you need a backlinks strategy.

But what is a backlinks strategy? It’s a step-by-step plan focusing on building quality links to your site in order to improve your search engine rankings. There are three main types of backlinks:

• Natural links
• Artificial, or “unnatural,” links
• Manual links

What makes a quality backlink?

Ben Goodey, Head of Growth Marketing at CustomerGauge, shares his take on the topic:

“A good website with high authority (check them in SemRush or Ahrefs)

Lots of traffic driven to that page

A contextual link. For example, a website like New York Times mentions your website as a tool they’re using. Then others read the article and click the link. That is contextual, it looks organic, and people are actually clicking on it and coming from that site. Google values this very highly.”

Backlinks Checker

What is the best backlink checker? Ahrefs, because it has the second most active web crawler after Google, this means that it has the best backlink database in the industry. Plus, this tool is 100% FREE!

At the time of writing this, the company’s website shows:

• 43 trillion Known Links.
• 170 million Unique Domains.
• 24 billion Pages Crawled Each Day.

Ahrefs’ backlink index is updated with new data every 15 minutes.

Here are its top functions and why you’d want to give it a test drive:

• See domain and page-level metrics for any target.
• Monitor the growth and decline of backlink profiles.
• Get a complete breakdown of the target’s backlink profile.
• See estimated organic traffic to each linking page & referring domain.
• See all websites linking to your target with domain-wide metrics.
• See the most linked-to pages.
• See a complete breakdown of all outbound links.
• In-depth link analysis features.

Bonus White Hat Backlinks

White hat SEO is a long-term strategy designed to improve the visibility and accessibility of your websites on search engines like Google and Bing. It involves using strategies that follow search engine guidelines and best practices. White hat SEO tactics include:

• Creating high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience and optimized for search engines.

• Building links from other websites with related content that are likely to be clicked by visitors searching for your products or services.

• Using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your content and generate traffic to your site.

• Optimizing your site, so it appears in search results based on relevant keywords, not just paid placement in “sponsored links” sections at the top of SERPs (which Google calls “Ads”).

Jeremy Moser, CEO of Userp.io, answers the million-dollar question:

What makes content ‘linkable’?

“Linkable content has one or more of the following characteristics.

(1) Evergreen

Evergreen content typically revolves around topics that have sustained levels of interest. In other words, it never goes “out of date” as people are always interested in it.

This article on what makes a great logo is a good example. It covers a topic that’s always relevant. Countless people start a business each year, which means they’ll need a new logo.

So how can you tell if a topic is an evergreen? One way is to use Google Trends, which shows interest over time, based on search volume. ”

What are the other characteristics or key components of linkable content as revealed by Jeremy?

(2) Educational and
(3) Well-designed

Grey Hat SEO

To paraphrase Will Morris, staff writer at WordCandy, who wrote an intriguing post for ElegantThemes, here’s a comparison between ‘grey’ hat, ‘white’ hat, and ‘black’ hat:

There are many ways to define ‘grey hat’ SEO, but the best way to think about it is as a spectrum. On one end, you have ‘white hat’ SEO: the tried-and-true methods that are approved by Google and other search engines. They’re designed to create content that meets user intent, build links organically and provide a pleasant user experience.

On the other side, you have ‘black hat’ SEO: techniques that focus on getting results quickly, often by breaking the rules. Some examples include faking or buying links instead of building them, copying and spinning content (read: stealing content) instead of writing your own, or using cloaking techniques that hide content from search engines so they don’t index it properly.

Grey hat SEO lies between these two extremes, but where exactly? That depends on how you choose to define it. As with ethical hacking, gray hat SEO is a nuanced concept that’s often contentious. Some people say that any technique that isn’t listed in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines is a grey hat; others argue that only techniques that break Google’s guidelines are grey hat.

Black Hat Backlinks

Adam Steele, entrepreneur scaling SEO for agencies @ Loganix, reveals:

What is Black Hat Link Building? (Definition)

“When it comes to backlinks, Black Hat Link Building is the process of acquiring links through illegitimate or unethical means. Many site owners and SEOs use black hat link-building tactics because they believe it is the most effective way to improve their website’s search engine ranking.

While true in some circumstances, black hat tactics are often not worth the risk.

Sure, while these methods can provide short-term results, over the long-term, they are unsustainable.”

“You see, black hat SEO techniques go against Google Search Central’s guidelines (formerly Google Webmaster guidelines). And while many of these tactics were effective back in the day, Google’s algorithm has improved dramatically over time and can now easily detect any SEO tactics that are viewed as manipulative or nefarious.”

Broken Link Building

Broken link building can be a waste of time (if it’s your only SEO technique)

I’m sure you have heard this before, but it’s such a waste of time because you could be doing something else that gets you more links and traffic.

The most important thing about broken link building is that you should not be using broken link building as a core strategy for building links to your website.

Instead, use broken link building to supplement your inbound marketing efforts by finding relevant websites and reaching out to them to see if they are interested in linking back to your content or article on their website.

Broken link-building strategies include:

1) Find sites in your niche that have broken links, contact those sites and see if they would like to add backlinks from their website to yours.

2) Find sites in your niche that have out-of-date information (e.g., old articles), contact those sites and see if they would like to add backlinks from their website to yours (to update their content).

3) Identify niche forums where people talk about your topics and scan the posts for broken links, thin or poorly written blog posts, and articles.

Testimonial Backlinks

According to SEO speaker, and pro blogger, Matthew Woodward:

“Testimonial link building is the process of getting your positive comments about a product or service featured on the provider’s website.

At its core, the testimonial link building technique provides a lot of value to the owner in exchange for a link from their site.

This Is How It Works

I recently created a video testimonial for MyThemeShop.

I’m incredibly happy with it’s service when creating my Authority theme, and I wanted to share my thoughts about it.

I pitched them and asked if they’d like a testimonial from me.

They wanted one.  And now it’s featured on their homepage.”

Blog Comment Backlinks

Blog commenting SEO is an old technique that has been around since the early days of the Internet. It’s a simple concept. You leave comments on other blogs to build backlinks and get traffic from those sites.

It’s also one of the most misunderstood forms of link building.

What Blog Commenting Does for SEO Today

Content Specialist @ Close, Amy Copadis, provides the answer:

“There are plenty of reasons to keep commenting on blogs as long as you’re doing it correctly and with the right goals.

So, what’s blog commenting SEO good for today?

Creating Relationships with People in Your Industry

We keep hearing about how important real relationships are in the digital age. Connecting with the right people can be the difference between success and failure for your website.

So, use your blog comments to connect with people.

Establishing a relationship with the author or owner of a website through blog comments can be a great way to get your foot in the door for a guest post, which will get you a valuable backlink.”

Infographic Backlinks

Infographics are visual representations of data, information, or ideas. They can be used for various purposes, including education, marketing, or even entertainment. They’re usually created using a combination of charts, diagrams, and illustrations to show how something works in a simple way. The goal is to communicate complex information quickly and clearly so readers can easily understand it.

Why Are Infographics Such a Good Source for Backlinks?

The answer is pretty simple: because of their unique characteristics. They are easily shareable, highly linkable, and visual, which makes them great content for social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and more.

How to Get Backlinks With Infographics?

There are many ways to use infographics for backlinks:

Create an infographic about a topic related to your industry or business area. For example, if you sell car parts, you can create an infographic about the history of cars or the evolution of car parts.

These topics will attract people from other industries and make them want to share your content with their circles.

You should also include links to your website or blog in the footer of your infographic so that people can easily find them when they share them on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

SEO Web Analytics

If you want to improve your website’s SEO rankings, then it’s essential that you choose the right analytics tool. There are many out there, from free options like Google Analytics and Matomo to paid tools like HubSpot or Hotjar, but which is best for you?

What Is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is the process of measuring user behavior online in order to inform future marketing strategy decisions. It allows businesses to collect data on their audiences, products, and campaigns so they can make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

Web analytics tools include Google Analytics (GA), Matomo (formerly Piwik), and Hotjar. These tools allow you to track traffic sources, conversions, and user behavior across multiple channels such as social media, email marketing campaigns, and more.

The first step to analyzing your website for SEO is to look at the user experience.

Do you know the most common metrics used to measure user experience?

Here are the top five:

1. Bounce Rate and Dwell Time

How long do people stay on your website? This can be measured by the number of pages visited and the bounce rate (the percentage of visits that only visit one page).

2. Broken/Dead Links

If a visitor clicks on a broken link, it will show them an error page or take them to another page on your site. If you have a lot of broken links, this can make it difficult for users to find what they’re looking for on your site, which will lower their satisfaction with your site, increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time.

3. Scroll Depth

Scroll depth is another way of measuring how engaged visitors are with your content. It measures how many pages people scroll down before leaving your site, so if they go past the fold (the point where the screen goes from being full height to being half height), that’s considered high engagement with your content.

Other key metrics, as revealed by the analytics blog, Matomo:

Internal Site Search

Another important metric is internal site search. This can gauge how many people are using your search bar on your website and what they’re searching for. If you’re not seeing any traffic coming through this metric, it may be worth guiding your visitors on how to best use the search bar.

Segments

It’s also worth looking into segments to see where your traffic is coming from, desktop vs. mobile; country; browser; etc. This can help you to clarify where to focus your optimization efforts (e.g., mobile responsiveness, city-specific landing pages, etc.).

Google Search Console

The Google Search Console (GSC) is an all-in-one, free tool that gives you access to all the search data you need to improve your site’s SEO. It offers detailed insights into your site’s crawl errors and accessibility issues, as well as the ability to submit sitemaps for indexing by Google.

ManickBhan, Founder and CTO of LinkGraph, shares seven ways to use Google Search Console for SEO:

• Track keyword rankings, impressions, organic traffic, average position, and click-through rate (CTR).
• Understand index coverage and confirm that Google crawlers are properly indexing web pages.
• Submit sitemaps, disavow files, and removals.
• Identify and troubleshoot page experience, Core Web Vitals, or mobile usability issues.
• Confirm Google sees schema.org markup so web pages can appear in rich results.
• See security issues or manual actions Google has identified.
• Analyze essential backlink data like total external links, internal links, top linked pages, top linking sites, and anchor text distribution.

Google Analytics SEO

Looking to know how to increase and optimize your organic traffic by leveraging Google Analytics?

SaaS writer, JolissaSkow, reveals the top 9 SEO hacks to increase your organic traffic using Google Analytics:

1. Get Detailed Insights from the Queries Report.

1. Understand Keyword Intent Using the Queries Report.

1. Track Focus Keyphrase Data in Google Analytics.

1. Monitor Referral Traffic for Link Opportunities.

1. Analyze Landing Page Reports to Increase Engagement.

1. Reduce Loading Time by Analyzing the Site Speed Report.

1. Use Campaigns to Track Your Traffic.

1. Set Up a Custom Alert.

1. Set Up a Custom SEO Dashboard.

For full details on these SEO analytics hacks, we recommend you read the complete blog post (see link above).

Enterprise SEO Analytics

Enterprise SEO Analytics: What is it, and why is it important?

