Or maybe your content disappeared from search engine results entirely?

Either way, SEO ranking drops are something every website owner fears, as they can end up costing you a lot of money. 

That’s because the effect of a significant ranking drop is two-fold – you lose the ability to generate as much organic traffic as before, and the resources you spent on creating the content are now going to waste. 

We don’t want you to experience this, so we’ve created this SEO rankings drop guide for 2023. 

That way, you’ll know exactly what to do should one of your web pages experience a rankings dropoff. 

While losing a top-ranking spot is never an easy pill to swallow, there are plenty of website changes you can make to gain it back. 

With the right tweaks, you may even rank in a higher spot than you did before. 

Many factors can cause your SERP rankings to drop, including Google algorithm updates (like the most recent Link Spam Update), indexing errors, lost backlinks, and making changes to your website. 

Since there are so many causes, it can be tricky to pinpoint the underlying cause of your ranking drop. 

We will cover all the most common ranking issues in this guide, so stay tuned to learn how to become an SEO rankings recovery expert.

Why Did My SERP Rankings Drop?

Most SEO experts religiously check tools like Google Search Console (GSC) weekly to monitor their SERP rankings. 

They do this to ensure that they maintain or improve their rankings. 

However, on some dreaded occasions, they open GSC only to realize that their web pages have dropped 10+ positions – causing them to hemorrhage traffic.

Besides having to clean off their computer screens after spitting coffee all over them, SEO experts also have to gather their composure and attempt to find out why their rankings have fallen so far. 

Sometimes it won’t be such a mystery, such as if you reorganized your URL structure or made other significant changes to your website. 

In these instances, it’s normal to expect some changes to your SERP rankings, and you can even make preparations for them. 

Yet, it’s the unexpected rankings drops that really cause website owners to pull their hair out, such as when their content disappears from the SERPs entirely. 

There are many factors that can cause unexpected drops like this, including the following:

1. Slow loading speed 
2. Your target keyword lost popularity 
3. Your domain name or hosting plan expired
4. An improperly formatted robots.txt file 
5. Competitors outrank you
6. Lost/poached backlinks
7. A newly released Google algorithm update 
8. On-page SEO factors
9. Crawling errors
10. Broken links and redirects 

As you can see, there’s a long laundry list of suspects to cross off whenever you experience a rankings drop. These issues can all negatively affect your online visibility, so let’s take a more in-depth look at them. 

#1: Page loading speed 

If you aren’t able to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test, you’ll see a drop in your SERP rankings. 

Even if your rankings don’t drop, slow loading times will negatively affect your bounce rate and dwell time – as modern internet users won’t want to wait more than 3 seconds for your content to load. 

That means you have every incentive to ensure all your web pages load as quickly as possible. 

Luckily, Google has its PageSpeed Insights tool, which is a huge help. 

It will let you know how fast your loading times are and recommend speeding things up. 

Tweaks like compressing images, using browser caching, and minimizing code are all great ways to speed up your site if things have slowed down. 

Also, Google Search Console lets you view how well you did on the Core Web Vitals test, which measures not only how fast your site loads but also how long it takes for users to begin interacting with your content (i.e., typing their email address into a newsletter form). 

#2: Your keywords are losing popularity 

Another cause for a rankings drop is the target keyword you used for the web page isn’t as popular as it once was. 

It’s normal for search terms to rise and fall in popularity, and most keywords won’t stay on top forever. 

Keywords that pertain to trending topics, fad products, and current events tend to fizzle out after a few months, which can cause significant ranking drops. 

While this is to be expected for content topics that aren’t evergreen, sometimes keywords can lose traction sooner than you thought. 

In this scenario, your best bet is to find another related keyword to target that still has a decent search volume.

Our free keyword planner tool from The HOTH is your best friend in this regard, as it includes the trend for each query – so you’ll know if a keyword is gaining or falling in popularity before choosing to target it. 

#3: Domain/hosting issues

If you don’t have an active domain name or hosting plan, all your content will disappear from the SERPs entirely. 

So if you awake one morning into every SEOs nightmare and realize that none of your content is ranking, don’t forget to check your website to see if it’s working. 

If it doesn’t appear, it could be an issue with your web hosting company, such as a DDoS attack. 

Or it could be that your domain name has expired, in which case you’d need to renew it. 

It may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s hard to think logically when you suddenly realize that you’ve disappeared from the SERPs – so don’t forget to check your website to ensure that it’s working. 

In the past, we knew a website owner that was in a full-on panic because their SEO rankings dropped, but they had no clue why. They had checked all their on-page and technical SEO factors, only for everything to appear normal. 

The culprit?

They were in the midst of a 5-day DDoS attack that caused their site not to load. 

That shows that ranking drops aren’t always within your control, so it’s important not to panic when they happen. 

#4: Improperly formatted robots.txt file 

Your robots.txt file tells search engines which web pages their crawlers can access. 

Why does it matter for your SEO?

It does because it helps you allocate your crawl budget more effectively. Crawling URLs takes a lot of bandwidth, and search engine bots will only crawl a limited amount of URLs to avoid overloading their servers. 

Crawl budget tends to matter more for large websites with millions of URLs, as smaller websites usually don’t have to worry. 

However, it could be that some of your most important URLs aren’t getting crawled because your robots.txt file isn’t granting them access. 

So if a piece of content you spent a lot of time and money on isn’t appearing in the SERPs, you should check your robots.txt file to ensure that it’s not keeping search engine bots from crawling it. 

If a search engine can’t crawl your content, it cannot appear in the SERPs, so keep an eye on your robots.txt file and noindex tags. 

#5: Competitors have outranked you 

Sometimes an SEO rankings drop occurs because one of your competitors outperformed you and dethroned your content. 

While it’s certainly a bummer, this type of thing happens all the time, and it’s the nature of SEO (and digital marketing in general). 

How can you find out if your competitors are stealing your rankings?

First, it’s likely that you’ll experience rankings drops across a few pages, not just one. Next, you can find out by simply searching for your target keyword and then clicking on the website that’s in your old spot. 

Try to identify what they’re doing that you aren’t. 

That way, you can possibly outdo their content and reclaim your previous rankings. 

There are a few key factors you should pay attention to when evaluating competitors, including:

• Their backlink profile. Do they have more high-authority backlinks than you?
• Do they have more high-quality web pages than you? Websites that have a large volume of outstanding content tend to rank higher. 
• Do they have a better user experience than your website?
• Is the content that outranked you longer and more insightful than yours?

These are all vital questions to ask. 

To get a clear picture of a competitor’s metrics, you can plug them into our free SEO Audit tool. It’ll give you an overview of their backlink profile, on-page SEO factors, technical factors, and more. 

#6: Check your backlink profile  

Your backlink profile plays a huge role in determining your rankings, especially for Google Search. 

The more high-authority websites online that point to your content, the better. 

However, if you were to lose some of your most powerful backlinks, your content would drop in the SERP rankings, sometimes by a significant margin. 

What causes you to lose backlinks?

It could be that a competitor used the skyscraper technique to poach one of your links, or the webmaster may have simply removed it for a variety of reasons (i.e., deleting the content containing the link, redesigning their website, purging old links, etc.). 

To discover if you’ve been losing backlinks, you can use our free backlink checker tool. 

Spammy and unnatural backlinks can also cause SEO rankings to drop, so you should keep an eye out for them, too. 

Here’s what to check for when evaluating your backlink profile:

• Too many links coming from the same IP address appear unnatural to Google (and they may suspect you’re using a PBN). 
• Ensure that you don’t have too many links coming from foreign-language websites. A handful is okay, but it will raise some red flags if you have 6,000 French websites linking to your American website. 
• Duplicate content will hurt your backlink profile, so use a tool like Copyscape to ensure every URL is original. Also, you should canonicalize pages that are too similar (such as eCommerce product pages). 

As long as your backlink profile is spam-free and you didn’t lose any links, you can rule out lost/spammy backlinks as the reason why your rankings dropped.  

#7: A Google algorithm update 

Google is constantly updating and changing its algorithm to resolve problems and provide a better user experience. 

However, these algorithm changes often affect SERP rankings, and sometimes in a big way. 

For example, the Link Spam Update that occurred in December 2022 made a big splash, as it negated the effect paid backlinks had on SEO profiles. 

That caused many websites to lose rankings virtually overnight due to the lost impact of paid/spammy backlinks. 

It’s an example of how Google updates can seriously affect SEO campaigns, so you need to keep up with them. 

If you determine that a Google update affected your rankings, the solution is always to optimize your website in accordance with the new update. 

Stay in the loop with the new updates with HOTH Technical SEO.

#8: On-page SEO factors 

Next, you need to check your on-page SEO to ensure that everything is in order. 

The top on-page SEO factors that can cause rankings drops include:

• Thin content 
• Over-optimization or under-optimization of keywords 
• Lack of a keyword-rich title tag and meta description 

Google isn’t a fan of thin content (500 words or less), so your web pages should contain at least 1,000 words. If they’re meant to be informative blog posts, aim for a 2,000-word minimum. 

That’s because long-form content ranks higher and generates more backlinks. 

Also, there’s a sweet spot for keyword usage. 

If you use your keywords too much, it’ll be viewed as spam. If you don’t use them enough, crawler bots may not associate your content with your target keywords. 

As a rule of thumb, use your keywords in the following places:

• Your title tag and meta description 
• Your H1 header 
• The first 100 words of the content 
• 3 – 7 times in the body content (if it’s a 2,000-word article)

Also, don’t forget to include a detailed title tag that contains your keyword and summarizes what your content is about. 

#9: Crawling/Indexing Errors 

As stated before, if a search engine can’t crawl and index your content, you won’t appear in the SERPs. 

That means you need to take measures to ensure your most important web pages get successfully crawled and indexed. 

The best way to do so is to use Google Search Console and view its Index Coverage Report and Page Indexing Report. 

Both will show you the exact number of URLs Google has indexed and the presence of any crawling/indexing errors. 

#10: Check HTTP status codes  

If a page has dropped rankings or disappeared from the SERPs, it could be due to a failed status code such as a 404 not found or a broken redirect. 

Checking your HTTP status codes will help you determine if a broken link or redirect is the reason for your lost visibility. 

Every piece of content you want to rank & generate traffic should display a 200 OK status code.

You can use this free HTTP status code checker to ensure that all your content is displaying the way it should. 

Closing Thoughts: SEO Rankings Drop Guide 

Ranking drops are never fun to deal with, but they’re a regular part of SEO – so you shouldn’t let yourself get too discouraged if you experience them. 

This guide will help you pinpoint the underlying cause of your loss of online visibility, so don’t forget to bookmark this page! 

Want to form a winning SEO strategy for your business to dominate the SERPs in your industry?

Then don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services that have yielded impressive results for countless clients.     

The post SEO Rankings Drop Guide: 10 Steps to Fix Common Issues appeared first on The HOTH.

The proof?

The top Google result contains an average of 3.8x more high-quality backlinks than positions #2 – #10. 

Also, countless experiments and campaigns have proved the effectiveness of acquiring high-authority backlinks for better SERP (search engine results pages) rankings. 

If you want to find out if a website has a strong backlink profile, standard practice is to check its domain authority. 

What is domain authority (DA)?

It’s a third-party SEO metric first developed by Moz that represents how likely a domain is to appear in the SERPs over its competitors. 

It’s a score from 1 – 100, with 100 being the strongest and 1 being the weakest level of authority. 

If there’s another website that you just can’t seem to outrank, their stronger link profile is likely the culprit – so don’t forget to check their domain authority. 

Domain authority isn’t something that you can improve overnight, but airtight on-page SEO practices and a winning link-building strategy will both help you improve your DA score. 

While your SEO strategy shouldn’t revolve around building domain authority, it is a reliable metric for judging the strength of your backlink profile.

Stay tuned to learn more about domain authority as well as effective tactics for improving your DA score.

What is Domain Authority?

As a concept, domain authority has been around since 1999 when it was mentioned in a paper by John Kleinberg called Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment.

In it, Kleinberg asserts that search engines have an ‘abundance’ problem – where all the relevant results that could be returned for a query are too large for a human to digest. 

Therefore, search engines need a way to filter the results so that only the most ‘authoritative’ or ‘definitive’ results remain. 

That’s why the top-ranking results on Google are always the most trusted, highest-quality websites.

Moz’s domain authority score

Moz, an SEO software company, took this concept to the next level by officially inventing the domain authority metric – which looks at many factors to determine how likely a domain is to rank high on the SERPs. 

Which factors does DA look at?

The most important ones are linking root domains and a website’s total number of links. In other words, the DA score primarily judges the strength of your link profile – which definitely matters for SERP rankings.

In addition to these factors, Moz also uses a machine learning algorithm that predicts how often Google will use a domain in its SERPs. If domain A is determined to appear more in the SERPs than domain B, then it will have a higher domain authority score.

Because DA score uses machine learning algorithm calculations based on constantly changing data points relative to every website, it’s normal for DA scores to fluctuate. 

For example, if Wikipedia were to acquire 100,000 new backlinks, everyone else’s DA score would drop as a result. 

Not only that, but established domains like Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook have such massive link profiles that they tend to occupy the higher DA score slots (think of scores 80 to 100). 

As a result, most small-to-medium-sized websites have DA scores that range from 10 – 60 on average. 

Also, it’ll be easier to raise your DA score from 20 to 30 than it is from 60 to 70. For this reason, Moz suggests that you use DA scores as comparative metrics to determine how you size up to other sites around the same level of notoriety as yours.

Is Domain Authority an Official Google Ranking Factor?

Speaking of using domain authority strictly as a comparative metric, it’s not an official Google ranking factor – and Moz will be the first to tell you this. 

To directly quote their website, “Domain authority is NOT an official Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs.”

Google’s John Mueller has also stated continuously that Google’s algorithms do not use domain authority as a metric when ranking websites. 

Since it’s not an official ranking factor, why even pay attention to your domain authority?

While Google’s ranking algorithms don’t use Moz’s exact domain authority formula, it’s no secret that things like backlinks, referring domains, search traffic, and user experience ARE Google ranking factors, and they’re what comprise domain authority calculations. 

As such, domain authority is a useful metric for comparing your site health and SEO-friendliness to your direct competitors – regardless of the fact that it’s not directly measured by Google. 

How to use domain authority 

As an example, let’s say that your eCommerce store has a DA score of 50, and you’re only able to rank in position #2 for your target keyword. 