Enterprise SEO Analytics refers to the analysis of search engine data across multiple websites and domains. Enterprises are often interested in collecting this data because they want to understand how their websites perform relative to their competitors’ websites. They might also be interested in understanding where their users are coming from, so they can optimize their website based on these insights.

These days, many enterprises have multiple websites, each with its own unique business goals and audiences. The number of sites can vary widely; a small business may have one or two websites, while larger enterprises may have dozens or even hundreds of different sites. This makes analyzing website performance across the enterprise very challenging without some automation or toolset that takes care of all the grunt work for you.

Enterprise SEO Analytics tools help businesses automate this process by collecting all relevant search engine data from multiple sources (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools). This data is then put into one centralized location for easy access and analysis by anyone within your organization who needs access to this information (web developers, content creators, marketing teams).

Pratik Dholakiya, Founder of Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO, recommends Botify, “a top enterprise SEO software with three suites:

Botify Analytics

Enables you to see your website at every phase of search over a period of time with a log file analyzer (LogAnalyzer), keyword tracker (RealKeywords), crawler (SiteCrawler), and enterprise SEO analytics integration (EngagementAnalytics).

Botify Intelligence

Prioritizes high-impact opportunities and notifies you about critical SEO issues using machine learning.

Botify Activation

Tools that enable you to perform optimizations quickly and without resource constraints.

(Source: Growfusely.com)

Pratik further mentions:

“Botify works well for companies with large websites that want to increase ROI through organic search and for enterprise businesses with requirements like SLA, SSO, and adherence to search engine TOS.”

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that help you evaluate your website’s quality, performance, and usability  (i.e., the overall user experience).

(Source: SEJ)

Google is using Core Web Vitals to encourage website owners and developers to create more user-friendly web experiences by following best and good UX practices.

Google Analytics Alternatives

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools on the market, and for a good reason. It’s free, easy to use, and has many features that allow you to track your website traffic. However, several alternatives to Google Analytics can provide similar functionality but with more advanced features.

Here are 25 of the best alternatives to Google Analytics.

SEO E-A-T

What Is E-A-T and How Does It Impact SEO?

Just hearing about E-A-T and not sure what it means?

Content marketing specialist at Siege Media, Luke Strauss, explains it:

“E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Google uses these characteristics to determine the authenticity and quality of a web page in an effort to minimize misinformation on the internet.

While E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor,  that is, it isn’t a quantifiable criterion Google uses to determine whether a page should rank, E-A-T still matters to Google a lot.

Why Does Google Care About E-A-T?

Imagine you’re interested in taking out a loan and are looking for financial advice online.

As you comb through the articles on the first page of the SERP, all you see are small blogs run by individuals without financial degrees. When you open a page, you see stream-of-consciousness opinions about what you should do with your money: no Investopedia, no NerdWallet.

That wouldn’t fly.

E-A-T is one of Google’s tools to ensure this doesn’t happen. Google has a social responsibility to surface pages that provide readers with accurate and useful information.”

EAT & YMYL

Expert digital marketing consultant,John Lincoln, writes:

If you don’t have enough SEO-related acronyms to keep track of, here’s one more: YMYL.

That stands for “Your Money or Your Life.”

What Are YMYL Pages?

According to Google, any page including content that can affect someone’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability is a YMYL page.

Google reserves high-quality rating standards for YMYL pages because bad information could hurt people financially, physically, or emotionally.”

Formal expertise is important if you’re covering YMYL topics (such as medical, financial, or legal advice) on your website. Hence, it is pretty much a mandatory requirement to hire experts to write for your site.

If you can’t afford to hire someone, you can always conduct an interview with an expert or have them write a guest post for your website.

Google E-A-T: How to Create SEO-Friendly Content

How do you ensure your pages are seen by and ranked on Google?

Here is a SiegeMedia post where the content marketing manager at Siege Media, Michaela Wong, shares 12 actionable tips to create SEO-friendly content.

1. Start With Audience Research.

 2. Find Your Keyword.

 3. Evaluate Search Intent.

 4. Write Your Title.

 5. Choose Your Title Tag.

 6. Optimize Your URL.

 7. Write Your Meta Description.

 8. Build Your Content Structure.

 9. Start Your Research and Writing.

 10. Build Your Internal Linking Web.

11. Add Visual Elements.

E-A-T Signals

What are E-A-T Signals?

E-A-T signals are elements on your website that indicate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These elements include a company logo, contact information (address, phone number, and email), a customer testimonial, and a link to your social media accounts.

Why should I display these signals?

When people visit your website, they want to know if you’re a legitimate business. By displaying E-A-T signals, you’ll build customers’ trust and increase their likelihood of buying from you.

Copywriter @ SEO PowerSuite, Andrei Prakharevich, shares 8 E-A-T signals to add to your website:

1. Author bio
2. Article date
3. References
4. Policy pages
5. Business details
6. User-generated content
7. HTTPS
8. External signals.

How to Increase Your Content Authority and E-A-T score

Pro blogger Eb Gargano wrote an interesting post about 15 easy ways to improve your blog’s E-A-T score; here are her first two tips:

1. Link to Authoritative Sources

“Whenever you write a blog post, ask yourself, ‘could this blog post be made better by linking to an authoritative source?’. For example, whenever I include nutritional information or make a health claim on my food blog(such as, ‘Sweet potatoes contain lots of vitamin A’), I always link to an authoritative source in the health space.

Linking to authoritative sources, where appropriate, makes your blog more trustworthy and credible, both in your readers and in Google’s eyes.”

2. Always Edit Your Blog Posts

“A well-edited blog post will come across as more authoritative and trustworthy than a blog post littered with spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes.”

Google E-A-T Algorithm

, the founder of Einstein Marketer, wrote an extensive guide on Google’s E-A-T Algorithm and published it on Linkedin:

Everything you need to know about Google’s E-A-T algorithm update

He writes,

“Websites seeking quick fixes, hacks, and the use of bots, spam, or content scraping will be punished now more than ever before.

Google’s E-A-T algorithm update is the latest in a host of changes from the web’s biggest players, and as web crawlers become more advanced, you should expect to see more and more movements in this direction.

You must produce high-quality, targeted content. If you aren’t, it’s about time you started. It’ll make all the difference to your digital performance.”

SEO Rankings

There are things that can hurt your site rankings and minimize your SEO efforts; here are some of the most important ones you need to be aware of:

1) A poor user experience, poor navigation, broken links, content that is too long or too short, font size issues (too small), etc., all contribute to a poor user experience which can negatively affect your search engine rankings.

2) An outdated design that doesn’t match your brand’s aesthetic or a cluttered design with too many elements competing for attention on a page.

3) Slow site speed.

4) Duplicate content: having two pages on your website with the same or very similar information. It also includes duplicating other people’s content without giving credit or linking back to their source.

If a search engine finds duplicate content on your site, it will penalize you by lowering your ranking or even removing you from its index altogether.

5) Low-quality content. This is one of the most common mistakes people make when ranking their site. They try to stuff as many keywords into their articles as possible, but all that does is annoy readers and make them leave your site. To rank well, create useful content that adds value to users’ lives.

What are Domain Authority, Authority Score, and Domain Rating?

Domain Authority, Authority Score, and Domain Rating are metrics used by SEOs to determine the strength of a website. But what do they mean, and how can you use them to improve your rankings?

CEO & Founder, SISTRIX,Johannes Beus wrote an intriguing and  eye-opening post entitled:

“Why Domain Authority (Moz), Authority Score (Semrush) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) can lead to wrong decisions.”

Inside he shares tips on:

• How are these metrics calculated?
• How does Google do it?
• What does it look like in real life?

The Right Way to Increase Domain Authority

ManickBhan, founder, and CTO of LinkGraph, advises on how to increase Domain Authority safely; here are five simple and effective methods:

1. Get listed in directories.

1. Write great content.

1. Contribute guest posts.

1. Invest in public relations.

1. Try broken link building.

Manick also shares other ways to use Domain Authority in your SEO strategy:

1. Choose keywords according to DA.

1. Identify your SEO priorities.

1. Pay attention to Google’s guidelines.

Domain Authority and Page Authority

Domain Authority is a scoring system developed by Moz that measures the authority of a website and its pages. The score ranges from 1 to 100; the higher the number, the more powerful and authoritative the site, and therefore, the more likely it will be ranked highly in Google SERPs.

Domain Authority is not a Ranking Factor!

Page Authority is another scoring system created by Moz that measures the authority of individual web pages. It’s similar to Domain Authority but focuses on individual web pages instead of entire websites. It also uses a 100-point scale. The scale ranges from 0 to 100, with higher numbers indicating higher page authority (and thus better rankings).

How to Optimize Images for Better Rankings and More Organic Visitors

Can images improve rankings and boost organic traffic?

How to leverage graphics to optimize your SEO

Amanda Milligan, Head of Marketing @ Stacker Studio, says:

“It’s easy to look at image optimization as an afterthought in boosting SEO. However, when done correctly, it can help drive traffic to your website.”

Inside her Semrush article, Amanda shares:

The Major Benefits of Using Visual Content

• It helps break up a wall of text.
• It aligns with Google’s future goal of visual searching.
• It gives better context to your webpage’s content.
• It allows readers to comprehend written content better.

Tips to Optimize Images:

• Image file size and format: JPEGs are smaller than PNGs, so they load faster.
• Descriptions and Names: That includes alt tags, image file names, and image titles.
• Copyright: Make sure the images are yours.
• Relevancy: Ensure the images are relevant to the content.
• Mobile-friendliness: View the images to ensure they have the correct mobile dimensions.

How to Write Effective Alt Tags

“One of the best ways to improve your SEO instantly is to optimize your alt text. When writing alt text for your images, be sure to follow these rules:

• Be Descriptive

Describe the image in as much detail as you can. Imagine you are describing it to someone who can’t see it. In addition to being helpful for search engines, this also helps those who use screen readers better understand images.

• Be Distinctive

You should not use your content keywords as the alt tag for every image on the page.

• Be Relevant

Just like keywords, the alt text should be used naturally without feeling forced. This means you shouldn’t overdo it with keyword stuffing.”

Ranking Site with NO backlinks (link earning)

Can you rank a website page or blog post without backlinks?

Is there any smart alternative to buying ads or writing guest posts?

Roberto Popolizio, International SEO Consultant, has the answer;

He wrote an article profiling a cybersecurity website that finds new data leaks and publishes them.

Roberto explains:

“This kind of information gets almost instantly shared on major newspapers and top websites in the tech industry, like Techradar.

The result is that each one of these pages gets hundreds of links from super-authoritative websites without guest posting.”

PR Outreach Ranking

Can you use press releases to get better rankings and Google traffic?

Is PR worth the time, effort, and money?

PR and SEO are often seen as two separate worlds, but they can work together to help you achieve better results.

Press releases are one of the best ways to get noticed by journalists and bloggers in your industry. These people will then write about your business in their articles or blog posts, which can improve your rankings in Google search results.