After doing a little digging, you uncover that the website outranking you has a DA score of 58.

This is a strong indication that they have superior site health and a stronger backlink profile than you – which is why they’re currently outperforming you. 

The good news is you can closely analyze their website and backlink profile to discover what they’re doing that you aren’t (more on this in a bit). 

To summarize, digital marketers still pay attention to domain authority because it’s a quick and easy way to gauge the overall SEO-friendliness of a website. You can think of your DA as the overall grade representing the strength of your SEO stats (i.e., organic traffic, referring domains, etc.). 

What’s Page Authority?

SEO is about more than getting your homepage to rank; it’s also about snagging the #1 position for content centered around keywords important to your target audience. 

As such, you need a way to determine not only the ranking strength of your overall domain but also of each individual web page. 

After all, it could be that you have a decent DA, but the authority of your most crucial product pages & blogs is less than optimal.

Enter page authority (PA), a metric that lets you judge the ranking strength of any page on your website. 

Much like domain authority, it’s not an official Google ranking factor but instead serves as a score grading a page’s overall probability of ranking in a top spot. 

Important note: While page authority looks at crucial factors like the total number of links – it does NOT take into consideration on-page SEO elements like keyword use or content optimization. That means you should only view a web page’s authority to gauge the strength of its backlink profile and ranking probability. 

To evaluate your on-page SEO, use our free SEO Audit Tool instead. Not only will it let you know a website’s domain authority, but it also judges crucial metrics like keyword usage and user experience. 

How Can You Check Domain Authority?

If you want to check your DA or a competitor’s DA score, there are many ways to do so. 

While Moz’s domain authority was the OG, plenty of other SEO companies have developed their own authority metrics in the years since, including:

• Ahrefs uses two metrics, Domain Rating (DR) and Ahrefs Rank (AR). Domain Rating is a comparative metric (like Moz’s DA) that compares the strength of a website’s backlink profile to others in Ahrefs’ database. AR ranks the websites in Ahrefs’ database according to the size and quality of their backlinks. 
• SEMrush uses an Authority Score that measures the overall quality and performance of a domain or individual webpage. It’s less of a comparative metric and more of a straightforward gauge of your SEO-friendliness. 
• Majestic’s Flow Metric Scores measure content quality and a website’s total number of links.

As you can see, each of these domain authority scores is a bit different. 

Ahrefs is useful because you get both a comparative metric and a more straightforward one, whereas SEMrush is more about judging the quality of your SEO strategy. 

In addition to these tools, our free SEO Checker Tool will provide an overview of an entire website or specific web page (including both DA and PA). 

Techniques for Building Domain Authority 

If your DA and PA scores are falling behind your competitors, it’s time to start building them both back up. 

How do you do that?

Here’s a look at the most effective techniques for boosting your domain authority. 

Guest posting 

If you want your DA score to rise, then acquiring high-authority backlinks is key – and guest posts are still one of the best ways to get them.

Guest posting involves finding relevant websites in your niche that accept guest posts and then reaching out to them with an article pitch. 

If you want a snowball’s chance of securing a guest blog, then your pitch needs to provide real value to the website’s target audience. Don’t try to regurgitate one of your existing blogs, as you’ll need to create something brand-new for it to work. 

When looking for websites that accept guest posts in your field, Google Search Operators are your best friend. 

In particular, this formula works wonders:

Your niche keyword “guest post.” 

If you’re in accounting, then the search operators you could use include:

• Accounting “guest post”
• Accounting “write for us”
• Accounting “guest poster wanted”
• Accounting “This post was contributed by.”

Besides using Google, you can also check out our extensive list of vetted guest post websites in need of fresh content.

The best part about our list is that all the websites were self-submitted, meaning they’re actively seeking guest posters. 

Once you have a list of websites to target, then the hard part comes. You need to come up with an original blog post that will add value to your audience. The good news is that they’re in the same industry as you, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. 

Analyze competitor websites & backlink profiles 

An excellent way to uncover viable backlink opportunities is to take a peek at the link profiles of your top competitors. 

You can use our free Backlink Checker Tool to view the backlink profile of any website on the internet (including yours). 

When examining a competitor’s link profile, keep an eye out for the following things:

• Do you notice any guest posts?
• Are they listed in any directories that you aren’t?
• Do any ‘top 10 lists’ mention their products?

Also, just keep an eye out for any websites that you think might want to link to your website as well. 

Analyzing your competitors can provide invaluable insights into how to outrank them. 

In addition to looking for backlinks you can poach, you can also look for any glaring weaknesses in their content. 

For example, let’s say you pull up a competitor’s top-ranked blog posts and put them under a microscope. 

You notice that they don’t explore the topic as fully as you can and that some of their information is false. 

That prompts you to create an even more in-depth blog on the same topic containing accurate, up-to-date information – boosting your reputation and SERP rankings as a result. 

Ensure optimal site performance 

The strength of your backlink profile isn’t the only factor determining your domain authority score. 

You also need to ensure that your website features a pleasant user experience. 

What does that entail?

If you want to rank on Google, then your website needs to pass the Core Web Vitals test. It judges your website’s loading speed, including how long it takes for users to start interacting with your website. 

If your page loads poorly, you’ll fail the test and won’t be able to rank. 

To find out if your loading times are up to snuff, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. 

Mobile responsiveness is another necessity for modern websites, and Google has used mobile-first indexing since 2017. 

That means you’ll need a responsive website design to rank on the SERPs. Luckily, Google has another free tool to check your mobile friendliness, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. 

Final Takeaways: What is Domain Authority?

While domain authority and page authority aren’t official metrics that Google measures, they’re both one of the most reliable ways to judge the ranking power of a website or web page. 

If your domain authority is lacking, then you need to improve your site’s performance and acquire more high-quality backlinks. 

Do you need help improving the domain authority for your website?

Then don’t wait to check out our Link Outreach and Link Insertion Services from The HOTH. Our link-building gurus have built stellar link profiles for countless clients, so don’t wait to get in touch.  

The post What is Domain Authority and How Can You Build It? appeared first on The HOTH.

Then you will have to master SEO writing to make it happen.

What’s that?

SEO writing refers to creating online content like blog posts that are optimized to rank on search engines through proper keyword usage and other on-page factors. 

In order for your web pages to stay on top of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you’ll need to consistently release stellar content (think blogs, videos, white papers, eBooks, etc.) that caters to your target audience. 

Beyond writing posts that your audience wants to consume, you also need to follow SEO best practices so that search engine crawler bots will index your content and rank it for relevant user queries. 

Accordingly, SEO writing marries the art of content creation with search engine optimization. 

This marriage is so strong that one can’t exist without the other. 

Even with perfect SEO tweaks, irrelevant, poorly written content won’t rank very high on search engines like Google. 

Conversely, flawlessly written content that’s immensely valuable to your audience won’t generate organic traffic without proper optimization for search engines. 

That’s why you’ll need both strong writing skills and in-depth SEO knowledge to master SEO writing. 

Luckily, the 10 tips that we’re about to cover will provide you with both, so stay tuned to learn more. 

What Makes SEO Writing Unique?

Writing for SEO is unlike any other form of writing, which may throw off some at first. 

While the mechanics of good writing still apply, such as grammar, spelling, and sentence structure – it also involves clever use of keywords, header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.), and lots of internal/external linking (with optimized anchor text). 

Character counts also matter for SEO writing, which is something traditional writers don’t deal with most of the time. 

For example, title tags that appear on Google’s search results should be no more than 60 characters, which presents a unique writing challenge. Meta descriptions also have a strict character limit of 160, and your H1 tag should be within 60 characters. 

Why such strict limits?

Should you exceed the character limit for a title tag or meta description, it’ll be too long to fully display in Google’s search results, which will look awkward. 

The use of keywords and character limits exemplifies what makes SEO writing unique. It’s about more than writing coherent sentences and paragraphs. 

Instead, SEO writing is all about catering to specific search engine factors while still producing excellent content for your readers. 

Unique challenges of SEO writing include the following:

• Placing your target keywords in the right spots in a way that flows naturally and doesn’t appear spammy. 
• Fitting your target keywords into title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions that already have strict character limits. 
• Presenting your content in an easy-to-read format. 
• Uncovering keywords that your audience searches for and then creating content based on them.

How Has SEO Writing Changed?

Besides all the challenges that go along with it, SEO writing is always changing and evolving (just like SEO in general). 

Writing techniques that worked in the past won’t get you very far today and may even land you a manual penalty from Google. 

In the early days of search engines, the more times you used your keyword in a post, the higher you would rank on the SERPs. This led to many site owners filling their blogs with keyword-spammy posts that provided little value to readers. 

As time has gone on, Google has gotten a lot better at cracking down on websites that are trying to ‘game the system’ instead of providing excellent content. 

Also, the recent update to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines has changed the way site owners write for SEO. 

Its famous acronym E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) gained an extra E that stands for experience. 

So if you want Google’s quality raters to consider your content high-quality, you need to demonstrate your first-hand experience with a topic (more on this to come). 

There are also SERP features (image carousels, Knowledge Bar, Local Pack, etc.) that you can target with your SEO writing for an additional boost to your online visibility. 

If you’re able to rank for a featured snippet, you’ll appear in the coveted position zero (which appears ABOVE the organic search results).

All these changes mean that SEO writing looks very different than it did just a year or two ago, so stick to a current guide like this one. 

10 Tips and Tricks to Perfect SEO Writing 

You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway Jr. to master SEO writing; you just need to understand the type of content your audience wants to see and the search engine optimizations that have the most impact.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be churning out perfectly-optimized blogs, articles, landing pages, video scripts, and other types of SEO content with ease. 

Here are 10 of the most critical tips that matter for SEO writing. 

#1: Always start by researching keywords 

SEO writing wouldn’t exist without keywords, as they’re the terms that your target audience searches for every day. 

By researching keywords, you’ll be able to discover the types of content that your audience craves.

If you attempt to create content without researching keywords first, you’ll either be guessing topics to write about – or you’ll write about what matters most to you. 

Yet, what matters to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll matter to your audience, which is why you need an informed content strategy backed up by keywords. 

There are multiple ways to research keywords, but the easiest way is to use a tool like our free keyword planner. 

By entering a generic keyword related to your niche, our planner tool will provide you with a long list of real-world keywords that your audience searches for the most. 

These keywords will let you know which type of content you should create to generate the most traffic. 

For example, say that you’re in the fitness niche and you specialize in meal planning. By entering ‘meal planning’ into our keyword planner, you notice the keyword ‘Mediterranean diet meal plan’ has lots of search volume, a decent KD score, and is trending up in popularity. 

That means a huge chunk of your core audience is interested in planning meals for the Mediterranean diet – so you should create some content for it – like a blog post entitled ‘How to Master Mediterranean Diet Meal Planning.’

Crucial keyword metrics to look for 

The most crucial metrics to pay attention to are the following:

• Search volume. This number represents how many users are searching for a particular keyword. The higher the search volume for a keyword, the more traffic you stand to generate from it. 
• Keyword difficulty (KD) score. A keyword’s difficulty score is a number that represents how hard it will be to outrank competitors on the SERPs for it. If a keyword has a high KD score (anything over 50), it may be wise to consider other keywords. 
• Search trend. A keyword’s trend is its popularity over time, which is typically represented in a line graph. If a keyword’s trend is pointing up, that means there’s growing interest in it. If the line is trending down, users are starting to stop searching for it. 
• Search intent. Every keyword has an underlying intent, which is what the user wants to find by searching for it. A keyword’s intent can be informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. 

To summarize, ideal keywords will have a high search volume, a mid-to-low KD score, and a positive search trend. 

The search intent you target will depend on what you’re trying to achieve with each keyword. 

For instance, if you’re trying to raise brand awareness, then informational intent keywords are the ones to seek out. 

If you want to boost conversions, then you should focus on keywords that have commercial and transactional intent. 

#2: Outline each piece of content 

After you have a myriad of topic ideas from your keywords, you can start to outline each piece of content you plan to create. 

Working from an outline makes SEO writing so much easier, especially blog posts. 

If we told you to write a 2,000-word blog post without an outline, the task would seem very daunting. 

Yet, if we provided you with an outline breaking down the post into digestible 200-word chunks, suddenly writing the post doesn’t seem so impossible. 

Additionally, using an outline will make including any necessary SEO tweaks a lot easier, too. 

Here’s a quick example of what a typical blog outline looks like:

• H1: How to Master Mediterranean Diet Meal Planning
• Introduction – 200 words
• H2: What is the Mediterranean diet? – 200 words
• H3: Health Benefits – 200 words
• H2: Mediterranean Meal Planning Basics – 100 words
• H3: Breakfast – 200 words
• H3: Lunch – 200 words
• H3: Dinner – 200 words
• H2: Conclusion/call-to-action 

As you can see, the outline includes titles for header tags and word counts, which makes it effortless to stay on track while writing. 

Outlines also create the ‘scannable’ layout that blog readers love, where you break up the topic into various headings. That way, readers can quickly scan the headings to determine if reading the full post is worth their time. 

#3: Use header tags properly 

Speaking of header tags, it’s crucial to understand how they work – otherwise, you’ll confuse readers and search engine crawler bots. 

Your H1 tag serves as the title for the post (only on the web page, not the Google results, as the title tag handles that). 

For maximum ranking power, your H1 tag needs to contain the target keyword for the post, and it shouldn’t exceed 60 characters. Moreover, do your best to write H1 tags that entice readers to consume your post. 

A strong H1 tag provides a convenient overview of the topic while also encouraging readers to learn more. 

H2 tags are the main talking points for the piece, with H3 tags representing subtopics within a talking point. If there are further subtopics to bring up in your H3, then you use an H4, and so on. 

It’s critical to keep your header tags in order, so never use an H3 tag before an H2 tag, and always ensure that your title is an H1. 

#4: Optimize content for humans first, search engines second

This is arguably one of the most important tips for mastering SEO writing, and it’s something that lots of SEOs still need to learn. 

Above all else, your content exists to provide value to your human audience. 

While ranking high on search engines is great (and should be your ultimate goal), catering to search engines instead of humans is a losing bet. 

What do we mean by ‘catering to search engines?’

If you use your target keyword 50x in a 1,000-word blog post in ways that read very awkward and unnatural, you’re optimizing for search engines instead of humans (and you’ll also get flagged for keyword spam in no time). 

That’s a rather extreme example, but it exemplifies what we’re talking about. 