But press releases aren’t just useful when it comes to SEO. They’re also great for building brand awareness and getting more traffic from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The key to successful PR outreach is finding the right people who have an interest in the topics you want covered. So find out who these people are before sending out any press releases.

Justreachout.io wrote a case study where they profiled how Pipedrive used PR to rank #1 for their target term (“sales management,” a high difficulty key term, with 30,000+ global searches per month, at the time of writing this).

Inside the full-blown article, you’ll learn the eight steps the Pipedrive team took to reach their goal;  BradZomick, the former Director of Content Marketing at Pipedrive, reveals the process as follows:

1. Select the right topic.
2. Create bad-ass content for our blog.
3. Optimize on-page SEO & engagement metrics.
4. Build internal links.
5. Find people who would link to this content.
6. Ask people to link to our content.
7. Write guest posts on leading blogs.
8. Fine-tuning content with TF * IDF.

Expert Quotes and Expert Roundups

Expert quotes are a great way to add credibility to your content. But, how can you use them effectively?

We’ve found that the best way to use expert quotes is to:

Use a Variety of Sources

Use multiple experts in your industry, and don’t be afraid of mixing it up with some outside voices as well. This will help you create a more diverse set of opinions and insights.

Include Context for Each Quote

The best expert quotes are ones that are relevant and interesting on their own but can also make more sense when placed in the context provided by your article or blog post.

Make Sure Each Quote is Accurate and Attributed properly

You need to be sure that you’re using accurate information from reputable sources when quoting anyone;otherwise, it can lead to problems later.

Here’s an expert roundup example (blog post) we created for our agency:

Business Growth Strategies for Selling Digital Services:

18 Expert Digital Marketers Reveal How to Deal with Client Objections and Pricing Issues.

Expert quotes help with SEO. This is a fact.

This is the case because Google ranks pages higher when experts in their field write them. This makes sense when you consider that Google wants to provide the best possible results for its users. If readers see an article written by an expert, then it’s likely that they’ll find the information more trustworthy and accurate.

The only problem is that getting these expert quotes can be challenging. After all, most people don’t have time to write them themselves, and asking other people to do so can also be difficult. That’s why many people turn to expert roundups instead.

But expert roundups can be risky if you don’t use them correctly. Here are ten of the biggest mistakes that you should avoid when creating your crowdsourced blog post:

Mistake #1 to avoid

Not Having a Plan Before Starting the Roundup Process

If you’re going to create an expert roundup, then there must be a purpose behind it.

What do you want to achieve? Is it simply to get more traffic? Or do you want more backlinks? Or is it just to generate brand awareness?

Once you know your goal, creating an expert roundup becomes much easier because you’ll know exactly what kind of experts need to be included in it.

Mistake #2 to avoid

Not Including Experts from Different Niches or Industries Within the Post

I’ve seen many times where someone has created an expert roundup post about blogging but includes only bloggers who specialize in blogging about blogging.

I don’t know about you, but I’d also be keen to know what the average blogger, i.e., the person who has a job and doesn’t blog full-time, has to say about their experience blogging outside of the blogging niche.

Mistake #3 to avoid

Asking Too Many Questions

This makes it difficult for participants to answer all the questions in a genuine, authentic, and comfortable way.

Mistake #4 to avoid

Not Giving Enough Direction with the Questions (or not providing any guidance at all)

This leads to long answers that don’t easily fit into the format of the article, or worse, responses that aren’t related.

Mistake #5 to avoid

Assuming that Everyone Will Want to Participate.

You need to have a good relationship with the experts you invite before you ask them to contribute.

Mistake #6 to avoid

Asking Too Much Information from the Experts at Once

The more information you request from them (e.g., links, images), the less likely they’ll want to participate in your roundup.

Mistake #7 to avoid

Not Getting Enough Responses

If you have only one or two experts agreeing to participate, then you need to rethink your approach. You may have asked the wrong questions, or maybe your request came at the wrong time of year. Be flexible and try again later if needed, but don’t let a lack of responses stop you from conducting an expert roundup.

Also,

If you ask ten people for quotes on a topic and only five respond, that isn’t going to look good when the post goes live. If you want more people to contribute their expertise, make sure you have a compelling call to action in place.

Consider including an incentive like free products or services as well.  It doesn’t have to be monetary, but sometimes just offering something free can get people excited about contributing their knowledge and expertise.

Mistake #8 to avoid

Not Asking Specific Questions

If your goal is simply to get a “yes” or “no” answer from each expert, then your survey will probably fall flat. Instead of asking open-ended questions like “What are your top three SEO tips?” try asking specific ones like “How do you optimize images for SEO?” or “How can I improve my rankings on Google?”

The more detailed your question is and the more specific it is to their area of expertise, the better response rate you will likely get from them.

Mistake #9 to avoid

Not Including Enough Experts

If you want your article to be successful, make sure you include at least ten experts in it. Ideally, you want to double or triple that number for maximum impact.

Keep an eye on the competition and out-rank them in terms of featured experts.

Mistake #10 to avoid

Not Following Up with Experts

It’s common for experts to ignore requests for quotes or interviews. This is especially true if they don’t know who you are or what your business does. If an expert doesn’t respond, send them another email asking if they received your original request and if they would like more information about the project.

Let them know that you have been in touch with other experts and would love their input as well. If they still don’t respond after that, it might be time to move on to another expert.

SEO Schema

What is schema, and how does it work to strengthen your SEO?

Brian Glassman, Director of SEO @ DreamHost, wrote a piece on how to

Use Schema to Enhance Search Results

He reveals:

“Schema is structured data that can help web browsers and search engines gain a deeper understanding of your page’s content. By adding this markup, you can improve how your website displays (and ultimately ranks) in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Using Schema to enhance content such as creative works, events, recipes, organizations, people, and products is recommended. For example, a search result using Schema will display richer information than one without.

 

(Source: DreamHost)

As you can see in the example, one of the results displays ratings, images, and more. You can manually add this kind of markup to your posts or use one of the many tools available to test and improve your structured data. If you don’t want to mess with the HTML of your posts, you can employ a dedicated plugin to help you take advantage of this SEO functionality.

Additionally, you can review Google’s structured data guidelines, as well as numerous reports offered in their webmaster tools. Ultimately, Schema is a vital addition to your website if you want search engines to read your products’ details rather than view your content as non-descript text.”

SEO Rank Tracking Tools

SEO rank tracking is vital for any business to keep an eye on their rankings. But with so many options out there, it can be hard to find the right tool.

Here’s everything you need to know about SEO rank tracking tools and which one is best for your business.

What is SEO Rank Tracking?

SEO rank tracking is part of any reliable SEO strategy which requires you to use a software tool that will help you monitor your website’s search engine rankings automatically.

This enables you to see how well your site performs compared to other sites in your industry and how much traffic it receives from search engines.

By skipping manual keyword tracking and using SEO ranking tools instead, you’ll be able to determine whether or not your efforts to improve your website’s performance are working and when they need adjusting.

Rank tracking tools are a great way to stay on top of your rankings and outsmart competitors. Using these tools, you can identify trends and changes in your search engine ranking positions.

These are 3 of the Most Popular Rank Tracker Tools:

1. SEMrush:

Best for beginners and professionals alike, this is one of the most popular SEO tools available today. It has a nice interface that is easy to use and understand.

With their Position Tracking function, you can track any keywords, domains, and competitors on Google. Their tool makes it easy to track your campaign progress, spot and fix cannibalization, and optimize your targeting efforts based on the most accurate data, updated daily.

You can get seven days of full access to all its features and toolkits. Cancel anytime.

2. Ahrefs:

This tool also provides an excellent interface that allows you to easily see how your site ranks for keywords across multiple websites simultaneously. It also has many other features,  such as backlinks research and social media monitoring tools,  making it very useful for both beginners and professionals.

You can also get regular email reports detailing the most notable changes in your keyword rankings, along with a sample of gained and lost SERP features and performance data based on your tags.

3. Moz Pro:

This tool provides lots of helpful information about your site’s performance in the search engines, such as keyword difficulty scores and more. The best part about this tool is that you can compare and optimize mobile and desktop visibility. For example, you can compare US mobile and desktop down to the national and local levels.

Check out other rank tracking tools here.

SEO Tools

SEO tools are a necessity for any business that wants to improve its online presence. These tools help you analyze your website and identify areas where you can improve. They also help you track your SEO progress and measure the results of your efforts.

SEO tools can be divided into two main categories: those that help you with on-page optimization and those that help you with off-page optimization.

As you already know, on-page optimization is the process of ensuring your website is configured in a way that search engines can understand and index it correctly. This includes things like optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions, as well as making sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Remember, off-page optimization is the process of building backlinks to your website from other websites. This helps search engines understand that your website is relevant and authoritative, leading to higher rankings in the search results.

Some SEO tools are free, some cost money, and some are subscription-based.

Some focus exclusively on keyword research; others offer more advanced features such as backlink analysis and broken link building.

Some SEO tools are geared towards bloggers; others are meant for marketers who need more sophisticated functionality.

How to Leverage Today’s Best SEO Tools to Rank Websites and Blogs for Business

We have asked Terkel’s community:

What is the one SEO tool you cannot run your website/blog without, and how are you leveraging it?

Here is what 12 thought-leaders had to say:

• Google Trends
• Yoast SEO
• Kwfinder
• Google Data Studio
• Ubersuggest
• SurferSEO
• Seo Quake
• Google Search Console
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• Google Analytical Tool
• com

Google Trends

“Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for SEO, but one of my favorites is far less popular: Google Trends. Search trends change daily, and the topics and keywords you planned for six months ago might be losing popularity quickly, making it important to track trends and adjust content and keywords accordingly.

With Google Trends, you can measure topic trends, top queries, interest over time, and rising queries by geographical locations. It helps us determine which trends to add to our content planning strategies and which are better left behind.”

Stephen Light, CEO at Nolah Sleep, Nolah Mattress

Yoast SEO

“Yoast SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that we use for keyword analysis and optimization. Yoast SEO does an in-depth SEO evaluation, analyzing and scoring each page and post on our website.

It assigns a score to each page or post based on elements like key length, external and internal links, keyword distribution, meta description length, SEO title width, and image alt attributes.

Along with the score, Yoast SEO offers tips for optimizing the page for search engines. These suggestions are incredibly specific and actionable, allowing us to quickly determine what is amiss on each page and make revisions. This capacity enables us to generate and distribute content more efficiently.”

David Bitton, Co-Founder & CMO at Doorloop

KWFinder

KWFinder is our ultimate keyword tool, helping us to quickly grab long-tail keywords with lower competition, improving our chances to rank quickly with Google.

We can look up the strengths of the keywords we’re interested in and pull great suggestions from their software. Beyond content planning, the tool also analyzes our backlinks and lets us track our ranking thanks to their handy Rank Tracker tool, so we can see where there is room for improvement and how well our hard work pays off.