All the optimizations you make for search engines, like adding keywords, using inbound links, and targeting SERP features – should all serve to enhance the content you’ve created for your audience, not hinder it.

So whenever you’re creating content for your website, do everything that you can to add value to your audience by answering their questions, solving their problems, and providing unique insights that demonstrate your expertise and experience. 

Do that first, and then pepper in tweaks for search engines, such as injecting keywords in a natural, organic way. 

#5: Follow E-E-A-T

As stated in the beginning, the Google Quality Rater Guidelines acronym is now E-E-A-T instead of E-A-T. 

What’s E-E-A-T, anyway?

It’s an acronym representing how Google views quality content. For a blog post, video, or landing page to be considered high-quality, it needs to exhibit experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. 

Google has a team of human quality raters that manually review websites, and their ratings influence Google’s search algorithms. 

That means you’ll need to incorporate E-E-A-T into your SEO writing if you want to rank high on Google’s SERPs. 

Let’s start with the new kid on the block experience. 

Google wants you to demonstrate that you have first-hand experience with the topic you’re writing about, especially if it’s a product review. 

Including anecdotes, real stories, and other types of experiences in your content is the best way to do this. 

Also, show your expertise by providing unique insights, demonstrate authoritativeness through backlinks and external linking, and show trustworthiness by publishing accurate, up-to-date information for your readers. 

#6: Target SERP features with your writing 

SERP features are a great way to take your online presence to the next level by obtaining position zero. 

You’ve seen a SERP feature if you’ve ever searched for a simple question on Google and received a response in bold above the organic search results. 

It looks like this:

Alt tag: A screenshot of a Featured Snippet on Google. 

As you can see, the answer to our question appeared at the very top of the search results, and it includes a link to the website that produced it. 

This is an extremely powerful position to hold, so you should attempt to target SERP features whenever you can. 

To find out if your content is eligible for SERP features, you can use Google’s Rich Results Test. 

#7: Use a combination of inbound and outbound links 

Links also play a big role in SEO writing, as it’s a good idea to use both inbound and outbound links in your content. 

Inbound links are good for your user experience as they create a content loop that will keep your readers engaged on your website. 

They’re also excellent for SEO, as lots of internal links make it easier for search engine crawlers to make sense of your website’s layout (and to ensure they don’t miss any pages you want them to index). 

Whenever you create a new piece of content like a blog post, write down all the other web pages that relate to it and then link to them throughout. 

For instance, if one of your fitness routines comes up when discussing Mediterranean meal planning, why not link to a blog you wrote about it?

Outbound links are great because they help boost your website’s authority (as long as you link to trusted, reputable websites). 

#8: Add keywords to metadata 

Title tags are HTML tags that serve as the title for your content on Google’s SERPs, and you should include your target keyword in them. 

Additionally, including your keyword in your meta description is also a good idea, but it’s not entirely necessary. Your meta description serves to entice readers to click on your link, so include a call-to-action (CTA). 

#9: Use keyword-rich alt text for images 

Any images that you include in your post need to contain alt text. 

What’s that?

It’s a brief line of text that describes the content of an image, and it serves two purposes. 

First, it helps seeing-impaired readers to understand your images. Second, it’s the way that search engine crawler bots understand how your images relate to your content (since they lack computer vision). 

When writing alt-text, always include the target keyword for each post. 

#10: Editing and proofreading 

Lastly, every piece of content you write needs to go through the editing and proofreading process. 

First drafts are always rough, even if you’re an experienced writer. 

Tools like Grammarly are excellent for proofreading, but you can’t replace a human editor reviewing each piece – so use both. 

Things to look for during editing and proofreading include:

• Short sentences and paragraphs for optimal readability 
• Proper use of keywords 
• Internal and external links that aren’t broken 
• Spelling and grammatical errors

Once you’ve gone through the content with a fine-toothed comb, you can finally publish it and let the traffic and conversions start rolling in. 

Final Takeaways: Perfecting SEO Writing 

These 10 steps will help you produce outstanding SEO content that caters to both search engines and your audience. 

With excellent SEO writing, you’ll be able to dominate the SERPs, gain a loyal following, and grow your business. 

Do you not have time to write stellar SEO content yourself?

Then you need to check out HOTH X, our managed SEO services, and HOTH Blogger, our five-star content writing service.   

The post SEO Writing: Tips to Master the Art appeared first on The HOTH.

You probably also know that in the SEO community, there are a few different opinions on what it takes to find a high-quality guest post placement.

Luckily, here at the HOTH, we’ve seen how content marketing and search engines have changed over the past 12 years for clients and constantly analyze our data.

We’ve worked with thousands of websites and blogs for guest posting placements. We know link building.

You could say that we know what makes for good link building opportunities.

That’s why in this article, we are going to cover 9 important red flags and criteria that we use when finding high-authority sites for high-quality guest posts.

9 Red Flags to Look for when Vetting Guest Posting Sites

You want your backlinks to come from good-looking sites that add value in Google’s eyes. The point is to show Google that you can be trusted and that you deserve to rank higher in Google Search results.

Here are 9 actual red flags and criteria that we look for when vetting a site from to consider for link outreach.

Metrics: Website Authority vs. Traffic

When it comes to good guest posts, Google is looking for links from sites that have established authority or organic traffic from Google.

The more quality links you have, the better your content (and domain as a whole) looks in Google’s eyes.

Google is very upfront with this.

One of the biggest things that Google is looking for when it comes to your backlinks is the authority of the linking site.

Here at the HOTH we use two of the most common metrics in the SEO industry: DR and DA. When ordering guest post links, you can select your preferred criteria

The minimum DR and DA requirement of sites that we work with is 20.

On top of that, each DR 20-39 and DA 20-39 placement must have a minimum of 150 traffic/month.

Guest Posts with a DR or DA of 40+ require a minimum of 500 traffic/month.

Why? 

Because this prevents getting links from sites with artificially inflated authority that don’t actually provide any value for users. 

In other words, if Google is sending organic traffic to them, you can bet that a backlink from that site will be valuable in Google’s eyes.

What’s the difference?

Why do we use DR from Ahrefs and DA from Moz? 

Because they are such widely used metrics and are standard in the SEO industry when identifying authoritative domains.

DR is used solely to indicate the relative strength of your backlink profile.

DA is calculated using a variety of different factors. Some of the most important ones according to Moz are:

• Age of the domain
• The mobile-friendliness of the site
• Quality of backlinks
• Quality and quantity of unique content
• Social share signals
• Various on-page, and technical SEO elements

Both are relative metrics, meaning that the scores are based on how you stack up relative to all other sites.

Other metrics like TF/CF from Majestic can be helpful in a granular sense, but they don’t matter much to us when it comes to standalone metrics. Ultimately, we see Google is looking for established authority or established organic traffic and preferably, both.

Traffic

Organic traffic is one of the biggest signals that Google likes a website.

Think about it. If Google trusts a site enough to send traffic to it and rank it, then it makes sense that a backlink from that site would look good in Google’s eyes.

We set a minimum requirement of 1000 estimated monthly organic traffic according to SEMRush when finding backlinks for our clients.

Both?

If you can find a site with established authority and organic traffic, you’re getting the best of both worlds!

A contextual backlink from a site that has a good track record in the eye’s of search engines and currently brings in visitors from Google provides maximum value. 

From thousands of campaigns on our managed service, HOTH X, we found that a mixture of website authority and traffic-based links is an effective link-building strategy. 

It’s also a great way to ensure a variety of different referring domains to your money pages.

This led us to experiment with stricter criteria…

We recently launched a tier of our link outreach service that guarantees a link from a DA 30+ and 5k/month minimum traffic site or a DA30+ and 15k/monthly minimum traffic site and the results have been out of this world!

Eye Test (How does it look?)

Look at the website. You don’t want something that has formatting issues or is not easy to navigate.

Spammy websites, forum sites, dead sites, all of them can often be eliminated with a general eye test.

That being said, keep in mind that the aesthetics of a DA 10 site will probably be different than the aesthetics of a DA 50 site.

Ultimately, you want an easy-to-navigate website header and well-organized sections on the website according to topic/niche.

Here is an example of a site that DOES NOT pass the eye test:

Too Many Ads

Nothing is worse than a website littered with ads. It’s a sure sign of a spammy site and doesn’t provide any real value to users or Google’s eyes.

Sites that are hard to navigate due to too many ads are a MAJOR red flag when looking for link outreach sites.

Here is an example:

Updated Content

How often is the domain posting new content?

If it’s a dead domain that hasn’t posted in over a year, it might not be the best choice for a guest post submission. 

The more content they post, the more Google will crawl their website.

Irrelevant site categories

If the site you want to guest post on has a variety of site categories about topics that are completely irrelevant to your niche, that’s a red flag. 

That being said, here’s a little secret…

General sites are ok!

If I run an eCommerce business that makes fishing equipment, Google isn’t looking for JUST fishing blogs to link to me. That might actually look a bit unnatural.

Let’s say there is a general online magazine that creates a variety of content for readers. 

If it’s an authoritative website in Google’s eyes, why wouldn’t I want it to link to my business? As long as content is well written and you are using proper anchor text strategies, it will result in a contextually relevant and juicy backlink. 

Do-follow vs No-follow

When paying for a backlink, you want a the followed link to be the most powerful.

Check out a few of the articles on the website. Use Moz‘ toolbar extension or any other extension/SEO Tools to check if there is a do-follow link within the article.

You can also use Ahrefs site explorer.

First, put the URL of the domain into site explorer

Next, scroll down and click “linked domains”:

From here, you can select the type of link and see the total number of each type coming from this domain.

This is a great way to make sure that your link will be do-follow.

Additionally, you should confirm that your link will be do-follow with the webmaster when doing outreach.

Sponsored Tags/Sponsored Messages

Some websites have guest posts but with sponsored messages or sponsored tags on the posts.

In 2019, Google introduced the rel=”sponsored” attribute which identifies links that are sponsored content or promotional in nature. Think of it as a type of “no-follow” link

It’s basically telling Google that you’ve paid for the link and that it is promotional content.

There isn’t anything inherently bad about that for SEO purposes, but it doesn’t carry the same weight nor does it look as organic as a genuine guest post.

These sites will often mark all of their sponsored content with a “Sponsored” tag, which makes it easy to find:

Even if they don’t use the sponsored link attribute or use a sponsored tag, they might have sponsored messages before or after the content on their blog.

Any site that has a blatant “Write for Us” section is a red-flag.

PBNs

If you’ve been in the Search Engine Optimization world for a while, you are probably familiar with this outdated marketing strategy. 

You can spot PBN’s because they just look spammy and unnatural which makes it easy to see that they are just churning content for the purpose of getting a link back to their other websites.

Many of these sites have a “Partner” section that is full of spammy links and walls of random text. Out of all of the backlink guidelines we have at the HOTH, this one is the easiest to spot.

Homepage and sidebar links are a HUGE red flag. Oftentimes they will be at the bottom of the page and link to completely irrelevant sites with exact match keywords. It just LOOKS bad.

No Forum-only sites

Forum-only sites are websites that allow anyone to create an account to become a contributor.

Let’s be clear, sites that allow you to create an account to see certain content is absolutely fine. It is only a problem if the site allows ANYONE to publish content.

Extra tips:

2 extra tips when you find a good opportunity for link outreach:

Make sure YOUR content is quality

In digital marketing in general, you need to have quality content. 

Keep in mind that big websites can get dozens, sometimes hundreds of guest blogging and backlink requests per week, so you need to make sure you are creating content that will actually add value to their website. Many of these sites have guidelines that you need to follow.

If I own a website, why would I want to litter my website with pages that don’t help anyone?

Do lots of outreach (and follow up)

If you found a relevant website that you want a link from, it’s not guaranteed that they will want your post or that they will even RESPOND.

We make sure to follow up ASAP with webmasters we work with if we haven’t heard back from them for a few days.

Check out our complete guide and for more information on how to do quality manual outreach.

Conclusion:

There it is! We’ve shared our process of how we determine if we can work with a site for backlinks. Our team thoroughly checks each site to make sure they meet all of these guidelines.

It’s a lot of effort to vet websites for link opportunities and keep up with quality manual outreach at scale.

That’s why we’ve spent so much time building out our vetting and outreach process at the HOTH. Our team is full of experts at vetting websites and manual outreach for link placements.

Trust US with your link outreach so that you can know that the sites you get placed on will be quality.

You can sign up for a free HOTH account here.

The post How to Identify Quality Backlinks appeared first on The HOTH.

In reality, old posts are arguably the best to optimize. 

It’s because you have the added benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Since the content is already there, you can now identify which posts have the strongest chances of ranking in the top 5 on search engines. 

Not only that, but you can check which keywords existing posts are already ranking for – creating an ideal 80/20 approach to post optimization.

In many cases, websites have hundreds of existing blog posts in limbo – some of which have the potential to really shine with a few tweaks. 

Since you’ve already made the investment to create a blog post, why not refine it so it starts generating a stronger return for you?

Of course, I won’t ask you to just take my word for it. So in this article, I’ll present my own case study about how I executed this methodology AND increased organic traffic by over 40%.

In this extensive guide, I’ll cover the following:

• The benefits of updating old content
• How often to update older posts
• How to discover which posts to optimize
• How to determine which keywords to target
• How to optimize the post for these keywords
• Tips for making old blog posts stand out

Afterwards, I’ll show you what effect this had overall on the website.

Let’s dive in.

What Can Updating Older Blog Posts Do For You?

Are you still on the fence about updating your old content? If so, perhaps these attractive benefits will help you see the light. Updated blogs can generate organic traffic and reignite interest in older topics, among many other things. 

Acquire Outdated Competitor Backlinks 

It’s crucial to regularly update content to obtain (and retain) quality backlinks. Let’s say that you have an article on your website entitled ‘FinTech Trends for 2021’ that you haven’t updated yet. 

From there, you notice a key competitor with attractive backlinks that hasn’t updated their FinTech trends article either. You jump at the opportunity and become the first to post ‘FinTech Trends for 2022.’

Next, you reach out to the backlink owners from the competitors’ article and convince them to link to your more current post instead. That’s a decision they’re likely to make since nobody wants to link to outdated content. To discover which backlinks your competitors have, you can use a backlink checker tool like the one from Ahrefs. 

That’s how you can use updated blog posts to acquire competitor backlinks. Also, updating your content will help you retain the backlinks you fought so hard to get. So remember – do your absolute best to keep your blog posts updated for the sake of your domain authority. 

Obtain Thought Leader Status Among Readers

It should be the goal of any content marketing strategy to build loyalty among readers. One of the most reliable ways is to keep your posts updated. It doesn’t bode well for your blog whenever users land on outdated content – and it’s also a guarantee that they’ll look for updated information elsewhere. 

If your blogs get updated regularly, the opposite will take place. Readers will know that they can always expect the most valuable, up-to-date information from your blogs. 

That’s a fantastic way to obtain ‘thought leader’ status – something that every blog attempts to do but few perfect. 

Updating your existing content is a must if you want readers to flock to your blog. It shows that you care about your content and want to provide the maximum amount of value to your readers. If you’re struggling to retain readers on your blog, try updating your posts and creating evergreen content (blogs that remain fresh over time and answer questions that don’t change.)

Stay Current with the Latest SEO Tactics 

SEO strategies are constantly changing and evolving, so updating your content is essential. What worked for SEO in 2018 will see drastically different results in 2022. 

Whenever you update a blog post, make sure to include the SEO best practices of the current era. 

An example would be incorporating keyword clustering into an old article that only focused on a single keyword. A keyword cluster is a group of related keywords with the same purchase intent. It’s a more recent strategy that can provide impressive results and is now preferred over only using a few keywords. 

Conversely, some older strategies can even land you in hot water with Google and other search engines. Back in the 2010s, keyword stuffing or spamming was a widespread practice – which is now frowned upon and penalized today. 

If you’ve got a ton of old blog posts from 2011 – it’s wise to dig them up and look at what they have going on. You never know; you may discover an older blog perfect for today’s age with just a few adjustments. 

Generate More Revenue From an Existing Investment 

Last but not least, updating existing content will help you capitalize on the money you’ve already spent.

It would be a shame to let content you spent money on disappear into obscurity forever. 

Instead, you can keep generating revenue from content you’ve already spent money on by simply updating it. I’ve found that tweaks like adding the current year, doing new keyword research, and adding more insights can drive lots of new traffic to a once-dead blog post. 

Much like SEO itself, blog posts can continue working for you well into the future. As long as you keep updating them and adding relevant new information, a single blog post can generate traffic for many years. 

So if you’re a fan of getting the most bang for your buck, updating your older blogs should be a no-brainer. 

Remember, you’ve already spent the money, so why not do everything you can to get that money back and then some? 

It’s a plus for you as you get to conjure new interest in an existing piece. It’s also a win for your readers as they enjoy new insights and up-to-date information by reading the post. In short, updating older blog posts provides a lot of perks with next to no downsides – and it’s a great way to generate new traffic and revenue.

How Often Should You Update Old Content?

There are several ways to go about this, but I like using free tools like Google Search Console.

So first, go to Google Search Console. Below it, click Search Traffic > Search Analytics.

Google Search Console

Make sure the boxes for Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position are all checked. These are the metrics that you’ll want to view for each blog post.

Search Console Filters

Search Console Filters

There are numerous ways to filter the search results on Google Search Console – so it’s imperative to know which one to use to find blog posts in need of updating. A quick and reliable way to use the Pages filter. It’s my preferred filter because it’s the simplest way to view the performance statistics of a particular page. 

That way, you can determine if the blog in question is worth updating or not by viewing its CTR, impressions, and position. Ideally, you want to update blogs that currently aren’t doing very well, but are within range of obtaining traffic. 

A potential drawback of the Pages filter is that you can only view one page at a time.

If you need to view the performance of an entire category of pages (such as all blog posts or a sub-category), you’ll need to use the URL containing filter. I sometimes use it to see if several older posts need updating. 

The filter contains other valuable information, such as how Google viewed your site when crawling it. Data points include when Google crawled your page and any navigational mistakes during indexing. 

That comes in handy for pinpointing technical issues holding your posts back in the search rankings. 

Once you’ve selected the appropriate filter, you’ll want to download the results and place them in a spreadsheet for analysis. 

Download Search Console

Download Search Console Results

At this point, you have two options.

• Option 1:  Optimize all the posts (skip the following section)
• Option 2:  Focus only on the posts that will give you the largest gains

If you have a smaller blog with only a handful of posts,  option 1 might be the best.

But, if you’re like most people and want to work at peak efficiency, I’m going to give you some highly adjustable criteria that you can use to identify the posts that will give you the most bang for your buck.

That criteria is:

• A CTR lower than 1%
• A ‘high’ impression rate (what you consider high depends on your blog / it’s traffic)
• A position between 1 to 30

I chose this criteria because it tells me that the post is ranking for something that has volume, is being seen, but for some reason isn’t getting clicked enough. 

In theory, if we can move it up in the rankings and optimize the title / description to be more relevant to what the user is searching for, we can generate more clicks.

Given that, create three columns used specifically for the criteria, and use IF statements to indicate whether or not the post is getting high impressions, how it’s ranking, and if the click through rate is lower than 1%.

OnPage SEO Stats

On-Page SEO Stats

You can then filter out the posts that don’t fit the criteria to avoid updating content that won’t lead to conversions or generate organic traffic. As stated before, I only recommend updating every post if you just have a handful. 

If your blog has been going strong for years now, optimizing every post will take a lot of time and effort – and won’t necessarily lead to any returns. 

That’s why I highly suggest only optimizing posts that meet your criteria. Bear in mind that you can adjust and tweak my provided criteria as much as necessary for your needs. That’s especially true for the impression rate, as it will vary greatly depending on your blog and the average amount of traffic you see. 

It’s best to have a clear reason to update content instead of just going through the motions. An example would be a revitalized interest in a topic you covered in the past. 

Let’s say, years ago, you did a piece on digital marketing trends that weren’t prevalent at the time but have since sparked in popularity. That’s a great reason to revisit the post and beef it up with fresh content and new insights. Since you know there’s interest in the topic; it stands a greater chance of attracting interest.

How To Determine Which Keywords You Should Be Targeting

You now have your target posts, so let’s find out what keywords you should target for maximum effectiveness.

Venture back to Google Search Console to the same screen with your chosen filter and find a post that you want to optimize. Note – you may have to go to the bottom and increase the number of results to show more if you don’t see the blog you want to update. 

Click the post, and then adjust the filter from Pages to Queries.

Search Console Queries

Search Console Queries

Now it’s time to learn about another filter you can use on Google Search Console, Queries. This query provides an invaluable report containing vital keyword information about your website. In particular, you’ll get to discover all the keywords you’re currently showing up for on Google’s search engine results pages. 

Beyond that, you also get to see which keywords are actively driving users to visit your website. That lets you know which keywords are the most valuable for each webpage, which is incredibly useful. 

It helps you avoid placing focus on keywords that you don’t stand a chance at ranking for and lets you know where you’re currently finding the most success. 

You can also view the information by date range, which is especially helpful for updating older posts. I like to set the range to cover the last three to four months, giving me full visibility of the entire business quarter. 

You can sort the results to show pages with low CTR yet high ranking and strong impressions. That’s a sure-fire way to locate pages with high-quality keywords that aren’t getting the clicks they deserve. From there, you can go about tweaking the pages to obtain a boost in traffic once the click-through-rate improves. 

Another favorite technique of mine is to sort by impressions, so the keyword queries receiving the most impressions are at the top.

Sort By Impressions

Sort By Impressions

Generally, the top one is what I choose to make the focus keyword unless I find that it’s totally irrelevant. The other ones can serve as great secondary keywords for even more of a boost. I create two more columns in the spreadsheet for my focus keywords and go through all the posts in the list.

You can also filter the results to only show posts with impressions of 1,000 or greater (or another number of your choosing.) 

That way, you’ll only view keywords generating the most interest. Remember, a post containing a valuable keyword isn’t enough. The post must have valuable, well-written content that outdoes the competition. 

Keywords are undoubtedly necessary to succeed with SEO, but they go hand-in-hand with creating stand-out content. You’ll want to create posts that inform, educate, entertain, and ultimately convert readers into customers. 

How To Optimize The Post For These Keywords

Once you’ve built your list of blog posts that are ripe for optimization, you’re all set to get started on the actual process of updating them.

I highly recommend Yoast’s WordPress plugin as it’s one of the most helpful SEO tools on the market. It also has a Focus Keyword feature where you can enter your target keyword, and it spits out recommendations.

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast works by providing you with an ‘SEO score’ for each one of your blog posts and web pages. Your score will be a series of color-coded circles grading each aspect of your content in regards to how optimized it is for search engines. Here’s a rundown of Yoast’s color-coding system:

• Gray: If you see a gray circle, that means there isn’t enough information on the page to calculate an SEO score. 
• Red: This represents the weakest SEO score and signifies that your post needs improvement. 
• Orange: This isn’t the worst but it is still a poor SEO score that needs work. 
• Yellow: If you see a yellow circle, the SEO score is average but still isn’t great yet. 
• Green: If you’ve got a green circle, you have a high SEO score, and your content is optimized well. 

If your Yoast SEO score is red or orange, the post needs some serious work. To make things easier, Yoast separates the tasks it scores you on into three categories:

• • Problems. Under this category, Yoast will list all your red circles. These are the most troublesome areas that you should focus on first. Examples of a red circle include missing a meta description or title, broken links, and having a keyword density of 0%. 

• Improvements. This category contains all your orange circles – which are weak areas that need improving. Examples include missing alt tags and not including your target keyword in a header. 

• Good Results. Here, you’ll find all your green circles or the areas where you’re doing the best. Ideally, you want to make as many circles go green as you can – or at least yellow.

You’re doing things right when you don’t see any orange or red circles. That means your content is highly optimized and stands a great chance of generating website traffic.  

The plugin updates in real-time, so it’s quite easy to follow your progress. It’s free, but the premium version allows you to add additional keywords and contains other robust features. Besides scoring your SEO overall, Yoast’s Focus Keyword feature makes it effortless to build an extensive list of keywords related to your niche. 

General Tips for Optimizing and Improving Blog Posts

Beyond using Yoast’s plugin, there are some sure-fire ways to improve a post, such as:

Add Images with Alt-Text 

Want to know a great way to strengthen any post and potentially outdo the competition? Include high-resolution images and visuals that are relevant to your post. Once again, the idea is to add images that are RELEVANT to your post. Stock images are totally fine, but you need to make sure that they relate to what you’re talking about and aren’t totally random. 

I always make a point to include images in my posts because they’re excellent for breaking up the monotony of continuous text. Also, relevant images can work to enhance readers’ understanding of the subject matter. Beyond stock images and original photos, infographics are amazing for SEO. That’s because they not only provide a visual but also entertain and embellish the topic. 

Also, every image you upload needs alt text or an alt description. 

What’s that?

Alt-text is a physical description of what an image contains. It has three primary uses, the first of which is for accessibility. Anyone that’s visually impaired will have a text-to-speech program read the alt description to them so they can understand the image. 

Next, and this is why it’s crucial for SEO, is it provides image context for search engine crawlers. In other words, it helps engines like Google to index your images properly. 

Lastly, the alt text is what will display if the image fails to load. 

To ensure search engines understand your images and what they represent, always include an alt description for the visuals on your posts. 

Fix Grammar and Formatting Issues

You aren’t doing yourself any favors if your content and headings contain spelling and grammatical errors. First and foremost, these errors affect readers the most. Nothing will hurt your trust and reader loyalty more than constant formatting and grammatical errors. It reflects poorly on your brand because you didn’t care enough to make sure your posts were readable. 

If you want readers to take you seriously, aim only to publish (or republish) flawless content containing no errors. 

There are plenty of tools that can help you do this, such as Grammarly, which has a totally free version you can use. The premium version takes things a step further by assisting with things like sentence structure and enhancing vocabulary. 

While it’s critical to have impeccable grammar and formatting for readers, it also matters to search engines too. In particular, Bing programmed their algorithm to only rank content that contains no errors whatsoever. That’s another reason why double and triple-checking grammar, spelling, and style is crucial for your blog posts. 

Add More Internal Links, Research-Backed Stats, and New Backlinks 

External links to reputable websites will boost your domain authority. Also, internal links are great for your SEO and also create a web of interrelated content on your site. Well-placed internal links can also influence readers to check out your other posts – driving more traffic to them in turn. 

Research-backed stats will also boost your authority in the eyes of search engines. If you make a claim, do your best to back it up with a study or report from a trusted source. Try to find links from .gov, .edu, and .org websites in particular. 

Also, you’ll want to add new backlinks to any articles that you update. More recent, high-authority backlinks will work wonders for your domain authority. As I stated before, updating old blogs is a reliable way to poach links from other outdated posts by competitors. 

Lastly, take a look at your cited sources. The chances are high that they’ll be just as outdated as your blog post. Replacing them with updated citations is another way to optimize an aging post. 

Use More Multimedia Content for the Post 

I already mentioned how effective infographics are at enhancing articles. Yet, they aren’t the only form of multimedia that will add value to your blogs. There are also videos, slide decks, GIFs, tables, podcast episodes, and more. These are all fantastic additions to a post so long as they’re relevant and provide additional insights. 

An example would be including a how-to YouTube video embedded in one of your posts. Ideally, the video should contain original content separate from the blog post. 

You never want media to replace your written content, only to enhance it and serve alongside it. 

Let’s say you have a post going over the health benefits of spinach. As a companion to the article, you include a YouTube video containing a tasty recipe for a spinach salad. The video doesn’t step on the article’s toes – but instead serves to enhance it by providing a recipe readers can make once they realize how healthy spinach is for them. 

The Results

Between August and December of 2016, I used exactly this method to optimize nearly 200 old posts on AvocadoPesto, my girlfriend’s food blog.

Mind you, we did very little in the ways of adding new content, rewriting, or adding images. The primary focus was simply keyword adjustment and following Yoast’s guidelines. On average, optimizing each post took about 10 minutes, so in total the project took around 30 hours.

Here are the results.

Onpage SEO Results

On-Page SEO Results

As you can see, for a long time the blog’s organic traffic was stagnant at around 40k organic visitors a month, even though new content was being produced weekly!

In September, after we started optimizing, there was a noticeable uptick to 55k visitors; an increase of almost 40%!

January, being only half over, is on track to surpass 60k visitors, which would be a 50% increase overall.

Not bad for less than a week’s worth of work.