John Li, Co-Founder at Fig Loans

Google Data Studio

“The must-have SEO tool we use is Google Data Studio, a fantastic analytics dashboard suite. We use to combine in one view all the analytics data we have from Google Tools to third-party software. We use it daily since it also allows us to make and share reports with clients and our teams.”

Brenton Thomas, Digital Marketing Expert, Founder of Twibi

Ubersuggest

We use Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest tool as a key cornerstone of our competitor research. You get all the most useful features here, like backlink data and top SEO page rankings, but the real benefit comes from reverse engineering your competition’s SEO strategy.

Use Ubersuggest to see what kind of content ideas your competitors are using, then couple those insights with their keyword suggestion tool to go even further. It’s extremely useful, functional, and easy to use.

David Patterson-Cole, Co-founder atMoonchaser

SurferSEO

“There is no single SEO tool without which I cannot run my website/blog. However, SurferSEO is an essential tool for my SEO strategy.

SurferSEO provides me with the data I need to optimize my website for the search engines, and it helps me to RankTracker my progress and keeps track of my keyword rankings.

Additionally, the Link Prospector feature helps me find new link building opportunities, and the Site Explorer tells me what keywords my competitors are ranking for. Overall, SurferSEO is a comprehensive SEO tool I would not want to be without.”

Rick Elmore, CEO at Simply Noted

Seo Quake

“Yes, that’s right, SEO Quake is a cost-effective browser extension that is a great alternative to the more expensive SEM Rush. It provides 90% of the same information at a fraction of the cost.

With SEO Quake, I can use it for a host of tasks. Extracting more data from SERPS, comparing domains and URLs, examining internal and external links, and quick audits on page. All of this in a plug-in makes life a lot easier.

Sure, a resource like SEM Rush can provide more information, but much of that is specific data that may not apply to many projects. For the meat and potatoes of SEO tools, SEO Quake is the pound for pound champ.”

Devin Schumacher, Founder of SERP

Google Search Console

“Google search console is my go-to SEO tool for all the SEO optimization and what content to put out there.

It does the A-Z for the website. Whether it’s reviewing the website’s performance or just troubleshooting the problems, it will handle both for me. And with this tool, you can see how much organic traffic you can bring to your website by the keywords you’re using. And same as that, you can analyze your keywords too. Hence, it’s all in one knight in shining armor for the people looking for SEO tools out there.”

Meera Watts, Owner of Siddhi Yoga International Pte. Ltd.

Semrush

“Right now, SEMrush is the most complete SEO tool available. We use it for almost everything; keyword research, backlink tracking and authority development building, competitive analyses, and performance tracking. But the way we best leverage it is through the content template tool.

Combined with keyword research, it allows us to easily understand how to generate SEO-backed content that can compete with existing top-ranked pages.”

Ryan Jacobsen, Director, SEO at LaneTerralever

Ahrefs

“I use Ahrefs for practically everything, including identifying topics and subtopics based on low competition keywords as well as niche and backlink analysis to identify potential off-page opportunities.

Ahrefs gets me every time over similar tools, mostly because I like the UX more and find it clear and intuitive. Their backlink analysis is famous for a reason. They make it easy to get the necessary information to knock out some quick wins and insights for your site.”

Klara Dumancic, Alpha Investors

Google Analytics Tool

“Although Google Analytics offers a premium subscription, the free version can help you monitor your website’s SEO, especially if you use it in conjunction with Search Console. All of your website’s SEO data will be centralized and gathered in this way, and you’ll be able to utilize queries to find opportunities for improvement with the keywords or phrases you want your site and web pages to rank for.

Determine the following engagement metrics: Employ Site Content Reports to establish engagement rates on individual web pages, engagement for your website’s directories and pages, page departure metrics, and landing page acquisition, behavior, and conversion.

Isaac Robertson, Total Shape

AnswerThePublic.com

“I can’t imagine running our site without Answer The Public. This tool is enormously helpful for coming up with blog content ideas. I use it every time I’m outlining a piece of content.

If you’ve never used it, AnswerThePublic.com has a search bar on their site where you type in your target keyword. The search engine returns an enormous list of common search queries that contain or relate to your target keyword.

In other words, it tells you about your audience’s search intent andwhat types of information they’re looking for when they type your target keyword into Google.

Every time you write a blog article, your goal should be to create the best resource on your chosen topic that is available anywhere. We try to do that and Answer The Public greatly helps us in our efforts.

Chris Zacher, Intergrowth

SEO Content Strategy

A successful SEO content strategy is about understanding what your audience wants and how to give it to them.

I know that sounds simplistic, but it’s a core principle of any successful business. Content marketing is just the same, regardless of whether you’re looking to sell products or services.

Content creation is a lot more than just writing blog posts. It’s about providing value beyond your product or service. It’s about inspiring people to take action because they want to, not because they have to.

It’s about building strong relationships with your audience and encouraging them to engage with you on every level: from social media, through comments, and all the way down to sharing your content with others.

It’s about helping your customers solve problems and removing obstacles so they can live happier and more productive lives. And it’s about doing all these things honestly, transparently, and in service of their needs first, yours second.

If you don’t know where to start, follow these steps:

1. Understand the needs of your target audience.

1. Do keyword research and find out what people are searching for in your industry.

1. Create a list of topics you can cover in your content, then prioritize them based on their potential ROI.

1. Create an editorial calendar so you can stay on track with your content creation efforts (and make sure nothing slips through the cracks).

1. Track, monitor, and refine your progress daily, weekly, and monthly. This will allow you to improve your ROI and boost digital marketing efforts overall.

SEO Content Ideas

Are you stuck writing engaging content that connects with your target audience?

Megan Mahoney is an expert content writer for SaaS companies. She reveals 16 content ideas you can replicate for your brand or business:

• Find trending topics on Reddit.
• Look for easy topics with SEO potential.
• Have a contrarian take on a popular opinion.
• Host a virtual lunch for your customers.
• Swipe popular headline frameworks.
• Ask the customer success and sales teams.
• Check the “People Also Ask” results.
• Look for pain points in case studies.
• Check your competitors’ paid keywords.
• Research who your customers compare you to.
• Recall experiences to document.
• Find highly shared content in your industry.
• Find your competitors’ top-ranking content.
• Use a content idea generator.
• List pain points your business solves.
• Update existing content.

Silo Structure

Not sure how silo structure helps with SEO?

Joshua Hardwick, Head of Content @ahrefs, talks about the importance of silo structure in SEO;

Silo structure in SEO is a type of website architecture where you group, isolate, and interlink content about a specific topic. This creates clean, distinct sections of related content on your website.

The reason for the popularity of silo structure is the perceived benefits, which usually go  like this:

• It helps Google to find your pages.
• It boosts rankings.
• It creates a good user experience.

For example, if you knew that a page had these internal anchors…

• the company founded by Steve Jobs
• the iPhone manufacturer
• The CEO, Tim Cook.

You could probably figure out that it’s about Apple.

The same would be true if a page had internal links from pages about these things:

• iPhone
• iPad
• Mac

Topic Clusters

Mimi An wrote a detailed guide about topic clusters; she affirms that SEO has shifted to a topic cluster model. This means that a single “pillar page” acts as the main hub for content on a specific topic. Multiple content pages related to the same topic link back to the pillar page and each other.

Mimi adds that this linking action signals the ‘authority’ of the topic pillar page to search engines, which may lead to the page ranking higher in search engines over time. Topic cluster is a way to organize a site’s pages according to simpler and more planned site architecture.

How to Create a Topic Cluster:

Mimi further suggests analyzing your existing content pages and classifying them by topic. If necessary, create a content marketing pillar page that covers all aspects of the topic.

Example: Content Marketing

• Content Marketing Strategy
• Brainstorming Techniques
• Blogging
• Blogging Mistakes
• Buyer Personas
• Writing Skills
• Writing Productivity
• Buyer’s Journey
• Gated Content
• Growing Readership
• Content Planning
• Content Creation Tools
• Blog Post Topics
• Grammar Fails
• Post Types
• Scaling Content Output

“Take note that pillar pages need to broadly cover the topic you’re focusing on so that it makes sense to tie to all the cluster content linking to it. The cluster content you create or optimize should go into depth on just one area mentioned on the pillar page.

For example: If you have a pillar page on search engine optimization, a cluster content page will detail how to optimize your site architecture for search engines.”

Keyword Mapping

SEO expert, Romain Brabant, explains keyword mapping as a way to make it easier for search engines to understand the context and relevance of each page. You’d also be helping your audience find the information they want.

Plus, a keyword map helps you identify what content you need to create, where optimization is needed, and where to add pages to drive greater traffic to your website or blog.

According to Romain, there are five steps to performing keyword mapping:

1. Create a List of Target Keywords.
2. Group the Keywords.
3. Come Up With Content Ideas.
4. Find Your Website’s Potential.
5. Do it Regularly.

SEO Product Pages

Richard Conn, Senior Director, Demand Generation at 8×8, talks about how to leverage product pages for SEO; he writes:

“At their most basic, product pages are web pages that list and describe products or services that can be purchased.

These pages are where your website’s visitors will come to learn about the product. A product page acts as both an information cache and a persuasive sales tool. This can be a challenge for marketers, particularly when the product being sold is also available elsewhere.”

Richard further adds:

“Creating search engine optimized product pages isn’t as simple as throwing in a few keywords here and there. You need to take a measured approach to build product pages that offer value and usability.“

Follow these quick tips:

• Prioritize Data
• Integrate Relevant Keywords
• Cover the Smallest Details
• Avoid Replicating Copy
• Offer Consistent Content
• Deliver Simple Information
• Add Videos and Imagery
• Avoid Too Many CTAs

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content, or having multiple versions of the same page on your site, is a serious problem you should tackle sooner than later. Aside from potentially confusing your visitors, it can negatively affect your search engine rankings and dilute the link equity you have built for specific pages.

The most important thing to remember here is that Google has a specific set of guidelines for how and when it can penalize websites for duplicate content. Even small infractions can result in action being taken against your site.

Possible penalties range from a subtle downgrading of the duplicate pages to complete removal from the index, meaning no one will be able to find your web pages or blog posts on Google and other search engines.

Website SEO Protection

In the world of online marketing, one of the most important things you can do for your clients is to protect their website from Google and organic search penalties. What are Google penalties? They are penalties that websites receive when/if they violate Google’s guidelines.

Google can penalize websites for several reasons, including linking schemes and content spam. If your website has been penalized by Google, it can be extremely damaging to your business because it will make it difficult or impossible for potential customers to find you.

Fortunately, there are ways to prevent this from happening, and one of them is using website SEO tools and hiring SEO experts.

Negative SEO Protection

Negative SEO is the act of using black hat or unethical methods to undermine a competitor’s ranking in search engines.

The first step in protecting your website from negative SEO is understanding how it could happen. Once you know what potential risks there are for your website, you can take steps to protect it.

According to Co-Founder at Neil Patel Digital: Neil Patel says negative SEO attacks can take many forms:

• Hacking your site.
• Building hundreds or thousands of spammy links to your website.
• Copying your content and then distributing it over the Internet.
• Linking to your website with keywords like Viagra, Poker Online, and many others.
• Making fake profiles on social media and ruining your online reputation.