Concluding Thoughts: How to Re-Optimize Your Old Blog Posts To Boost Traffic

Now that you know my step-by-step blog revitalization process, it’s time to take your old (or dead) content out for a makeover. That way, you can derive more value out of your existing content and start ranking higher in users’ organic search queries. 

What I’ve shown you is not something overly technical or complicated and honestly can be accomplished with the help of a dedicated assistant. It’s a paint-by-the-numbers process that’s pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it – and it’s well worth the payoff. 

If you have anything to add or share about your experience optimizing existing posts, let us know about it in the comments below. 

The post How to Re-Optimize Your Old Blog Posts To Boost Traffic appeared first on The HOTH.

Its user-friendly interface and drag and drop editor-style make it an ideal platform for beginners. Wix also has a free plan, which is a great way to get started building a website without having to put any money down. 

Yet, creating a website is only half the battle. A fancy new Wix site won’t mean much if you aren’t showing up on search engines – as that’s the primary way new prospects will find you. 

In fact, more than 1/4th of all the traffic Wix’s website gets is from search queries – with the keyword ‘Wix’ typed into Google more than 6.8 million times. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is integral for generating organic traffic to any website, and Wix’s sites are no different. While Wix has caught some flack for its SEO capabilities in the past, the platform has made some vast improvements. 

Namely, the Wix SEO Wiz is invaluable for generating an SEO plan for your site. 

With the right strategy, you can double your traffic by optimizing your Wix site for search engines – which is why we put together this guide. 

So if you want your Wix website to get found on Google, you’re in the right place. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about Wix SEO.

Understanding the Wix Platform

The best thing about Wix is that you can use it without any coding experience. Wix uses an intuitive drag and drop editor combined with customizable templates. That way, users can create everything from a menu for their restaurant to a list of products for an online store. 

You can also get started using Wix’s free plan – where you can build a website without having to pay a membership fee. The catch is that you’ll have to display ads on your website – but it’s worth it if you’re a startup on a shoestring budget. 

In a nutshell, Wix is the perfect website builder for small businesses, startups, and simple online stores. By using its editor and features, you can create a competent and visually appealing website in a few hours. 

Yet, if you’re familiar with coding and desire more advanced builder features and SEO options, other platforms like WordPress or Squarespace are better choices. 

Is Wix bad for SEO?

In the past, there was a bit of a negative stigma surrounding Wix and its SEO features due to its simplicity. Wix has since put new features and settings in place, largely addressing these criticisms. 

In particular, the team at Wix resolved the following issues affecting Wix sites in the results pages:

• You can now add alt tags to images (crucial for letting the Googlebot know what your images show and how they relate to your content).
• You can now optimize meta descriptions and title tags for blog posts. 
• You can use structured data markup (it wasn’t available in past iterations).
• Pages are no longer defined by a #, which improved the URL structure.

Fixing these problems was gigantic for the platform, as SEO is far less of a challenge for website owners now.

In 2019, Wix even started an SEO Battle to prove that Wix websites can and do rank at the top of search engine results. The winners (Marie Haynes Consulting) were able to rank #1 for the query ‘Wix SEO’ on Google. 

As such, there’s no reason why you can’t dominate the website rankings and generate a ton of organic traffic using a Wix website. 

Listing Wix’s SEO Features 

For more proof that Wix is indeed SEO-friendly, here’s a rundown of the SEO tactics you can employ using a Wix blog or website:

Mobile-friendly templates

Your website must work on mobile devices to rank on search engines, especially Google – which uses mobile-first indexing. Wix has mobile-friendly templates you can use to make this easy. 

Editable title tags and meta descriptions

In the past, there was no way to optimize these. Now you can create keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions to enhance your on-page SEO. 

Alt tags for images

An alt tag describes what an image shows, and it serves two purposes. It’s an accessibility feature for sight impairments – and it lets crawlers know how your images relate to your content. 

Editable header tags

If you’re familiar with SEO basics, you know how integral your header tags are to your blogs. Distinguishing H1s from H2s and H3s is great for readability and SEO. (Also, don’t forget to use your targeted keywords in your headers) 

HTTPS

If you run an eCommerce store through Wix, HTTPS is a must-have to keep your customer information safe. Google also likes to see safe and secure websites. 

XML sitemap

While you can’t edit your sitemap in Wix, you still receive one, which is handy. You can upload it to Google Search Console to ensure Google has visibility of your website.

Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC)

The team at Wix knows how crucial it is to monitor metrics for your SEO campaign. That’s why they’ve made it effortless to connect GA and GSC to your Wix website for easy monitoring. 

Canonical tags

Duplicate content is a massive no-no for SEO, and canonical tags are the remedy. Wix lets you place a ‘canonical tag’ on your preferred version of each web page. That way, you won’t wind up ranking two identical pages on Google, which will confuse the crawler and tank your SEO. 

Decent PageSpeed scores

Wix sites used to struggle with PageSpeed scores in the past. The average Wix website now features a high PageSpeed score, thanks to some new updates. That’s great for SEO and your bounce rate.

301 redirects

404 Not Found pages are not the best for SEO. Now that you can use 301 redirects on Wix, you should replace all your 404 Not Found pages with them. Google and other search engines prefer 301 redirects (permanent), so use them instead of 302s (temporary changes only). 

Begin with the Wix SEO Wiz 

Everyone that builds a website on Wix gains access to their SEO Wiz.

It’s a remarkable tool for devising an SEO strategy – especially for beginners. 

If you don’t know much about SEO, this tool will help you understand what you need to do to rank higher on Google and other search engines. 

The Wiz is user-friendly and works by providing a step-by-step 

checklist for connecting and verifying your site with Google. That way, you’ll know for sure that Google was able to discover, crawl, and index your site. 

Beyond making sure that your site gets indexed, the Wix SEO Wiz is designed to help you develop ways to improve your SEO, so you rank higher in the search results. It will ask you a series of questions about your business that it will use to develop an SEO strategy for you. 

Setting up the SEO Wiz in Wix 

Once you sign in to your Wix dashboard, navigate to the section dedicated to Marketing and SEO – as that’s where you’ll find the SEO Wiz. 

Later on, it’s worth checking out the Analytics & Reports, Finances, and Customer Management sections so you can become a wizard at managing your online business. 

If you’re well versed in advanced SEO techniques, your knowledge may be a bit beyond the capabilities of the SEO Wiz. It’s an SEO tool intended for beginners only, as is the entire Wix platform. 

Part 1: Connecting and verifying your site 

There are two parts to the SEO Wiz process. The first part involves adding essential information to your homepage that you need to connect your website to Google. 

What kind of information do you need to include?

In general, the Wiz recommends that you have:

• A website that works on mobile devices
• A title for your homepage
• Targeted keywords in website content
• Meta descriptions

To include all this information, you’ll have a checklist and a detailed guide. 

Part 2: Creating an SEO plan for your business

Once part one is complete, you’ll know for sure that you’re indexed and will show up on Google. Yet, you don’t simply want to show up on search engines; you want to rank high in the results. 

That’s where part two of the process comes into play. 

Here, the SEO Wiz will ask you to answer three questions about your business. Once you provide an answer, it will create a detailed SEO plan for your business. 

All you need to do is answer these three questions:

• Do you have a physical business, or are you 100% online?
• Which three keywords do you feel best describe your business and what you offer?
• How would you describe your business, and what makes it unique?

That’s all the information Wix needs to create a customized SEO plan for your business. 

The plan will provide suggestions on keyword usage, blog content, internal and external links, and more. That’s why it’s such an invaluable tool for those new to the world of search engine optimization. By using Wix’s SEO Wiz, you can gain a fundamental understanding of the basics of SEO and how to use them to generate organic traffic. 

Keyword research and long-tail keywords

While the SEO Wiz is undoubtedly helpful, you’ll still need to do a bit of keyword research to come up with the three keywords you’ll choose for your business. 

To help out with that, you can use our free Google Keyword Planner Tool to discover the keywords that relate most to your business and have low competition with high search volume. 

If the competition for a particular keyword is too steep, you’ll have difficulty ranking for it. Instead, seek out keywords that have lower competition yet are still popular. 

Pro tip: You should also mix long-tail keywords with your short-tail ones. 

What’s the difference?

A long-tail keyword uses a long phrase instead of a short one. For example, ‘new shoes’ is a short-tail keyword, but ‘new shoes that fit perfectly’ is a long-tail keyword. Make sense?

An ideal keyword strategy makes use of both short and long-tail keywords. While long-tail keywords have lower search volume, they’re highly targeted and are more likely to convert. In fact, the average conversion rate of long-tail keywords is 36% – so it’s well worth using them. 

Maintaining Your SEO Strategy 

Okay, so by now, you should have an SEO plan put in place by Wix’s SEO Wiz. 

What now?

It’s time to start checking the boxes off your SEO checklist. In other words, you need to make tweaks to your existing website and start using the keywords you researched.

The good news is that most of these steps are straightforward and only require basic copywriting skills. 

The first steps include:

• Updating the homepage title, so it’s SEO-friendly
• Write a description for your homepage using your keywords
• Optimize all your web copy with your keywords
• Make sure you have a responsive site that works on desktop and mobile
• Link your website to Google Search Console and sync Google Analytics for metrics

Technical SEO optimization

After that, you’ll need to do some technical tweaks:

• Write alt tags for all images
• Make sure website contact info is up-to-date
• Update all your social media links
• Set up hyperlinks on your homepage
• Rinse and repeat for Book Online, Services, and Products pages

SEO is a game that doesn’t end, so you shouldn’t complete this checklist and call it quits. Instead, you’ll want to regularly analyze your metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t. 

If you have trouble keeping up with all these tasks yourself, you can always contact our SEO experts at The HOTH. 

For now, let’s focus on how you can improve your Wix SEO. That includes optimizing your domain, tweaking your metadata, uploading a sitemap, and acquiring backlinks. 

Select a ‘Good’ Domain Name

Is the name of your domain as important as the name of your business?

In many ways, it is, especially in the eyes of Google and other search engines. The strength of your domain name will play a large part in your SEO. 

Wix’s editor allows you to create a secure domain name. That will make your entire website look professional and help your SEO. 

If you don’t currently own a domain name, you can purchase one through Wix. Click on Main Menu > Settings > Domain to get to the menu. 

Your domain name should be short, memorable, and easy to type into a browser. Also, do your best to include your business name or something about what you provide. 

Don’t Forget Your Metadata

All too often, website owners forget about and neglect the metadata on their websites. This is a fundamental flaw because your metadata is one of the first things crawlers will view. 

In other words, your metadata is how Google understands what your pages are about. 

If you know anything about how search engines work, you know that’s a huge deal. Google’s goal is to match the most relevant, highest quality content with a user query. 

So if Google can’t tell what your website is about from your metadata, your chances of ranking on page one diminish greatly. 

That’s why each of your web pages MUST have a title tag and meta description. 

Your title tag should not exceed 60 characters and should contain your target keyword. Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters and should contain your target keyword and a few others if you can fit them in. 

To add title tags and meta descriptions, go to Wix ADI. From there, select the page you want, click the gear icon, and click on Page SEO. That’s where you’ll be able to enter your metadata. 

Once you add a title tag and meta description to your homepage, rinse and repeat the process for every page on your website. 

Upload Your Sitemap to GSC

An XML sitemap will help search engines discover, crawl, and index your site. You can think of it as a literal geographic map for navigating your website. 

You’ll want to upload your sitemap to Google Search Console. That way, you’ll know without a doubt that Google has visibility of your website. 

How do you submit your sitemap?

It’s real easy – all you have to do is go to GSC and click Sitemaps on the left-side navbar. Next, type out ‘sitemap.xml’ next to your unique domain name. Once you’re done, hit ‘Submit,’ and voila! Google now has visibility of your website. 

If you’re using the SEO Wiz from earlier, you don’t have to worry about that step. As long as you connect your domain name there, it will automatically link it to GSC. 

Generate Backlinks for Your Site 

The last step is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO and the most difficult. Yet, backlinks are necessary for any website that wants to rank higher on search engines. 

The more quality backlinks (emphasis on quality) you have pointing to your site – the easier it will be to rise through the rankings. 

Are you not sure how to generate backlinks for your website? If so, you need to check out our post on how to get over 100 backlinks in 30 days. 

Here are a few quick tips for acquiring backlinks:

• Publish consistently great content on your Wix blog
• Reach out to bloggers in your field for guest blogs 
• Outdo top-ranked content in your niche and ‘poach’ their backlinks
• Reach out to social media influencers and develop a business relationship 

These are all ways you can pick up some reputable backlinks without spending any money. 

Concluding Thoughts: Wix SEO Secrets

That’s how you can improve your SEO on Wix to rank on page one of Google and other search engines. 

But do you know how to create stellar content that will establish you as a thought leader in your field?

At The HOTH, our experts provide top-tier content that audiences crave. Whether you need videos or blog posts, our team does it all – so don’t wait to sign up now.

The post Wix SEO Secrets for Doubling Your Traffic appeared first on The HOTH.

Yet, if you want to find success with SEO, you need the proper tools to analyze your progress through KPIs like click-through rate (CTR), impressions, and page views.

If you’re brand-new to the SEO world, you likely won’t have the budget for fancy programs with robust reporting features.  

But if you want to rank on Google, you’ve got to start somewhere, and you have to dive in with something. 

A great place to start is using Google’s set of free tools.

Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console (GSC) is what they’re calling it these days (seriously, I’m still getting used to saying Google Ads instead of Adwords).

You can also access GSC from any mobile device (for SEO insights on the go). Google Search Console tracks 16 months’ worth of data and has detailed page analytics, new tracking flows, and improved reports – making it a must for all website owners serious about improving their search performance. 

Read on to discover how you can use GSC to optimize your website for Google’s search engine. 

What Is Google Search Console Good For?

GSC is an invaluable tool if you want your landing pages to rank higher on Google. 

Why’s that?

It’s because it lets you view how Google crawls your website. In other words, you’ll get to view your web pages through the eyes of a Googlebot. As such, you’ll get to view and address any crawl errors and indexing issues. 

That will ensure that your web pages are all indexed and appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). 

The last thing you want is to spend lots of time and money optimizing your website for Google – only for it to not get indexed due to an error. That means all your SEO efforts will be for nothing until you resolve the issue. 

But if you aren’t using GSC, you may not even realize that your web pages aren’t showing up in the search results. That’s one of the reasons why GSC is such a crucial tool for website owners to use (it’s a good rule of thumb to check it once a day or at least once a week to avoid any issues popping up). 

GSC is also useful for viewing:

• Which search queries you show up for 
• How often users click through to your site (click-through rate or CTR)
• Viewing backlinks
• Troubleshooting mobile usability 
• Monitoring your website’s core web vitals
• Evaluating the search performance of new content
• AMP

Differentiating GSC from GA 

GSC also works hand-in-hand with another one of Google’s free tools, Google Analytics (GA). At first glance, it may seem as if both tools provide the same information – but there are subtle differences. 

Google Analytics primarily provides data on who is visiting your site. For example, you’ll see detailed analytics for how many guests you receive, how they got to your site, and how much time they spend there. You’ll also discover where most of your users come from geographically. 

Google Search Console is more about displaying your site performance as Google sees it. You get to see if there are any indexing or crawling errors and which keywords you show up for in the SERPs. 

The good news is Google Search Console easily links up with Google Analytics to allow you to see all the numbers in one place. That way, you can get the best of both worlds by looking at both your user data and how your website appears to a Googlebot. 

Other key features of GSC 

Google Search Console also makes it easier to beautify your website’s appearance. That is because Google Search Console presents how your pages appear in Google’s SERPs. That will give you valuable insight into your user experience as well.  

Furthermore, you can view how your content will look in the rich snippets and rich cards.

So if you’re constantly going for featured snippets in your blogs, you’ll want to take advantage of this feature in GSC. 

If you want to avoid indexing issues – the best way is to make sure your title tag, meta description, and headers are all optimized. You’ll also want to minimize orphan pages (web pages that don’t have inbound links pointing to them) and ensure that your internal linking structure makes sense. 

And to be clear, Search Console isn’t just for the site administrator. 

SEO specialists and content marketers on your team should be familiar with it to monitor and optimize inbound traffic, and your website developers can use it to monitor and resolve issues with markup (more on adding team members in a bit).

How Do I Set Up Google Search Console?

First things first: you’ll need to set up Google Search Console in your browser, preferably the most recent version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge, and then enable cookies and JavaScript.

You’ll probably have a Google account if you’re already using Google Analytics. If not, you’ll need to set one up to get into GSC.

After that, sign up for Google Search Console and confirm ownership of your website. 

Why do you have to verify ownership?

It’s because GSC will provide you with confidential information about your site performance and influence how Google crawls the website. As such, you’ll have to prove that you’re the official owner of the domain to proceed. 

Much like getting verified as a business account on Twitter or Instagram, you’ll need to provide proof that you are, in fact, authorized to view some proprietary insights for your website.

Here’s how to add a new website to GSC:

• Log in to your Google account.
• Go to Webmaster Tools and click ‘Add Property.’
• Select ‘Website’ from the drop-down menu, and enter the URL for your site. Make sure that it’s the exact URL that shows up in your web browser. 
• Click ‘Continue’ and choose a verification method (see below).
• Add every version of your URL. That is a crucial step not to miss. That includes ‘yourwebsite.com,’ ‘www.yourwebsite.com,’ ‘blog.yourwebsite.com,’ and any others you may have. 

Note that the last step is significant. You’ll want to add every version of your domain so that Google doesn’t separate your organic traffic and backlinks for each URL. 

You’ll also want to set your preferred domain as your website’s ‘canon’ version. To do so, set up 301 redirects from your non-preferred domains to the preferred one. 

Verifying site ownership in GSC

There are a few different ways to verify ownership of your website, including:

• HTML file. You upload a verification HTML file to a specific location on your website. 
• Domain name. Log in to your domain registrar to verify your website from GSC with a DNS TXT or CNAME record. 
• HTML tag. You can verify your website by adding a <meta> tag to the <HEAD> section of a web page’s HTML code. 
• GA tracking code. If you have the ‘edit’ permission on GA, you can copy the tracking code that you use for your site. 
• Google Tag Manager (GTM) snippet code. If you use GTM, you can copy and paste the GTM container code associated with your website. Note that you’ll need view, edit, and manage container-level permissions to perform this task. 

By signing up for Google Search Console, you’ll automatically receive alerts when Google spots something that seems a little off – such as some weird markup or a page that isn’t indexed. 

Once you get into the dashboard, you won’t see data right away – it could take a few days to get everything up and running (so keep this in mind if you’re working around the clock).

Adding Your Team With Search Console Users

Members of your team will likely need to have access to Google Search Console as well, and Google gives you a few different management options: 

• Verified owner. The verified owner has complete control over all their properties in GSC. The owner can add and remove users, access all data, and use any tool. They’re the ‘head honcho’ that calls all the shots for the rest of the team. 
• Delegated owner. There are two types of owners on GSC, verified and delegated. The verified owner can designate delegated owners – who can do just about anything except change settings. A delegated owner can also appoint other delegated owners.
• Full user. A full user can see most data and even take some actions. A typical example of a full user would be a member of your blogging team so they can analyze blog performance. 
• Restricted user. A restricted user can only view data and cannot perform any actions. You can also restrict how much data they can view – such as restricting them from viewing the index coverage report.  

Whoever creates the Google Search Console account for your website property will automatically be deemed the verified owner and entirely in control of the tool.

The owner can add other delegated owners and full users with view rights and some actionable power. They can also create restricted users who can only view data for the property.

Load Your Sitemap

A sitemap is a file on your website that tells Google which pages should be indexed. 

According to Google, if you have a smaller site (less than 100 pages) – you can simply input the homepage URL for indexing as long as all pages are ultimately accessible from the homepage, and Googlebot will take care of the rest. 

So if your website has a logical internal linking structure, uploading your sitemap to GSC may not be necessary. 

You’ll only want to upload your sitemap if:

• Your site is gigantic. The larger your site is, the harder it will be for a Googlebot to crawl it without running into any issues. More pages mean more opportunities for Google to miss new changes or additions. 
• Your site is brand-new. If your website is hot off the press, the chances are high that there aren’t many (or any) backlinks pointing to it. As a result, it will be more difficult for Google to discover it, so uploading your sitemap is good. 
• There are orphan pages. Are there certain landing pages that don’t have any inbound links or backlinks pointing to them? If so, Google may miss them during the crawling process. 

If your website checks any of these boxes, uploading your sitemap should be your next step, as it’s much better to be safe rather than sorry. 

How Do I Get the Most out of Google Search Console?

Lucky for you, if you’re just starting with Google Search Console, you’re getting the best version yet. 

Believe us, this tool used to be much clunkier and more difficult to understand. 

That said, each website has different goals when it comes to SEO, so we’re going to break down each tab of the Console for you below.

Overview

For Search Console beginners, this is probably the most helpful section of the tool. Here, you get an overview of all your metrics and analytics. This page is excellent for glancing at your average position, CTR, and impressions. 

Performance

You can configure the Performance report based on which data you’d like to view (as you would in Google Analytics). Google Search Console allows you to group and filter by queries, pages, countries, devices, search type, search appearance, and date.

Basically, this will help you view where your organic site traffic is coming from, which queries are most likely to show your page, be it click-through rates from the SERP to specific pages, how your search traffic shifts over time, any searches by device, and more.

URL Inspection Tool

Put simply: input a URL from your website, and you’ll be able to access analytics for that page. 

That was part of the big revamp of Google Search Console, and it’s beneficial when you’re looking to optimize specific pages for the SERP.

Index Coverage Report

Google Search Console keeps track of all the indexed pages of your website, and you can view them here.

A high-level report will display all the URLs by index status. 

Statuses include Error, Warning, Exclusion, and Valid – which will be paired with a Reason for that status. While we won’t cover all the reasons here, you can reference this resource from Google on Search Console to learn more.

Pro tip: If your website has less than 500 pages, you may not need to use this report. Instead, you can simply search for your site on Google using this query, “site: your_site” (insert your homepage URL here), and the search results will display the pages Google knows about.

Removals

This section of Search Console will let you temporarily block your web pages from the SERP and enables you to view content on your site that Google has flagged as “adult.”

Core Web Vitals

These are an excellent addition to the Google Search Console suite that allows you to fix poor user experiences resulting from long load times, lack of interactivity, and poor stability. 

There are 3 core web vitals that Google looks at via Chrome usage data. They are the longest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS). 

LCP refers to how long it takes your page to load from when a user clicks on it. If your page has poor loading times, your user experience will suffer (so will your bounce rate). 

FID is how long it takes until a user can interact with your web page. An example would be how long it takes until a user can start typing their credentials into a login page. 

CLS is how stable your website is when loading its content. If it’s not stable, links and page elements will jump around during the loading process. 

The core web vitals report covers each vital listed above – and ranks them as either good, needs improvement, or poor. 

This report will also be broken into Mobile and Desktop so you can identify and fix platform-specific issues.

That brings us to…

Mobile Usability Report

Fairly self-explanatory, this section of Search Console will show you with pages on your site are valid, aka mobile-friendly, or rendering an error, aka not mobile-friendly.

Now that there’s mobile-first indexing, you’ll want to pay close attention to this report.

When you’re looking to fix mobile rendering issues, Google recommends fixing them in the order they appear on the summary report page–it’ll be sorted from general issues (like templates) to more granular.

When you’ve completed fixing the errors, you can “Validate and Update Google” from here to improve your ranking.

For more details on any errors that you may encounter, check out this resource from Google.

Links

This report will give you even more insight into your top-linked pages, which domains link to you, and supplement the data you get through Google Analytics.

One of the best features here is the “top linked text,” which gives you insight into the domain linking to you and the actual text that the writer hyperlinked to your page. That is a great way to know how others value the content you are producing.

Legacy Tools and Reports

If you’re a legacy user of Google Webmaster Tools, you may be missing out on the old set-up (with way more options on the left side).

Because some of the tools that were eliminated don’t yet have replacements, Google stuck them under “Legacy Tools and Reports” for you to access.

• Crawl stats: if you’re brand new to Search Console, you probably won’t need this. Crawl stats checked the number of times Google crawled your site and how many requests it made. Developers or SEOs mostly used this. However, check this every so often to make sure Google isn’t sending too many requests to crawl your site!
• Crawl Rate Settings: use this to reduce the number of times Google crawls your site, mainly if your crawl stats show too many requests.
• Tester for robots.txt: this helped developers troubleshoot their robots.txt files and fix blocked pages on your site.
• URL parameters tools: this was a pretty niche tool for pages with parameters that changed the content of the page, e.g., for international retailers. It was tricky to use anyway, but advanced SEOs probably still use it.
• International Targeting: This was useful for international websites that feature different languages when adding hreflang tags or a primary country on your website.
• Google Analytics Association: this is a pretty big one that I still use. It imports Search Console data into Google Analytics and approves/denies other association requests from Youtube, an Android app, etc.

Google Search Console also allows you to verify and edit issues such as schema markup and errors with structured data.

Connecting Search Console to Google Analytics

To leverage data from Search Console in Google Analytics, you’ll need to authorize data sharing in your GA settings.

Go to admin, click the property you want to add, go to the Search Console setting, select the data you wish to view, and hit save.

One final note: Search Console now keeps data for 16 months, so that is the max time you’ll be able to access through GA. There is an average lag time of 48 hours before data will be shown in GA or Search Console.

Concluding Thoughts: What is Google Search Console?

By following this guide, you’ll be able to make sure you’re getting the most out of this powerful, free tool.

Take the time to correctly set up your Google Search Console and unlock truckloads of free data, including mobile usability reports, site authority, backlinks, and several other SEO metrics.

We know it can be a little overwhelming trying to decipher the data – but there’s no reason not to use Google Search Console for a small business.

If you’d like some help, you can schedule a free SEO consultation with us. We’d be happy to lend a hand and help identify some quick wins for you.   

The post What is Google Search Console? Dive in with this Beginner’s Guide appeared first on The HOTH.

That’s where things get difficult.

There are many ways to capture the hearts and minds of your target audience. You could run stellar ads, produce thought-provoking blog posts, and create shareable video content that evokes both curiosity and excitement.

All of these marketing strategies have one thing in common: they involve producing and optimizing content.

Content is more than just a marketing buzzword. It’s the beating heart of your business — a sales pitch that carries your message to the masses, proving both the effectiveness of your product or service and your expertise in the industry.

But if you want your content to reach people, you must optimize it for both search engines and people.

In this article, you’ll learn all about content optimization, including what it is, how it’s done, and how you can optimize various forms of content.

What is Content Optimization?

Content optimization is exactly what it sounds like — it’s a way to take the content you produce and optimize it for maximum profitability. This is possible for many different kinds of content.

Text-based content can be defined as a series of tweaks that make content more appealing to search engines like Google and Bing (but mostly Google) without losing readability or flow for human readers.

This is a sub-discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) and is often called “on-page optimization.”

When someone says content, the first thing that springs to mind is often text-based content, like blog articles, e-books, and website copy. But there’s so much more to the world of content than just text.

There are many different forms of content, including:

• Text
• Visual content like images and infographics
• Video
• Podcasts

There is no “best” form of content because different companies have different goals and requirements. There’s also no one-size-fits-all content optimization approach because there are different ways to optimize each content type.

The content optimization process comprises technical steps along with some editorial and marketing steps to generate the best results.

Of course, optimization is not something that can be done quickly. While we’ve seen results in as little as four months, it often takes up to six months or longer before you notice a meaningful impact on rankings, traffic, and revenue. That makes content optimization a long-term investment that requires patience.

It also takes quite a bit of know-how if you’re going to try it on your own without the help of a skilled agency. You need to know what you’re doing when selecting keywords and planning the structure of your content plan. Trying to take on a project like this with little to no expertise will only be a waste of time.

Remember, the best content in the world is useless if no one can find it. That’s why optimization is so vital to content marketing success.

But even if you commit to learning everything there is to know about content optimization, it’s an education you have to stay on top of. Content marketing is constantly evolving, with changes to Google’s search algorithm coming frequently and without warning.

That’s why you need SEO experts in charge of your content optimizations who keep their collective ear to the Google ground. (If you don’t have any on your team, reach out to Hoth X today.)

How to Optimize Content for SEO

Now it’s time to dig into the heart of the matter. How can we optimize content for search engines so that you’ll start generating more traffic, more conversions, and more profits?

We’ve broken the process down into five distinct steps. Of course, these are broad explanations that can span different content types. In the next section, we’ll further drill down into the specifics of the three main content types.

Step 1: Perform keyword research

Before you can start optimizing your content, you first have to understand what you’re optimizing it for. That’s where keyword research comes into play.