How to Prevent Negative SEO Attacks

Neil recommends you do the following:

• Setup email alerts via the Google Webmaster Tools.
• Monitor your backlinks.
• Protect your top backlinks.
• Protect your website from malware and hackers.
• Track your social media mentions.
• Monitor the speed of your website.
• Avoid making online enemies.

Knowing that some people might try to harm your website, you’ll want to take steps to protect yourself. Implementing a comprehensive SEO content strategy will help you create content that is not only good for your business and links, but also helps you defend against negative SEO.

Link Audits

Whether you’re a publishing house, a B2B company, an advertising agency, or a service provider, your website is an essential component of your content marketing strategy.

Link audits are an essential part of your website’s maintenance. They can help you make the most of your online presence and protect your website from bad rankings, less traffic, and revenue loss.

It’s easy to lose track of the number and quality of incoming links to your website over time. This can impair your ability to build upon existing relationships with sites that can link back to yours while also cutting off those who’ve stopped linking to you.

Link audits are designed to identify both the sites that link to you and those you link to.

Link audits should be performed regularly,  but the frequency will depend on how frequently your site’s content is updated. If it’s updated daily, then every few weeks should be sufficient; if it’s updated weekly, then monthly would suffice.

You may also want to perform link audits at other times of the year if there are specific campaigns or events that require extra attention from search engines (e.g., a new product launch).

The first step in any link audit is the tools you use for data collection. The second step is actually analyzing the data, and the third step is fixing any problems identified in the web pages used in data collection.

Brand Reputation Management

Caroline Forsey provides a clear overview of brand reputation management in this HubSpot Article. According to her,

“Brand reputation management is the process of monitoring how consumers perceive your business and taking strategic action when necessary to improve your brand’s image.

Nowadays, reputation management is centered around monitoring and protecting your brand’s online reputation in reviews, social media, and Google.”

Caroline further adds that positive reputations strongly drive customer loyalty and revenue growth. Moreover, she mentions that a negative reputation can hurt sales and customer retention. But it can also help you learn more about your customers to make better business decisions.

WordPress Backups

Website backups are crucial. If you’re not backing up your content, your SEO efforts will go down the drain if something happens to your site. You’d be surprised by how many small businesses and large corporations have had to deal with data loss due to hardware and software failures, human error, or malicious hacking.

For this reason alone, you must regularly back up your content, blog, and entire website.

But if you want to make sure you’re doing it right and protecting yourself from mistakes that have ended in disaster for many, here are the top seven mistakes you need to avoid:

1) Not having a plan for backing up your website.

There are plenty of plugins and solutions out there that make this easy, yet, it takes time to find the right fit. Create an action plan and implement it so that no matter what happens, you’re covered.

Here are a few things to remember when planning your backup plan:

– Find plugins that will backup your site automatically.

– Make sure your plugin is compatible with whatever host you’re using.

– Install more than one plugin, so if one fails, you have another to fall back on.

2) Not using a premium plugin.

When it comes to WordPress backups, a premium plugin is definitely your best option. While a free plugin might seem like a big enough deal, it often doesn’t offer all the necessary features needed to have an efficient site backup.

3) Not taking a snapshot of your website’s most current version.

This means that if you change your site’s content or design, don’t forget to create a backup before updating anything. Doing so could be a huge mistake if something goes wrong and you can’t revert back to an older version.

4) Not keeping track of which backups are working.

It’s easy to get into a habit of just making a new backup every week or two without checking whether it actually works when needed or when you need it the most. Make sure all backups are working or risk losing everything when the one that doesn’t work is needed.

5) Not using multiple backup methods.

You should always have multiple copies of your files so that if something goes wrong with one, you still have others available that can get you back online quickly. Don’t rely on only one method for all of your backups. It’s safer and more reliable if you have several methods in place instead.

Also, we recommend backing up your site to an offsite and internal location. The offsite location is meant for storing your last complete backup, while your internal location stores incremental backups of your site’s changes.

6) Failing to create backups on a regular basis.

This means more than once a year, every month, or every week is ideal (at least). You can schedule the backup process to happen automatically so that your site stays safe and secure at all times, even if you forget about it.

7) Relying entirely on your host for a backup plan.

Many hosts offer backups as an added service. This backup is convenient, but you shouldn’t rely solely on it.

Everyone knows that it’s a smart idea to back up your website and blog files regularly, but many people still fail to do so.

Google Disavow Tool

Google’s disavow tool lets website owners provide a list of troublesome links they no longer want showing up in their search results. It allows you to tell Google, “Don’t count these links because they’re unreliable.”

To use it, they log in to Google Search Console, click on the property they wish to see its status, or upload a new list with disavowed links.

When they do this, Google will crawl the other site and strip out those links from its index (so instead of showing up as helpful search results for your site, they’ll essentially count as if they didn’t exist).

If a site has been hacked, for example, all of the sites it links to might suffer as well. Before Google launched the disavow tool in 2012, people who wanted to make amends after such a breach had no way to do so.

Links you may need to audit and remove:

• Links from pages that have been manually manipulated or that are unrelated to the site’s content (e.g., pages with no text or a lot of unrelated keywords).

• Links from irrelevant sources, such as low-quality directories or pages with “doorway” text (e.g., pages optimized for specific phrases by using spammy words or repetitive keywords instead of providing useful and relevant content).

• Links from hostile sources (e.g., competitors’ sites).

Google Algorithm Updates

The Google search engine is the most popular in the world. It is estimated to have more than 92.47 percent of the market share. The key to how it works is through constant algorithm updates.

Algorithm updates are changes to how Google’s search engine works or what it considers relevant when delivering a search result.

Google has three main goals when developing its algorithm:

1) To provide the most relevant and useful results.

2) To provide quick access to those results.

3) To get users to stay on Google as long as possible so they can continue making money off of them.

Google regularly updates its algorithm to maintain relevance, freshness, and quality. When a user performs a search, the algorithm looks at a number of different factors like keyword searches, link structure, backlinks, relevance, and trustworthiness. The goal is to deliver the best results for any search query.

Consider the possibility that you are not in control. If you assume that you have complete control over your position in search engine results, you might overlook an important aspect of SEO: Google controls it.

Google may change its algorithm at any time and without notice. As much as we wish we knew how Google worked, it is ultimately up to them to decide what they want to display.

Since Google’s algorithm is constantly being updated and “cloaked,” this means it can change rapidly even while appearing to be static.

One of the best ways to keep your site safe is to be aware of all the updates and changes that have been happening recently and what they mean for your site.

Sites change continually as people adapt to the algorithm, and keeping up with those changes can be difficult. By staying updated on algorithm changes, you’ll know what areas might be affected by the latest update, whether or not your site will be affected, and how you can get ahead of a possible update.

Another way to stay ahead of updates is to have an expert look at your site from top to bottom, left and right. They’ll be able to spot any potential issues or gaps in what you’re doing for SEO, link building, and content-wise, which will help ensure that your site stays secure even if major changes are coming down the pipeline.

Video SEO

How to leverage video SEO to rank websites and blogs for business

We asked Terkel’s community this question:

Give your best tip for leveraging video SEO to rank websites and blogs for business.

Here is what ten thought-leaders had to say:

• Add Videos to Your Website and Blog Posts.
• Optimize Title & Description Tags.
• Minimize Loading Time.
• Always Upload to Youtube.
• Add Meta Tags.
• Include Video Transcripts and Closed Captions.
• Make Videos that Satisfy Search Intent.
• Be Social & Leverage Video SEO Through Your Networks.
• Select Your Thumbnail Carefully.
• Repurpose Blog Content into Video.

Add Videos to Your Website and Blog Posts

“Using videos makes it more likely for your posts and websites to rank on Google. It’s also much more likely that users will come to your website instead of going to competitors without video content.

This is because people don’t want to put much effort into anything. Allowing them to watch a video instead of reading will definitely draw attention since it saves time. Writing is also great for SEO keywords, but adding that extra touch goes a long way.”

Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure

Optimize Title & Description Tags

“Optimize Your Title Tags: The title tag is what appears at the top of the browser window when someone searches for your content. Ensure that this text is descriptive and contains keywords related to your video. Try not to include any unnecessary information here.

Optimize Your Description Tag: Your description tag is what shows below the title tag. This is where you can add some additional details about your video. Be sure to keep it short and concise. Include relevant keywords and try to avoid using too many emojis.”

Ilija Sekulov, Mailbutler

Minimize Loading Time

“Embedding SEO-friendly video content into your website can help draw more users through Google, but don’t forget to consider the influence of “Page Experience” on your search engine rankings. This is essential because your content needs to be as easy to access as it is relevant.

Keep your embedded videos on the smaller side to minimize buggering time and reduce the mobile data required to load and watch your videos. Compress videos built into your website and set videos to play once, rather than on a continuous loop.”

James Diel, Textel

Always Upload to Youtube

“Double down on your SEO efforts by uploading your videos to YouTube and embedding them on your website rather than directly uploading them there. You’ll expose your brand to 2.6 billion users, building reach and reputation through more traffic to your website, too.

You can even allow other users to embed your uploaded videos to their own site, blog, or channel. Interested viewers can find your brand through links directly in the video or by clicking through your YouTube page. Be sure to link your website on your YouTube channel.”

John Li, Fig Loans

Add Meta Tags

“Your meta tags should be complete and full of keywords for video SEO. If the meta tags are incorrect, your overall SEO will tank quickly. Use Moz to finalize your meta tags for free before posting. This way, your video SEO will be ranked correctly, and you will succeed overall.”

Daniel Tejada, Straight Up Growth

Include video transcripts and Closed Captions

“Including a textual source for your video adds metadata to the webpage, boosting your SEO. Your keywords appear more often, and searches related to the video audio will rank your webpage higher.

Including closed captions also increases your video’s accessibility, making it viewable for those who cannot hear or are hard of hearing.”

Roy Morejon, Enventys Partners

Make Videos that Satisfy Search Intent

“Google prioritizes videos that align with search terms that people use. It also pays attention to the purpose behind a person’s search. Put together, this is called search intent. It’s the difference between seeing restaurants and recipe videos when your search involves “pizza.”

Matching informational search intent is one of the most efficient ways to rank higher in search. To leverage it, your content must address your audience’s most common queries. Combined with detailed titles and descriptions that clearly reflect your video’s purpose, this ensures that Google and its users can easily find your content.

If users like what they see, this signals to search algorithms that your content is relevant, valuable, and informative. As a result, your video and your website or blog get promoted even higher on search engine results pages. This exposes users to other content published on your website, which is an excellent driver of repeat traffic.”

Patrick Casey, Felix

Be Social & Leverage Video SEO Through Your Networks

“The best tip for leveraging video SEO to rank websites and blogs for business is to share it far and wide across your social accounts. We can’t always rely upon automated processes, and sometimes you must be proactive in sharing your product with your personal network.

Creating diverse networks to share content across greatly boosts your campaign. These viewers have a personal tie to the content (you) and will be more inclined to watch, engage, and share.

Using this as the springboard for your content is a great way to leverage video SEO. Building a groundswell via familiar people in your network can be an effective start to getting your content campaign off to a great start.”

Devin Schumacher, SERP

Select Your Thumbnail Carefully

“It’s all about the thumbnail. If the thumbnail is boring, people are less likely to click on it. But if it’s attractive and gives a curiosity, everyone is likely to click on it to see what’s in there. In videos, people judge the video by its thumbnail. Hence, focus the most on the thumbnail to boost the video SEO.

Don’t make it a clickbait because this strategy will only work once. If you do it repeatedly, the audience will know what you’re trying to do. Hence, keep the curiosity alive but with professionalism.”

Meera Watts, Siddhi Yoga International Pte. Ltd.

Repurpose Blog Content into Video

“One simple trick that can help with ranking is repurposing blog content into video. Videos keep the audience engaged for longer. Meaning they will be on your website for a longer period which is a metric heavily affecting your SEO.

Even if your website has massive traffic but low time spent on it, Google will probably lower your SEO rank. A survey by HubSpot shows that 55% of users watch video content with attention, whereas blogs only have 29%.

Instructional or informative blog content has proven to work excellent as a video. Reuse the blog itself as a script. An insider tip to check if your blog can be reused as the script is to read it out loud. If it sounds odd or bizarre, try shortening your words and sentences.

Often we use words on paper that are not necessarily used in conversation. Being aware of this, you should edit accordingly. Ensure you have high-quality cameras (today’s smartphones are more than enough) and video editing software that are easily available online.”

Klara Dumancic, Alpha Investors

Outsource SEO

Should you learn SEO or outsource it? That question is on the mind of many business owners these days. And for a good reason. SEO (search engine optimization) is a complicated, constantly evolving field that requires expertise to navigate.

Whether or not it’s worth your time to learn SEO will depend on what you’re trying to achieve with your website and how much time you have to devote to learning and maintaining it. If you want to be able to make day-to-day changes to your site yourself, then yes, you should probably learn it and become an expert in it. However, if your goal is simply to generate leads or sales and grow your business, then outsourcing SEO may be a better solution.

Whether you’re doing your SEO or outsourcing it, there are four main components to optimizing your page:

1. On-page optimization—Increasing the value of your page through HTML tags, content, visuals, and more.

1. Off-page optimization—Building inbound links that point back to your site from other websites, including but not limited to guest posting, guest podcasting, blog commenting, etc.

1. Local SEO—Optimizing for local search results through categories and ranking information.

1. Marketing research—Knowing what people are searching for so you can optimize for those terms.

In-House vs. Outsourced SEO

As a small business owner, you want to do whatever you can to attract traffic to your website. If you’re not getting the traffic you want, it’s tempting to try to hire an outside company to handle some of the more technical aspects of your online presence.

But how do you know whether hiring an in-house professional or outsourcing SEO tasks it’s best for your company and your budget? It all depends on how much control and influence you want over SEO and how much money you can realistically spend.

If you manage your SEO work in-house, you’ll need to decide whether you want to hire an employee or partner with a freelancer.

Hiring an employee has its perks: you’ll be able to hire someone with extensive knowledge of the field and won’t have to spend time training them on what they need to learn. However, hiring employees is more difficult than hiring freelancers because of the greater commitment and the required background checks.

On the other hand, freelancers offer complete flexibility; because you’re only paying for their services when you need them, there’s no long-term commitment.

The benefits of hiring an outside firm to take care of your SEO are the same ones you’d get from any other service provider. The experts will have more experience and knowledge than you do. They’ll be able to specialize in what they do best and use more time-efficient methods, and they can focus solely on achieving your goals without having to balance your needs with their own.

Why Outsource SEO

There are many benefits to outsourcing your SEO. Here are a few:

1) Employing an expert allows you to focus on other parts of your business and achieve more success.

If you’re a small business with limited resources, you have better uses for your time than learning about the latest algorithms and update cycles for various search engines.

For example, if you have an online store that sells handcrafted jewelry and you’ve reached a point where you’re getting lots of organic traffic from Google, that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop working on SEO; it means it’s time to start thinking about paid advertising.

2) You’ll have access to specialists who know the ins and outs of SEO best practices.

No matter how much research you do and how many industry blogs you read, there’s no substitute for hands-on experience.

Finding the right keywords to target, understanding the nuances of how Google ranks pages based on keyword relevance, and setting up tracking software. There are so many tiny details involved in the process that the only way to truly master it is to hire somebody else.

If someone with experience does not manage the project, it can be costly and take up a lot of time.

3) An in-house person could be overwhelmed by all the information that needs to be learned and spread across various departments. An outside firm will have access to more resources and staff than an individual can support. This allows for quicker research, implementation, and report generation turnaround.

When Should You Outsource SEO

There are a few different situations that might call for it.

First, if you’re a small business with a small staff, it could be an easy way to bring in new talent without hiring more full-time employees.

Second, if you work in an industry where content is constantly changing or evolving, like news, tech, digital marketing, or fashion, it makes sense to have someone who can adapt and stay up-to-date. This is also a good approach for industries with regularly updated websites.

Finally, if you are getting off the ground and don’t need SEO but plan to in the future, consider hiring someone as an outside contractor. Their expertise could give you a head start when it comes time to launch your site officially.

What’s important is that you find the right person for the job. It’s not so much about looking for someone who has been doing SEO for years; instead, look for someone who has done SEO for companies like yours and who understands your business and its needs.

Do some research into their online presence: are they active on social media? Do they attend industry events? Do they share articles that relate to your business? Look at their website design. Read testimonials. Ask for references.

You should also consider hiring someone when:

A) You have limited resources and need someone who can manage your SEO from start to finish (or when it’s critical for you to be able to work on other aspects of your business).

B) You don’t have the skills or knowledge necessary to execute some of the more advanced components of SEO.

C) You’re looking for long-term planning and support (e.g., monthly reports).

D) Your business is growing rapidly and has significant opportunities.

How to Outsource SEO Services

Rachel Hernandez, Director of Brand Strategy at The HOTH, gives us the following advice:

“Outsourcing your SEO efforts might seem as easy as just hiring the top result on Google, but not so fast. To find the right partner, you must first understand your goals, needs, and budget.

Review your goals, budget, and needs.

What do you want to achieve with your SEO campaigns?

How much can you afford to spend?

What can you do in-house? (Writing content, designing pages, taking product photos, etc.)

Any self-respecting SEO firm will ask you these questions, so you need to have concrete answers before starting this journey.

A good way to estimate your budget is to look at what you’re spending on PPC and other paid advertising.

You must be honest when considering what you can do in-house. Content and visuals must be professional to strike a chord with your prospects.

You wouldn’t want your storefront to be marred by a horrible paint job or a hand-drawn sales sign with typos. Your website and blog are your digital storefront, leaving an impression on every potential customer.

If you’re an agency looking to resell SEO services, you should consider the same things but from both your clients’ perspectives and your own company’s.”

Outsource SEO to an Agency

I’ve always been a proponent of doing your own SEO, but as my business has grown, I have also learned that there is no replacement for expertise, especially regarding something so technical and nuanced as search engine optimization. If you’re not a technical person and don’t know much about SEO, hiring an agency to manage your SEO might be the best way to go.

Outsourcing your SEO to an agency can be a great decision for many businesses. It’s not always the right call, but there are several reasons why you might benefit from outsourcing this aspect of your marketing strategy:

1) An agency can help elevate your brand and increase brand awareness. This is especially true if your company isn’t well-known or if you’re still trying to build a brand name for yourself in the marketplace.

The agency can help you establish a solid foundation that you can use to grow your business.

2) Hiring an agency gives you access to resources you might not otherwise have:

They may have connections to potential clients they can introduce to you, or they may already have established relationships with companies within various industries that they can leverage to get your business in front of new eyes.

You also gain access to data and insights that would be difficult for you to get on your own. They have the tools and the knowledge (and likely the experience) necessary to help you make informed decisions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing strategies and tactics.

3) Hiring an agency could save you time:

You can spend more time on the things you’re good at and less time worrying about SEO.

SEO agencies are also good for hiring full-time staff for your company to keep your website updated and ensure that everything is optimized for search engines.

Outsource Link Building

Outsourcing link building is an effective way to scale your outreach efforts and ultimately search rankings, but it comes with its own unique challenges.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering the option:

1. If you’re outsourcing your link building, ensure you have a clear idea of who should be doing what.

Do you want interns to be working on this? A social media manager? An additional member of your content team?

Make sure everyone is on the same page and that there’s clear ownership of the task among any team members involved.

1. Conduct interviews before making hires or signing contracts with agencies.

Understand who will work on the project, how they’ll do it, and how they’ll report progress (and know how much detail you want). This will help you determine whether or not an outsourced solution is right for you.

1. Be flexible when it comes to working with contractors and freelancers. Their availability may vary depending on their other clients’ needs and schedules, so unless you need someone on staff at all times, don’t hold a grudge if someone takes a week or two off between projects (at least).

Make sure whoever is managing the project understands what needs to be done and has enough time to complete it.

Hiring an SEO Agency

SEO is one of the most confusing fields to break into. There are so many technical terms, acronyms, and different areas of expertise that it’s impossible to know where to start. That’s one of the main reasons why you should hire an SEO agency.

Let’s further explore the topic;

Why Hire an SEO agency

If you’re like most small business owners, your time is stretched thin. You want to do everything yourself, but you can’t possibly keep up with all the aspects of running your own business. And so, shouldn’t you consider hiring an SEO agency?

Hiring an SEO company is like hiring any other service provider. When you hire a plumber, for example, you don’t try to fix the leaky pipe under your sink yourself; you hire an expert to do it for you because you know that they’ll get it done faster and better than you will.

When it comes to search engine optimization, there are so many factors that go into ranking in search results that it’s difficult for a business owner to juggle all of them.

Even if the business owner is pretty knowledgeable about search engine optimization, they still need to run their business and not spend all of their time worrying about how they can improve their online presence. With an SEO company, they can leave all of that up to the experts.

When you hire an SEO agency to work for your business, you get the expertise and skills of a team of professionals who know what they’re doing. An agency can handle all sorts of marketing needs you may not have time to handle yourself.

You can also rely on an agency’s experience, which means your company won’t have to start from scratch and learn as it goes. A qualified SEO agency will develop strategies that are specifically tailored to meet your needs. This can help turn your website into a valuable asset for your business, which will keep paying off over time.

The Benefits of Hiring an SEO Agency Include:

1) You don’t have to do any of the work yourself:

You don’t have to spend hours on research or software setup, digging through code, figuring out how to optimize your page or anything like that. The SEO agency will handle everything from start to finish, so you can focus on running your business.

2) They won’t hurt your business:

If you try to perform SEO on your own website, there’s a chance that you’ll end up doing some damage unintentionally. Your company will take a loss because of Google penalties or other search engine mishaps.You could even end up having to rebuild your entire website from scratch.