First, you have to determine what your audience is looking for and how you can help them find it. Then, perform an audit of the search engine results page, also known as a SERP. Using SEO tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to identify relevant keywords and create a list of topics to create content around.

It’s important to take search intent into account here as well. When determining what keywords you need to rank for, you want to make sure they receive traffic on the SERP, they’re relevant to your business, and they speak to the specific intent of your audience.

For example, if you’re selling cars, you’ll want to appeal directly to people searching for a new car to buy, not someone looking for information on fixing or selling a car.

It’s also important to be realistic and look for low-hanging fruit. These are relevant terms with good search volume and the right intent but less competition.

Don’t try to compete with Wiki pages and national brands. They dominate broad keywords, and you’re not going to be able to compete with them. But more niche terms and “long-tail keywords” often lead to the perfect content optimization opportunity.

This is also when you identify semantically related keywords. These terms are a lot like those you’re targeting and appeal to the same audience. Often, finding semantically related keywords to high competition terms can reveal some low-hanging fruit.

Step 2: Determine your format

Now that you know how you’re going to optimize your content, it’s time to start planning it out. You’ll first need to decide your content’s format (or formats). Are you going to focus on revamping your text-based blog articles? Will you create infographics? Invest in video production?

This isn’t about personal preferences. Instead, ask yourself this question: what content format does your target audience prefer?

After all, they’re the ones who will open their wallets and pay for your products. So, where are they? What do they want to see? Creating a blog article for an audience that responds best to video content or a podcast is an exercise in futility.

Also, you need to look at what your competitors are doing. No one is saying that you have to copy them, but if they’re beating you, you’ll have to figure out what they’ve got that you don’t.

Step 3: Produce and post your content

Now it’s time to produce the pieces of content you’ve planned out and post them to the proper platform.

When producing said content, make sure that you do so with keywords in mind. However, there’s a fine line between adding keywords and keyword stuffing. Ensure that the keywords you’re including fit naturally and don’t stick out.

Incorporate keywords into every page’s title tag and meta description. Optimize all headers with semantic keywords and relevant questions to appeal to both search engine crawlers and the casual readers who are going to skim.

While it’s important to optimize, you also must ensure that your content covers the topic in depth. If people come to your page and can’t find answers to the questions they have, they’re going to bounce and look for answers elsewhere.

Step 4: Linking

When creating content, you need internal links that connect each piece of content to other pages on your site. Not only can this increase the amount of time people spend on your site, but it also helps search bots find your pages.

You’re essentially creating an interconnected web of content that Google’s search bots can navigate to index your pages more easily.

If you’re working with text content, this is easy to do. Simply place relevant links in the body of your article where it makes sense. Video content can (and should) have links placed in the description. Images can have links included in captions.

You’ll also have to get outside pages to link back to your content. This is a crucial step that can’t be overlooked. Powerful high ranking websites can give credibility to the pages you’re trying to build. These backlinks are something that Google puts a lot of emphasis on.

Step 5: Audit your content, analyze data, and update accordingly

It’s important to know who is viewing your content and where they’re coming from. This will show you what strategies are working and which aren’t. You’ll also track the movement of your content pages through the SERP. Obviously, you want to see steady upward movement.

Leave your ego at the door and alter plans when needed. Sometimes a search engine optimization strategy that looks foolproof on paper turns out to be a big dud. But as a marketer, you’re going to need to determine where it went wrong and switch things up to get back on track.

Regularly return to the content you create and update it. This isn’t a set it and forget it process, and the content you make now could still pay off for you in five years if it remains relevant.

That means:

• Updating stats
• Adding new relevant keywords
• Updating images
• Updating tags
• Updating headers

If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. That’s why we created HOTH X as a service that can help with all of your search engine optimization needs.

Optimizing Existing Text Content for People and Search Engines

When optimizing text content, you want to make sure that it’s well-written and appeals to Google’s search algorithm.

Ensure that you’re using the proper keyword density, covering important related topics, and including semantic keywords in your copy. You can determine this with an SEO content optimization tool like Frase or MarketMuse.

By optimizing your article headers, title tags, and meta description with keywords, you’ll be able to generate more organic traffic. But you’re also looking to create content that people will find appealing — something that shows your expertise and inspires trust in your audience.

To that end, make sure that you’re adding suitable images or other visuals to break up the text. This also provides you with another opportunity to inject some keywords through image alt tags, file names, and URLs.

Address the specific questions that people in your target audience are asking. You’ll be able to find these questions through the “People Also Ask” section of Google. If you optimize for these questions, you might even show up in the PAA section or rank for a featured snippet.

Finally, make sure that your content is well-edited and checked for plagiarism. We recommend using a grammar checker like Grammarly.

If you want a shortcut to high-quality text content for your blog or website, hire experts like our HOTH Blogger team.

Optimizing Video Content on YouTube

Video has become easier to produce with advanced video production software and the availability of stock footage and open-source music. But creating an interesting video is only the first step. You also have to optimize it for the platform you post it on.

To start optimizing video content, create an account on a video-sharing site like YouTube. Use all the proper branding on your YouTube account that aligns with your website and social media pages. It should look like an extension of those pages to ease customer engagement across platforms. The next step is to find YouTube video ideas that will speak to your target audience.

Optimize your video titles to ensure that they contain the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Make them both exciting and optimized simultaneously, creating a catchy title that will generate interest. You also need to make sure the first 10 seconds really capture the viewer’s attention with a punchy opening line or interesting visual.

Your video descriptions should also tell what the video is about while containing keywords. This will allow you to address the needs of your audience and the YouTube search engine at the same time.

Make sure that you:

• Add video tags
• Include links to other pages
• Use cards at the end of the video to hype other content
• Embed videos on your site and optimize them with title tags to boost your YouTube SEO

Optimizing Images

Visual content can be a highly effective medium, but only if properly optimized.

People search for images all the time, and you want to make sure that yours pop up when they do. An optimized image might even rank higher on the SERP than the page it’s featured on

When optimizing images, it’s important to remember that search engines can’t just look at an image and know what it is. That’s why you need to optimize the title and alt description of every image with keywords. You can also optimize the URL and file name for an additional SEO boost.

Start Reaping the Rewards of Optimized Content Today

Content is vital to your success, and content marketing can be highly effective. But content without optimization is useless.

Apply the tips and tricks we’ve outlined above to your content and ensure that the people you’re trying to reach can find you. If you are looking for content optimization help from experts with decades of experience and a history of success, you should schedule a call with The HOTH today.

The post The 2022 Guide to Content Optimization appeared first on The HOTH.

This mythical no-man’s land goes by the name position zero since it appears above the organic results. 

If you’ve ever entered search queries that ask questions into Google, you’ve likely come across a featured snippet (or at least if you’ve used Google since 2014). 

A snippet is a brief paragraph, video, list, or table that partially answers the query and encourages users to click to learn more. 

If you want your website to rank higher and generate more organic traffic, you’ll need to know how to optimize for featured snippets. 

That’s why we put together this guide for implementing featured snippets into your SEO strategy. Read on to discover how you can identify featured snippet opportunities and optimize your content for them. 

What Are Featured Snippets on Google?

Starting in 2014, Google added featured snippets to its SERP features. To date, it’s still one of the most significant additions to Google’s search engine – and has drastically changed the SEO landscape as a result.

Google is always looking for ways to match user queries with the relevant content in the quickest and most convenient way possible, leading to the birth of the featured snippet. 

It’s a unique search result that appears at the top of Google search results, even above the #1 ranked organic listing. 

It contains a brief ‘snippet’ of information that Google believes either answers the user’s question or provides enough value to entice them to click and learn more. 

As you can probably guess, you don’t want to answer the question outright in the snippet, as that can lead to losing a click. The best-featured snippets for SEO are ones that provide a partial answer but leave enough out, so the user clicks on your link. 

Regardless, any type of featured snippet is excellent for brand-building and leads to a higher click-through rate (CTR), so they’re worth pursuing. 

Where does Google pull featured snippets?

From existing pages in its index – most commonly pages that already rank in the top 10 or top 5. For this reason, featured snippets are the most powerful when you combine them with an already robust and successful SEO strategy. 

To learn more about featured snippets and other SEO fundamentals, check out our Learning Hub. 

The elements of a featured snippet 

Each featured snippet will contain the following components, regardless of the type:

• Relevant content to the search query
• The title of your web page
• The unique URL
• An image from Google Images that matches the keyword

A featured snippet can take on a few different forms, not just a paragraph of text, so let’s break down each one.  

Learning the Types of Featured Snippets

There are a few ways that Google presents its featured snippets. While the most common type is a paragraph snippet, there are three other ways a snippet can present content.  

Paragraph Snippets

A paragraph snippet displays a brief bit of information pertaining to the topic. If you want to boost your click-through rate, you should optimize for paragraph snippets the most. 

That’s because a paragraph usually isn’t enough space to fully answer a question, only to hint at it or provide a partial explanation. 

Paragraph snippets always appear with images on Google SERPs – yet these images aren’t always from the snippet website. Instead, Google will select an image from its library to match the search intent. 

In the example above, the snippet contains related terms that searchers can click on to find other featured snippets. This is the ‘people also ask‘ section. If you click on one of the terms, the search query will change to the selected term, and you’ll see the new snippet for it. 

Remember, featured snippet optimization is all about encouraging your readers to click on your link to learn additional information. When writing paragraphs that you want to become snippets, don’t provide all the answers in them. 

List Snippets

Sometimes Google will present a featured snippet in a list format. This can take on two forms, bulleted lists or numbered lists. 

Google favors the list format for:

• Queries that require a set of instructions 
• Recipes
• Things that rank in a specific order (movies in a franchise, books, etc.)
• Listing the ‘best’ of something (software tools, TVs, etc.)
• Checklists

Google will typically use an HTML element from your website to create the lists. 

Table Snippets

The table snippet is the third and most rare form of a featured snippet. Google will display

 a simple table containing relevant information to the search query for these results. 

To do so, Google will take information from HTML elements and compile it into a table. 

For the most part, table snippets are reserved for queries related to statistics and figures. An example would be searching crime rates for a particular city. 

Video Snippets

Lastly, Google will sometimes link to a related YouTube video in the featured snippet – complete with a timestamp on the spot in the video containing the answer to the query. 

They show up as ‘suggested clips’ – and only videos from YouTube make the cut (which makes sense since Google owns it). 

You won’t need to worry about optimizing for video snippets if you don’t create marketing videos. Even then, it’s difficult to tell when, where, and why Google will use a featured snippet from YouTube.

Google’s Other SERP Features That Aren’t Featured Snippets

Besides featured snippets, Google has other SERP features that look shockingly similar to them. Yet, it’s crucial to distinguish the difference, as your SEO will only benefit from featured snippets, not knowledge cards or entity carousels. 

In other words, you can optimize for featured snippets to heighten your chances of ‘winning’ one. 

You can do no such thing for the other SERP features, as they’re random and don’t highlight one particular website in the SERPs. 

Knowledge cards and entity carousels 

A knowledge card appears nearly identical to a featured snippet with one key difference – it doesn’t draw information from one website. Instead, all the data comes from Google’s Knowledge Graph. 

These features are Google’s way of enhancing its user experience and don’t have anything to do with SEO. 

Knowledge cards and graphs often answer quick questions (such as a company’s founding date), make a calculation, or provide weather forecasting. You can think of them as answer boxes instead of featured snippets.

An entity carousel is a series of links that list related topics. You might see an entity carousel if you Google a band’s discography. All their albums would display from left to right, allowing you to scrub through them. 

It’s also very common for the cast and crew of a movie to appear as an entity carousel. Each ‘entity’ contains a link to each actor and crew member’s IMDB page.

Some Featured Snippet Statistics: 

Results from a study conducted by Mangools:

• 41% of queries on Google display a featured snippet.
• There are an average of 272 characters per paragraph snippet. 
• 23% of all comparison keywords have featured snippets.
• 7% of generic keywords display a featured snippet.
• Nearly all (99%) of question queries have paragraph snippets – except for ‘how’ questions. For those, 52% displayed list snippets.
• A list snippet will never contain more than eight items.
• A majority (70%) of featured snippet URLs use HTTPS.

What Can Featured Snippets Do For You?

These benefits should change your mind if you’re on the fence about optimizing for featured snippets. 

Primarily, any web page containing a featured snippet will have a higher CTR than one without. 

In fact, Hubspot found that, on average, content containing a featured snippet will have a 2x higher CTR than unfeatured content. 

That means even if you suspect your featured snippet answers the question and ends up losing clicks – you’ll still be better off with it than not. 

The proof?

Moz‘s Cyrus Shepard conducted an experiment where he opted out of Google’s featured snippets. So even if one of his articles is a prime candidate for a snippet, Google can’t use it. 

The thinking behind the experiment was that snippets take away from your organic search rankings and cause you to lose traffic – such as a snippet answering a user question, so they don’t need to click through. 

The results found exactly the opposite. As soon as his posts lost their featured snippets, he saw a 12% dropoff in traffic that happened almost immediately. 

That’s proof that it’s always beneficial to have a featured snippet working for you in position zero. 

Besides more organic traffic, featured snippets are excellent tools for brand-building. Users will remember that you answered your question, and the fact that you rank so high on Google reflects well on your brand. 

How to Earn Featured Snippets

All right, now that you know it’s worth optimizing for featured snippets, how do you do it? 

You’ll want to incorporate the featured snippet style into your content marketing strategy. We recommend taking a two-pronged approach to the process:

• Use ‘snippet-friendly’ keywords. Specific keyword phrases, such as ‘how,’ ‘recipe,’ and ‘best,’ tend to appear in featured snippets more than others. It would be best if you also focused on keywords that ask questions. 
• Optimize content for snippets. We’ll go into more detail on this below, but you’ll want to tweak your content in specific ways to heighten the chances of Google displaying a snippet. 

Let’s go into more detail on each part of the process. 

Featured Snippet Keyword Selection 

As with discovering any keyword, it all starts with how you conduct research. For snippets, there are a few online tools you can use. 

There are a few places you can look to find the keywords you should target to earn featured snippets for your site. First off, you can use our free keyword planner tool to conduct in-depth research. 

It would help if you also turned to your Google Search Console (GSC) account to see which keywords you’re already ranking high for – as these are most likely to trigger a snippet. 