Hiring an SEO agency to handle your company’s website is a big decision, and it’s not one that many business owners make lightly. In the face of a changing digital marketing landscape, they want to do their due diligence and make sure they’re making the right choice in hiring someone else to take care of their online visibility.

We’ve had clients come to us who have been burned by companies claiming to be SEO specialists. Some have been asked to pay thousands for substandard work and false promises. Others have been scammed by companies that disappear with their hard-earned money, leaving them with no website presence and no means of getting back on track.

When clients come to us with these horror stories, we understand where they’re coming from. Still, our goal in this article is to help you understand that hiring an SEO agency isn’t necessarily synonymous with being a victim of fraud.

Hiring an SEO agency can be a great way to put your faith in the hands of professionals who know what they’re doing and won’t charge you an arm and a leg for it.

How to Hire an SEO Agency the Right Way

The idea of hiring an SEO company can be both exciting and daunting. When you decide to hire an SEO agency, you’re handing over control of your site to a third party, which is often a scary proposition. Once you’ve decided on the right SEO agency for your business, however, you’ll be glad you took the time to find and hire the right one.

A wrong SEO agency can do irreparable damage to your site by doing things such as creating duplicate content, using black hat SEO techniques, or flat out not doing any work at all. A good SEO agency will create original content for your site, build relevant and helpful links to your industry, and help you grow your business through various services.

As someone who has been on both sides of the hiring process, I know that it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of finding a great SEO agency and spend your entire budget before you’ve even sat down to interview them.

Even with a small budget, using the right approach can help you find the right team for your needs. Here are some suggestions for taking the mystery out of the process:

– Do Your Research.

Have a list of requirements of what you want from an SEO partner, and ensure you’re asking all the questions that are important to you.

Ask them if they have experience working with companies like yours, and inquire about their track record. Look at their portfolio and see if they’ve done work similar to what you’re trying to achieve.

If they don’t have any experience in your industry, ask them who did the work for their previous clients, and contact those companies directly for references.

– Try a Pilot Project.

If you’re considering a partnership that will be ongoing, I recommend starting with a short trial where you offer them a small but specific portion of your SEO workload and see how they respond. If they do well, then consider more comprehensive terms later on.

– Ask Around!

Asking friends and colleagues about their experiences with agencies can help you fill in any gaps in your research and confirm your intuitions.

If an agency has the skills, knowledge, and experience to help your business succeed, ask them about their process for achieving results.

Make sure you understand all steps involved in the process and how long it will take before you start seeing any results from their efforts.

Remember that SEO can be unpredictable, so it’s best not to expect immediate success. Ideally, SEO plans should be evaluated within a six to twelve month timeframe.

How to Tell if You’re Hiring a Black Hat SEO Agency

SEO agencies aren’t all created equal. In fact, for many businesses, hiring an SEO agency is like playing Russian Roulette. The problem is that the wrong SEO agency can hurt your business’ search rankings, throw off your SEO strategy, and even run afoul of Google penalties. But how do you tell if an SEO agency is a “black hat” SEO agency? And more importantly, how do you know if they’re the right fit for you?

Here are five warning signs to look for:

1. The agency gives off a “too good to be true” vibe. If you encounter an agency offering unrealistic assurances about increasing your rankings or traffic, chances are there’s something fishy about them.

Be wary of any company that seems too confident in its abilities.

2. They make promises that don’t seem realistic.

Google has many factors that influence how well your site will rank. It’s not as simple as just posting on social media or creating a few backlinks here and there. It can be hard to pin down exactly what will work best.

3. If their strategy includes any of these elements:

Keyword stuffing, cloaking, article spinning, doorway pages, hidden text, fake links or directories, link farms, and automated tools that generate random link requests.

4. The agency:

• doesn’t have an off-page optimization strategy or plan;
• doesn’t work with analytics or track your site’s progress;
• doesn’t care about your long-term success;
• won’t help you build a content strategy around your audience;
• won’t teach you what they’re doing and why.

5. Their work seems to be about getting rankings for keywords that no one would search for on Google.

What to Ask When Hiring an SEO Agency for Your business

When hiring an SEO agency for your business, you want to make sure the company you choose will be a good fit. But how do you know if you’re picking the right company?

There are many points to consider when choosing an SEO agency. To help you evaluate potential agencies, here are ten questions to ask.

1. What is your process for improving organic search traffic?
2. How long will it take to see results?
3. Who will be doing the work, and how long have they been with the company?
4. How do you measure success?
5. What is your estimate of the cost and length of our contract, including monthly fees and expenses?
6. Can you provide references of clients with whom you’ve worked in the past year?
7. Can I speak with a current or past client about their experience working with your company? What were their goals, and did they achieve them?
8. Do you follow a white hat approach to SEO? Why or why not?
9. How do you determine the ROI of working with a new client?
10. Is there anything else I should know about your process or services?

How Much do SEO Agencies Charge

Here’s the thing about SEO agency pricing, it can get complicated. There are a lot of variables at play, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for how much you should pay for your campaign.

If you’ve been in the market for an agency, you’re probably familiar with some of these variables. You may have been told that how long your campaign will run is a factor in pricing. Or that you should expect to pay more if your company is well-known.

Maybe you’ve been told that the size of your company matters or that your location affects the price. All these things matter, but even then, giving an accurate range for how much SEO agencies charge is still difficult because it all depends on what kind of service you’re looking for.

The internet is filled with SEO agencies, and the price of their services can vary greatly from one hundred dollars to thousands of dollars per month. While some companies charge flat rates, others have price structures that include discounts for longer-term contracts. A few agencies might even offer free consultations.

With so many options, it’s hard to know how much you should spend on an SEO company and what kind of service you can expect for your money.

When evaluating prices from different firms, consider the following:

1) How long has the agency been in business?

2) How many clients does it typically have?

3) What is its reputation in your area?

Don’t make the mistake of hiring SEO firms based on cost alone.   Many SEO companies will offer to do your search engine optimization for a low price, but they probably aren’t going to deliver the best results.

You want someone who understands your niche or industry, knows how to market your site, and knows how to get it ranked high in search results for the keywords that matter most for your business. That takes time, effort, and experience.

SEO Agency Hiring: Handling False Expectations

It’s natural for business owners to have their own set of expectations when it comes to hiring an SEO agency. There’s no question that many people in this industry take advantage of the fact that businesses are often clueless about what SEO is and how it works. An SEO agency is not always held to the same level of accountability as other agencies.

Rather than focusing only on results and ROI, many agencies will promise businesses results if they sign them on with the agency. This creates many problems because it creates a lot of false expectations, and none of the accountability businesses need to see actual results.

Business owners need to be aware of their own expectations because it’s very easy to convince yourselfthat things are going well when you’ve already invested money in an agency, even when they’re not.

If you’re considering hiring an SEO agency, you need to learn how to set your expectations to avoid being taken advantage of. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all you have to do is pay someone, and they’ll bring you results. This approach won’t work; you need to do your part too.

It’s common to have expectations about how long it will take for your SEO campaign to start showing results.Still, SEO is not a method for generating traffic and revenue overnight.

Even if you do notice growth early in your campaign, you should be prepared for a long-term investment. If you hire an SEO company that promises quick results or bogus guarantees, run away as fast as possible.

You’ll be much better off going with an honest and realistic agency about the process, not one that seems to overpromise. You can avoid the inevitable letdown when they don’t deliver.

SEO Agency Hiring: Mistakes to Avoid

When hiring an SEO agency, make sure you do your homework before jumping in.  Many agencies are very persuasive and know how to get you to hire them. As a business owner, it’s easy to be taken in by the hype and promises of what an agency can do for you.

To avoid these common but important mistakes, make sure to ask the right questions and find out more about the SEO agency before hiring them.

Here are some key points to look for:

1) Flexibility in Pricing:

Some SEO agencies may offer extremely low rates because they want you to hire them immediately. However, when a company is willing to give you a low rate upfront, that means they probably aren’t looking at long-term goals. A company that is willing to adapt its pricing structure depending on your needs will be able to help you in the long term.

2) Make Sure They are Honest:

A good SEO agency should not have any problem being completely transparent about its services and processes. They should also be upfront if there is anything they can’t or won’t do for you. A dishonest firm can damage your reputation online, so be careful when interviewing potential agencies.

When evaluating an SEO agency, look for these signs of a good fit:

1. They understand your business goals.
2. They ask questions and listen.
3. They can clearly articulate the plan they’d use to achieve your goals.
4. Their references are solid.
5. You feel like they’re invested in your success.

Search Intent SEO

What is Search Intent?

How often have you heard someone say, “I’m not interested in SEO, I just want to rank for this keyword!” This is a common misconception about SEO. You don’t rank for keywords; you rank for searcher intent.

For example, if I type “New York City hotels” into Google, it doesn’t matter to me what the keyword is. It could be:

-new+york+city+hotels

-new york city hotels

-new york city hotels near times square

-new york city hotel deals

-best new york city hotel

All of these keywords would be difficult or impossible to target with a single page. And yet all of them are commercial search terms. So how do you determine which keywords are good ones to target?

You look at the competition and find out what they’re doing right. You see where they’re spending their money and how they’re reaching out to customers.

Search intent is the idea that when a user performs a search on Google, they do so with a certain “intent” or purpose in mind. A user who searches for “how to make soup” is probably looking to make soup, while someone searching for “best places to eat in New York” might be trying to find a place to eat. Search intent can help you understand your users’  thoughts about your products and services.

Search intent SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for the main search terms and phrases your target audience is likely to use when looking for businesses like yours.

Optimizing your site’s content, metadata, and backlinks can help you win more traffic from these searches, traffic already poised to convert once it gets to your site.

Chris Beck, a Senior Consultant for Deloitte and founder of Chris Beck SEO consulting, further adds:

“With Google Hummingbird, Google RankBrain, and other algorithm adjustments, Google automatically interprets search intent and shows users results that align with it. The search engine often uses rich snippet results like the Answer Box and Knowledge Panel.

Because people’s queries reflect where they are in the conversion funnel, understanding search intent can help you create effective content that targets potential customers.”

Chris gives a breakdown of the four types of Search Intent:

While they often overlap, you can break search intent down into four basic categories:

• Navigational intent: Trying to find something (e.g., “Subaru website”).
• Informational intent: Trying to learn more about something (e.g., “What’s a good car?”).
• Transactional intent: Trying to complete a specific action (e.g., “buy Subaru Forester”).
• Commercial intent: Trying to learn more before making a purchase decision (e.g., “Subaru vs. Nissan”).

 

(Source: Semrush)

How to Track Search Intent

Use Google Analytics segments.

CRO specialist and Experimentation & Analysis Lead @ Shopify, Shanelle Mullin,  says:

“Google Analytics is like an iceberg. 91% of it is below the surface.

So, when browsing around the standard reports and checking your monthly visitor count or your daily revenue, you’re only getting about 9% of what Google Analytics has to offer.“

Shanelle further adds:

“If you don’t slice and dice your data with Google Analytics custom reports and segments, you will completely miss that 91%.

Plus, if you use AdWords or Google Optimize for on-site experiments, you can really leverage segments. Once you isolate a segment, you can then use that segment as the basis for an audience.“

Advanced segments help you define your audience based on how they search online. By setting up an advanced segment, you can determine how your users are searching and learn what their intentions are.

Best Tool for Search Intent SEO

According to Tom Demers, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Measured SEM:

“Keyword Hero pairs your visitor’s sessions with the keywords they used to land on your page, all within your Google Analytics account. In other words, this tool gives you an understanding of the search intent of your organic traffic.”

Top functions:

“Identify the organic traffic and conversions: Uncover the success you receive from your intended keywords.

Separate traffic: Identify brand versus non-brand search traffic.

Optimize your position in the SERPs: Optimize your website for specific target keywords.

See query details: Understand whether your visitors used informational versus transactional queries to find on your website.”

ToFu – MoFu – BoFu

Creative Director at Weidert Group, and HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, Eric Severstad, writes:

“When you create a content strategy for your inbound marketing plan, there are three levels of content that relate to the lead’s buying journey: top-of-the-funnel (ToFu), middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu), and bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu).

 

(Source: weidert.com)

ToFu stands for “top of funnel.” This is when someone doesn’t have super-specific information but wants tolearn more about something they know they’re interested in.

This happens a lot with topics related to your business because if you run a car repair shop, people are going to be searching online for things like “car repair,” “what’s wrong with my car,” etc., even if they’re not sure what the exact problem is yet or how much it’s going to cost them.

MoFu stands for “middle of funnel,” and it refers to the content your audience is consuming as they evaluate whether or not to purchase a product or service. This is the point where you can start to educate instead of sell. Not just by telling them about your product, but by showing them how it works in their lives and why it’s worth buying.

BoFu stands for “bottom of funnel.” It’s a term that comes from the world of marketing and sales. The idea is that you should focus on getting people to come to your website at the very end of the sales process, the bottom of the funnel.

That’s because only people interested in your products or services arrive at the bottom of the funnel and are highly likely to buy your products or services.

These are the most valuable kinds of leads. These people are already educated and know what they want. It’s time to embed case studies, product demonstrations, and testimonials within your content that illustrate how you can help them solve their problems or needs.

The information you provide will change depending on where your audience is in their journey. So it’s important to consider what stage they’re at before producing any content for them.

Informational Intent

Dan Taylor, Head of Technical SEO, says “know” queries are informational queries in which the user wants to know more about a subject.

He further adds:

Knowledge queries are closely related to Google’s micro-moments, which are happening due to increased smartphone penetration and internet accessibility.

“Micro-moments occur when a user needs to satisfy a specific query there and then, and these often carry a time factor, such as checking train times or stock prices.

Because users can now access the internet wherever, there is the expectation that brands and real-time information are also accessible, wherever, whenever.”

“A pure informational query can range from [how long does it take to drive to London], to [gabrielmachtimdb].

To a certain extent, these aren’t seen in the same importance as directly transactional or commercial queries, especially by e-commerce websites. Still, they provide user value, which is what Google looks for.

For example, if a user wants to go on holiday, they may start by searching for (winter sun holidays Europe) and then narrow it down to specific destinations.

Users will research the destination further, and if your website is providing them with the information they’re looking for, then there is a chance they may also inquire with you as well.”

Navigational Intent

Ecommerce specialist, Armando Roggio, talks about Navigational intent and says:

“When search engine users select keywords that include a company’s brand name or a specific description of a company, it is likely that those people want to navigate to the company’s website. It is also likely that they are already familiar with the company.

Here is an example of how a navigational search might get started.

Yesterday, say, a friend of yours tweeted about a GoRuck event in Portland, Ore. It sounded fun. But now, twenty-four hours later, you cannot find the tweet with the link. So you head to Google and search for “go ruck website.”

Often folks just want to find (navigate to) a website.

GoRuck is a retailer, but your search intent was clearly to get to the website. It was not to buy one of the company’s rucksacks.

From the e-commerce marketing perspective, ranking well in search engine results pages for your brand is important. But it may not be a good idea to buy ads around a keyword with navigational intent, as many of those searches will not likely produce immediate sales.”

Commercial Intent

Commercial intent is the desire to purchase or compare (specific) products and services.

What commercial intent means to your search marketing efforts is this: if someone has commercial intent, they have a desire to purchase right now, and they’re trying to find information that’ll help them do that.

This could be anything from researching a product they want to buy to finding out where they can get the best price on something they’re interested in. They’re actively looking for a solution, and this kind of behavior indicates a high likelihood of purchasing soon.

Commercial intent keywords are those keywords that reflect explicit interest in products or services.

For example, if I’m an attorney and I want more potential clients to find me when they’re doing searches on Google, I might choose a keyword like “personal injury lawyer,” which is a head term. This is because people who look up personal injury lawyers are looking for someone with whom they can hire. Contrast this with a tail or long-tail keyword like “laws on dog bites in Los Angeles,” which is not very commercial because people who search for this aren’t looking to hire anyone.

Transactional Intent

Most consumers familiarize themselves with a product before making the leap to purchasing it. They read reviews and compare prices across multiple sites. When they finally decide to buy something, they’re usually looking for specific information on how to complete the transaction, as well as a discount or a coupon.

For example, someone might search for “buy Grammarly online” or “diamond wedding rings under $1000.”

Transactional intent is a great example of how your keyword selection can make or break your SEO campaign. As Meghan Hayden, SEO specialist at Eternity Marketing, says:

“Keywords with transactional intent are what marketers really want. They’re the Holy Grail of search marketing, and they include specific product names in association with buying words, such as “buy,” “coupon,” etc., which means that people searching for these terms are ready to make a purchase.”

Search Intent Modefiers

The TEAM behind STAT Search Analytics, a product by @Moz, explains:

Modifiers help give Google (and us) insight into what might motivate a searcher. When someone plunks in a keyword like [graphics card], it’s far more difficult to guess their end goal than if they’d typed [buy graphics card]. In the latter case, “buy” is the modifier that tells Google that the searcher likely intends to make a purchase.

In our study, we looked at the following keyword modifiers, categorized by search intent, on US mobile devices:

Keyword Modifiers

We devised some keyword modifiers and slotted them into different search intent stages.

We then looked at the top twenty Google SERP results, excluding the organic results, and zeroed in on how many times each SERP feature showed up.

Without forcing you to look at the world’s longest table (For our fellow nerds, here’s a Google Sheet with all the data from this little study), we chose the most interesting modifiers for each intent category for you to feast your eyes on.”

SEO, Social Mentions, and Social Listening

Founder of SEO PowerSuite&Awario, AlehBarysevich, shares six ways social listening can help your business grow through SEO:

1. Find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links.
2. Monitor new links to your site.
3. Find guest blogging opportunities.
4. Keep an eye on your brand’s reputation.
5. Grow brand mentions.
6. Learn from your competitors.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

In this article, CRO at Brightpearl by Sage, Nicholas Shaw compares social listening and monitoring.

Social Listening: A Definition

When we talk about social media listening, we refer to the action of extracting data from social media channels to figure out how customers interact with a brand’s products, services, and even competitors.

Social media listening incorporates social media monitoring, but it also includes other aspects that make it a much more complex and multifaceted process. For this reason, not many brands are taking advantage of social listening as a tool to better interact with and understand their audience.

Social Monitoring: A Definition

In social media analytics, social monitoring reigns supreme.  Most brands invest in this as it helps them to provide great customer service and support on all social media platforms.

Through social monitoring, a company representative is in charge of keeping a close eye on how the company interacts and engages with customers over social media. This allows brands to spot any potential issues, build solid relationships, enhance customer loyalty, and provide all-around exceptional customer service.

Social listening and social monitoring are, effectively, two sides of the same coin. On one side, you have the more quantitative aspect of your brand’s mentions. Whereas on the other side, you have the quality of those mentions.

Social listening will help you collect first-party data and gain customer sentiment insights, whereas social monitoring will allow you to fine-tune your online customer care and service.

By combining both into your social media marketing strategy,  you can provide great customer service at all times,  unearth potential issues, drive innovative improvements, and keep abreast of your competitors.”

Social Media Mentions Tracking

Here is a quick analysis of “social media mentions tracking” by Klara Malnar. She is the Customer Engagement Specialist at Mediatoolkit. According to her,

“Tracking mentions is essentially finding out when someone mentions one or more of your relevant keywords online. It can be your brand name, CEO’s name, competitor’s name, product, etc. You can find mentions on social media, media outlets, forums, etc.

Mentions found on social media are often called social mentions, and the process of tracking social media mentions is called social listening.

At the beginning of 2021, the number of social media users was 4.20 billion. These statistics show that manually tracking all social mentions is close to impossible. Not to mention all the time and effort that would go to waste doing that.

That’s why media monitoring and social listening tools are the best options to do the dreadful task for you. These tools can save you a lot of time and money.”

Benefits of Tracking Mentions:

By monitoring what people are saying about your business in real-time, you’ll have an idea if there is anything wrong or needs improvement, which could prevent upcoming crises.

This will also help boost brand reputation by making customers feel confident when buying from the company because its goods/services haven’t been talked about negatively in outside sources.

Tracking these conversations helps companies find opportunities within new markets that no one has yet approached, allowing them to charge entry-level prices due to lack of competition.

The more information you have on what people are saying about your business, the better. That’s why it’s essential to track mentions and gather all of this data so that when there is a need for analysis or reports, everyone will know exactly where they should go.

Equipped with the right social mention tools, you’ll be able to build brand awareness and customer loyalty by responding quickly to positive or negative comments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social networks.

Social Listening Tools

Senior Content Marketing Manager, Kristen Baker, shares fifteen tools for social listening to monitor mentions of your brand; she says:

“Social listening tools can help you monitor several social media platforms in one place. You can check mentions of your brand, relevant keywords, and direct feedback through tags and DMs.

Many of these tools will allow you to post directly on your social media accounts from the dashboard. Additionally, when you integrate your various social media accounts, you’ll see all your analytics in one area.

Here are the Top Five Social Media Listening and Tracking Tools according to Kristen:

1. HubSpot Social Media Management Software
2. Sprout Social
3. io
4. Hootsuite
5. Buffer

Unlinked Brand Mentions

If you’re a marketer, you’ve already heard about unlinked brand mentions.

Unlinked brand mentions are when someone mentions your brand in a post or on social media but doesn’t link to it. For example, if someone says, “I love my new Nike shoes,” but doesn’t include any links to the product or website, it’s an unlinked mention.

Here’s Why Unlinked Brand Mentions Matter:

If someone is talking about your company online and not linking to one of your online properties, they might be saying something negative (e.g., “I hate my new Nike shoes”). This can help you in identifying pain points before they become big problems.

You can use these mentions as part of your SEO strategy and improve how well Google understands your business and its products/services.

You can use an automated tool like Brand24 to monitor your brand mentions across social media networks, blogs, and more.

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