To do so, open up GSC and go to the Search Results Performance Report. Next, filter the data to only display keywords that ask questions. You’ll have to do this one question word at a time due to GSC’s limitations. 

Sort the queries to show the highest-ranking keywords first. The top 10 keywords are the ones you should optimize for featured snippets first. 

Another technique is to use a keyword research tool that displays SERP feature data. For this, we recommend using WooRank’s Keyword Tool. It will let you know if a keyword is likely to show up in a featured snippet or not. 

You should look for:

• Web pages that already rank high on the search engine results page (top 10 or top 5).
• A web page that isn’t ranking #1, as the featured snippet will drive you over the top and beat out the competition. 
• A keyword that will trigger a snippet that doesn’t entirely answer the question.
• Keywords with informational intent. 

Beyond targeting keywords, you can also optimize your content for featured snippets. That way, you’ll be set up to claim a featured snippet if Google decides to display one for your keyword. 

Optimizing Content for Featured Snippets

Once you have question keywords with informational intent, it’s time to create quality content centered around them. 

Hubspot discovered that on-page SEO matters far more for featured snippets than backlinks. That means once you’ve penetrated the top 10, it’s all about optimizing your content more than it is acquiring more links. 

But how should you tweak your content for featured snippets?

Here are some general guidelines for writing content that Google is likely to feature in a snippet:

• Pose the target question in a header (H1, H2, H3, etc.), preferably the H1 header. 
• Don’t forget the <p> tag. Immediately after posing the question, use a <p> tag, and then include the content you want for the featured snippet. If it’s a paragraph, write some text. If it’s a list, include bullet points and so on. 
• Provide a concise answer that encourages users to read more. You’ll have about 50 words to work with here, so think hard about what you want to say.
• Answer related questions later on in the content. Once you’ve answered the target question, back it up with supplementary questions. I.e., if it’s ‘what is a guitar?’ You could follow up with ‘how do guitars work?’ 
• If you’re going for a list or table snippet, use structured data markup for them.
• Write naturally and follow a logical structure. It’s crucial not to overthink it when optimizing your content for snippets. Instead, write as you normally would and consider readability and flow. The last thing you want is for your content to appear unnatural because you injected too many keywords. 

In a nutshell, you want to create high-quality content that answers customer questions. After that, run a savvy link-building campaign to get that content on the first page of Google (where it stands the highest chance of getting displayed as a snippet). 

Track Your Existing Featured Snippets

You should closely monitor the featured snippets that your website has while working on claiming new ones.

Doing so will benefit you in the following ways:

• Know how your site will appear on search engines. SERPs with tons of features will push the #1 organic result further down the page. Knowing this can help you select the right keywords for your website. 
• Understand how Google views the intent behind search queries. That way, you won’t be shooting in the dark with your target keywords. 
• Locate opportunities where you can beat out competitors. The higher that you rank on SERPs, the harder it will be to advance any further. For example, if you’re ranking fourth for a keyword, a featured snippet can act as a shortcut to drive you over the top. 

The WooRank tool will enable you to see which keywords have featured snippets and which don’t. You’ll also be able to see the domain for the page in the snippet. 

Additionally, you’ll be able to see the featured snippets for 3 of your competitors. That helps you get a complete picture of how you’re performing compared to others. 

Concluding Thoughts: Optimize for Featured Snippets 

By now, you should have a better understanding of how to leverage Google’s featured snippets for your SEO. 

Featured snippets are all about obtaining the legendary position zero for your content at its core. Doing so will always enhance your CTR, which is a huge benefit. 

So if you want to circumvent the #1 position and gain an explosive amount of traffic, you should optimize for featured snippets. While it takes a fair bit of work to earn a spot in position zero, the results are more than worth it. 

If you lack time to pursue featured snippets for your website, you can let us handle your SEO at The Hoth with HOTH X. We offer fully managed SEO services, including content creation, link building, and optimizing for snippets. 

If you’d rather receive candid advice from an expert, you can schedule a call to speak with one of our SEO experts today.    

The post Optimize for Featured Snippets to Obtain Position Zero appeared first on The HOTH.

They look at ROI or return of investment. It helps them compare the money they’ve generated for every dollar they’ve spent on marketing.

Marketing ROI (MROI) is calculated to help marketers and stakeholders understand if a campaign is worth the marketing spend.

A successful campaign is one where revenue is greater than the marketing expense. Even in an unsuccessful campaign, MROI and related metrics can help identify where things went wrong so marketers don’t repeat their mistakes.

This article will take a deep dive into marketing ROI, explain what it is, how to calculate it, and why it’s so challenging for marketers to get definite numbers.

What Is Marketing ROI?

Marketing return on investment (ROI) or (MROI) is a term used to define the profit or revenue generated compared to the amount of money spent.

Businesses and marketers can look at the overall ROI, aka overall sales, revenue, or profit, or they can consider other valuable benefits such as increased website traffic, higher search ranking, and more brand awareness.

In the second scenario, marketers often look at metrics by different channels, like email, social media, and SEO, to track progress and see if their campaigns are successful.

There are different ways to ascertain marketing ROI. The most common ones are:

Revenue: The total revenue generated from all your marketing activities.

ROAS: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures how much revenue was generated compared to every dollar spent on advertising.

Sales cycle days: The number of days a user takes to complete the sales cycle, from becoming aware of your brand to buying a product. The fewer the sales cycle days, the better.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) ratio: An average of how much a brand needs to spend to acquire a new customer.

Duration of Engagement: How long a customer stays engaged with your brand or a particular campaign. Measuring this helps marketers identify which part of the sales funnel needs optimization.

Customer lifetime value (CLTV): The customer’s overall value to your company over their time with your brand. Marketers often compare this with CPA to understand how much profit a customer generates vs. the cost of acquiring them.

These are some of the many metrics that a marketer has to keep track of during a campaign. Often, businesses run multiple campaigns, and these metrics indicate which ones are worth continuing.

Why is marketing ROI important?

Calculating the return on marketing investment is crucial for understanding whether their marketing activity is successful or not. Here’s how:

• Indicates the performance of your campaign

The MROI shows how a campaign is actually doing. At the end of the day, shareholders and leadership are focused on the money. If your campaign is generating leads, but few of them are converting into customers, leadership might decide to end the campaign.

MROI rounds out your campaign assessment by helping you look past false promises of success garnered by incomplete or standalone metrics like lead volume or click rate. Relying only on these could lead to bad marketing decisions.

• Identify the most effective marketing channels

MROI helps marketers clearly see which channels are the most effective for each campaign. They can then optimize their marketing efforts by creating and promoting content suitable for the best channels.

• Optimize marketing budget distribution

Marketing heads have a finite budget to work with. Using MROI metrics, they can allot funds to channels and campaigns with a proven track record of success. They can also decide on future marketing budgets and spending.

For example, if a specific new campaign needs additional investment to get off the ground, the budget for that month or quarter will have to be moved around.

• Secure further marketing investment

Giving stakeholders a clear picture of progress will ease their fears and add to your credibility. MROI can be used to prove campaign success and secure funding for future marketing programs or additional funding for existing ones.

How To Calculate Marketing ROI

To calculate the overall marketing ROI, you can use this formula:

Marketing ROI = (Sales Growth or Revenue Generated − Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost

For example, if sales grew by $5000 and the marketing campaign cost $500, the ROI is 900%. However, most marketing efforts look past this simple marketing ROI formula.

In most cases, marketers use direct or indirect revenue attribution to calculate ROI. In direct attribution, marketers credit the entire revenue to the last marketing element a customer interacted with before their purchase.

For indirect attribution, marketers evenly distribute the revenue across all the marketing channels that a customer interacts with.

You can also use a hybrid model to identify the channels generating the most leads and the channels that have the most conversions.

Marketers can use other more complex formulas to track ROI during the course of a campaign. For example, you can use this one to measure MROI. To calculate the ROI mid-way through the sales cycle:

Marketing ROI = [((number of leads x lead-to-customer rate x average sales price) – cost or ad spend) ÷ cost or ad spend] x 100.

Since marketing channels don’t have hard numbers, it’s best to also account for:

• Time spent: How much time it took to launch or complete a campaign from inception to its current stage.
• Production Costs: How much money you spend creating assets used in the campaign.
• Page Analytics: How users interact with your website.
• Non-financial returns: Good results that are not financial include an increase in engagement, website traffic, and brand awareness.

The Challenges of Calculating Marketing ROI

If you’re new to MROI, you’ll likely make the mistake of thinking calculating MROI involves collecting data and then using them in formulas. But it’s not that simple. In fact, proving ROI was the second biggest challenge for marketers in 2021.

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It’s hard to concretely nail down marketing ROI since attributing a lead to a specific channel is difficult, despite improvements in tools and technologies.

For example, let’s say you have a social media marketing campaign that brings a user to your website, who then takes days or weeks to interact with various other content marketing elements (such as a video, newsletter, or webinar) before completing the purchase.

In this case, attributing the lead or revenue to any one channel could be a mistake. Instead, you could use statistics related to these channels to make a call.

For example, 78% of customers in a 2021 survey said watching a video convinced them to buy or download a software or app.

But, this doesn’t mean that video was the primary lead generation tool for YOUR campaign.

The best way to measure marketing ROI is on a long-term basis. This means marketers often look past the hard numbers gathered during the initial stages of a campaign and focus on other improvements, such as audience growth or engagement levels, to track success.

Marketing ROI Benchmarks Across Different Channels

Since marketers have to look at metrics across different channels to gauge campaign success, here are a few key channels to track ROI on.

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Email marketing ROI

Email is well-known to be the channel with the highest ROI, with studies estimating that emails generate a return of $36 on average for every $1 spent. As a result, this is an essential marketing channel for most businesses.

You can measure the ROI for this channel by tracking key email marketing KPIs, such as open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates.

For example, you can place unique tracking URLs in the CTA buttons of your emails. So, when you send a limited-time offer in a marketing email, it’s easy to see which users clicked on the link and used the code to complete the purchase.

Social media ROI

Social media ROI goes beyond definite numbers like leads generated or website traffic. Marketers have to track engagement metrics instead. These include likes, comments, followers, and page views.

Engagement metrics help you understand if your marketing is impactful and resonating with your audience. If your posts are not garnering any interactions, it’s a sign that you need to pivot and maybe even try out paid promotions or sponsored posts.

For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS company that posts about a free trial of their platform on all your social media channels. The link to this promotion is a tracking URL. Using this URL, you can track which platforms garnered the most sign-ups.

On the social media channels themselves, you can also track engagement. So, an increase in likes could indicate that customers are fans of the promotion. You can use this to create follow-up posts asking for reviews or thoughts in the comments. These comments then prove to future users that your app is worth checking out.

PPC campaigns ROI

PPC or Pay-per-click campaigns are when marketers use paid advertising to increase brand reach. In this method, the company pays a specific amount every time a user clicks on their ad. On Google, your ads can be placed on search engines, YouTube videos, and on different websites.

Here’s an example of a search ad:

Marketers can heavily customize ads to target specific user demographics and keywords. Once the ads are out there, it’s up to the marketers to analyze and optimize the landing pages they lead to.

Measuring ad metrics includes tracking website traffic, leads generated, and conversions. These numbers can help you identify bumps in your sales funnel. For example, if you see a repetitive pattern of users that click on your ad but then leave your landing page, it’s time to optimize your landing page.

Ad-based metrics like the revenue generated are also important. Marketers often calculate the return on ad spend (ROAS) to see if the campaign is working, needs optimization, or is not worth continuing.

Content marketing ROI

Every content marketing strategy includes different content types, platforms, and individual metrics for each platform. Blogs, videos, guest posts, social media posts, and more fall under the content marketing umbrella.

The ultimate goal of content marketing is higher search engine rankings. The MROI for content marketing tracks leads, conversions, and each channel’s metrics.

For example, if blogging is a part of your strategy, then the number of views and shares each blog generates indicates whether the plan is working or not.

Video marketing ROI

Video marketing has become essential in every strategy. In a 2021 survey, 92% of marketers say they consider video to be an “important part” of their marketing strategy.

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Whether you’re a B2C or B2B business, videos are crucial for explaining your products and promoting them. This is why the survey found that explainer videos and social media videos were the most common types used by marketers.

Video marketing ROI relies on the number of views, watch time, shares, click-through rates, and conversions.

For example, a plumbing channel with tutorial videos that garners thousands of views but very few actual website visitors or leads will have a poor marketing ROI. It indicates the need to localize your content so the people around you can use your services. Local SEO could also help.

Sponsored content ROI

Sponsored content is used to promote your products or services. Typically, companies pay an advertiser, influencer, or publisher to create and share content related to their brand. Paid reviews on social media or YouTube are a popular example of this.

Sponsored content aims to create engagement. Customers are more likely to check out your product if an influencer they trust gives it a glowing review. Metrics here are harder to measure since increased engagement doesn’t always mean increased sales.

Sponsored content ROI is typically calculated by comparing the cost of hiring an influencer or publisher to the number of leads or conversions their video or post generated.

For example, if the influencer charges $1000 per post, but their followers purchase $3000 worth of products, the investment is well worth it.

In many cases, marketers don’t track direct conversions from sponsored content, but they track click-through rates from the publisher’s post.

Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) indicates how much an average customer spends on your products or services throughout their time as your customer. It’s a key marketing ROI metric since most companies these days look past the first transaction and want to develop brand loyalty.

When it comes to MROI, comparing CLV to customer acquisition cost is a better indicator of your brand’s success. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average amount you spend on getting a new customer.

Your CAC:CLV ratio is the key indicator of business success. Some experts estimate that 5:1 is a good ratio for most businesses, while 10:1 is exceptional.

So, if it takes $400 to acquire a new customer on average, but this customer is expected to spend upwards of $2000 over the next few weeks or months, then the ratio is 5:1, and your marketing campaign is working.

A lower ratio means your marketing is struggling to develop brand loyalty and needs to be changed.

Get an Accurate MROI and Improve on It

Marketing ROI is often not a straightforward calculation since it relies on many smaller metrics. Marketing and revenue go hand in hand, so ignoring marketing metrics like increased engagement, website traffic, or higher search rankings would be a mistake.

However, marketers need to see the big picture and relate their marketing to revenue generation. Many companies fail to track vital metrics and make poor decisions based on just leads and conversions. Rather than optimization and continued marketing, they tend to eliminate and start over. This is expensive and not always needed.

If you want your marketing campaigns to be handled by a team of experts, get in touch with The HOTH today!

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